Connecticut seems surprised that people are ignoring their citizen control laws

Connecticut State Police feel compelled to remind citizens that it is their duty under the state’s draconian new citizen control laws to register their most effective self-defense firearms and standard capacity magazines for more efficient future government confiscation:

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The state police have sent a reminder for gun owners that an important deadline is looming for two key parts of this year’s gun control law.

Owners of guns classified as assault weapons must get assault weapon certificates by Dec. 31. They must submit an application for a certificate by that date along with proof that they bought the weapon before the law took effect April 4.

Owners of magazines that can hold more than 10 rounds face the same Dec. 31 deadline. They too must submit an application form along with proof they owned the magazine before the law took effect. Note, even though the law allows people to keep their already-owned large-capacity magazines if they register them, it forbids loading them with more than 10 rounds at a time except in their homes or at a shooting range.

Reason suggests that the state has sent out this “reminder” because the supermajority of citizens are ignoring the blatantly unconstitutional registration law, just as Americans have historically chosen to ignore previous registration laws. American citizens have apparently never complied by registering more than 25% of those firearms that were required to be registered by law (Illinois handgun registration in the 1970s was the dubious high-point), and at least 90-percent of Americans in other states ignore these more blatant citizen control laws designed to do little more than weaken citizens before the power of the government.

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J.D. Tuccille suspects that non-compliance in Connecticut will be even higher.

Connecticut may want to look close to home for even lower compliance figures. In New Jersey, reported The New York Times in 1991, after the legislature passed a law banning “assault weapons,” 947 people registered their rifles as sporting guns for target shooting, 888 rendered them inoperable, and four surrendered them to the police. That’s out of an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 firearms affected by the law.

Over the years, officials in New York City and California used registration records to confiscate guns, in violation of their own promises. That’s a lesson that firearms owners have taken to heart in this country (and elsewhere), probably permanently dooming the enforceability of such laws.

The end result of pushing through gun laws that people won’t obey is very predictable. You end up with a society in which people continue to own vast numbers of weapons regardless of the law. Connecticut may be on the way, sometime after the new year’s registration deadline, to turning itself into a replica of Germany, where up to 20 million unregistered firearms are held in addition to 7.2 million legal ones, or France, where as many as 17 million illegal guns overshadow 2.8 million legal ones.

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It doesn’t take a great deal of investigation to discover why citizens are ignoring these government decrees rushed through state legislatures without being read in party-line votes under “emergency” conditions in order to stifle discourse and debate. It comes down to the simple fact that we are very cognizant of recent world history and how these laws are used against the people.

Disarming the citizenry under the guise of “stopping crime” has been used repeatedly throughout human history, and always, without exception, towards the singular end of establishing a monopoly of force for the government. The end result is that once the citizens of a state have been disarmed, then the government has no reason to negotiate; they may then chose to rule by brute force.

It is feared that in the 20th Century alone, 262 million people were murdered by their own governments. In each instance, these democides (a democide is when a government slaughters its own people) occurred only after those governments disarmed the citizenry and rendered them powerless to resist.

As modern human beings, we like to imagine ourselves as erudite, refined, and intelligent creatures. We like to pretend that government is benign and benevolent, even though all of recorded history shows that governments inevitably begin to amass power for the benefit of the government itself instead of the citizenry they claim to protect.

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Down deep, Americans know that “gun control” is not targeted at stopping crime, but disarming the citizenry and transferring power from citizens to the state. It is about citizen control. It always has been, and so it is no wonder that a free people refuses to comply.

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