Legal gun owners in Connecticut are now forced under the
state's new gun control laws to register their "assault weapons" and
ammunition.
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| Hundreds of Connecticut residents lined up Monday to make sure their weapon where registered.. |
The queue of citizens seeking to register their weapons
stretched around the State Department of Public Safety in Middletown on Monday,
in a scene that must warm the hearts of gun control advocates everywhere.
Mike Lawlor, the governor's undersecretary for criminal
justice said,
"If you get caught with a banned assault weapon after
tomorrow night then you're going to be prosecuted as a felon."
Lawlor is not kidding. In New York, were similar laws were
passed, CBS News reported this week that "arrest data show more than 1,000
gun possession charges in New York City were boosted from misdemeanors to
felonies because of the changes."
Times have changed since the Connecticut state constitution
declared,
"Every citizen has a right to bear arms in defense of
himself and the state."
The "controversial, wide-ranging" laws passed in
April in the wake of the mass killing at Sandy Hook Elementary school. This, in
a state where gun control laws were already among the strictest in the country,
yet failed to deter Adam Lanza, 20, who clearly was not concerned about laws
when he killed twenty children and six adults last year.
Twin Cities reported in the wake of the mass killing that
"Connecticut’s laws are strict by comparison to many other states, but
they still fall short of what many gun control advocates want."
Lawlor continued to say,
"The goal of the law is to have fewer of these assault
weapons in circulation in the years to come..."
The law-abiding residents who are forced to undergo this
exercise are not among those committing crimes, as noted by one resident, who
said,
"Anybody who's going to bring their assault rifles here
to register them aren't criminals...The criminals are the people sitting at
home hiding them in their closet right now."
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