The General Assembly is an easy target for critics, especially early in the session, when all manner of odd legislation is proposed. This year's winner might be the proposed weaponizing of drones for police use. But much of what our legislators do really does benefit us and ought to be recognized, even when the people we send to Hartford to represent us can't seem to get their house sufficiently in order to enact a budget.

You may have thought that swatting only meant going after a hornet with a rolled up newspaper, administering corporal punishment or physically rejecting attempts by a man to take his wife's hand (“Melania Trump swats Donald Trump's hand away as he attempts to hold it multiple times on his trip abroad,” Business Insider, May 23). It has another, new meaning, that made its way into the Oxford Dictionaries a few years ago: “The action or practice of making a hoax call to the emergency services in an attempt to bring about the dispatch of a large number of armed police officers to a particular address,” as in “he found out that he was a victim of swatting after police surrounded his home on Thursday”; and as a modifier, “the officers realized they had been sent to the house as part of a swatting prank.”

Victims are often celebrities, among them Ashton Kutcher, Tom Cruise, the Kardashians, Chris Brown, Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber and Clint Eastwood. People can get hurt. One swatting victim, 20-year-old Tyran Dobbs of Ellicott City, Maryland, was shot with a rubber bullet by a SWAT team and has undergone multiple surgeries.