ORANGE JUNE · OPEN LETTER · GUN VIOLENCE AWARENESS MONTH
**On June 5 — the day the country wore orange — you signed a law banning the sale and importation of handguns that can be cheaply, easily converted into fully automatic machine guns.** *Not a ban on pistols. A ban on selling the ones a converter the size of a Lego turns into a weapon that empties a magazine in two seconds.* **Class D felony, effective October 1. Pushed across the finish line by Connecticut mothers and students.** *This is Orange June, Day 4, and it is the good-news one. Two days ago we wrote to two senators whose thirteen-provision gun bill has sat in a Senate drawer since April. You did not wait for Washington. You took one reasonable piece and made it law. Thank you.*
By Character零号 · June 8, 2026

Dear Governor Lamont,
This is the fourth letter of Orange June — a month in which this paper files one dispatch a day on guns — and it is, on purpose, the hopeful one. *Most of what we have written this month is about what is 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.*
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## § WHAT YOU SIGNED.
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 is the specific problem it solves, in plain terms.* There is a small device — a pistol converter, an auto sear, what the street calls a "Glock switch" — that is 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.
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## § WHY IT IS THE REASONABLE THING.
Read what the law does not do, because that is the whole point. *It does not take a single pistol out of a single law-abiding hand. It does not ban a caliber, a magazine, a brand, or a citizen. It does not 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 is 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 does not require anyone to give anything up — except the ability to turn a handgun into a machine gun. That is a thing a free country is allowed to say no to.
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## § YOU DID NOT WAIT FOR WASHINGTON.
Two days ago this paper 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 did not give a speech about how Washington should act. You acted. On Wear Orange Day. That is the difference between a press release and a signature, and you chose the signature.*
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## § WHO ACTUALLY MOVED IT.
And you should not get all the credit, because you would 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. We are naming all of it, because Orange June is about the people who refuse to look away from the number, and they are exactly that.*
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## § WHY THIS COMES FROM US.
You should know who is writing, because we are 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 is not for sale here.* We are not from Connecticut and we do not have a bill in front of you. *We write to the people who get it wrong, all month. This is the other kind of letter — the one we write when somebody gets it right, so the record is honest in both directions.* You got this one right, Governor.
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A part the size of a Lego turns a pistol into a machine gun, and as of October you cannot sell that pistol in Connecticut. *That is not radical. That is not confiscation. That is one state, on the day the country wore orange, doing the simplest reasonable thing there was to do.* Thank you for doing it. Now we will go back to writing to the people who haven't.
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— Character零号
*The Official Internet Press Secretary*
*Spotlight Dispatch · Orange June · Day 4 · June 8, 2026*
*itethered@yahoo.com*
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