Ken Dixon: Case should be closed on open carry

Eric Milgram, a father of two children present at the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in 2012, speaks in support of the proposed bill that would require someone open-carrying a firearm to produce a state permit if requested by a law enforcement official. less Eric Milgram, a father of two children present at the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in 2012, speaks in support of the proposed bill that would require someone open-carrying a firearm to produce a state ... more Photo: Michael Cummo / Hearst Connecticut Media Photo: Michael Cummo / Hearst Connecticut Media Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Ken Dixon: Case should be closed on open carry 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

“... Pancho was a bandit, boys,

his horse was fast as polished steel.

He wore his gun outside his pants

for all the honest world to feel...”

“Pancho and Lefty,” by Townes Van Zandt

In a year when any mildly controversial bills are bound to fail in this thoroughly divided General Assembly, the Judiciary Committee finds itself rearranging desks in Sandy Hook Elementary School.

The committee could actually do something constructive for gun safety, like banning the law called open carry, which lets cowboys wear their pistols and revolvers on their belts for public consumption. Instead, the Judiciary Committee spent most of a 10-hour hearing on allegedly repairing a law that requires yahoos to have permits when they take Glock 9s out for a walk. A loophole lets them refuse to show the permits to an inquisitive cop.

Unlike the couple dozen dudes — a small turnout — in their orange double-XL Connecticut Citizens Defense League T-shirts, I don’t feel safer knowing that someone other than a cop has a gun in a public place. That’s one of the reasons why I don’t patronize those coffee places named after the character in Moby Dick: they support open carry.

There are about 240,000 permits in the state, so it would not be politically expedient to ban all weapon carrying. But even an armed camp like Florida prohibits open carry. And it has been upheld in court. Scott Wilson, the articulate president of the CCDL, admitted to the committee that open-carry incidents are few and far between, but he and his 27,000 members want their rights upheld, so this is the 2017 gunfight.

“If you have the permit, then you have the right to carry your firearms,” Wilson said.

They can still have their rights, but why should normal people wonder what the guy in front of them at the sandwich place has in mind when he — they’re always men — gets to the front of the line? On one level, I’d accept concealed carry, because then the bad guys, whoever they are, don’t know who has a firearm. Keep the crooks guessing, you know? Everyone might be armed.

A couple of pistol-packing instigators, including one in a Bridgeport Subway sandwich shop last year, had some high-stakes fun over their rights to carry firearms and not show their permits. They illustrated the loophole, and the divided General Assembly might not even be able to fix it this year because of the deadlocks in the House and Senate.

The special guest of the Judiciary Committee, who didn’t get to sit in front of the cowardly committee until well after the five-hour mark, was a tall, thin 11-year-old named Lauren Milgram. She was a first-grader that bleak December day in 2012 when a sick, demented young man blasted through the front door of her school and killed six adults and 20 other first-graders. Lauren’s class was saved when her teacher, Kaitlin Roig-DeBellis, piled the kids into a classroom lavatory and locked the door.

Lauren, off school on a snow day, got a good dose of the Second Amendment types, and a taste for the politics among the Judiciary Committee. Her father, Eric, a chemist, said she took a little nap, but learned the caliber of Connecticut politicians getting paid with tax money to look out for her best interests. She could tell the differences among the committee members in the bag for the NRA; the urban legislators tired of street violence; and the dominant suburban types who think a half measure, forcing open-carriers to yield their permits, is the only way they can advance gun safety in 2017.

Eric and I talked about how we still occasionally get phone calls from, most likely, mentally ill people, who believe the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre was a hoax and are called “truthers” by conspiracy radio.

Eric, whose son was a fourth-grader at Sandy Hook during the attack, grew up in Florida and fired shotguns competitively in his early teens. He said that one aggressive pro-gun PR tactic is to assert that people are fearful of them because they don’t understand them. While he gets profiled as a liberal gun hater, when confronted, he offers people to go to a range, rent a rifle and use the Marine Corps marksman course: targets at 500 yards, $100 a point. He doesn’t get takers.

“Even in gun-crazy Florida they banned open carry because it’s not in the best interests of the public,” Eric said, stressing that it didn’t take Lauren long to size up the committee and the speakers. “An 11-year-old child could see through the sophistry and absurdity of the positions,” Eric said.

Yep, it’s a missed opportunity for the Judiciary Committee to do something serious about gun safety, to pursue a “conversation,” as the liars on either side call it. Me? I want an up and down vote and lawmakers on the record for gun safety. Connecticut isn’t the wild West.

Ken Dixon can be reached in the Capitol at 860-549-4670 or at kdixon@ctpost.com. See twitter.com/KenDixonCT. His Facebook address is kendixonct.hearst. Dixon’s Connecticut Blog-o-rama is at blog.ctnews.com/dixon/