Malloy’s One Percenter Crony Capitalist Campaign Contributors

When Northeast Utilities CEO Thomas May talks campaign donations, his managers listen. But then, Governor Dannel Malloy’s crony capitalist friends tend to be effusive in their praise of their benefactor. "While he has accomplished much, there is more to do," Mr. May wrote in an e-mail to 50 of his managers. "Please join me in providing support to continue the work begun, providing new opportunities, and securing the leadership to make it happen."

Of battling Dannel, Mr. May enthused, “he battled through issues of historic proportions — from nature's wrath to one man's horrific actions," a reference to Adam Lanza’s slaughter of children in Sandy Hook Elementary School. Storm Sandy, of course, stood no chance when confronted with battling Dannel. And mention of Mr. Lanza by politicians in campaign modes cannot help but generate among the voting public a thumbs up for the politician and a thumbs down for Mr. Lanza.

Mr. May provided in his e-mail to his managers the nexus that tied Mr. Malloy to Northeast Utilities. The governor “has clear energy goals that align with our corporate mission and initiatives. He wants clean, reliable and affordable energy — so do we. He brought all appropriate stakeholders together to develop the state's first comprehensive energy policy. He understands the value of and is supportive of expanding access to natural gas… He is supportive of bringing clean, affordable and carbon neutral large scale hydro power into New England. And, he has been a supportive partner in our system hardening efforts and storm preparation initiatives."

Following these effusions, came the hard sell: “"Please make contributions payable to: CT Democratic State Central Committee — Federal."

Convinced by Mr. May’s irrefutable proofs of Mr. Malloy’s leadership and boundless energy in “continuing the work begun,” Mr. May’s employees ponied up. Campaign cash in return for political favors delivered is the heart and soul of crony capitalism.  The exchange, it should be noted, benefits both the crony capitalist suck-ups, who receive from the politician favors that tend to give them an advantage over his competition, and the politician, who magically creates the favorable impression that he is rescuing his state from the penury he himself has brought upon it through high taxes, union friendly agitation, which drives up the cost of labor, and excessive regulation, all of which tend to impact unfavorably smaller capitalist operations that do not have available to them the sycophantic resources of large corporations and quasi-public enterprises. 

NU contributors made their checks payable not to Mr. Malloy, the subject of Mr. May’s sycophantic appeal, but to “CT Democratic State Central Committee – Federal,” according toa copyrighted story in the Hartford Courant. And the managers were generous too. Campaign finance records show that $46,500 in contributions have been made by more than 20 NU executives in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the Connecticut Democratic Party following Mr. May’s appeal for funds on behalf of the heroic Mr. Malloy.

Since Mr. Malloy was the only person mentioned prominently in Mr. May’s appeal to his managers for campaign donations, one investigative reporter wondered, why were the checks to be made payable to the federal wing of Connecticut’s Democratic Party?

State campaign laws do not permit these kinds of campaign contributions. However, where there is a will, there is a way. Under federal campaign laws, more lax than the state campaign laws under which both Mr. Malloy and Mr. May are compelled to operate, a state party may appropriate and spend funds deposited in a federal account, provided the funds are used to support “get-out-the-vote activities” in connection with an election where a candidate for federal office is on the ballot, and never mind that such appropriations and expenditures also assist party candidates running for state office. The “federal option” is one of those campaign finance loopholes large enough to accommodate Santa Claus and his sleigh, outrigged with jingling cow bells and eight beefy and determined reindeer.

A brief consultation with NU lawyers confirmed that the company was operating within the confines of the law, according to NU spokeswoman Caroline Pretyman. Crony Capitalist Tom, Ms. Pretyman said, “consulted our internal legislative and legal affairs experts to determine where to direct any funds. There are rules and regulations that govern where donations can be directed when individuals do business with the state and the federal account is one that all NU individuals are lawfully permitted to participate in." Ms. Pretyman assured doubtful reporters that fatwas would not be issued against non-compliant managers.

Republican opponents of the governor, scandalized by such a blatant violation of the spirit of campaign regulations, might have responded to Ms. Pretyman in the accents of Mr. Bumble, a character in Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist,” Told that the law supposed that Mr. Bumble’s wife was acting under his direction, Mr. Bumble responded, “If the law supposes that, the law is a ass — a idiot". And if the law supposes that slippery politicians will not take advantage of loopholes engineered into the law by other slippery politicians, we may say, along with the practical minded and astute Mr. Bumble,” If the law supposes that, the law is an ass – an idiot.”  

Republican Prospects

During the last presidential election, Republicans put up against a popular president a candidate, Mitt Romney, who had a deep and admirable political and business history. Republicans were surprised when President Barack Obama, perhaps the most progressive political candidate since progressivism was showcased in a serious way in the 1912 national election, walked back into the Oval Office unruffled and unscathed.

The election was supposed to have pivoted on the economy – stupid. Instead, a majority of voters, overlooking economic indicators that almost certainly would have sunk the prospects of a lesser candidate, were persuaded to give Mr. Obama a second chance.

For Republicans, the “take-away” from the election ought to have been: Social issues trump economic issues – stupid.

During the last election, especially in Connecticut, Republicans had managed to keep a ten foot pole between themselves and social issues, while Democrats joyously embraced the notion of a paternalistic state. Mr. Obama had managed to cobble together a new coalition that gave him a significant margin in the election. He pulled others with him into office, especially within Connecticut and the New England states. Moderate Republicans – left of center on social issues – lost heavily to progressive Democrats disguised, for purposes of the election, as left of center traditional Democrats. After the election, the masks quickly came off.

No one should have been surprised at the magnitude of the losses for moderate Republicans in Connecticut and throughout the Northeast. The moderate Republican has been a species slated for extinction for a couple of decades. When Chris Shays lost his bid for the U.S. House in 2008, he was the last left of center House Republican in all of New England.

