Connecticut knows gun violence in a way that most states do not. Sandy Hook is not an abstraction here. It is a wound that has not fully healed, and it has sharpened — rightly — the collective demand that we do everything we reasonably can to prevent such tragedies from happening again.

The operative word is reasonably. Because the gun debate in America has a persistent habit of collapsing into two camps that talk past each other entirely — one treating any firearm regulation as an existential threat to liberty, the other treating gun ownership itself as the problem. Neither position is honest, and neither leads anywhere useful.

The Second Amendment recognizes an individual right to keep and bear arms. That right is not a relic or a technicality — it reflects a genuine and defensible principle: that individuals have the right to defend themselves, their families, and their property, and that the state does not hold a monopoly on that capacity. Private property owners have the further right to set their own conditions regarding weapons on their premises. These are not fringe positions. They are settled constitutional law and sound principle.

But rights carry responsibilities. A gun owner who stores weapons carelessly, who allows access by those who should not have it, who enables violence through negligence or worse — that person has forfeited the moral high ground that responsible ownership confers. The full force of the law should apply, and communities should demand that it does.

The same accountability applies to our institutions. Town governments, school systems, and public organizations have an obligation to be transparent about the safety measures they have in place. Not as a bureaucratic exercise, but as a genuine commitment to the people in their care. Are access points secured? Are emergency protocols in place and practiced? Is there adequate supervision and trained personnel? These questions deserve real answers, not reassurances.

The path through this debate is not to disarm the responsible or to excuse the reckless. It is to insist — clearly, consistently, and without political convenience — that rights and responsibilities are two sides of the same coin. You do not get to claim one while disclaiming the other.

We can still do this.

There is a principle that should not be politically complicated: we have an obligation to protect the most vulnerable among us. That obligation doesn’t dissolve when the subject becomes uncomfortable or politically charged. It becomes more important.

Transgender students are among the most vulnerable young people in our schools. The data on this is not ambiguous — they experience disproportionate rates of bullying, harassment, anxiety, and depression. The environment we create for them in our public institutions is not a peripheral concern. It is a direct reflection of whether we take equal protection seriously or merely pay it lip service.

Connecticut’s Constitution is unambiguous on this point. Article First, Section 20 holds that no person shall be denied equal protection of the law or subjected to discrimination in the exercise of civil or political rights. That guarantee does not come with an asterisk for students whose gender identity makes others uncomfortable. Equal protection means equal protection.

What does this require in practice? Town governments, school systems, and community organizations should publicly affirm their commitment to a safe and inclusive environment for transgender students — and back that affirmation with actual policies. That means clear answers to straightforward questions: Do transgender students have access to facilities consistent with their gender identity? Are gender-neutral options available? Is there adequate adult supervision and accountability? Have staff received appropriate training?

These are not radical demands. They are the basic administrative questions any institution should be able to answer about any vulnerable population in its care. The failure to answer them — or worse, the active refusal to enforce existing legal protections — is not a policy position. It is a dereliction of duty, and it should be treated as one by the communities, and if necessary the courts, that these institutions serve.

Good citizenship means showing up — attending school board meetings, writing to local officials, demanding accountability from the institutions that serve our children.

We can still do this.

Jerome Tuccille died in 2015. He was a writer, a novelist, a biographer, and for a brief, exhilarating moment in the early 1970s, the Libertarian Party’s candidate for Governor of New York. His 1971 memoir, It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand, remains one of the most entertaining accounts of what it felt like to be young, idealistic, and politically homeless in postwar America — too individualist for the left, too skeptical of authority for the right, and thoroughly convinced that both parties were selling the same comfortable illusions in different packaging.

Martin Morse Wooster captured it well when he noted that Tuccille understood political debates to be as much comic as serious — and had the stylistic gifts to prove it. The book holds up because Tuccille never mistook enthusiasm for argument, and never let ideology get in the way of honest observation.

Which makes his later epitaph for the movement all the more worth examining. Writing in National Review, Tuccille declared libertarianism “hopelessly utopian” — a worthy intellectual exercise, perhaps, but not a serious political alternative. He said it with the weariness of a man who had believed deeply and been disappointed thoroughly.

He wasn’t entirely wrong. The history of libertarian political organizing is largely a history of noble intentions colliding with the stubborn architecture of a two-party system, followed by internal squabbles that would have embarrassed a town selectmen’s race. The utopian strain — the conviction that the perfect framework, once articulated clearly enough, will carry the day — has cost the movement more ground than any opponent ever has.

But the conclusion doesn’t follow. The ideas themselves — individual liberty, voluntary association, skepticism of concentrated power, the belief that people are generally capable of running their own lives — have not been disproven. If anything, the decades since Tuccille wrote his epitaph have made them more relevant, not less. The institutions he might have trusted to govern wisely have not covered themselves in glory.

Utopianism is a trap. Pragmatism in service of principle is not. The goal was never a perfect libertarian society — it was a freer, more humane, more accountable one. That goal doesn’t expire. It just requires patience, persistence, and the willingness to work within imperfect systems toward better ones.

Goodbye, Jerry. You were right that the revolution wasn’t coming. You were wrong that it didn’t matter.

Connecticut has a problem no one in Hartford seems willing to name plainly: we are taxing our residents and businesses into leaving.

The state income tax — introduced in 1991 over fierce public opposition — has grown steadily ever since. What was sold as a stabilizing measure became a permanent drag on every household and business in the state. The evidence isn’t abstract. People are voting with their feet. Between 2010 and 2020, Connecticut was one of the few states in the nation to lose population. The wealthy leave first, then the businesses that employed their neighbors, then the neighbors themselves.

The case against the income tax is both principled and compassionate. Money earned belongs to the person who earned it. When government takes less, individuals and families decide how to allocate their own resources — saving, investing, spending locally. All of those outcomes beat feeding a state bureaucracy whose track record of resource allocation is, to put it charitably, unimpressive. And lower taxes aren’t a gift to the wealthy — they’re a recognition that the working family in Bridgeport and the small business owner in Torrington deserve to keep more of what they earn just as much as anyone else.

The obvious question is how. Connecticut can’t eliminate the income tax overnight. But that’s precisely the right conversation to force — what does the state actually need to do, and what has it taken on that properly belongs to individuals, communities, and the private sector? Reduce rates, eliminate exemptions that favor the well-connected, and commit to a glide path toward elimination. Remove the obstacles that prevent people from contributing to the state’s economic health on their own terms.

Connecticut was once one of the most prosperous states in the nation. Prosperity won’t be taxed into existence. It has to be earned — and for that to happen, the people doing the earning need to be trusted with the fruits of their work.

We can still do this.