Thomas MacMillan Photo
As the horrific details of the school shooting rampage in Newtown continued trickling out Saturday, New Haven state Sen. Marty Looney promised a push to strengthen Connecticut’s gun-control laws.
Looney (pictured) made that vow in an interview as New Haveners came downtown for a 6 p.m. vigil on the Green on behalf of the 26 students and adults massacred at Sandy Hook elementary school by a gunman who then killed himself.
The shooting provoked a national outpouring of grief — and an immediate call for a resumption of efforts by gun control proponents to take on the NRA and pass tighter legislation.
Looney, a Democrat who’s now the Senate majority leader, cosponsored Connecticut’s assault-weapons ban (with a Republican, then-state Sen. Bill Aniskovich of Branford). The ban passed into law in 1993. Looney said Saturday evening that it’s time for a “fact-finding” mission to see whether the law needs to be expanded to cover more weapons.
He also said he now plans to reintroduce a bill he sponsored two years ago to ban the sale of ammunition to people who may not legally own a gun.
“Without ammunition,” he said, “a gun is just a club.”
He also said he plans to look at reviving a bill to allow for court orders to require that people with mental illness take prescribed medication if they pose a danger to themselves or to others.
In coming days partisans on both sides of the gun control debate will look closely at the emerging details of the shooting. The shooter apparently carried two handguns on him that are legal in Connecticut: a Sig Sauer and a Glock, a rapid-fire gun used by cops. He is believed to have used a third weapon, a Bushmaster .223 M4 carbine rifle in the actual killings. The Bushmaster are “similar in type to the weapons used in” other mass shootings in the control, according to this New York Times story. It’s unclear whether the rifle was legally purchased and owned or not; Connecticut’s 1993 law grandfathered in already-owned rifles. Among the questions under consideration: Whether new state laws can make a difference, whether this incident will shift a political calculus that has tilted toward the gun lobby, and whether the state adequately enforces its existing laws.
Looney acknowledged that the bigger fight is on the national level. People can easily buy assault weapons in other states and bring them across the border, he said.
Connecticut has some of the more restrictive gun control laws in the nation, Looney said. “The fact that federal laws are so lax undermines the capacity of the individual states,” he continued. “We really needed strong federal gun legislation. We need the federal government to not be intimidated by the gun fanatics and people who feel only the Second Amendment is important to the exclusion of everything else in the constitution.”
The federal government passed a ban on the sale of assault weapons in 1994 under then-President Bill Clinton. The law included a sunset clause. It expired 10 years later during the Bush administration. Connecticut U.S. Rep. John Larson Saturday called for renewed federal gun control legislation.
As the gun control debate possibly heats up again, Looney knows how passionate it can get. The night his law passed in 1993, “somebody called and said we [he and Aniskovich] were both dead men because of our support of that bill.” Looney called state police, who escorted him home, while local police stayed with Looney’s wife and then-young son.
Markley: Good Intentions, Bad Ideas
Christine Stuart Photo
One of Looney’s Republican counterparts in the Senate, Joe Markley (pictured) of Southington, said he would not support Looney’s initiatives.
“My answer on a Saturday night [to the question of how to stop these tragedies] is: I don’t know what the answer is. If I thought Marty Looney, who I deeply respect, had an answer to this, I would entertain it. But I don’t think he has it, either on the weapons or the medication. It’s more than that. It’s spiritual on another level. That’s where the hunger is.”
The root of the problem is the way our “troubled society” is producing people who would carry out an act like the Newton massacre, Markley said. He said that he doesn’t believe banning guns or ammunition will stop them.
“That root cause of what has made a sick society is a complication beyond me and 187 legislators to correct. I do believe in the constitutional right to the protection to bear arms. If I thought some kind of control might have some kind of effect, I might entertain it anyway. But I don’t believe it. I don’t believe changing the number of rounds in a clip or the style of a weapon is going to prevent things like this from happening,” he argued.
“You can ban guns, and there will always be another kind of gun. The question ultimately comes down to: Should citizens be allowed to have guns or not? It’s fundamental to our country to say that they should. I don’t think we accomplish much by drawing lines around what kinds of guns we are talking about.
“No matter what you have in your mind, to walk into a room of elementary school kids and say, ‘I’m now going to do this,’ isn’t there a moment when you look out and say, ‘What am I doing?’ We live in a society that is creating people who are beyond that, a large percentage of people who need pharmaceutical assistance to cope.”
That doesn’t mean a law to require people to take medication would solve the problem, either, Markley argued.
“Forcing people to take drugs is a strange thing for us to do in this society. One day it’s the wonder drug; four years later the study shows” otherwise, he said. “I’m very hesitant to take away individual choice.”