A last-minute Westville aldermanic candidate proposed a fix for New Haven’s street violence: take more young people to the gun range, and help them get more guns.
That way fewer potential shooters would mess with them, argued the candidate, Aaron Freeman.
Freeman just made the deadline to register as a write-in candidate in next Tuesday’s election for alderman in Westville’s high-voting 25th Ward. Until a week ago, Democratic incumbent Adam Marchand was running for reelection unopposed. Then Michael Pinto, a prominent backer of mayoral candidate Justin Elicker, announced an 11th-hour candidacy as a write-in candidate. (Read about that here.) And now Freeman has entered the fray.
Pinto and Freeman are among two of five officially registered write-in candidates in next Tuesday’s municipal elections. The others are perennial mayoral write-in candidate Roger Uihlein of the Neverending Books store; and aldermanic candidates Kevin Diggs and Patricia DePalma, who lost Sept. 10 Democratic aldermanic primaries in Beaver Hills/Westville’s Ward 27 and Fair Haven Heights’ Ward 11, respectively.
The candidates’ names won’t appear on ballots. But because they registered, their votes will officially count if people write in their names. (West Haven’s incumbent mayor, John Picard, is running for reelection as a write-in.)
Aaron Freeman, a 59-year-old unemployed former pizza-delivery driver, is a registered Libertarian, he said, although “I haven’t paid the $425 [the party] has been asking me for.” He discussed his reasons for running the other evening in a conversation on a bench outside the Central Avenue apartment complex where he lives with his mother, a retired teacher and bookkeeper.
“Want a Twizzler?” he said, beginning the conversation by defying a a stereotypical criticism of Libertarians as selfish (as opposed to people who believe protecting individual rights produces the greater social good).
“Politics today needs more initiative at the grassroots level,” he said. “I see so many 2nd Amendment advocates who don’t take inner-city children out to the rifle range. We haven an entire constitution that needs to be brought into the spotlight to see what the moths have eaten away.”
He said the rifle-range trips would help both the gun-owners and their young guests — while offering a better alternative to city officials’ attempts to stem street shootings by seeking to ban guns.
“It would make [the 2nd Amendment advocates] a lot of friends. It would give them better political clout,” Freeman argued. “It would demonstrate some willingness of outreach.”
Meanwhile young people would less likely become shooting targets, in Freeman’s view: “People are going to be shot less often if they are not afraid of guns. If you can’t scare a person by pointing a gun at them, then you either have to fish or cut bait.”
Especially if more law-abiding citizens arms themselves.
“The way to control the illegal guns is for the illegal gun owners not to know who’s carrying,” said Freeman (pictured). Freeman he doesn’t have a gun and can’t afford to buy one; he’d buy a “little target pistol” if he could.
His campaign platform also calls for reexamining drug laws, making more of them legal. Legal drugs often cause more harm than illegal ones, he said. He said that the gunman who went on a deadly rampage at the U.S. Navy Yard in Washington, D.C., in September, and the 34-year-old Connecticut woman who was shot dead while crashing her car near the White House on Oct. 3 both used prescribed Trazodone.
“The outlawed stuff is safer than the legal stuff,” Freeman argued. “It is not constitutional.”
Asked about crack cocaine, he said he doesn’t know if the state should continue banning it. “It is the only illegal drug I’ve heard of with an actual addiction.”
Freeman said he hasn’t been able to land a new pizza-delivery gig since the family’s car died. True to his free-market, limited-government beliefs, he does not intend to apply for welfare, he said. “The thought does not please me. I don’t want to sell my soul.”
We'll clearly be safer if everyone is armed; that's why for Halloween I'll be giving out Glocks instead of candy.