HARTFORD, Conn. — As the initial shock and horror of the deaths of 20 young children and six female educators at a Newtown elementary school was still fresh in everyone’s mind, Connecticut’s top legislators decided they needed to do something.
Lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle said they owed it to the families to respond with their best attempt to reduce the chances of a similar catastrophe.
“Within 24 hours of the tragedy, I reached out to [Senate Republican leader] John McKinney,” recalled then-Senate President Pro Tem Donald Williams, the highest-ranking senator. “At the end of the conversation, we both talked about the need to do something. And ideally if we could do something in a bipartisan way, that would send the most powerful message. As we were working through the tragedy and the grief, we were also thinking about the responsibility of doing something significant.”
It took months in 2013, but they not only did something major — they passed the toughest package of state laws in the country.
But it wasn’t easy.
“The first couple of meetings reflected where the United States was on this issue — one of the most partisan and divisive issues in America,’' Williams told The Courant near the 10-year anniversary of the shootings. “You don’t see bipartisan agreements on taking significant steps to curb gun violence. ... Quite frankly, I think there was a feeling on both sides that somehow this was not going to work — that there would be a point where things blew up and we would not have an agreement. But we kept at it.”
The difference, lawmakers said, came when family members talked to legislators, including coming to the state Capitol.
“The horror of this tragedy — hearing from the parents and the families and the friends and relatives of the children who were murdered and the teachers and educators who were killed — had a profound effect,” Williams said. “I remember a pivot point in our discussions where we moved from leaders of two different political parties on one of the most divisive issues to legislators who resolved to take strong action and work out the details.”
Those details were new laws on assault weapons, universal background checks and, more recently, an expansion of the existing red flag laws in place.
In fact, the state has more firearms-related law provisions than almost any other. In 2018, the state had 92 such firearm-related provisions, the most of any state except placing it behind only California and Massachusetts, according to an inventory maintained by the Boston University School of Public Health published at StateFirearmLaws.org.
At the federal level, it took nearly another 10 years for a breakthrough.
In the 10 years since the December 14, 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, there have been 27 mass shootings at U.S. schools, including 19 at elementary schools and eight at colleges or universities, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
But since the deadly massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School 10 years ago, federal gun control laws have barely changed.
“It’s sad that we’re still here, fighting these battles,” U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy said. “For nine years after Sandy Hook, we couldn’t get any action at the federal level until just this year.”
In 2013, then-President Barack Obama tried, and failed, to implement stricter gun control. That year, Congress defeated a bill to restrict assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, which have been used in multiple mass shootings since then, including the 50 killed at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in 2016, 59 killed at the Harvest music festival in Las Vegas in 2017, 17 killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, and 22 killed at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, earlier this year.
“But despite this, over the last 10 years, there was a lot of movement at the state level,” Murphy said. “Yes, there were some states that loosened their gun laws. But there were lots of states that tightened them, including here in our state.”
Connecticut Assault Weapons Ban
“This is a profoundly emotional day, I think, for everyone in this room,” then-Gov. Dannel Malloy said at a signing ceremony for the state’s assault weapons ban in 2013. “We have come together in a way that relatively few places in our nation have demonstrated an ability to do.”
The bill was signed into law on April 4, 2013, less than five months after the massacre, in a packed state Capitol meeting room with parents and family members of the victims in attendance.
The law immediately expanded the state’s existing 1990s ban on assault weapons to include a long list of new firearms — including the Bushmaster AR-15 semiautomatic rifle that Adam Lanza used in the Sandy Hook shootings.
“That bill banned over 100 different types of long rifles, greatly expanding on the law from the 1990s,” said former House Speaker J. Brendan Sharkey, who represented Hamden. “It was a very pressure-filled couple of months trying to get that bill passed.”
The legislation also created the nation’s first statewide registry of people convicted of crimes involving the use or threat of dangerous weapons and available only to law enforcement agencies.
It also required universal background checks for purchasers of all firearms, even transactions between private individuals.
“We recognized we had to do something for the families,” Sharkey said. “We could not come up short — it would have been unthinkable.”
One of the other major pieces of the bill prohibited the sale and purchase of ammunition magazines holding more than 10 rounds — such as the 30-round magazines used by Lanza.
Sen. John McKinney, then-Republican Senate leader whose district included Newtown, was a key proponent of the bill.
“There were some tense moments and disagreements in the room,” McKinney said. “There were times we had to take a break and cool off and then come back, but I never got to the point where I said this wasn’t going to happen. We were all just focused on the negotiations.”
According to statistics provided last month by the Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection, the state has issued nearly 82,000 certificates of possession for assault weapons, which includes registrations dating back to an earlier weapons ban that was adopted in 1994.
