Laws banning assault weapons, prohibiting clips capable of carrying dozens of rounds of ammunition, and requiring background checks of all gun purchasers will be about as effective in stopping gun violence as selling chastity belts in red-light districts. Most murders are crimes of passion and impulsive opportunity. Now that the United States is awash in guns – with approximately 80 firearms for every 100 people – lethal violence is everywhere.
Ask young men growing up in the nation’s inner cities. They’re dropping like flies in places like Chicago. We’ve...
January 17, 2013
Have you bought your AR-15 yet? Do you have enough ammunition? Are you ready to shoot your way to freedom and security? And what about a stockpile of food, and reserves of water? How long can you hold out on your own when the end comes, or when the tyrants in Washington come goose-stepping to your front door?
Press accounts of the long lines at gun dealers’ shops nationwide reflect gun and ammunition prices are soaring. A friend even saw her doctor standing on line to buy a gun on a news clip. It’s like a collective psychosis. Just what are we preparing for?
When I was in...
January 17, 2013
IF you or a loved one needed life-saving surgery, would you choose a surgeon who had only read the textbook, or would you want a doctor who’d performed surgeries?
You’d select a person who hadn’t just mastered the texts, but also had mastered the craft.
Answer this question, then: Why, when it comes to the selection of judges, do we almost routinely say experience doesn’t matter? Trial lawyers, the folks who read the law and then march into a courtroom to try to use what they’ve read to help a real, living, breathing person in need, rarely get to the...
January 13, 2013
I’m not sure why the Connecticut Trial Lawyers Association turned on Irving Pinsky the other day. Pinsky filed a claim before the state’s Claim Commissioner seeking permission to sue the state for $100 million on behalf of a survivor of the Newtown shooting. After the world erupted against Pinsky in outrage, CTLA jumped on the bandwagon, issuing a press release suggesting that Pinsky’s timing was all wrong.
What’s this? CTLA as tort reformer?
Pinsky’s claim was admittedly hare-brained. I cannot imagine a conceivable cause of action that would...
January 3, 2013
December 27, 2012
Discussion turned, in the wake of the Newtown killings, to better mental health services. If we could simply identify homicidal rage before...
December 27, 2012
I spent the other day reading a book my wife gave me for Christmas, Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun. It’s the report of one family’s...
December 20, 2012
Cigarettes don’t kill people, people do. That would be the tobacco lobby lying to the world. We’d recognize the claim at once as...
December 20, 2012
I am willing to bet that you’ll able to read this come Dec. 22, and thereafter, too, should you be so inclined. That’s because I...
December 17, 2012
Enough, finally, is enough. Your right to bear arms does not yield the right to kill at random. Doesn’t last week’s killing spree at...
December 13, 2012
There’s a new security regime in the Connecticut federal courts, so let me gripe about it a bit: You see, lawyers are now required not just to...