Barry Goldwater used to joke that if you lopped off California and New England, “You’ve got a pretty good country.” Connecticut, for all practical purposes now a one party state, has been effectively lopped off and added to the Democratic basket as an economic basket case.  All the state’s Constitutional offices are held by Democrats; the Democrats have controlled the state Senate since 1996 and the state House since 1986; and with the ascendancy of Dannel Malloy to the governor’s office in 2011, the Democrats were able to breech the so called Republican gubernatorial “fire wall’ for the first time since Governor William O’Neill had occupied the office. The clean sweep has made it possible for Mr. Malloy effectively to marginalize Republicans in the General Assembly. Republican leaders in the legislature were not permitted to put their fingerprints on either of the two budgets cobbled together by Mr. Malloy, progressive Democrats in the General Assembly with knives in their brains and SEBAC, the coalition of Connecticut unions authorized to negotiate contracts with the state.

The media in Connecticut -- for ideological and business reasons warmly attached to the Democratic Party – only lately has begun to notice that the state is slipping beneath an economic receding tide. The news that Connecticut had come in dead last among the 50 states in economic growth, according to a Bureau of Economic Analysis report made public on the day following the close of the budget session, was greeted by the state’s astonished left of center media with a gasp of astonishment. Business reporter for the Hartford Courant Dan Haar wrote, “In 18 years of following economic reports daily, this is the most shocking piece of news I've seen, period. As a bombshell, it rivals the $2.2 billion loss posted in January 1989 by Bank of New England — heralding the region's worst recession since World War II.”

Considering the nearly universal left of center bias of the state’s media, Republicans – if they ever should successfully raise a barricade against improvident spending – will not find the media on the right side of the fortification.  Connecticut’s media is uniformly convinced that hard times necessitates a strong central government to spur the economy by diverting tax dollars gathered from businesses already flagellated by burdensome regulations and high taxes to other promising companies the directing state regards as fruitful “investments.” The unitary state and high taxation invariably leads to a self-defeating crony capitalism in which taxpayers, rather than company investors, are forced to bear the burden of failure while one percenters enjoy infrequent successes.

Democrats this year have increased spending about 10 percent, when economic indicators show a flat-lining economy. They have imposed on the state the largest tax increase in its history. They have abolished the death penalty following a horrific multiple murder in Cheshire, which was followed by an even more horrific mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary School. (The shooter in that instance committed suicide; but, had he survived, Connecticut would have been forced to incarcerate the 20 year-old Adam Lanza for life. The death penalty abolition was passed by a cowardly, election conscious General Assembly that left in place the punishment for 11 prisoners on death row in clear violation of a principle underlying all jurisprudence pithily stated in Latin: Nulla poena sine lege – “Where there is no law, there is no transgression.”  Reporting on debates in the House of Commons, Samuel Johnson drew the proper corollary from the centuries old legal doctrine: “That where there is no law there is no transgression, is a maxim not only established by universal consent, but in itself evident and undeniable; and it is, Sir, surely no less certain that where there is no transgression, there can be no punishment.”)

Somewhere in this mush of progressivism an effective Republican counter campaign awaits birth. Whether Connecticut Republicans can tease from it a message that will spark a cleansing rebellion in Connecticut’s cities and towns depends ultimately upon the indispensable three M’s of any successful campaign: message, money and media.

An Interview With Don Pesci: Sandy Hook And The Data Trap

Q: I’ve now read everything you’ve written about the Sandy Hook mass murders, quite a lot. I’ve noticed two things: You have not weighed in on what some people might consider the central legislative issues, the “should”questions – should certain weapons be banned, that sort of thing; and throughout your commentary, you manage to sound like a Jeremiah on what some grey heads in the journalism business use to call “freedom of information.” Is that a right reading of the main thrust of your commentary on Sandy Hook?

A: It’s a fair reading, yes.

Q: Why the emphases on the free flow of information?

A: Because what one does will always depend upon what one knows. It would be more accurate to say “the full and accurate flow of information.” Can I pick a bone with you on Jeremiah?

Q: Sure.

A: Jeremiah was repetitive because he had a positive genius for getting quickly to the decisive point and, of course, repeating it, much to the distress of the hypocritical whitened sepulchers in his audience. Someone –I think it might have been me – once said that journalism was 20 percent thought and 80 percent repetition. That is the nature of journalistic reporting and commentary. Some themes are dearer to you, because they are more important to you, than others, and so you inflict upon your readers the burden of repetition. I’d like to try out on you an answer to the second part of your question.

Q: Okay.

A: Legislators in the General Assembly are pretty much finished with their bills. [This interview occurred on Wednesday, April 10, 2013. Governor Dannel Malloy signed into law on Thursday, April 4, 2013 a bill containing, according to a New York Times report,“… sweeping new restrictions on weapons and ammunition magazines similar to the ones used by the man who fatally shot 20 children and 6 educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown.”] Remarking on the missing data that should have driven their efforts, I said in one of the columns, all of which may be found on a site called “Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes From A Blue State,” [Here sorted by date] that the bills were premature because the criminal investigation report was not due to be completed until June. The General Assembly produced its bill – a bipartisan measure, we are reminded often enough by its architects – in the first week of April, about a month before the criminal investigation report was due to be completed. I think I quoted the Queen of Hearts in Lewis Carol’s “Through the Looking Glass” in the course of that blog and column: “First the verdict,” said the imperious Queen, “then the trial.”

Q: Well yes, but people were impatient to get something done.

A: And their impatience had been stoked by politicians and others interested mostly in bum-rushing legislation before the data upon which that legislation should have rested was available. Why is that?

Q: You had the families of the 26 victims in Sandy Hook waiting patiently for legislation that would…

A: … insure that the slaughter at Sandy Hook would not be repeated. There are so many assurances on this point from state and national politicians, Democrats mostly, that it would be unnecessarily tedious to repeat them here. The two U.S. Senators in Connecticut most voluble on this point are Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy.

