Lawmakers take pass on gun control
Apparent inaction follows last year’s passage of sweeping reforms
HARTFORD — A year after reenforcing one the nation’s strictest gun control laws, Connecticut legislators are not expected to mount a serious effort at passing new restrictions on firearms or gun ownership during this year’s short budget session, according to legislative leaders.
Of the hundreds of bills that remain viable ahead of the legislature’s May 8 deadline, only a handful deal directly with firearms and none would restrict ownership of particular weapons. The co-chairman of the legislature’s Judiciary Committee, state Rep. Steve Stafstrom, D-Bridgeport, said lawmakers have decided not to pursue “major” gun legislation in 2024.
As of Wednesday, the only gun bill passed by Stafstrom’s committee was H.B. 5467, which he described as a “technical” fix to comport with changes to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System passed by Congress in 2022. The bill passed out of the committee with bipartisan support in March, and is awaiting action in the House.
A second measure, H.B. 5448, was referred to Judiciary this week after passing out of the committee on Government Administration and Elections. The bill would make it a felony to possess a firearm within 250 feet of a polling place, as well as protecting the addresses of election workers from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. The Senate’s signature healthcare bill, S.B. 1, also includes a provision mandating that doctors offer patients with materials about firearm safety.
“I think there’s always an extent to
which our legislation is going to have to keep pace with the advent of technology,” Stafstrom said in an interview this week. “I think we made great strides last year catching up to where the technology has gone, but that’s not to say we won’t need to update again in the next year, or two years or five years.”
Connecticut is widely recognized as having some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation ever since it became one of the first states to pass a ban on military-style rifles in 1993. In the three decades since that ban went into effect, lawmakers have periodically worked to expand the law to cover new types of weapons and specific modifications like silencers and high-capacity magazines — most notably doing so in the aftermath of the deadly massacre at Newtown’s Sandy Hook Elementary School.
That law added dozens of specific firearm variants to the list of military-style rifles that are banned in Connecticut. Still, in the years that followed lawmakers and gun control advocates accused the firearms industry of tweaking their products to skirt state bans.
Last year, Gov. Ned Lamont successfully fought for the passage of the state’s most expansive gun control law since Sandy Hook, tightening definitions of military-style weapons, expanding safe storage requirements, banning open carry and cracking down on the proliferation of unserialized “ghost” guns.
The lack of follow-up legislation this year is little respite for opponents of gun control, who argue that laws in Connecticut go well beyond the bounds of the 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
“I think we’re always cautious with the Connecticut legislature when it comes to guns,” said Mark Oliva, a spokesman for the Shelton-based National Shooting Sports Foundation, a firearms industry trade group. “There never seems to be an end to their appetite for more gun control.”
Oliva said he fears that Connecticut lawmakers in future sessions will attempt to emulate legislation currently being considered in other states, such as a Colorado bill that would require gun sales processed with a debit or credit card to be assigned their own merchant category code — used to classify types of businesses such as grocers and clothing stores — which would alert the financial institution of the transaction.
When asked about the potential for future legislation, Stafstrom said he is interested policies related to new technologies such as microstamping, a process through which bullet casings are stamped with unique markings when fired, allowing investigators to more easily connect ballistics from a crime scene to a specific weapon.
While at least three states — including New York and New Jersey — have passed laws mandating sale of guns capable of microstamping, enforcement of those laws has been delayed for years due to concerns about the feasibility of the technology. Oliva said the firearms industry is opposed to those mandates, calling the technology “unworkable.”
“We’ve seen California and some other states start to work on that type of technology and implement legislation,” Stafstrom said. “Once that technology is worked through, that is something I certainly would be interested in pursuing in Connecticut.”
Melissa Kane, the interim executive director of CT Against Gun Violence, said the group’s principal policy goal in 2024 is maintaining a $3.9 million line item in the budget for gun violence prevention grants. “Even though last year was a big year, this is an important year,” she said.
Other leaders, including Lamont, have argued that Connecticut and its neighboring states can only go so far to restrict access to firearms as long as they remain legal and easily obtainable in far-flug regions of the country.
In early April, President Joe Biden’s administration announced new rules to close the so-called “gun show loophole” that had allowed thousands of guns to be sold without background checks by unlicensed dealers. While the impact of the new rule is unlikely to be felt in Connecticut — which has long mandated universal background checks — advocates for gun safety argue that overtime, closing the loophole will help slow the flow of illegal firearms across state lines.
Lamont praised the ruling, calling it a “coherent national policy that closes a gap in our federal background check system and is supported by the overwhelming majority of Americans.”
“There always probably are going to be some changes, but ultimately this is federal,” House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, told reporters on Wednesday. “You can’t do it state-bystate to make a big difference.”