Strengthening FOI law must go beyond guns

Now the campaign to outlaw gun ownership is turning to publicizing the names and addresses of gun license holders. The other day a newspaper in New York posted on its Internet site a map pinpointing local gun license holders, and in Connecticut the House chairman of the General Assembly’s Public Safety Committee, state Rep. Stephen D. Dargan, D-West Haven, proposes to repeal the exemption in the state’s freedom-of-information law to make gun licenses here public records too.Dargan’s nominal rationale is that people with gun licenses are more dangerous than everyone else. That may be plausible in theory but as a practical matter gun permit holders are more law-abiding than most, having been fingerprinted and background-checked, even as gun-toting criminals tend not to apply for permits, lest they can be tracked down more easily.Of course Dargan’s actual rationale is just to embarrass gun license holders, to depict them as kooks and discourage others from trying to obtain gun licenses, on the premise that only the police and criminals should have guns, including the sort of criminals abounding in Connecticut — incorrigible criminals with five, 10, 15, or 20 felony convictions who nevertheless manage to avoid life sentences until they kill someone.But, like all other licenses, gun licenses should be public record anyway, as any license is a grant of government authority whose appropriateness can’t be evaluated otherwise. The arguments offered for secrecy here — avoiding embarrassment and burglars looking for guns — are weak. For far from being cause for embarrassment, a gun license is actually certification of sound character, and few burglars want to risk being noticed perusing a government database or encountering an armed homeowner.Being right for the wrong reason doesn’t make Dargan any less phony. Most things in government, he says, already are subject to disclosure under freedom-of-information law. But in fact the damaging exemptions from disclosure in Connecticut have been increasing for years without complaint from Dargan and other legislators who are now so intent on disarming the law-abiding.Just the other day the Connecticut Council on Freedom of Information called attention to some troubling exemptions in the hope that the General Assembly and Governor Malloy would repair the FOI law. Among these exemptions:• The information police are required to disclose about arrests has been sharply curtailed by a state Appellate Court decision.• The Malloy administration has construed the law forbidding identification of welfare applicants to forbid as well the disclosure of the disciplinary records of the dozens of state employees who last year defrauded state government of food stamps. If this interpretation of the law prevails, the public will have no right to know about any welfare fraud. • State labor law enables public employee unions to negotiate exemption of their members’ personnel files from FOI law. As a result, Central Connecticut State University in New Britain is withholding the file of a professor who has been convicted criminally several times while employed by the university but has kept his job anyway. Betraying the public, the state university system has given the professors union a contract protecting its members against embarrassment for criminal misconduct.• While last year the governor complained about teacher tenure, state law still prohibits disclosure of teacher evaluations, even though conscientious parents would want the right to see them.Connecticut needs to strengthen its freedom-of-information law, generally, not just for gun licenses. Without a general strengthening of the law, Dargan’s legislation will only establish the pernicious principle that people who pass a character test and follow the law should be embarrassed and inconvenienced but state employees who fail a character test and break the law shouldn’t be. Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.