Q: Okay.

A: And how can you write such bills if you do not know what happened at Sandy Hook? To be sure, there were reports in the media, many of which relied upon heavily edited information from sources that may or may not have been accurate. Some of the information in the polluted media stream was partial or inaccurate enough to give credence to absurd conspiracy theories. Very little of the information could be described as authoritative -- because much of the information was in the custody of criminal investigators who were determined to draw about the data an impenetrable iron curtain. Every time you approached a data master with a question, you were told, “Sorry Bud, that information is not available because of an ongoing criminal investigation.” To some commentators, myself among them, the criminal investigation seemed overblown, since the two people who might have been charged criminally, Adam Lanza and the mother he murdered, were both dead, as were most of the witnesses to the mass murder. Finally, as the General Assembly was on the point of emitting bills, the carefully guarded bucket sprung a leak. A New York Daily News reporter loosed upon the public some quarantined details that came to him from a source who had attended a police convention in New Orleans, after which it was decided to release police arrest warrants – be it noted, a full month or more before the final criminal report was due.

Q: Which means what?

A: It means that the data in the arrest warrant could have been release long before to legislators charged with shaping bills. Now, I may say – without, I hope, drifting into the bog of conspiracy theory – that, as a general rule, a political sequence occurs because politicians want things to happen in a certain sequence. Even the data included in the arrest warrant was by no means complete and definitive. Arrest warrants reveal only what police are looking for and what they have found at the beginning of an investigation. The General Assembly should have insisted, right from the get go, that all information in the custody of investigators pertinent to the bill or bills the legislators were constructing be made available to the relevant heads of legislative committees – in camera, if necessary. That did not happen. Connecticut’s very robust Freedom of Information [FOI] law means, if it means anything at all, that the only thing the general public need fear about the release of information is that information necessary to a well ordered Republic will NOT be released. But what happened in this instance goes far beyond FOI laws.

Q: You are not saying that people intentionally edited the data you think necessary so that bills could be constructed as they wished, are you?

A: Well, I do think there is a well-documented tendency among politicians to use available laws and processes to advance a preferred end. That’s politics. If the end they have in view is defective, or if the process leads ineluctably to an end the consequences of which are destructive, you must adjust the laws and processes. Politics, at its best, is the legislative art that conveys us to an end result that increases liberty and justice for all.

Q: But how much of what happened was purposeful?

A: All of it -- I hope. To suppose otherwise would be to suppose that our legislators are either stupid or mad. You would have to go to a different planet to find a convocation of reporters and commentators who did NOT think that Democratic lawmakers and some Republicans wanted gun restrictions, whatever the data suggested. The data trap in Connecticut eased their way. But bad data – or, worse, sequestered data – makes for bad laws. If Republicans in Connecticut were not a bunch of spineless go-alongs hanging by their torn fingernails to increasingly disappearing legislative seats, they would insist on bills that break down Berlin Walls intended to prevent the liberating and free flow of data. But look what is happening: As a result of Sandy Hook, we now have before the General Assembly a bill that would restrict information on death certificates. Why? Because we wish to spare the stricken parents of young children murdered in Sandy Hook the resulting publicity that might occur should FOI laws be rigorously enforced. Really? Death certificates, available for centuries to the public, contain only general information. The certificate requires a review of the cause of death by a medical examiner to determine the presence or absence of foul play indicating that a murder may have been committed. How can the general public know that authorities responsible for apprehending and convicting murderers are doing a proper job if information of this kind is not made available to them? Who are the political beneficiaries of such a bill? Why, dear me, can’t we say it plainly? The bill would largely benefit propagandist politicians whose efforts would be furthered any restriction that data-traps inconvenient truths and prevents the free flow of information. You control the messenger – there are still in Connecticut some alert reporters, a few brave Jonahs who have managed to escape the maw of Leviathan – by controlling data. In history, the upward progress of politicians has always been paved by the careful editing of information. In constitutional republics, some subtlety that veils naked political purposes may be necessary to sell such anti-democratic measures to an increasingly apathetic public. Do we wish to further wound stricken victims? How could we be so heartless? This is how the liberties of free men disappear, not through honest battles waged on an open field but with a flick of the serpent’s tongue.

Q: Are you satisfied with the final bill [recently signed into law by Mr. Malloy]?

