While lawmakers and the general public grapple with calls for greater gun control in the wake of the Newtown shootings, Robert Crook, head of the Coalition of Connecticut Sportsmen, is emerging as a central figure in the statewide debate.
Crook in the past week has decried a proposal to tax certain kinds of ammunition, calling the idea “asinine.” He also has said the term “assault weapon” is partly a “media invention,” and has expressed confidence that a proposal to ban or limit high capacity gun magazines, which can hold dozens of rounds of ammunition in a single clip, will fail once the state’s attention on Newtown begins to quiet.
"We killed it once," the Hartford Courant quotes Crook saying about such a ban, "and I would suspect, once things quiet down a little bit, we'll probably do it again."
When state Sen. Beth Bye, D-West Hartford, who knows the parents of one of the 20 children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School, proposed the idea of a tax on high capacity rounds Crook publicly took the suggestion to task.
"We should be looking for solutions to the problems, not these asinine ideas," the Connecticut Mirror quotes Crook about Bye’s idea. "I don't think ammunition is a health hazard. We use it in hunting. We use it in target shooting. I don't know how you can call it a health hazard, unless it's used in something like this Newtown shooting."
Homeowners should have access to semi-automatic weapons, Crook said in this New Haven Register report, to safeguard against home invasions that involve more than one assailant.
“You want to have as much ammunition as possible,” Crook said.
