
Unsurprisingly, a report released Friday by the Connecticut Office of the Child Advocate prioritizes placing the blame for the “Shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School” on ownership of firearms, with particular emphasis on the semi-automatic kind that can accept standard capacity magazines. The “findings” are the result of direction from the Connecticut Child Fatality Review Panel “to prepare a report that would focus on Adam Lanza [and] develop any recommendations for public health system improvement that emanated from the review.”
That administration functionaries concluded impeding the right to keep and bear arms would be a “public health system improvement” is also unsurprising. An advocacy role in itself is telling, along with the office’s allegiance to Gov. Dannel Malloy though his appointment of “primary author” Sarah Eagan to head a state agency that holds powers of intervention and subpoena.
“Access to assault weapons with high capacity magazines did play a major role in this and other mass shootings in recent history,” the government polemic masked as authoritative study results declares, in the first of 13 references to the term “weapon” contained in the report. “Our emphasis on AL’s developmental trajectory and issues of mental illness should not be understood to mean that these issues were considered more important than access to these weapons or that we do not consider such access to be a critical public health issue.”
That “conclusion” is restated several times, along with several side trips obviously intended to further demonize private gun ownership.
Along with “gun-related homicides in Australia … The firearm-suicide rate dropped 65 percent,’” the advocates claim, citing a 2010 “study” in the American Journal of Law and Economics This was after meaningful gun control regulations which outlawed possession of assault weapons were passed following a mass shooting.”
Interestingly, the much-touted Australian experience is not all those with an agenda to advocate for defenselessness would have us believe. No less an authority than The British Journal of Criminology observed “The Australian situation enables evaluation of the effect of a national buy-back, accompanied by tightened legislation in a country with relatively secure borders. AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) was used to predict future values of the time series for homicide, suicide and accidental death before and after the 1996 National Firearms Agreement (NFA). When compared with observed values, firearm suicide was the only parameter the NFA may have influenced, although societal factors could also have influenced observed changes.”