A: No. the legislative product was shamelessly oversold by demagogues. The passage of the bill here in Connecticut marked the boundary of overheated rhetoric. Before passage, Connecticut politicians, mostly Democrats driven by a script that bore the watermark of Washington D.C., were telling us that the measures they preferred would make school children across the state safe from the Adam Lanzas of the world. Suffering parents in Sandy Hook, perhaps traumatized by the slaughter of their children, were used to prop up an improbable theory: namely, that restrictions imposed on certain weapons –indeed, the most popular and bestselling long rifle in the United States, the AR15 – would render schoolchildren safe from attack. Even town administrators in Newtown dramatically spurned that theory when the town fathers voted to appropriate money to place armed guards in all their schools, including the three private schools in town [Sandy Hook is a section of Newtown]. They knew from direct experience that unarmed interveners, however brave, could not stop a determined shooter. The shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School stopped when armed first responders appeared in the school. After the bill in Connecticut had passed, U.S. Senators Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy and Governor Dannel Malloy took their show to Washington D.C., where a national gun bill, much more pallid that the Connecticut version, was up for consideration. Here at home, legislators who had championed “the toughest gun laws in the nation,”perhaps with a cautious eye focused on reality, began a tactical retreat from their overblown rhetoric: True, the bill wasn’t perfect, but we should never allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good. Vice President Joe Biden said at one point that if national gun legislation saved but one life, it would be worth it, which is simply another way of saying that Mr. Biden regards human life as precious. Well, of course he does. All the old canards were trotted out and dangled before an aroused but doubtful public. A rhetorical mountain had been made of a mole hill, and now politicians were concerned with reducing their overinflated mountain of promises so that, when lives once again were lost in what should properly be regarded for purposes of punishment as a terrorist act, politicians who had overpromised in their legislation would not be held to account. Mr. Blumenthal and Mr. Murphy both come from a state that had recently abolished a death penalty following a horrific multiple murder in Cheshire committed by two newly released prisoners on parole. Their crime was spectacularly heinous. They broke into a house, beat the male householder with a bat, tied him up in the basement, assaulted three women in the house upstairs, forced a mother to go to a bank and withdraw money, raped two daughters and set fire to the house, killing all the women. That incident sparked massive purchases of guns in Connecticut, especially in rural areas, where the response time from police is necessarily longer. Now, if Adam Lanza had survived his attack on Sandy Hook Elementary school, he could not have been executed in Connecticut for having murdered his mother, 20 children and 6 brave faculty members of the school because – largely owing to politicians like Mr. Blumenthal and Mr. Murphy – the state, for humane reasons, had deprived itself of a punishment tool. Had Mr. Lanza survived, the political play we are now witnessing would not be the same. We have to begin to focus on the criminal misuse of weapons. In the week prior to passage of the gun restriction law in Connecticut, Managing Editor of the Journal Inquirer Chris Powell noted in one of his columns, there were three handgun murders in Hartford alone. “Some of the shots fired there,” Mr. Powell wrote, “may have been audible from the Capitol grounds, at least with those with ears to hear. No one in authority seems to know what to do about such murders, and over the course of a year, such murders in Connecticut’s disintegrating cities will be far more numerous than the murders in Newtown, but nobody has to know or even pretendto know because that part of Connecticut – the part where mayhem is ordinary and daily, not a freak event such as Newtown – can be written off politically. Murder victims in the cities long ago ceased being cute.” Unfortunately, not as many people are like to have read Mr. Powell’s column as those who read Mr. Murphy’s maiden speech in the U.S. Senate on gun violence in the course of which Mr. Murphy pointed out, quite correctly, that guns in the hands of criminals are more lethal than knives. He might have done a valuable service for his constituents had he read Mr. Powell’s column into the legislative record.

 

The Sandy Hook Data Dump

After maintaining a four month quarantine on information concerning the Sandy Hook Elementary School slaughter, Danbury State’s Attorney Stephen Sedensky dumped some arrest warrant information into Connecticut’s highly speculative media stream. The closely guarded information, released only days before Connecticut’s General Assembly was poised to write bills restricting gun ownership, begs the question: Why now?

When criticized by a few Connecticut reporters and commentators for having withheld information inadvertently released by state police Col. Danny Stebbins during a New Orleans Chiefs of Police conference, investigators suddenly and inexplicably abandoned their often iterated threadbare rational: that releasing information in the arrest warrants would compromise “an active investigation.” They let part of the cat, its nose only, out of the bag.

Apparently the released arrest warrant data was harmless enough to allow Mr. Sedensky to release the data about three months before the criminal investigation will be completed sometime in June.

Journalists, the intended recipients of carefully screened data, do not often enough rely on their best reportorial instincts, which ought to signal to them that artfully edited data is often a craven attempt to slice and dice information for political purposes. If any of the tribunes of the people in Connecticut had asked Governor Dannel Malloy or legislators who need accurate data to write effective laws restricting gun ownership why the data dump -- released months before a criminal investigation is due to be completed but only days before legislators are due to present their final bills -- will not compromise a yet incomplete investigation, the answer to the question is blowing in the wind.

Mr. Sedensky in his media release insisted that “an ongoing and active criminal investigation” to be effective requires the imprisoning of information that may be necessary in an official“ongoing investigation.” The rules of “Professional Responsibility as they apply to prosecutors require that I take steps to not make extra judicial statements that I know or reasonably should know will be disseminated by means of public communication and will have a substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing an adjudicative proceeding in the matter… the release of any information could potentially jeopardize a future prosecution if evidence were developed to support one. It is not unusual to develop a viable prosecution late in an investigation when one was not contemplated earlier.”

A wide-awake reporter at the Journal Inquirer asked the governor’s Chief of Staff Mark Ojakian, and through him Governor Dannel Malloy, whether Mr. Stebbens would be penalized in any way for having been responsible for the information leak in New Orleans that found its way into a piece written by Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News.

Surely the leak of such carefully quarantined information had a “substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing an adjudicative proceeding,” the fig leaf so often cited by investigators who wished to keep data from legislators contemplating bills restricting Second Amendment rights.

Mr. Ojakian’s response was a barely suppressed yawn: “Those conferences take place for law enforcement officials to share information with each other — confidentially, in private — that might help their investigations. We were satisfied with his [Mr. Stebbins’] explanation."

In a piece written for The Connecticut Law Tribune, criminal defense lawyer Norm Pattis, whose specialty lies in torching prosecutorial pretentions, doubted that further charges are pending and ventured to hope that “someone challenges whether the privileges the state claims justifies this cloak and dagger editing are justified.”

Responding to Mr.Sedensky’s new fig leaf that redacted portions of the released affidavits “would identify persons cooperating with the investigation, thus possibly jeopardizing their personal safety and well-being," Mr. Pattis noted, chortling gently behind his hand, “Somehow, I doubt there will be further charges. I hope someone challenges whether the privileges the state claims justifies this cloak and dagger editing are justified… That is an extraordinary claim. From a distance, it appears that Mr. Lanza acted alone. He is dead. His mother, with whom he lived, is also dead, an apparent victim of her son's rampage. Mr. Lanza can hurt no one any longer…”

Did Mr.Sedensky, alone or in concert with others, sneak one past Superior Court Judge John F.Blawie when he asked for judicial permission to deep-six the redacted information?

“Surprising as it may seem,” Mr. Pattis writes, “the state's filing suggests that there is an active investigation of another defendant in the Newtown shooting case, a witness with such incendiary information that his or her safety would be in jeopardy were it to become public.”

