Pre-Crime and Pre-emptive Civilian Disarmament (William Grigg)

William Grigg's latest article indicates how close we are getting to the totalitarian world of the movie Minority Report. An excerpt:

Within a few months, advocates of civilian disarmament, working their familiar cynical alchemy, transmuted the Connecticut Lottery tragedy into totalitarian policy: With the help of State Representative Michael Lawlor (now chairman of the Connecticut Legislature's Judiciary Committee), they enacted the nation's first preemptive gun seizure act. Under that "law," the police can confiscate firearms from their lawful owners before a crime is committed.

"The value of this law is not so much that police will seize your guns," Lawlor explained when the measure went into effect in October 1999. "It gives police a system to investigate a person who poses a threat. If the police never confiscate a person's guns, they can at least look into the person's behavior and perhaps prevent a tragedy by intervening."

A recent wire service story celebrating the tenth anniversary of Connecticut's preemptive civilian disarmament measure reports that since it went into effect, "State police and 53 police departments have seized more than 1,700 guns.... Opponents of [that] gun seizure law expressed fears in 1999 that police would abuse the law. Today, the law's backers say the record shows that hasn't been the case."

To the contrary: The record, as described above, shows that there have been at least 1,700 incidents of abuse that grew out of that enactment. Each confiscation is an act of state theft perpetrated against someone who is innocent before the law.

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