Candidate for 5th District Bill Stevens: 'Universal Background Checks Shouldn't Apply to 2nd Amendment'

First of a four part series written by Scott Benjamin

Bill Stevens of Newtown said although one of his opponents in the race for the Republican nomination in the Fifth Congressional District is branding him as "The Second Amendment Candidate," he’s also well-versed on topics ranging from responding to ISIS, to immigration enforcement and boosting the economy. Stevens said he’s not a one-issue candidate.

Stevens said he's proud he was the one only one of the GOP contenders in the sprawling district who testified before a General Assembly task force in January 2013. The panel was considering putting more controls on gun sales following the deaths of 20 students and six educators about a month earlier in the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

“It’s an easy thing to say now,” declared Stevens, regarding the support for the Second Amendment by his rivals for the GOP nomination, “but I didn’t hear them testify about it.” Other contenders for the Fifth Congressional Distric include real estate investor Matt Maxwell of Newtown, Brookfield resident John Pistone and Sherman first Selectman Clay Cope.

Stevens said if there aren’t universal background checks for the First Amendment - voting - then they shouldn’t apply to the Second Amendment.

“It just infringes on the rights of law-abiding Americans” Stevens said. “Really this is more a conversation not about guns but about protecting the Constitution.”

He said he is the most conservative candidate in the most conservative of Connecticut’s five congressional districts. It stretches from Newtown to Salisbury, encompassing a diverse group of 41 municipalities that includes a wide swath of Litchfield County, part of northern Fairfield County and a section of the Farmington Valley.

Cope has received a raft of endorsements from municipal leaders, state legislators and former Republican nominees for Congress in the Fifth District, including Litchfield developer Mark Greenberg and former state Sen. David Cappiello of Danbury.

Stevens, 51, has been endorsed by the Kent Republican Town Committee and said he’s received encouraging feedback from the other 20 Republican town committees that he has spoken with. He said he plans to speak to a number of the other Republican town committees over the coming weeks.

Stevens said he is “reasonably confident” that he will have at least the 15 percent of the delegates required to force a primary, and is “pretty confident” that if he doesn’t win the nomination at the convention May 9 in Hartford that he would force a primary in August. Candidates also can collect petition signatures to force a primary if they don’t annex at least 15 percent of the convention delegates.