Both Reason and Instapundit have both roundly castigated the Hartford Courant’s faintly hysterical (in all senses of the term) editorial calling for Connecticut cops to harass Connecticut gun owners into providing something better than a 15% registration rate (at best) for their Scary Evil Devil-Guns “military-style assault weapons.” Goodness knows the editorial deserved it, given that it seems to have been written by one of the most politically tone-deaf people in the country. I especially enjoyed this pious hope of the Courant’s:

Although willful noncompliance with the law is doubtless a major issue, it’s possible that many gun owners are unaware of their obligation to register military-style assault weapons and would do so if given another chance.

Referencing my general rule of thumb that the average gun-control activist is about twenty or so IQ points dumber than the average Second Amendment advocate: no, I’m pretty sure that the folks currently possessing those “military-style assault weapons” are both well aware of the State of Connecticut’s Scary Gun registration diktat, and have absolutely no intention of complying with it. So now what, Connecticut? Is the plan to really go out and ask every gun owner if they still own a Scary Gun? Yeah, that should work out well – which is to say, it won’t work out at all.

This is not, by the way, a prelude to some sort of armed uprising in Connecticut (probably much to the secret disappointment to the more sweaty and fervid activists in the gun control lobby). Instead, it’s a civil disobedience issue – and it’s going to be the tough, hard-nosed kind of civil disobedience that looks you in the eye and dares you to turn tens of thousands of loyal, patriotic Americans into felons because of their Constitutional rights. This November will be the first election after the law was passed; neither party’s legislators are particularly eager to have this issue flare up.

Unless they’re stupid. And there’s some argument that they are stupid, alas; after all, Connecticut passed this law in the first place.

Moe Lane (crosspost)