Pre-Crime, Preemtive Civilian Disarmament Law In Effect Since 1999 In Connecticut
"The value of this law is not so much that police will seize your guns," Lawlor explained when the measure went into effect in October 1999. "It gives police a system to investigate a person who poses a threat. If the police never confiscate a person's guns, they can at least look into the person's behavior and perhaps prevent a tragedy by intervening."
A recent wire service story celebrating the tenth anniversary of Connecticut's preemptive civilian disarmament measure reports that since it went into effect, "State police and 53 police departments have seized more than 1,700 guns.... Opponents of [that] gun seizure law expressed fears in 1999 that police would abuse the law. Today, the law's backers say the record shows that hasn't been the case."
To the contrary: The record, as described above, shows that there have been at least 1,700 incidents of abuse that grew out of that enactment. Each confiscation is an act of state theft perpetrated against someone who is innocent before the law.
Lawlor, a former state prosecutor (color me unsurprised), is a standard-issue statist Democrat carved out from the familiar collectivist cookie cutter. I do find it of more than passing interest that he earned a Master's Degree from the University of London in Soviet-Area Studies, given that his perspective on the role of the law is close kindred to that of Lenin and Vyshinsky (the latter being the patron saint -- or the demonic analogue -- of public prosecutors).
When Connecticut's law went into effect {in 1999}, Lawlor pointed to the case of neo-Nazi cretin Benjamin Smith, who killed two and wounded nine in a two-state shooting spree, as the sort of person who would be disarmed under his measure.
According to Lawlor (as paraphrased in a 1999 wire service story), "Smith's criminal record and reputation for passing out hate literature" would offer adequate probable cause to justify a preemptive gun seizure. Of course, this assumes that law enforcement agencies would be in charge of determining what constitutes "hate" literature, and who is responsible for disseminating the same.
What Lawlor clearly had in mind (as I noted at the time) was Soviet-style political profiling and disarmament of specific kinds of people -- those deemed by the State to be "socially dangerous persons." This was the assumption embodied in Article 58 of the Soviet penal code, which specified (as pointed out in the authoritative scholarly study The Black Book of Communism) that the State "may use these measures of social protection to deal with anyone classified as a danger to society, either for a specific crime that has been committed or when, even if exonerated of a particular crime, the person is still reckoned to pose a threat to society." Lawlor's gun seizure measure was intended to be the first of many of its kind.
(more/source)
Links:
