With about five weeks until Election Day, Connecticut Senate Democrats are highlighting Republican opposition to a gun safety law passed a year ago. Republicans counter that Democrats are tough on guns, but soft on crime.
The exchange Monday illustrates the sharp differences on gun violence, not only judged by the actions of elected Democrats and Republicans but by the attitudes that voters expressed to pollsters.
In a recent poll conducted for The Connecticut Mirror, twice as many Democrats as Republicans listed gun policy as one of the issues that matter most to them in the presidential race. National polling finds similar divisions.
The messaging Monday by Senate Democrats is an element of a push to enlarge their current 24-12 majority by trying to undermine Republican incumbents who cast themselves as moderates in swing districts.
“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 them to be very different here at the Capitol,” said Sen. President Pro Tem Martin M. Looney, D-New Haven.
Exhibit A in that argument, Looney said, is a law adopted in 2023 and highlighted Monday: the first comprehensive update of Connecticut’s gun laws since the sweeping reforms enacted a decade ago in response to the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown.
The bill proposed by Gov. Ned Lamont banned the open carry of firearms, strengthened rules for gun storage and reporting stolen firearms, and expanded a ban on AR-15s and other so-called assault weapons passed in 1993 and updated in 2013.
The bill passed on a 24-11 vote, with one senator absent.
“What a shock: With Election Day five weeks away, Democrats are playing politics,” said Senate Minority Leader Stephen Harding, R-Brookfield. “Republicans in 2023 sought to enhance and strengthen the legislation regarding illegal gun crimes.”
The Republicans voted as a bloc for 14 GOP amendments, all of which were defeated on party-line votes. One would have weakened existing safe-storage requirements by requiring only that a firearm be kept in a locked room or apartment, not secured in a safe or protected with a trigger lock.
“Senate Republicans proposed an amendment that said it’s OK to have a gun lying around unsecured as long as the home doors are locked,” said Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff, D-Norwalk “Basically, it would have completely negated our safe storage law, and every single Republican in the state senate voted for it.”
Some other amendments fell under the heading of get-tough-on-crime proposals.
One would have exempted all gun crimes from eligibility for the erasure of a criminal record under the state’s “clean slate” law. Another would have repealed a current limit on searches-by-consent: Officers cannot press an individual to consent to a warrantless search unless the officer can articulate a reasonable suspicion that the person possessed weapons, contraband or evidence of a crime.
The only Republican in the Senate to vote for the law was Sen. Tony Hwang, R-Fairfield, whose 28th Senatorial District includes Newtown. The only Democrat not to vote for passage was Sen. Cathy Osten of Sprague, who missed the final vote on a bill that generated mixed opinions, at best, in her rural district.
Hwang is one of four Republican incumbents who won with less than 51% of the vote in 2022. The others are Ryan Fazio of Greenwich, Lisa Seminara of Avon and Jeff Gordon of Woodstock.
“This is all politics,” said Fazio, who won with 50.1% two years ago in a district where Donald J. Trump was a drag on the GOP ticket four years ago.
Trump lost by 20 percentage points statewide — and by 25 points in Fazio’s hometown of Greenwich — and ran behind most Republican candidates for the General Assembly.
“If I was in charge of the state government or state legislature and I presided over a 35% increase in homicides … I don’t think I would be accusing the minority party of promoting unsafe public policy in the state of Connecticut,” Fazio said.
Homicides spiked in Connecticut during the COVID pandemic, as they did nationally.
One study by the state Department of Public Health found a 42% increase in the average homicide rate in Connecticut for 2020 to 2022, compared to the four years prior to the pandemic.
Overall, violent crimes are low in Connecticut.
“Connecticut is considered the fourth-safest state in the nation, and that’s not by accident: It’s because a lot of criminal justice reform that we’ve done, and it’s because of the fact of some of these gun laws that we have passed as well,” Duff said.
Forbes named Connecticut the fourth safest state behind New Hampshire, Maine and Rhode Island. The ranking was based on the state’s rates of violent and property crimes per 100,000 residents, as well as the chances of becoming a victim of violent crime.
Since the passage of police accountability laws, including one adopted in Connecticut in 2020, and bail reforms enacted elsewhere, politicians have debated the correlation between crime and criminal justice policies.
Crime statistics are reported annually in the fall. After the increase in crime in 2020, Connecticut resumed its decade-long drop in crime in 2021, according to statistics released in 2022.
A year ago, the report for 2022 showed a violent crime rate that was the state’s lowest in the last decade. Harding said those statistics do not reflect a crisis of violent crime in selected cities, where nearly all the homicides occur.
“Republicans have consistently been the ‘Party of Public Safety,’ while Connecticut Democrats provide lip service when addressing actual gun crime in our urban and poverty-stricken areas,” Harding said.
This story was originally published by the Connecticut Mirror.