Wracked by what U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal calls the “horror” of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the tortured parents of 26 innocent victims in Newtown must await the lifting of the fig leaf sometime in June, when the final criminal report is released, before their hearts may find rest in the truth that will set them free. In the meantime, they will have to be satisfied with legislation inspired by the rush of circumstances that very likely will not satisfy their curiosity or mitigate their pain.

The Dick And Chris Show

Governor Dannel Malloy at first allowed that legislators who were to create bills assuring Connecticut citizens would not be exposed to another mass murder incident such as had occurred in Sandy Hook should take their time and craft a bill that would suit the purpose. Then he jumped ahead of his own gubernatorial commission and publically announced his own prophylactic measures, for which he received some mild criticism: How was the legislature to write an effective bill in the absence of hard data furnished by three investigatory bodies, the most important of which was the criminal investigation? Apparently, Mr. Malloy took this objection to heart, because he then issued strong signals that the various commissions should be allowed to complete their assignments so that a proper bill might be written.

After all, Mr. Malloy and members of Connecticut’s all Democratic U.S. Congressional delegation – most prominently Senators Dick Blumenthal and Chris Murphy – had visited Sandy Hook, met with family members of children slain by mass murderer Adam Lanza, and assured them that effective remedies were in the offing, Mr. Blumenthal insisting that national legislation was exceedingly important because state borders are porous and illegal weapons might easily pass through the semi-permeable membrane of state laws. Connecticut already has on its books some of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation. Mr. Murphy has been running tight end around the National Rifle Association (NRA), pummeling it defensively whenever he can and at the same time hoping to receive a pass from the anti-weapon team that he might carry to a touchdown.

Several difficulties have intervened. In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo quickly rammed through the legislature a ban on certain weapons but neglected to exempt New York policemen from the ban, a major boo-boo. The governor and legislature also launched a ban on magazines that contained more than 7 rounds, only to realize when the applause had died down that there is no company in the United States that produces such a magazine; so the solons in New York prohibited more than 7 rounds in any magazine holding more than 7 rounds, which raises the embarrassing question: How is the law to be enforced in the absence of X-Ray vision glasses that would allow the rearmed New York police to count the number of bullets in an opaque magazine? Mr. Cuomo and the anti-gun nuts in the New York legislature are still struggling with that one.

The moral to these goof-up is: Not only does haste make waste; sometimes, it makes you look incredibly stupid. And state office holders do not want to appear to be imbeciles. Idiot voters in the Unites States, it is generally supposed, are still in the minority.

The Dick and Chris show alighted in Connecticut days after Harry Reid, the Democratic Majority Leader in the U.S. Senate, had buried ardent hopes for a federal ban on assault weapons. Connecticut, much more progressive on this point than most states, already has such a ban. A federal ban is the Holy Grail of senators Blumenthal and Murphy.

Why? Because, as Mr. Blumenthal has been telling us, gun runners, the sort of disreputable folk who sell guns to criminals not legally authorized to use them, easily run around porous state laws; but a federal law… well sir, that’s the ticket!

Now then, it is important to understand that the proposed anti-assault weapon ban that was to have been presented in the U.S. Congress – the Holy Grail of Mr. Blumenthal and Mr. Murphy -- was not shot to death by itchy-fingered members of the NRA. The measure was not put up for a vote in the chamber where Mr. Blumenthal and Mr. Murphy do business -- when they are not hustling Connecticut legislators in their home state to hastily pass a bill in the absence of determining data -- because it was withdrawn by Mr. Reid, whose specialty lies in counting votes. The Democratic votes in a chamber owned by Democrats weren’t there.

Here is the breathless Blumenthal hustle: “Connecticut’s failure to act in the next two weeks will be a detriment when we go to the floor. On the other hand, if Connecticut can act within the next two weeks it will provide a very powerful momentum. It will speak volumes about determination and dedication here to making sure our nation is safer.”

Connecticut legislators, who wish to avoid the trapdoors through which idiot New York politicians have fallen, are pausing to consider hard data soon to be released in affidavits that have been carefully hidden from public view. As Attorney General in Connecticut for more than 20 years before his elevation to the U.S. Senate, Mr. Blumenthal should understand the importance of affidavits in prosecution and bill writing.

Mr. Blumenthal and Mr. Murphy need to get back to work in the Beltway rounding up votes for the Holy Grail in THEIR Democratic dominated Senate.

They should make haste: Time wasted is time lost.

Sandy Hook Is Waiting

Following a reasonable complaint from Republican leaders in the General Assembly that they lack sufficient data to write legislation that will assure people in Connecticut – and most especially the people of Sandy Hook – that massacres of the kind that occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School will not be repeated, Governor Dannel Malloy, who does not take kindly to critical objections, responded with a media release.

“Like many others,” Mr. Malloy wrote, “I was disappointed and angered to learn that certain information about the Newtown shooting had been leaked, specifically with concern for the victims' families who may have been hearing this news for the first time.”

Does Mr. Malloy truly think that the leaked information provided in a Daily News report by Mike Lupica will irreparably compromise the criminal investigation under way by the Chief State’s Attorney and other law enforcement officials?

Mr. Malloy does not seem especially anxious for an answer to this question. But the question is an important one because, depending on the answer to it, reasonable people, news reporters among them, might be able to determine for themselves whether or not the shroud of secrecy surrounding the mass murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School should be lifted so as to allow legislators to write rational and effective bills.

The Chief State’s Attorney has not indicated as a result of the data he has so far assembled that any prosecutions are pending. Adam Lanza, a quite efficient killer, managed to murder 20 school children, 6 staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School and his own mother. There has been some speculation, so far not supported by hard data, that Mr. Lanza’s mother might have been partly responsible for the mayhem by failing to render inaccessible four of the weapons Mr. Lanza carried with him to the school. Indeed, most of the information people in Connecticut and elsewhere have been regurgitating from media reports remains unverified. A final criminal report, we are told, will be completed sometime in June.

