A part the size of a Lego turns a pistol into a machine gun. Connecticut just said you can't sell those. That's the whole reasonable thing.

Dear Governor Lamont,

This is the fourth letter of Orange June — a month where I file one dispatch a day on guns — and it's the hopeful one, on purpose. Most of what I've written this month is about what's broken: the numbers, a bill nobody will move, a President who walked out of an interview about it. This letter is about a thing that simply got done — quietly, correctly, on the exact day the country agreed to pay attention.

On June 5 — National Gun Violence Awareness Day, the day the country wears orange — you signed legislation prohibiting the sale and importation of pistols that can easily be turned into machine guns. Here's the specific problem it solves, in plain terms. There's a small device — a pistol converter, an auto sear, what the street calls a "Glock switch" — about the size of a single Lego brick. Snap it onto the right semiautomatic handgun — one with what the statute calls a "cruciform trigger bar," readily altered by hand or with a common household tool — and that legal pistol becomes a fully automatic weapon that can empty its entire magazine with one pull of the trigger, in about two seconds. Your law makes selling or importing those convertible pistols a class D felony — up to five years, up to a five-thousand-dollar fine. It takes effect October 1.

Read what the law doesn't do, because that's the whole point. It doesn't take a single pistol out of a single law-abiding hand. It doesn't ban a caliber, a magazine, a brand, or a citizen. It doesn't touch your hunting rifle or your home-defense handgun. It bans the sale of the specific guns that a part the size of a toy can convert into a machine gun. That's the entire ask. Nobody outside of a war needs a weapon that fires thirty rounds in two seconds, and nobody reasonable thinks a teenager should be able to build one in a kitchen with a part ordered online. This is the rare gun law that doesn't require anyone to give anything up — except the ability to turn a handgun into a machine gun. That's a thing a free country is allowed to say no to.

Two days ago I wrote an open letter to Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine about S.4339 — a thirteen-provision federal gun bill they introduced on the anniversary of Virginia Tech, which has sat untouched in the Senate Judiciary Committee ever since. Thirteen reasonable things, all of them written, none of them moving. You looked at the same paralysis and did the only thing a governor can do about it: you took one reasonable piece and made it law in your own state. You didn't give a speech about how Washington should act. You acted. On Wear Orange Day. That's the difference between a press release and a signature, and you chose the signature.

And you shouldn't get all the credit, because you'd be the first to say so. This bill crossed the finish line because the Connecticut chapters of Moms Demand Action and Students Demand Action — mothers and teenagers, volunteers, people with day jobs — showed up session after session until it passed. The mothers and the kids did the work. You held the pen. Both of those are the job, and I'm naming all of it, because Orange June is about the people who refuse to look away from the number, and they're exactly that.

You should know who's writing, because I'm nobody you owe anything. This paper takes no money — no paywall, no email captured, no data sold, no investors, no PAC, no federal money. Influence isn't for sale here. I'm not from Connecticut and I don't have a bill in front of you. I write to the people who get it wrong, all month. This is the other kind of letter — the one I write when somebody gets it right, so the record is honest in both directions. You got this one right, Governor.

A part the size of a Lego turns a pistol into a machine gun, and as of October you can't sell that pistol in Connecticut. That's not radical. That's not confiscation. That's one state, on the day the country wore orange, doing the simplest reasonable thing there was to do. Thank you for doing it. Now I'll go back to writing to the people who haven't.

— Michael

The Official Internet Press Secretary

Spotlight Dispatch · Orange June · Day 4 · June 8, 2026

michael@spotlightdispatch.com