Senate Democrats Mark Anniversary of Public Safety Reforms, Passed Over GOP Opposition

Senate Democrats marked this week’s one year anniversary of key Connecticut gun safety policies during a Monday press conference, where they recalled an overnight filibuster of the public safety reforms led by the Senate Republican Caucus.

During the news briefing in the Legislative Office Building, Democratic leaders including Senate President Martin Looney and Majority Leaders Bob Duff highlighted the Oct. 1 anniversary of the effective date of two critical provisions of 2023’s An Act Concerning Gun Violence.

The law included a prohibition on the open carry of firearms in public and new restrictions on bulk gun purchases, effectively reducing gun trafficking. These policies have been protecting Connecticut families for one year, despite prolonged efforts by Senate Republicans, who engaged in an extreme, multi-hour filibuster in an attempt to kill the bill, the Democratic leaders said.

“It was something we had to do over Republican objections,” Looney said. “Many times they try to present themselves as moderates on a variety of issues when they go home to their districts. But often we find it to be very different here at the Capitol.”

Throughout their overnight obstruction efforts, Republicans made 14 separate attempts to water down the gun safety bill. Every single Senate Republican voted in favor of each of these attempts to weaken Connecticut’s public safety laws.

Among Republican efforts to walk back the state’s firearm policies was an amendment that would have undermined Ethan’s Law, a safe storage policy named for Ethan Song, a Connecticut teenager who was killed as a result of an unsecured weapon.

The policy, enacted in 2019, has served as a model that Congressional Democrats have sought to replicate on the federal level.

“As recently as this past month, Hearst Connecticut Media ran a story suggesting that maybe Ethan’s Law — if Congressional Republicans hadn’t prevented it from becoming law — Ethan’s Law could have prevented a mass shooting in Georgia, where a 14-year-old with unsupervised access to a gun killed four people at a school,” Duff said. “So while there’s this national dialogue going on about whether our law can save lives across the country, Senate Republicans are voting to undermine it here. All of them.”

Senate Democrats passed An Act Concerning Gun Violence, HB 6667, at 4:19 a.m. on June 3, 2023 over widespread Republican opposition. Its provisions involving openly displaying a firearm in public and limiting handgun purchases to three per month for most residents took effect several months later on Oct. 1, 2023.

Reasonable limits on bulk purchases have helped to curtail gun trafficking in states where they have been enacted and have helped law enforcement hold offenders accountable.

For instance, on Sept. 3, attorneys general in Maryland and Washington, D.C., filed a lawsuit against three gun dealers for selling 34 pistols to a straw purchaser over a seven-month period despite a Maryland law limiting handgun purchases to one per month.

At least nine of those weapons were later recovered at crime scenes in the Washington D.C. or Maryland area, according to the Office of the Attorney General for the District of Columbia. This is not uncommon. Handguns sold in bulk are as much as 64% more likely to be used in a crime than a gun purchased on its own, according to the Giffords Law Center, which estimated that between 20% and 25% of handguns found at crime scenes were originally part of multi-gun sales.

Meanwhile, Connecticut’s prohibition on the open carry of firearms in public addressed tense situations that have resulted from the state’s previous policies on the matter, which allowed open carry but did not allow law enforcement to compel a person openly carrying a gun to produce a permit.

In 2017, the Connecticut Police Chiefs Association submitted testimony to the legislature’s Judiciary Committee, arguing that a “small number of pistol permit holders have purposely engaged in open-carry behavior and used the current statute language to create situations in which an officer cannot request a permit. These situations are unnerving to the public and have the potential to escalate into confrontations.”

Prosecutors have also lauded Connecticut’s new open carry policy, which legislative Republicans sought to undermine. Last year, Connecticut’s Office of the Chief State’s Attorney submitted testimony supporting the provision to prohibit the knowing open carry of guns in public.

Among Senate Republicans’ 14 attempts to undermine the public safety bill, were amendments to weaken Connecticut’s safe storage laws and create loopholes in the state’s background check requirements.

Posted by Hugh McQuaid