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Police provide basic information following most serious assaults or murders in Connecticut, and to prevent panic they often add that there is "no threat to the public" and that the assault or murder was "an isolated incident."
But nearly every day Connecticut is full of "isolated incidents" that, if taken together, would constitute a crime wave, and while the perpetrators of the day may not be imminent dangers to others, they probably will pose danger to others eventually.
For as is often indicated by news reporting about crime, Connecticut is full of chronic offenders who aren't in prison. Indeed, news reports about an arrest for a serious crime often disclose that the accused has "a long criminal record," though such reports seldom provoke indignant demands from the public to know why the chronic offender was free.
Many years ago some politicians in Connecticut portrayed themselves as "tough on crime," but today it's hard to find any politician pressing the crime issue, especially in regard to chronic offenders. While serious crime is said to be declining and the state's prison population has fallen from a high of about 20,000 in 2008 to just less than 11,000 today, a drop of about 45%, this may not be so comforting.
For most serious crime charges long have been and continue to be heavily discounted in the criminal-justice system through plea-bargaining, which prosecutors and judges believe is necessary to prevent the system from being overwhelmed. They know that the courts are only as effective as they are ready for trial, and only a tiny fraction of criminal cases go to trial, because they system isn't so ready. Criminals expect plea bargains.
Connecticut would have plenty of room for locking up chronic offenders if it wanted to reopen the prisons that have been closed in recent years. But the state's Democratic administration accepts the damage done by chronic offenders because it is offset by savings in the prison budget and because imprisoning more people would worsen racial disproportions in the prison population. Suppressing those racial disproportions helps elected officials overlook the racial disproportions in crime itself and the poverty and educational failure that cause them.
Indeed, the obsession of the Democratic state administration with gun ownership is a distraction from the crime issue.
A new state law seeking to ban the sale of certain Glock brand guns was suspended in federal court last week and likely will consume hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal expenses over the next year or two even as the law would do little against crime if it was enforced.
The law would ban sale of certain Glock pistols that can be converted to full automatic firing with an inexpensive plastic attachment that already has been outlawed. Full automatic firing -- firing in which a single sustained pull of the trigger discharges all the bullets in the gun -- is what machine guns have, and ownership of machine guns is virtually prohibited by federal law. No one outside the military should have one, especially now that the country grows crazier politically and the threat of terrorism rises.
But Glocks are not machine guns unless they are modified, the manufacturer has changed its design so its new pistols can't easily be modified, and the automatic-firing feature of modified Glocks has seldom been used in crime. Glocks are used in crime just because, like most other guns used in crime, they are handguns. So the new law against old Glocks would have little impact on crime.
Similarly, the new law's only inconvenience to gun owners is that it would prevent owners of older Glocks from selling them to registered gun dealers, diminishing the resale market. But the older Glocks still could be sold or traded privately. So the new law would hardly impair Second Amendment rights.
Crime might be reduced by increasing the criminal-justice system's readiness for trial, by not plea-bargaining gun charges, and by permanently jailing chronic offenders. But that would cost money, while posturing about machine guns is free.
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