After the law took effect in 2014, public safety officials reported that residents had registered roughly 50,000 firearms under its provisions.
“The Democratic majority could have cast their own bill, but they felt the importance of working with us,” McKinney said. “I think the tragedy took all of us away from the traditional politics. Everyone was committed to finding a solution. It was both sides working really hard.”
McKinney said that there’s not a week that goes by that he doesn’t think of the children killed in his former district.
“This was my community, these were my constituents,” McKinney said. “I owed it to them to make sure this tragedy didn’t go without some response.”
But the bill also had its critics who cited concerns that it automatically would make anyone a felon who had a banned weapon and did not report it. In addition, the bill was criticized as a job killer since it was likely to drive away gun manufacturers out of the state.
On opposition to expanding the assault weapon ban, former state Rep. Craig Miner, R-Litchfield, and former co-chairman of the gun subcommittee, said the Republicans “believe that it’s not the gun that actually kills the person, it’s the person who kills the person. That is number one. That sounds pretty cold, but that’s kind of the way it is.”
Former House Republican leader Larry Cafero of Norwalk, a key player in the negotiations who has since retired from the legislature, said Republicans and Democrats worked together in a way that some pundits had not expected.
“It was one of the proudest moments I had in the legislature,’' Cafero recalled. “It was a monumental effort on everyone’s part and truly bipartisan — staff, the lawyers, the research.”
A challenge to the assault weapons ban
The 2013 law is now being challenged nearly a decade after its signing.
There are two lawsuits pending in federal court that seek to overturn the state’s assault weapons law, first enacted in the 1990s and strengthened with the 2013 law.
The National Association for Gun Rights asked a federal judge to immediately repeal Connecticut’s assault weapon ban while the battle over the constitutionality of Connecticut’s gun laws plays out in court — a move that Connecticut Attorney General William Tong called “incredibly dangerous.”
The lawsuits, including another case filed by the Connecticut Citizens Defense League and the Washington-based Second Amendment Foundation, are relying heavily on a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned part of New York’s gun regulations.
Tong argued during a press conference last month that the recently decided Supreme Court case is not applicable to Connecticut’s assault weapons ban, which outlawed the sale of long guns like AR-15s but allowed people who already owned those weapons prior to 2013 to keep them by registering them with the state.
“I am very confident that our laws are constitutional and defensible,” Tong said. “I’m confident that we will prevail, [but] this is a very dangerous maneuver by the plaintiffs. It’s very dangerous because, as I said, when you seek a preliminary injunction, you’re asking the court to immediately step in and change the status quo.”
New Haven University Associate Professor Michael P. Lawlor, a former criminal justice advisor to Malloy and longtime lawmaker, also argued that the state’s gun laws are safe under the ruling.
“In our state, unlike New York, you don’t have to give a reason why you need a pistol permit,” Lawlor said. “The state, however, has to give a reason and cite evidence to say you shouldn’t have one. That’s a much more sound system. What got overturned in New York was if you wanted a permit to carry you needed to give a reason in which the state could decide if it was good enough. That was found unconstitutional.”
New York courts previously defined proper cause for a pistol permit as requiring the applicant to “demonstrate a special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community.”
“I’m very comfortable with our law,” Lawlor said. “I don’t think our laws will be overturned because they are in lockstep with the U.S. Constitution. No one in the state can be denied a permit application because they don’t have a good enough reason to obtain one.”
Lamont also doubled down on the state’s assault weapons ban during a debate last month when he suggested that he may ask the legislature to consider passing a new law, which would end the loophole that allowed some gun owners to keep assault-style weapons that were purchased prior to 2013.
“When it comes to the safety of the people of our state, we must stand up and do what is right — that is why I proposed strengthening, not weakening, our assault weapons law earlier this year,” Lamont said in a press release. “I applaud the actions that Attorney General Tong is taking to defend Connecticut’s gun violence prevention laws on behalf of the people of our state.”
Lawlor agreed and said that the state has the right to make previously legal products illegal.
“The grandfather clause makes perfect sense if you’re a law-abiding citizen to keep your weapon. But all too often one person spoils it for everybody else,” Lawlor said. “Soon enough one of these perfectly legal grandfathered weapons will be used to commit a serious crime, which is exactly what happened in Bristol.”
Nicholas Brutcher, the man alleged to be responsible for shooting three Bristol police officers and killing two back in October, used an AR-15-style weapon grandfathered under the 2013 law.
“I think the impetus is there for a debate on it,” Lawlor said. “I’m sure there will be much discussion on it next year.”
