Looney proposal in Connecticut

Connecticut state Senator (and Senate majority leader) Martin M. Looney (I'm not making that up--that's really his name) plans to introduce a bill that would attack gun rights on an impressively broad front.

The bill (I'll call it the Looney Bill) would threaten victims of crime with criminal charges, in that failure to report a stolen gun within "a reasonable amount of time" (whatever that means) would itelf be a criminal offense. Even if "reasonable" is defined, there is no word on how police or prosecutors are expected to ascertain when the rightful owner discovered the theft (and thus when to start the "reasonable" clock).

A second provision of the bill would limit law-abiding citizens to one handgun purchase per month. This kind of restriction has become quite popular with the gun rights deprivation extremists, the theory apparently being that the best way to get a handle on violent crime is to limit the rights of law-abiding, peacable citizens. Makes sense to me.

The bill also has some Looney ammunition restrictions--the requirement for a state-issued license for retailers that sell ammunition, and the requirement for a state handgun permit (as far as I can tell, Connecticut doesn't require a permit to merely purhase or possess a handgun, only to carry one in public--and the carry permit is issued at the discretion of the police, so this bill would make it possible to deny a law-abiding citizen a way to buy ammunition). One of the problems with legislation regarding "handgun ammunition" is that there is a good deal of overlap between handgun ammunition and rifle ammunition. For example, carbines can be had in calibers (like 9mm, .45 ACP, .44 Magnum, and many others) that are normally thought of as pistol calibers. Likewise, there are pistols chambered in just about any caliber you could name, including the elephant gun caliber, .600 Nitro Express!

Despite all these problems with the Looney Bill (and I've only scratched the surface), it has apparently found some support among Looney allies:

Looney was joined by other legislators including Rep. William M. Tong, D-Stamford, who said he had personal experience with threatened gun violence. His mother was robbed at the family's store in Manchester three years ago by a robber who implied he had a gun. The assailant actually had a knife, Tong said, and his mother was stabbed repeatedly but survived.

It is not just the possession of guns, but the threat of guns that affects people in Connecticut, "including my family, Tong said.

Let's see if I have this straight--his mother is menaced by a punk who claims to have a gun (but doesn't), and who stabs her with the knife that he did have, and this genius believes that the solution is to make gun and ammunition purchases more difficult for the law-abiding citizens (you know--the ones who would actually obey the proposed law). I would think that the thug's implication that he had a gun posed a much smaller danger to her than the reality of his possession of a knife, and his willingness to use it. Besides, no one really believes that any number of gun laws will make a criminal's possession of a gun so unlikely that one need not take seriously a criminal's threat that he has one--so spare me that garbage about "the threat of guns that affects people in Connecticut." Also, how would her disbelief of his claim that he had a gun have protected her from multiple stabbings? Finally, it seems to me that had the victim had a gun, she may very well have come through this frightening incident with nary a scratch, and perhaps a thug would have been taken out of circulation permanently, without even burdening the criminal justice system.

I know just where this bill ought to be filed--the Looney Bin.