After Governor Dannel Malloy’s announcement this week that he would seek to increase Pistol Permit fees to ridiculous highs, pricing the human right to self-defense out of existence for many in Connecticut, we are firing back. We are going to show this Governor how common sense and leadership should work, instead of Governor Malloy’s continual mismanagement of state funds and his outright bigoted hatred towards those who possess the means to defend themselves in Connecticut.
It is a lost cause to debate such things with a bigot like Dannel Malloy. Malloy doesn’t care about fixing spending in Hartford, but only about penalizing gun owners further for his personal victim disarmament goals. We are reaching out to legislators with real ideas that can save municipalities money, save the state money, increase state revenue and make people who apply for a Permit to Carry Pistols and Revolvers satisfied with their access to legal means of personal safety and self-protection. And this can all be done right now, instead of taking 5 years to pan out like the Governor’s proposal.
We propose the following:
1. Remove pistol permitting responsibilities entirely from municipalities. Currently, the municipalities have a majority of the burden in the application process, and that work is entirely useless in terms of public safety.
2. All permits would be issued directly, the same day at the Special Licensing and Firearms Unit (SLFU) at DESPP headquarters in Middletown, Connecticut for a flat application fee of $100 which includes the $16.75 IAFIS query fee. No state background check fee (currently $50) is authorized by law anyway, and this is a good time to eliminate that illegal fee.
3. SLFU already conducts the same IAFIS checks and their own instant in-house state conviction history database search imediately when an application is submitted. IAFIS is guaranteed to return fingerprint results in less than two hours. Pistol permit issuance times are thus decreased from months to a few hours, reducing employee processing expense, time and effort.
4. Remove any and all ‘suitability’ requirements from the Connecticut General Statutes, which are catch-alls that allow local issuing authorities to deny people their right to armed self-defense on arbitrary and capricious grounds, which are often overturned on appeal at the Board of Firearms Permit Examiners.
Utilizing this simple plan, the legislature could work with Connecticut Carry to remove waste all over the state in municipal and state departments, saving countless amounts of money, retaining the same or increased levels of public safety, and keeping the public safe by expediting their ability to defend themselves.
Connecticut Carry will present this overall plan to legislators in the coming week, and offer our services to help craft the actual legislative package that can be directly presented to fix all of these problems and benefit the state’s treasury in a time of financial crisis caused by Dannel Malloy and his administration.