The Chief State’s Attorney likely will not prosecute Adam Lanza, because he is dead. His mother likewise is unavailable for questioning. Questions cannot be wrested from any of the brave and heroic school personnel who, unarmed, died in heroic attempts to frustrate Mr. Lanza’s murderous assault. Indeed, should some curious news reporter ask Mr. Malloy, a former prosecutor, who the Chief State’s Attorney intends to prosecute for this heinous crime, what names could he mention?

Until the New Orleans leak, the iron curtain of secrecy surrounding the massacre in Sandy Hook was impenetrable, and in the absence of verified information, speculation and rumor have been rampant. However, it may not seem to most reporters that the data tightly under wraps and released by Mr. Lupica would compromise the ongoing investigation by the Chief State’s Attorney and others closely connected with federal personnel, nor has the Chief State’s Attorney suggested as much.

Following criticism from leading data-starved legislators in the General Assembly, Mr. Malloy wrote in his media release:

“Today, my office contacted the Chief State’s Attorney. I requested, and they have agreed, to release additional information relevant to the investigation and to provide a status on where the investigation currently stands. This information will be provided by Friday, March 29.

“As to what information can reasonably be shared at this time – that is a question that must be left to the State’s Attorney and other law enforcement. As a former prosecutor, I’m sensitive to the need for an independent investigation and believe that we must allow their work to continue without any undue interference.

“Having said all that, I will also say that I am bewildered by the demands of Mr. Cafero and others for a special briefing they claim is necessary in order for them to take a firm position on potential legislative responses to this horrific tragedy.

“To Mr. Cafero and those others I must ask: what more could you possibly need to know?

It might be considered unbusiness-like for Mr. Cafero to respond, “We need to know more than Mike Lupica if we are expected to write rational legislation that will, as Mr. Malloy and members of Connecticut’s U.S Congressional delegation have insisted, prevent future Sandy Hook-like school invasions.” At the very least Mr. Cafero should busy himself making a list of relevant questions the answers to which might aid the General Assembly in writing pertinent legislation.

All available information should be released to legislative bodies considering relevant bills. It borders upon insanity to expect reasonable legislation from legislators not in possession of the data they need to write the legislation. If it is determined that the information – including Hippa information – will compromise the investigation, that data may be received by relevant committees in camera. If current Hippa regulations prevent the sharing of medical data with legislators who need the data to write bills, change the regulations. Legislators – and the governor -- should have been insisting on briefings and updated briefings all along. It is the lack of hard and accurate data that has slowed the legislative process. No more dawdling! The people of Sandy Hook deserve better than this.

By the way, would it not be proper for U.S. Senator Chris Murphy and other Democrats on Connecticut’s all Democratic U.S. Congressional delegation to direct some of the rhetorical fire aimed at the demonized NRA towards Democrats in the U.S. Senate. Senate leader Harry Reid could not muster enough votes in a body controlled by Democrats to pass an assault rifle ban: Connecticut has one. This commentator reads media reports sedulously, and he cannot recall any of the members of Connecticut’s U.S. Congressional delegation, all Democrats, being invited to express their dismay concerning the withdrawal of the assault weapons ban bill by Senate leader Harry Reid. These are the very people, Mr. Malloy among them, who stood shoulder to shoulder with groups in Newtown that were demanding an assault weapons ban from President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and the U.S. Congress.

What flower pots are they hiding behind now?

The Devil In Blumenthal’s Details

The expression “the devil is in the details,” first appearing in print in 1975, is a variation of an earlier expression, “The good God is in the detail,”sometimes attributed to Gustave Flaubert. Both expressions point to the importance of detail, what we moderns call verifiable data or facts.

Politicians, to no one’s surprise, sometimes traffic in facts, sometimes not.

In a recent copyrighted story in the Hartford Courant, U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal is shown expressing his disdain for the devilish details surrounding the Sandy Hook massacre: “Blumenthal dismissed the statistics and legal intricacies and focused on Begg and Heslin sitting at the witness table. He said, ‘Some or all of those 20 beautiful children and six great educators would be alive today if assault weapons had been banned along with high capacity magazines.’"

Mr. Blumenthal was speaking to reporters on the record following testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee of one of the parents of the children, 20 in number, who were slain in Sandy Hook Elementary School.

As expected, the testimony was heart rending. Only a heart of stone could fail to be moved by the personal testimony of Neil Heslin, whose 6-year-old-son, Jesse Lewis, was murdered in the savage attack.

Also present during the testimony was the sister of Victoria Soto, one of the heroic figures in the Sandy Hook mass murderer.

Ms. Soto was the First Grade teacher at Sandy Hook Elementary School who managed to save children’s lives by hiding several of them in a closet. When Adam Lanza entered her classroom after having killed fifteen students and two teachers, she told him, with great presence of mind, that the children were in the auditorium. Some students ran from their hiding place and Mr. Lanza shot them, also shooting Ms. Soto who, in an attempt to save their lives, threw herself in death’s path.

“We don’t want our sister to die for no reason,”Jillian Soto told the host of MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.” Courage runs deep in the Soto family.

“We lost our sister, tragically,” said Jillian, “and we are now honoring her by fighting for her name and for change–in her name, and all the other victims of Sandy Hook Elementary School and all the other school shootings. We don’t just want her to be a statistic. We want her to be known for who she is and the amazing teacher that she was -- the amazing sister she was -- and ask for something, demand that something be done so that nobody else has to go through this.”

“So that nobody else has to go through this…” These words should not be taken as a pointless rhetorical incantation. We should not allow the devil to ease a pathway for us around the details; for, if we do, we cannot arrive at a legislative destination that will assure family members of the innocent children slaughtered in Sandy Hook that other parents will not, like them, weep tears of blood when their innocent children are accosted by gunmen in what used to be considered here in Connecticut a sanctuary of peace and joy -- and this means that legislators must master the details, or the faults in their legislation will ride them like devils.

