Civilian disarmament advocates insist that the Sandy Hook Elementary School Massacre illustrates the dangers of inadequately restrictive firearms laws. That assumption is impossible to reconcile with the fact that Connecticut’s state government regards individual firearms ownership not as a right but as a highly conditional privilege subject to revocation without notice, on the whim of an unaccountable bureaucrat.
In 1999, the Connecticut legislature enacted Sec. 29-38c, a measure allowing the police to confiscate firearms from anybody believed to pose “a risk of imminent personal injury to himself … or to other individuals.” All that is required is a sworn complaint “by any state’s attorney or assistant state’s attorney or by any two police officers to any judge of the Superior Court.” A warrant will then be issued allowing police to confiscate the firearms and hold them for up to a year.
The gun confiscation measure was enacted in October 1999, about a year and a half after the last pre-Sandy Hook mass shooting to occur in the Nutmeg State. The assailant, Matthew Beck, was an ex-employee of the Internal Revenue Service who at the time was employed as an accountant at the Connecticut Lottery Corporation.
A few months before the March, 1998 massacre, Beck had been granted a medical leave for stress-related symptoms. His application for a promotion had been denied. Several of his co-workers and relatives had become concerned about his emotional state. Some of his close friends believed that Beck suffered from suicidal depression. But nobody had expected that he would arrive at work one morning, take out a Glock, and start gunning down his supervisors.
As is always the case in episodes of this kind, the shooter ended the rampage on his own terms, killing himself before the police arrived. The on-scene security guard was similarly useless: The only aid he provided was to suggest to the victims that they take refuge in a wooded area nearby.
Just weeks after the shooting, State Representative Michael Lawlor introduced the gun confiscation measure.
State police Lieutenant Robert Kiehm explained to the Associated Press that the purpose of the measure is to give police officers the power "to take some proactive steps instead of waiting for something to happen."
"The value of this law is not so much that police will seize your guns," Lawlor insisted when it took 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."
During the first decade following its enactment, Connecticut’s gun seizure law resulted in the confiscation of at least 2,000 firearms from people who were never charged with crimes. Nearly all of the seizures followed reports from concerned relatives – generally spouses -- of the victims. Attorney Rachel Baird, who has represented a dozen Connecticut residents whose firearms have been confiscated, insists that none of them posed any credible threat to anybody, including themselves.
Lawlor, who is now the state’s Under Secretary for Criminal Justice Policy and Planning, invokes a variation on Dick Cheney’s “One Percent Doctrine” (“Even if there’s just a 1 percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it’s a certainty”) to justify the gun confiscation program. “Maybe it would have been just a suicide or a single murder of a spouse, but potentially one of these guys along the road could have been a mass shooting,” he told NPR.
The standard set out in the Connecticut confiscation law – namely, that guns can be seized from anyone who presents “a risk of imminent personal injury to others” – would justify the pre-emptive disarmament of the police force. After all, the police constitute a body of armed individuals who are trained to employ violence and are rarely held accountable for injuring or killing others without a morally sound reason to do so.
If Lawlor’s defense of the measure – that it is justified by the prevention of “just a suicide or a single murder” – were applied seriously, it would buttress the case for disarming the police in Connecticut. Between April and June of 2011, there were four police suicides in Connecticut, a development that prompted authorities to convene a special statewide conference on suicide prevention. That argument is enhanced even further by the case of Hartford Police Officer Robert Lawlor (no relation, as far as I can determine).
The killer: Robert Lawlor (r.). |
In May 2005, Officer
Lawlor was part of a federal task force called the Violent Crime Impact
Team (VCIT). He and his partner, ATF Agent Daniel Prather, were deployed on the
streets of Hartford looking for firearms to confiscate.
On the evening of May 7, Lawlor
and Prather – who were decked out in street attire -- were harassing somebody on
a street corner when the officer spotted a black Maxima with a young black male
sitting behind the wheel.
Lawlor strode up to the car, flashed his badge, and ordered the driver, a young man named Brandon Henry, to stop the car and keep his hands in plain sight. He had neither probable cause nor “reasonable suspicion” to justify the contact. A few seconds later, five shots erupted and Henry, in a panic, pulled away in the car. While the officers called for backup, Henry collided into another vehicle before staggering from his car and running away, depositing a bloody trail in his wake.
Lawlor strode up to the car, flashed his badge, and ordered the driver, a young man named Brandon Henry, to stop the car and keep his hands in plain sight. He had neither probable cause nor “reasonable suspicion” to justify the contact. A few seconds later, five shots erupted and Henry, in a panic, pulled away in the car. While the officers called for backup, Henry collided into another vehicle before staggering from his car and running away, depositing a bloody trail in his wake.
The victim: Bryant. |
Although he had been shot in the chest, Henry survived. His
passenger, 18-year-old Jashon Bryant, did not. Lawlor, who had approached the
vehicle from the passenger side, had shot Bryant in the head. A thorough search
of the vehicle turned up a tiny amount of cocaine. No firearm was ever found.
Testifying under oath later, Prather admitted that he never saw a gun in the car – and never heard Lawlor mention
one at the time of the shooting. An official investigation by the State
Division of Criminal Justice concluded that "the use
of deadly physical force was not appropriate." In other words, Lawlor had
committed criminal homicide.
Unlike the people whose guns were stolen by Connecticut
police, Lawlor’s background demonstrated that he was clearly a danger to the
safety of others. He
was investigated for a 1990 on-duty shooting in which a 15-year-old boy was
needlessly wounded. He was sued on multiple occasions by professional
colleagues, who accused him of malicious harassment and reckless driving that
resulted in injuries to several other officers.
