Arizona Officials Trust the People With Guns; Connecticut Pols Don’t

I’ve carried a gun for self-defense on and
off for over 20 years. The specific gun has varied, and so have the
circumstances. In that time, I’ve lived in Connecticut, New York,
Massachusetts, back to New York, and Arizona. The major change over
that time is that in Arizona, it’s actually legal for me
to posess the means of self-defense on my person without special
(and hard-to-get) permission from the government. I raise the issue
because the CTPost has a piece contrasting (not especially
well) the widely different legislative reactions in Connecticut and
Arizona in response to high-profile violent crimes.

Basically, Connecticut set out to disarm its population, while
Arizona moved to make self-defense easier.

At the CTPost, Jessica Boehmand Sarah Ferris
write:

Four months after the elementary school shooting in Newtown,
lawmakers in Connecticut banned at least 115 types of
semi-automatic firearms.

Four months after the shooting of a congresswoman and a federal
judge in Tucson, lawmakers in Arizona declared the Colt Army Action
Revolver the official state gun.

The similarities in the attacks were striking: Both were carried
out by heavily armed young men with histories of mental illness.
But in the aftermath of the tragedies, the states took radically
different approaches to gun violence.

The differences reflect the wide divide separating Americans
from one end of the country to the other, in which long-established
gun cultures collide with efforts to restrict gun ownership.

While Connecticut took extreme measures to muscle through one of
the most comprehensive packages of gun laws in the country, Arizona
legislators moved to make it easier to carry guns in public.

While the CTPost piece covers some of the
sausage-making process involved in producing Connecticut’s “assault
weapons” ban, it’s sketchy on the details of that legislation.
There’s no mention of the
rushed, debate-bypassing emergency
certification process to pass the
hodge-podge of ill-defined terms and impossible-to-enforce
restrictions.

Nor is there mention of the scores of thousands of state
residents that have
refused to abide by the law, technically becoming overnight
felons—and driving hyperventilating editorialists to
demand mass arrests.

By contrast, the article focuses on the failures of anti-gun
activists in Arizona. But there have been a lot of legislative
successes, too. In 2010 (admittedly, before the Newtown shooting or
the attempt on Gabby Gifford’s life), Arizona
rescinded requirements for a permit to carry a gun
concealed.

Arizona last year required government agencies that conduct gun
“buybacks” of unwanted weapons to
resell them to the public so that people can get self-defense
use from them (some agencies were destroying them). At the same
time, localities were forbidden to keep lists of gun owners.

Anti-gunners will, no doubt,
point to the higher violent crime rate in Arizona relative to
Connecticut (428.9 per 100,000 population vs. 283.0, in 2012). But
the Centers for Disease Control
reviewed a wide variety of firearms laws, including “bans on
specified firearms or ammunition,” without being able to find a
connection. “[W]e do not yet know what effect, if any, the law has
on an outcome.”

That makes restrictive gun laws a mass experiment in denying
liberty and threatening people with fines and prison without any
evidence that something is to be gained in the process.

And that’s before you get to the major philosophical differences
in the Connecticut and Arizona approaches.

While neither state is a perfect example of a type, on this
issue Connecticut politicians act as rulers who fear their subjects
and want further controls on people in order to somehow increase
safety. Arizona lawmakers reduce restrictions on their constituents
with the stated goal of making it easier for them to defend
themselves without government interference.

The big difference betwen Arizona and Connecticut isn’t gun
policy; it’s the relationship between the people and their
government. As protests rage in Ferguson, Missouri, over
heavy-handed government use of force, that’s a relationship that,
very obviously, matters.