Connecticut's reputation for regulatory zeal when it comes to curbing the use of guns and the reach of Second Amendment protections has made it a crucible for the advocacy apparatus of the gun industry and its supporters. When the state legislature takes up bills viewed as impinging on the rights and prerogatives of gun owners, as it did at a hearing of its Judiciary Committee on Monday, gun advocates bring out their best arguments and assemble their most powerful allies to derail any and all perceived threats to their Second Amendment rights. And they have gotten pretty good at it. But this time, they had to argue against a modest measure designed to safeguard victims of domestic violence that made some of their best arguments sound exaggerated and forced.

The bill, first introduced in the 11th hour of a session last spring only to stall in the Senate, was motivated by the 2014 murder of Lori Jackson, a mother of two, in Oxford, whose estranged husband shot her to death after she secured a temporary restraining order against him. In such cases, current law requires the surrender of firearms by their owners only after a judge issues a permanent restraining order following a hearing in court, which can take up to 14 days from the initial temporary order. This second attempt to close the two-week-long window of vulnerability for domestic abuse victims seeks to address some of the concerns raised last year by gun advocates. It requires that pistol permits and firearms be returned immediately when the restraining order is lifted or withdrawn, and it provides for expedited hearings before a judge when the provisions of the law impact law enforcement officers whose employment depends on their access to firearms.

Once again, gun advocates are arguing that the law would remove a constitutional right without due process in a civil ex parte proceeding establishing probable cause before a judge in which only one party, the victim, presents an affidavit alleging abuse. Moreover, they point out that state law already allows police to execute risk warrants through criminal courts to confiscate firearms when their owners pose a public safety risk. A 2015 survey by the National Domestic Violence Hotline, however, shows that abused domestic partners have a strong reluctance to involve the police in their personal crises. Two-thirds fear that the police would not believe them or do nothing.  More than half said calling the police would make things worse.

According to data collected by Americans for Responsible Solutions (ARS), the group founded by former congresswoman Gabby Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly, after she was shot in Tucson in 2011, abused women are five times more likely to be killed if their abuser has access to a firearm. To accept that significant risk for any amount of time, let alone two weeks, seems an unreasonable abandonment of some of our society's least protected victims in the face of demonstrated probable cause.

ARS reports that 175 people in Connecticut were killed by an intimate partner in the years from 2000 to 2011 - most of them were women. Thirty-eight percent of the victims were shot to death. A recent survey of Connecticut voters by the group found that 86 percent favored extending the protections of permanent restraining orders to temporary restraining orders, taking guns out of the hands of domestic abusers during a short, but critically dangerous time for victims. State lawmakers should not balk a second time. Connecticut needs to join the 20 other states that have enacted this commonsense legislation to provide additional protection to some of our state's most vulnerable victims.