Stratford Town Council Chair Anthony Afriye said the town council will not attempt to reintroduce a controversial ordinance that would ban guns on all town properties.
“As of now, this item won’t be brought up again,” Afriye said.
Stratford’s town council unanimously rejected the ordinance during an October 13th meeting.
In a video posted to Facebook Monday, Stratford Mayor David Chess, said a move to ban guns at all town owned properties seemed like a logical extension of an existing town firearm ban.
“We already have a prohibition of guns at our police stations and our schools,” Chess said.
But the pushback against the ordinance by gun rights activists over concerns the ordinance would impact their 2nd Amendment right to possess a firearm, has been fierce.
Stratford is the latest Connecticut municipality that has either banned or attempted to ban guns at town owned properties over the last few years.
Woodbridge, Mansfield, and Stamford among others, have all passed similar efforts over the years. But others have failed not just in Stratford, but in other municipalities, most notably Newtown, the site of the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
While Stratford’s town council didn’t pass the ordinance, many gun rights advocates say the ordinance would have punished law-abiding gun owners.
Lorenzo Whilby, the owner of Stratford Guns and Ammo, a firearms range and gun store, said the ordinance, which would have applied to all town property and not just buildings, was government overreach during the town council meeting.
“We should be able to protect ourselves in Stratford, not you guys trying to take our rights away from us,” Whilby said.
While firearms advocates criticized the town for considering the ordinance, the ordinance did exempt firearms owners who possessed a valid concealed carry permit.
Connecticut’s state law allows local municipalities some latitude to pass their own ordinances regulating firearms as long as it doesn’t conflict with state law.
Some towns such as Bloomfield, do prohibit possessing a firearm on all town owned property, unless a resident has a valid concealed carry permit. Other municipalities such as Stamford have gone further and banned concealed firearms in government buildings.
Whilby wasn’t the only gun owner who spoke. Several others echoed similar complaints about the ordinance and many of them took offense at the town’s efforts, even as Connecticut already has some of the strictest gun laws in the country.
They include banning open carry of firearms, highly restricting the possession of assault weapons, and banning the sale of semi-automatic pistols which could be easily converted into fully automatic machine guns; that is now the subject of a lawsuit.
Chess said the town didn’t have any ulterior motives when it originally proposed the ordinance.
“The whole idea again is to protect our community, there is no other motive here,” Chess said.
