Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy explained that neighboring states’ gun laws undercut the restrictions in his state and called for standardized, federal gun laws.
“We just need to close some loopholes, we need to make sure that guns can’t be sold at shows in Florida and Virginia and work their way up to Philadelphia, where 219 people get killed, or work their way up to Bridgeport and New Haven and Hartford and Stamford and Norwalk,” he said on Thursday’s Morning Joe.
Gun rights advocates have regularly cited Connecticut's strict gun laws as proof that gun control doesn't work, but Malloy explained that if laws aren't consistent, neither is the control.
“Those guns shouldn’t be coming up to our part of the country, we don’t allow the sale of many of those types of guns of our states but you can go to the places where no one’s doing the kind of checking, no one’s doing the background. Let’s do the common sense things.”
Neighboring state’s laws are notorious for undercutting the laws in states with tough restrictions. A report in New York this summer found that states like Virginia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Florida provided the bulk of the illegal guns seized in New York: of 8,793 guns seized in New York last year, just 1,595 of them were bought in the state.
“These high capacity magazines they don’t make any sense, we don’t need those in our country, no one is going deer hunting with them, you don’t use that to protect your house, this has gotten crazy,” Malloy added. He also noted that mental health and the glorification of violence also needs to be addressed.
Federal gun law is needed to really control gun purchases and should limit ammunition magazines and standardize gun restrictions.
“Limit magazines under the assault weapons ban, which was allowed to go away, you couldn’t have had the clips that that young man took into the Sandy Hook schools, it would not have been possible, that’s a common sense example,” he said.
“Close all loopholes—every gun purchase has to have the same rigor attached to it regardless of where it’s occurs in our country. Those are two things that would make a gigantic difference in the amount of violence that’s taking place in our urban environments and, yes, under these environments where someone goes in and shoots up a movie theater or shoots up a school," Malloy said.