Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Sir James George Frazier, author of “The Golden Bough,” an examination of pre-literate, pre-Christian social mores among primitives, tells the story of a ritualistic punishment involving a murder. The foul deed was done with a knife. The village elders gather together in a hut and call witnesses to give testimony. First the presumed murderer is closely interrogated, then the family of the victim. Last of all, the knife is called to testify. Closely examined, it is pronounced guilty and suitably punished by the elders, who execute the weapon by throwing it in the river. Scapegoats are sometimes used for the same purpose; they are guilt receptacles that receive blood-guilt and are afterwards destroyed.

To begin with a footnote, “hoplophobia” is a political neologism coined in 1936 by military officer Jeff Cooper to indicate “an irrational aversion to weapons" and also “the fear of firearms and armed citizens.” Mr. Cooper was a far-sighted prophet of the our  century. The anti-gun careers of Connecticut U.S. Senators Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy did not hove into view until the 21 st century was well underway. “This state” – meaning Connecticut – wrote the editors of the Hartford Courant   the day following Barack Obama’s utterly ineffective Presidential edict on gun control, “is the cradle of heartache caused by the gun, the site of the dreadful slaughter of 26 innocents at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown four years ago.”

You know it’s over when all the notable politicians have taken their bows, this time draped in the winding cloth of Sandy Hook’s victims. On Sunday, a week after Christians, some of them, went to their churches to memorialize the resurrection of the Christ, and 15 weeks after Adam Lanza shot his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School armed to the teeth with weapons owned by his mother, whom he murdered with a still legal 22 caliber rifle, there slaughtering six heroic staff members of the school and twenty innocent children, the Hartford Courant ran on its Opinion page a series of columns surmounted by the eye catching headline, “Will This Stop More Newtowns?” By “this” the Courant intended to indicate the anti-gun legislation newly passed by Connecticut’s General Assembly. The mercifully short but emotionally inconvenient answer to the question is – “No.”