You can read it here, if you'd like, but the summary is this. The knockout game bill bumps an assault up to the second-degree when it intends to "cause serious physical injury to another person by rendering such other person unconscious" and "causes such injury to such other person by striking such other person in the head." And people who are 16 or 17 and who perform these acts would be tried as adults.

For analysis, let us turn to Gideon, a public defender and blogger in the state, who I know in the way one knows people on Twitter. "[Y]ou will now be subjected to a harsher penalty for one knockout punch than you would be if you took a baseball bat and beat the crap out of someone," Gideon writes. But he points out that the law is flawed in part because proving that someone intended to render someone else unconscious — the main stipulation in the bill defining such an attack! — Is impossible to prove. "Did you mean to knock him unconscious?" the prosecutor will act. "No," the defendant will respond. Absent a brain-reading device, reasonable doubt prevails.

Which loops us back to our original argument. The difficulty in evaluating whether or not particular assaults (of the 5,000-plus aggravated assaults the state sees each year) meet the constrained stipulations of the bill seems prohibitive. The Hartford Courant reports on two cases in the state blamed on the "game," but doesn't clearly indicate if they were punches in the head with the intent of a knockout. As we have noted several times, there isn't any evidence that there was a widespread or common "knockout game" phenomenon last year when the hype peaked. There is little evidence that this much-ballyhooed trend exists in any form now; even its most common form — made-up media panic — it has waned significantly.

So why pass the bill? The Courant quotes another legislator.

Rep. Themis Klarides, R-Derby, said some women have lost babies as a result of these types of random attacks and other people suffered brain damage. "At the very least, this sends a message to these kids this is not funny," she said of the committee's action.

Connecticut is passing a law to send a message to kids because maybe a particular thing happened once. But who will send the kids a message about climbing Christmas trees?

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.