Rep. Stephen Dargan, a Democrat (imagine that!), wants to take information that has been private for years, and now make it public so he can earn a political point. Nothing good can come from this, CT. This has bad idea written all over it.
You need to remember that a person in CT does not legally need to register shotguns. Shotguns are the preferred method of home protection among those who know.
What will happen the first time an innocent criminal get his butt shot when he tries to burglarize a house that is not on this proposed list of gun permit-holding residences, because the home owner has a shotgun? There will probably be a lawsuit. It would be an obvious case of false advertising. We need to protect our criminals and this proposed bill would only endanger them. *Yes, that is sarcasm, by the way*
From Jon Lender over at The Hartford Courant:
The names and addresses of about 170,000 handgun permit holders in Connecticut, now kept confidential by law, could be made public under a proposed bill that pits gun owners against would-be reformers in the aftermath of the Dec. 14 Newtown school massacre.
The bill, introduced by Rep. Stephen D. Dargan, D-West Haven, co-chairman of the legislature's public safety committee, would make public the names and addresses of permit holders under Connecticut's Freedom of Information Act — and would reverse lawmakers' decision to protect that personal information from disclosure nearly two decades ago.
And this:
In both states, the central question is whether the public interest in knowing how many guns are spread through communities is outweighed by the privacy rights of people exercising their constitutional right to own guns.
"Most things are FOI-able now," Dargan said in an interview Thursday. "Go to the local city clerk's office and you can find out where Steve Dargan owns property," as well as what cars a person owns and perhaps some of his debts. "I don't know why a responsible gun owner is worried about whether a permit for a revolver is FOI-able or not."
Dargan said that in the "computer age," and in an open society, it is reasonable for people to want access to gun ownership information. "Maybe their kids are going over to Johnny Smith's, and maybe they want to see whether they have guns in the house."
But gun owners and their advocates see it differently, saying that criminals would prosper by knowing which homes they could burglarize to steal firearms and which homes might not be defended by gun owners.
If this passes, be ready for backlash. By publishing this information, because your emotional response is to cry wolf against legal gun holders, you are endagering more people than just those that will be outed. Remember, this information as of this writing, is private. And it is private for a reson. You wish to throw back this curtain for the sake of the public interest? You are courting trouble.
You anti-gunners think you are doing that which will guarantee the safety of the whole by vilifying the few, and you could not be more wrong.