Lawlor is the kind of fellow who speaks of himself in the
third person when explaining to a reporter that he’s willing to bend the rules
to get things done – and that his problems reflect the fact that his
professional colleagues just aren’t worthy of him.
“If you're a boss, is it easier to bring Bobby Lawlor down
or is it easier to take 40 other officers and bring them up to my level?"
Lawlor said to the Hartford Courant following the 2005 shooting. "I've had
problems with supervisors because ... I fight for the little guy and I know
policy and procedure better than the supervisors."
“Policy and procedure,” from Lawlor’s perspective,
apparently justified subornation of perjury in order to protect himself after
he needlessly shot and killed Jashon Bryant.
About a week after the shooting, a minor-league drug dealer
named Jaime Diaz called the Hartford Police to report that he had the gun
Lawlor had supposedly seen in Henry's car. Diaz, who insisted that he didn’t
know Lawlor, provided a detailed statement to police describing how he came
into possession of the weapon. Two weeks later, Diaz contacted the Police again
to recant his statement, admitting that he was actually a confidential
informant who had worked with Lawlor as part of a narcotics task force.
Ten years earlier, Lawlor – once again, acting on “policy
and procedure,” as he understood the concept – refused to arrest Diaz on a
narcotics charge. Now that he was in serious trouble after gunning down an
unarmed 18-year-old kid, Lawlor called in the favor.
In July 2006, after the State Division of Criminal Justice
ruled that Lawlor’s shooting of Jashon Bryant was not legally justified, the
officer was confronted by several of the victim’s relatives outside the
Hartford Superior Court.
When Lawlor returned a week later for a pre-trial
hearing, "The entrance to the [courthouse] was lined with blue," reported the local NBC affiliate, WTNH.
"State and local police in uniform were there to guard Officer Lawlor from
friends and family of the man he's accused of killing...."
Although there was no serious dispute about the facts of the
case, Lawlor was acquitted in 2009. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that he displayed
not a scintilla of regret over the fact that he had needlessly killed an
unarmed and terrified 18-year-old boy.
“No mistakes were made,” Lawlor defiantly sneered at Bryant’s
father and sister as
the bereaved relatives confronted the killer outside the courthouse. “Being
sorry, to me in my personal belief, would be admitting some sort of wrongdoing.
I did nothing wrong.”
Lawlor did find it appropriate to express sympathy toward
someone he considered a worthy victim. After the trial, Lawlor – who by that
time had retired with a full pension -- whined that the verdict brought to an
end “the longest four and a half years of my life.” He
promptly filed a lawsuit against the prosecutor who had filed criminal
charges against him.
If Connecticut’s pre-emptive disarmament law had really been
intended to mitigate public danger, Robert Lawlor would have been required to
surrender his firearms, rather than using them to confiscate guns from other
people. But if sociopaths in uniform are required to give up their guns, how
would they be able to disarm the rest of us?
Please help keep Pro Libertate on-line. Thank you so much!
Dum spiro, pugno!
8 comments:
The fallacy with the kind of thinking in CT is that guns are the problem.
Guns have been in the hands of the public since the country was founded, but the mass shootings are a relatively recent phenomena.
While I am okay with local laws regarding firearm control, it has been posed to me, and I think it makes sense, that a lot of these guns control laws are an attempt to find out WHO has guns, and is the first step in disarming the public.
Of course, our government would never deceive us....would they?
LC
"But if sociopaths in uniform are required to give up their guns, how would they be able to disarm the rest of us?"
Bingo! And that Will is the bottom line. And do you think for one moment that they would willingly give up theirs in any act of leading by example? Hell no! And so long as they remain armed the public deserves no less than what they reserve unto themselves. Otherwise there is a cattle car waiting for us all.
In the U.S. there are 3 basic legal entities:
1)Government - Sovereign God
2)Corporation - Demigod
3)Person - Fodder
What Grigg is proposing is that we level the law to apply equally to all 3.
Christ was the embodiment of that same principle: God and Law made flesh.
Likewise, He commands that we bring our institutions to heel:
Ephesians 6:12
For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities,
against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world,
against spiritual wickedness in high places.
Executive impunity to commit murder is all of the above.
lawlor (small letter intended to befit the small man) lived his life out of the back pockets of the very society he murdered/abused members of.
This fine specimen of human trash then sues, in essence, that very same society, as taxpayers would provide the compensation should he win the case against the prosecutor.
It is a perverted society that allows such trash as lawlor to do all he has done to that society.
I have no word to describe a society that not only tolerates what lawlor did, but then also adds insult to injury by allowing such trash to sue the very taxpayers he so assiduously attacked and, ultimately, killed.
Such a society as that described will not last long because it is obvious such a society tolerates tyranny and will ultimately be totally enslaved.
He was sued on multiple occasions by professional colleagues, who accused him of malicious harassment and reckless driving that resulted in injuries to several other officers.
Wow -- I've never heard of anything like that. He must have been a real loose cannon.
This is a great piece and I am glad it is being circulated. There are a million things needed to protect our children at school and none of them have much to do with guns.
This Newtown tragedy is spinning out of control and the focus needed to address the real issues at hand is not there by any of our Leaders.
They just to focus on gun control....it is so irresponsible.
We need to remove the aura of godhood, and return them to a state of FEAR. Dor_ner was right in that.
And it will get WORSE as we put it off longer.
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