12 July—But first, a smart person: Litchfield’s diligent and vigilant First Selectwoman Denise Raap, who also answers to First Selectman. Last year, Denise caught an $82,000 town employee who was ripping the town off. A few days ago, she discovered that the liability insurance on the Bantam Lake beach Litchfield shares with Morris had lapsed several years ago. The peculative foreman was canned (with the cooperation of his union). The insurance has been reinstated.

Now for smart guns. It must be said right off that smart guns only benefit stupid people. A smart gun is a firearm that can detect and thus be deployed only by its authorized user or users. Supporters of smart-gun technology claim the idea is to prevent accidental shootings, gun thefts, and criminal usage by people not authorized to use the guns.

That’s what lock-boxes and trigger locks are supposed to do with old-fashioned analog technology but the smart guns would do with computer chips built into the firearms. Not a bad idea, you may say. If the anti-Second Amendment zealots had their way, of course, all law-abiding gun owners would lose their keys and forget their combinations.

The point of smart guns is to make them unusable by the wrong people, whoever they may be. But what if a digital malfunction should make the smart guns unusable by the right people? Of course, it’s impossible that the digital part of smart guns could ever fail, isn’t it? But, should the impossible happen, there’d be no means of analog or mechanical override. That’s the whole point. So the firearm would be useless except as a cudgel or a missile.

Equally disturbing to us paranoid, irresponsible believers in the Constitution is the fear that smart guns could be disabled en masse by signals disseminated by governments or other [sic] malefactors. To be sure, the smart chips would need to have some sort of master key coded into them at or after manufacture, like we know smartphones don’t have now. And we know that disabling firearms for any reason would never even be considered by governments or other malefactors . . .