State lawmakers have a chance to save lives

A few days before the Connecticut legislative judiciary committee held a public hearing on some gun legislation, the advocacy group Connecticut Against Gun Violence hosted Zoom sessions to train advocates how to testify.

One of the bills to be discussed in the public hearing, H.B. 6355, seeks to update a late ’90s law that created a process for temporarily removing guns from people who are a threat to themselves or to others, also known as extreme risk protection orders, or ERPO. Connecticut was the first state to enact such a law after an employee at the state lottery headquarters killed four co-workers and then himself in 1998.

Other states have followed Connecticut’s lead as mass shooting proliferated around the country. That’s been the pattern for extreme risk protection orders. Every mass shooting is followed by states passing legislation that creates a process to remove guns from at-risk residents. The most recent wave came after the 2018 Parkland school shooting that left 17 dead.

Connecticut’s updated bill would require a court hearing before a gun is returned, would prevent someone at risk from purchasing a gun, and would broaden the list of people (family, loved ones, health care professionals) who can petition the court for gun removal, among other changes.

Despite studies that show this law helps keep people safe, any time a piece of gun legislation comes up, people who nearly uniformly oppose gun legislation — including the ailing NRA, which called 6355 the “firearm seizure bill” — come out in force. Written testimony for a similar bill last year was four-to-one against, said Jonathan Perloe, CAGV communications director.

So for this early March public hearing, CAGV wanted to engage people who support responsible gun legislation.

As people settle in to the call, Perloe tells the faces on the screen that pro-legislation written testimony is fine, but in-person testimony is more effective. Take that extra step outside your comfort zone, he tells the trainees. If you’re nervous, that’s OK. Nerves give an air of authenticity.

This bill makes sense. A 2017 study from Duke, Yale, and University of Connecticut researchers looked at 762 gun removals, and found that for every 10-20 risk warrants, one suicide was prevented. Since, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, roughly half of suicides are completed by firearm, that’s a significant amount of prevention. In fact, Perloe said roughly two-thirds of these warrants are used to prevent suicide.

But one-issue gun voters, said Perloe, “worry that someone’s coming to their home in the middle of the night and taking their guns without due process.” That is not true. There is a process, and people who ask for these warrants do so at risk of perjury. Still, lying about a gun grab is an effective way to rile up the base who oppose any and all gun legislation, the glazed-eyed pry-itfrom-my-cold-dead-fingers people. We would all be so much safer if we didn’t reduce all gun safety laws to “antigun.” The arguments are more nuanced, though you couldn’t necessarily tell that from past legislative committee testimony.

More tips from Perloe: Watch the public hearing on CT-N. Log in when it’s nearly your turn. Keep your comments to three minutes, and then be prepared for questions. Most legislators save their questions for officials and people who run organizations, but if someone has a question, says Perloe, don’t let legislators take you down rabbit holes. It’s OK to say “I don’t know.”

Then that Friday, the hearing starts promptly. Early on, Sen. Rob Sampson, a Wolcott Republican who has called himself “Connecticut’s strongest defender of our Second Amendment Rights,” opined that there is a “sizable part of our population that would agree any person possessing a firearm might be a danger to themselves or others.”

Boom. It is not a nuanced opening, and somewhere, a gauntlet clatters to the ground.

But if that is the case, that supporters of gun legislation are basically just opponents of guns, that was lacking from the testimony. CAGV executive director Jeremy Stein talked about the importance of preventing gun violence, and he spoke movingly about an uncle who’d received a difficult medical diagnosis and died by suicide, with a gun, in 1989.

One woman talked about her troubled son, whom she feared.

Several of the people who opposed the bill talked about angry ex-spouses who might make a false accusation to come for their guns, or they talked about women gun owners who might not seek mental health treatment for fear of losing their guns. That’s not how the law works. (One can only guess at the state of these folks’ relationships, but the testimony smacked of the Trumpian “many people are saying.”) Someone else mentioned tyranny, though court challenges against these protective orders don’t usually get very far.

In all, testimony went quickly, with only a few hiccups. Absent, for the most part, were the histrionics that often accompany gun zealots’ love of all things weapon-like.

Afterward, Stein, an attorney who has argued Second Amendment cases in court, said this legislation is written clearly, and responsible gun owner support it, as they support safe storage rules and other safety measures.

So let the gun zealots rail. Common sense, data, and peer-reviewed studies say this legislation saves lives. Still, let’s take a moment and hope those gun zealots’ relationships are OK.