The architect of the federal bill preferred by Mr. Blumenthal is U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein of California. The Feinstein bill bans future sales of assault weapons, already illegal under Connecticut law, while permitting current owners to retain their weapons and, as such, would not have prevented Adam Lanza from acquiring the weapon he used to slaughter children in Sandy Hook. A confiscation of such weapons legally owned by their purchasers might have prevented Mr. Lanza’s use of the AR15, a semi-automatic long rifle, but then Mr. Lanza arrived at the school armed with two equally lethal handguns, the weapon of choice in urban areas where the preponderance of murders occur. Only a little less than three percent of homicides in 2011 were committed with long rifles. The Feinstein bill also limits easily replaceable magazines to ten bullets. According to a story the details of which have not been verified by the official criminal report, not due until the summer, Mr. Lanza replaced his thirty round magazines after having fired 15 rounds. The shotgun he left in the car and the two hand guns he carried with him into the school would have been as devastating.

When Mr. Blumenthal said, focusing dramatically on Mr. Heslin and dismissing as “unimportant”statistics and legal intricacies, “Some or all of those 20 beautiful children and six great educators would be alive today if assault weapons had been banned along with high capacity magazines," he was telling what Mark Twain used to call a stretcher, not that he will ever be reproved for it by the right people. Mr. Blumenthal, formerly an attorney general, did, after all, include the slither word “some” in his stretcher.

Back home, Democratic leaders in the General Assembly were spooking their brother legislators. The president pro tem of the Senate Don Williams and Majority Leader Martin Looney wrote a letter to their colleagues demanding that a legislative committee complete its work on time; and the bill presented to the General Assembly, they said, would be“emergency certified.”

An "emergency certified bill" is one that short circuits the legislative process because an “emergency”requiring short circuiting is at hand. The short circuiting, fortunately for legislators who do not wish to leave unsightly fingerprints on the resulting bill, renders hearings on proposed bills unnecessary. There is no emergency, only a legislative stampede made in Washington. Convenient emergencies of this kind are the enemy of the good and a shameless dereliction of legislative responsibility. If legislators don't want to create effective bills, they should find another means of employment.

The one notable Democratic legislator who appears to be committed to a tried and sure legislative process designed to produce efficacious legislation is Democratic Speaker of the House Brendan Sharkey. Mr.Sharkey is reluctant to sign on to emergency legislation the provisions of which have not been approved by the General Assembly appointed bipartisan task force. Apparently, Mr. Sharkey prefers a more comprehensive bill written by Connecticut legislators for citizens of Connecticut. Hearings on proposed legislation allow legislators to shape bills with a view to particular circumstances. The notion that the General Assembly should be stampeded in its deliberations simply to meet a schedule imposed from Washington DC is more than preposterous; it is dangerous because it subverts a republican constitutional order and will likely produce a product useful only to politicians concerned with campaign sound bites.

Where Is The Technological Solution To Unauthorized Gun Use?

One of the reasons Americans are by nature optimistic is that they seem to believe that there is no problem on earth to which there is not at least one technological solution.

State politicians are now actively engaged in addressing the mass murder in Sandy Hook where, more than a month ago, a gunman fired upon school children, killing 20 children and 6 staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and some critics have attacked a few of the legislative solutions so far offered because they regard them as non-solutions.

Two state legislators, Representative Bob Godfrey and Senator Beth Bye, have written a bill that imposes a 50 percent tax on the total sale of ammunition, a non-solution that struck a chord in the heart of Democratic Majority Leader Martin Looney, who observed, “A gun without ammunition is only a club. We really need to restrict access to ammunition.” But of course; and a car without gas is a stationary art piece. Wishing that every rifle in Connecticut were a club is a form of magic thinking that will do little to reduce gun crimes in the real world.

Mr. Looney, who has been leading gun control efforts in the Democratic dominated State Senate, recently has announced that a bill addressing the slaughter in Sandy Hook will bypass the usual public hearing process and be sent to the governor for his signature though an emergency certification process, a strategy that will obviate legislative oversight and leave no unsightly fingerprints on a final bill produced in General Assembly backrooms by legislative leaders. Too many fingerprints on legislation might imperil re-election efforts by removing vague assertions of approval. The Looney gambit can only succeed by enlisting the support of a governor armed with veto power.

It is one thing to know or think you know, and it is quite a different thing to know that you know. We should be modest about what we know concerning the events at Sandy Hook. So far, criminal investigators have released no definitive findings on the mass murder. After all the data has been presented, certified and sifted, all of us can begin seriously to ponder the problem and offer effective solutions. Until that time arrives, we are building our Looney castles on sand.

In proposing solutions that would in the view of Governor Dannel Malloy and others prevent future Sandy Hooks, we should first agree that the chief problem is the unauthorized use of guns; or, to put it in police terms, guns falling into the hands of criminals.

Pending a final report on Sandy Hook, there is some reason to believe that the shooter illicitly acquired the weapons he used at Sandy Hook Elementary School. If Adam Lanza’s mother had permitted her son’s use of her weapons to slaughter children at an elementary school, Mr. Lanza need not have murdered her.

We think we know that Mr. Lanza had at his disposal, two semi-automatic pistols, a shotgun, which he may have left in the car he took from his mother, and a Bushmaster long gun, a semi-automatic capable of firing 30 rounds from a dischargeable magazine. According to one news report not yet verified by crime investigators, Mr. Lanza changed his magazines after firing 15 rounds.

Could there be a technological solution to gun crime? Is it possible to engineer solution to the unauthorized possession of weapons?

