The Legal Process
n’s case went through five court hearings. Meltsner sent his client to Frank Scirpo at Patriot Performance Shooting (patriotperformanceshooting.com), a top instructor who offers, among other classes, remedial gun safety courses for people who’ve lost their permits. Scirpo told American Handgunner, “Mr. Robinson was a nice guy and a very good student. We did discuss the dangers of warning shots. It’s a shame he had to go through that ordeal.”
The multiple assailants created a situation of disparity of force, which means the likelihood of ostensibly unarmed people killing or crippling their victim is so great it becomes the equivalent of a deadly weapon and warrants recourse to lethal force in self-defense. Meltsner argued the disparity of force elements, along with Robinson’s reasonable articulable belief that some in the attacking crowd were armed, created a situation of immediate and otherwise unavoidable danger of death or great bodily harm to Robinson and his staff. This, Meltsner contended, would have justified Robinson in shooting one or more of his opponents; a GLOCK 30, after all, holds 10 rounds of .45 ACP in its standard magazine and an 11th round in the firing chamber.
The defense lawyer pointed out to both prosecutor and judge that Robinson had judiciously fired a single round, in what Meltsner called a “well-aimed warning shot,” with the intent of defusing the situation in the hope of not having to shoot anyone. If killing one or more of his assailants would have been justified under Connecticut law, he asked the powers that be, how could it be justice to convict and punish him for taking the least dangerous action in those circumstances — the lesser of two evils?
The designated prosecutor, Assistant State’s Attorney Edward Azzaro, was reasonable. He offered Mr. Robinson a diversionary program called Accelerated Pretrial Rehabilitation. This would have left the first-time offender free for 13 months, at which time the matter would be over, and the case would essentially disappear. Unfortunately, a “Catch-22” arose. Many years before, as a young man, Robinson had become involved in an altercation with another man, resulting in a low-level misdemeanor conviction. This wiped out the first offender privilege of the diversion unless he could get the prior conviction expunged … and the current pending charge from the warning shot incident automatically took an expungement off the table.
Meltsner took all this before the judge and, using a masterful piece of lawyering, convinced the judge to dismiss the case.
The specter of being behind bars was now gone. All that remained was getting his gun back and regaining the concealed carry permit that had been revoked as soon as Robinson was charged. Meltsner put that process in gear immediately.
That particular gun wasn’t coming back. Robinson was told it had been destroyed as part of department protocol with weapons seized under such circumstances. The G30 was destroyed after having fired a single shot: Robinson had been too busy to even test-fire it between the time he bought it new and the time at which it was confiscated.
Getting the permit back was another matter. It has been set for a hearing. Bureaucracies get backed up, all the more so in the wake of a pandemic. Kelvin Robinson told me his hearing is scheduled for June in the year 2026. That date, unfortunately, is not a misprint.
Robinson had lots of support from the Second Amendment community. None were more supportive than Josh Freeman at Connecticut Gun in Middletown, Conn. He promised to give Robinson a new GLOCK 30 as soon as he got his permit back. “We don’t have many 2A successes here in Connecticut,” Freeman told me, “and I wanted him to know there were people who understood and were standing up for him.”
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