For the sake of democracy, comity, equality of opportunity and prosperity, Connecticut, like the rest of the country, needs integration — racial, economic and ethnic. Exclusive zoning in the suburbs long has hampered that. It's getting worse as housing prices soar.

But advocates of the anti-zoning legislation in the General Assembly weaken their cause by deliberately misdiagnosing the problem. If last weekend's murders in Hartford don't knock some sense into them, nothing will.

First a 3-year-old boy was killed in a drive-by shooting. Two hours later a 16-year-old boy was shot to death on a street nearby. As a result, little notice was paid to another incident of urban depravity last weekend — the shooting of four people in Waterbury. At least no one was killed there.

The mayhem and depravity in Connecticut's cities help explain support for exclusive zoning. For why shouldn't people want to get away from city life and prevent it from following them, along with the awful performance of city students and the incompetence and corruption of city government?

Long ago, exclusive zoning was in large part a matter of race. Not so much anymore, for many inner suburbs are integrated racially and many minority families shop for school systems there as the whites who left the cities did years ago. While racism remains the big complaint against it, exclusive zoning today is mainly a matter of people protecting themselves against the pathologies and expense of poverty.

The zoning controversy makes this clear. Exclusive zoning's opponents call their bill the "fair share" legislation, insofar as the suburbs should have more low-cost housing to absorb their "fair share" of poor city residents and reduce city poverty. Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin and New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker speak openly of their desire to export their poorest constituents.

So it is stipulated that the people to be exported are burdens on government and society. Any suburban resident who didn't know this already might wonder: If the cities want to get rid of the expense of the poor — the social services they require, the crime they cause, the drag their neglected children put on the schools — why should the suburbs want them?

Thus, the anti-zoning legislation strikes at Connecticut's longstanding but unarticulated social contract: The middle and upper classes will let the state's majority political party, the Democrats, operate the cities as poverty and patronage factories as long as the suburbs offer escape. That's why the decisive opposition to legislation that might transfer more poverty from the cities to the suburbs has always come from suburban Democratic legislators.

The complaint of racism is hurled against exclusive zoning to distract from the far bigger underlying problem, the problem no one in authority dares to discuss: the everlasting failure of Connecticut's welfare and education policies to elevate the poor. Instead, these policies destroy the family and foreclose the opportunities that might come from education, thus maintaining the urban population's financial dependence on government and Democratic political regimes. In turn the party obtains from the cities its decisive pluralities in state elections, but at a devastating social cost.

A major beneficiary of these dependence-induced pluralities, U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, jumped opportunistically on the Hartford shootings last weekend, blaming them on the lack of a federal law requiring background checks for certain gun sales and transfers.

Yes, there are tens of millions of guns circulating throughout the country, but background checks won't get them back, even as checks on the backgrounds of most of the young perpetrators of serious urban crime in Connecticut would disclose fatherlessness and parental neglect leading to educational failure, mental and physical illness, drug abuse and crime.

But the perpetrators are only secondarily to blame, for they are what, for political advantage, government has made them.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.