Connecticut Democrats Take Aim at Gun Crime and Miss Entirely

A new bill in Connecticut seeks to ban Glock pistols and other handguns that feature a cruciform trigger bar. Ostensibly, it’s about preventing murderers from modifying their semiautomatic weapons into machine guns to more effectively spread chaos and death. But is that really what’s driving this ban, or is there something more sinister at work? And if passed, what comes next? As we all know, progressive gun control never stops progressing.

The Connecticut Glock Ban – And More to Come?

Connecticut Democrats in the state Senate – who hold more than a two-to-one majority – passed a new gun control bill that would ban the sale of so-called “convertible pistols.” The legislation describes any semiautomatic handgun that can be converted to full auto by the use of a device colloquially known as a “Glock switch.” Similar “Glock bans” have been introduced in other deep blue states, as well, and target any handgun with a certain type of trigger.

The new bill passed along party lines, save for Republican Tony Hwang and Democrat Cathy Osten, each of whom voted with the other party. It had previously cleared the House 86-64 in April, though there it faced more bipartisan pushback as 15 Democrats joined the entire Connecticut House GOP in opposition.

Democrats control the Senate 25-11, and the House 102-49, and Governor Ned Lamont is a classic anti-gun progressive Democrat who champions so-called “common sense” strict gun control. In short, this bill was always going to pass the legislature – and now with it headed to Lamont’s desk, it will almost certainly be law sooner than later.

Second Amendment advocates may rightly wonder what happens next. Is this the proverbial slippery slope? Are semiautomatic rifles next – or whatever the next handgun to be illegally modified happens to be? 

The Absurdity of Gun Control – Or Is It Malfeasance?

It’s already a crime both federally and in all 50 states to modify a semiautomatic weapon to make it fully automatic. It’s also illegal already to murder people – with or without automatic weapons or even firearms at all. If criminalizing bad behavior worked to begin with, we’d already live in a world free from violence. But if a murderer doesn’t mind breaking the law to cancel another person’s subscription to life, why would he or she be all that concerned about some new rule regarding gun types?

But not only is the law practically pointless from the whole preventing-crimes perspective, it’s also a gross overreaction to a non-existent problem. The last time someone was killed with a machine gun in Connecticut was … well, according to testimony submitted to the state legislature regarding this very bill, there is no record in state history of it ever happening.

Just how big of an issue is gun violence in general in Connecticut? Even the anti-gun Giffords Law Center shows just 234 total gun deaths in the state in 2024 – and 53% of them were suicides.

Overall, gun ownership is reportedly fairly low in Connecticut when compared to other states. Ammo.com ranked all 50 states by gun owners per 100 residents, and the so-called Constitution State came in 45th with just 23.6%. Still, that’s a lot of people. At the last census, the state’s population was 3,605,944 – which means somewhere in the ballpark of 850,000 gun owners. Many of these people have pistols, with publicly available (albeit old) data from the Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection showing more than 170,000 active pistol permits in 2013. And, as is the case in most places across America, Glock pistols are the most common. So, for a whopping 110 firearm homicides or so a year – none of which have involved automatic fire – hundreds of thousands of citizens who aren’t criminals must lose the right to keep and bear one of the most common arms in the country?

This makes no sense whatsoever for saving lives or preventing crime – not in any logical way. But it does make perfect sense if the true motive is disarming the population. If that’s the goal, any old excuse that feeds on high emotion will do.