Connecticut halts plans to round up firearms:Satire with a Point

Gun Watch ^ | 9 March, 2014 | Dean Weingarten

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A satire article with an appropriate measure of truth is going viral on the Internet.   "Connecticut halts plans to round up firearms after finding most cops in the state are on the list" is a satire posted on callthecops.net four days ago on March 4th.    At the bottom of the page, discreetly posted, is this disclaimer:

This site is a satire of the current state of Law Enforcement, Fire Fighting and Emergency Medical work. Stories posted here are not real and you should not assume them to have any basis in any real fact.

The article was emailed to me from a trusted friend who stated that he had not verified it.   Long established skepticism combined with a short search revealed the satire.   It is good satire, because there is considerable truth in the article.   The primary deviation from reality is the assumption in the article, that police officers in Connecticut would be required to follow the law, and register, transfer, move out of state, or surrender semi-automatic rifles and magazines that are included in the law, just like everyone else.

A commenter that bought into the satire, Ctlawman, posted this comment at the site:

I hate to tell the author of this but this is bogus ... If you read CT PA13-3 as well as the associated PA13-220 it clearly states Leo's can own and carry and purchase firearms that utilize magazines that hold more then 10 rounds as well as "assault rifles" and their associated standard capacity 30 round magazines. On page 3 Section 1 part d speaks to the ownership of magazines, the firearm section is a few pages further but reads the same.

The authors of the legislation were not as clueless as the article makes them out to be.  They foresaw that a great many police likely owned the second amendment protected items that they desired to outlaw, and that this could make enforcement efforts difficult and dicey.   So they offered the police this bribe: we will make you exempt from the law as long as you work for us.  You will not have to register your weapons... because we expect you to follow orders.  This sort of exemption for enforcers of authoritarian regimes is common around the world.   I recall the story of a fellow student that I knew in graduate school.  He was from Indonesia, and someone at his high school had challenged him to fight.  When he showed up, he was toting a Sten submachine gun that his father owned.  It was forbidden to nearly everyone in the country, but his father was a policeman.

It appears to me that this part of Connecticut statutes has a problem with "equal justice under the law".   Why should police officers be exempt, other than it creates difficulty in enforcing the law if they are not?    With this kind of reasoning, police will be allowed to steal peoples money and possessions on mere suspicion... already have that, called forfeiture law.   What about their oath to the Constitution?  Many police hold that oath to be meaningless, only binding if those who give the orders tell them that it is.  This renders the oath without any significance, as demonstrated in the viral recording of Lt. Vance, Public Information Officer of the Connecticut State Police:

 “Did I take an oath to the Constitution? What bearing does that have on this conversation? . . . I don’t want to talk about the Constitution, Ma’am, at all, at all.”

Police are clearly part of the new nobility.   The ruling class has to have its enforcers.

©2014 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice is included.
Link to Gun Watch

[marktwain]

Some officers take their oath seriously, but giving special privileges to enforcers has a long history.