If the weapons Mr. Lanza acquired, presumably without the approval of his mother, had been inoperable, children’s lives might have been saved. To put it in terms used by Mr. Looney: If the disarmed weapons used by Mr. Lanza were clubs, the slaughter might have been averted.

Present law requires weapons to be securely locked up and unavailable to unauthorized users. Suppose – just to suppose – that the gun safeties on most weapons were to be replaced by a lock operated by a fingerprint or a swipe card, the weapon rendered inoperable after purchase until activated by its owner each time it is used. That kind of technological solution to the problem of the unauthorized use of stolen weapons or illicitly acquired weapons– or some more practical method that would prevent any but an authorized user from discharging the weapon -- would be far more helpful in averting Sandy Hook mass murders than a tax on bullets, supposed by some to be a craven attempt to raise needed revenue that would not affect the illicit purchase of weapons or bullets.

Creating such a technological solution – not necessarily those suggested above-- that would render a firearm inoperable to anyone but an authorized purchaser ought to be a snap for a country that can put a rover on Mars. Where there is a will, there is a way; and where there is a demonstrable need, there is money to be made by some energetic and creative weapons manufacturer.

We already know that not every sociological or economic problem here in the land of Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, Samuel Morse, Orville and Wilber Wright and Samuel Colt yields to legislation.

Sometimes it takes an engineer to carve a path out of the wilderness to a safe and secure future.

Conspiracy Theorists And Connecticut Lawmakers

The absence of authoritative reports and data is the breeding ground of conspiracy theorists. No conspiracy theorists so far – though it may be best to keep quiet about this; you never know – has alleged that those who believe the earth is round are engaged in a vast conspiracy to subtly undermine the truth, which is that the earth is flat, as everyone can well see. For the professional conspiracy theorist, there is no point in doubting received truths of long standing.

Everything else is fair game.

Some early reports on the slaughter at Sandy Hook Elementary school were, at best, dubious. Multiple reports – particularly stories indicating the police had handcuffed a mysterious man in the woods surrounding the school – gave rise to suspicions that a second shooter was involved in the mayhem. There was no second shooter… we think.

We non-conspiracy theorists don’t know there was no second shooter because everyone in Connecticut who is not Governor Dannel Malloy or quick on the trigger legislators in Connecticut’s General Assembly is awaiting a final, definitive report on the slaughter from relevant authorities before he is is able, in a non-conspiratorial theorist manner, to draw hard and fast conclusion concerning what did and did not happen on the day Adam Lanza killed his mother, accessed her weaponry and shot to death 20 children and 6 adults at the school.

A long rifle was left in the car Mr. Lanza had stolen from his mother. What was the weapon? Very early reports suggested it might have been a Bushmaster rifle; later reports indicated it was a shotgun owned by Mrs. Lanza. Still later reports suggested that Mr. Lanza shot his way into the school with the Bushmaster, carrying with him two revolvers, one of which he used to commit suicide. So said media reports, but it is important to remember that investigators on the scene have not issued any official report. Police spokesman Lieutenant Paul Vance has, it is true, given numerous media opportunities in the course of which he has released minimal information that would not compromise what he has called “an ongoing criminal investigation.”

That expression is used most often in prosecutable cases; no one wants to weaken the prosecution of alleged criminals. In the Sandy Hook case, Mr. Lanza cannot be prosecuted, because he is dead, having committed suicide after his appalling slaughter of school children and their wards.

The weapon left in the car, unidentified in early reports, gave rise to the supposition that Mr. Lanza had left the Bushmaster rifle in his mother’s stolen car. Unsupported factoids such as these are meat and potatoes to conspiracy theorists. But it is important to understand that such data is unsupported because relevant authorities – for whatever reason, good or bad –have chosen neither to affirm nor deny in a timely fashion the facts of the case in their possession.

The governor, as well as other politicians, has said many times that he and the General Assembly must produce legislation that would prevent future crimes of the sort committed by Mr. Lanza in Sandy Hook. In a media release given out two days after President Barrack Obama had addressed the nation on his proposals to mitigate gun violence, Mr. Malloy said,“In the hours after the worst of our fears were confirmed, in the midst of the grief and sorrow over the loss of 20 innocent children and six dedicated educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School, there was one question on the minds of people across Connecticut and around the nation: How do we make sure this never happens again?”

Surely, one way to make sure Sandy Hook-like assaults on school children here and across the nation “never happen again” is to await definitive reports, eschew hazy suppositions of a kind made by conspiracy theorists on both sides of the National Rifle Association (NRA) barricades, and produce effective legislation that will answer the principal question on the minds of people across Connecticut and around the nation: How do we make sure this never happens again?

Unfortunately --fortunately for conspiracy theorists -- even the final report is not likely to be definitive. Mr. Malloy has spurned any further updates from the Connecticut State Police, but Lieutenant Paul Vance traveled to Newtown in the last few days to update the parents of those slain by Mr. Lanza, some of whom wanted information concerning Mr. Lanza’s medical records.

Mr. Vance told the parents that he was prevented by law from releasing information concerning Mr. Lanza’s mental state: “A medical history doesn't die with an individual. It's our responsibility to abide by state law even when conducting an investigation."

To quote Mr. Mr. Bumble in Dickenson’s Oliver Twist, “If the law supposes that, the law is a (sic) ass — a idiot. If that's the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience -- by experience.”

Mr. Obama, Mr. Malloy and his friends in Connecticut’s Democratic dominated General Assembly, the architects and guardians of state law, may be of some help here: Change the law -- right now.

All medical information that is part of a formal police investigation should be released in final reports – especially in this case in which a mental disorder may be a cause of the crime and legislation affecting mental health bills are awaiting a final report. It is not clear at this point whether leading legislators realize that a law they've written makes it unlikely that they will receive timely information that should shape current legislation.

If legislators in writing their laws have blinded themselves to the truth, we can only wish upon them a few million conspiracy theorists to spur them in the right direction.

How to Write a Dumb Law

The easiest way to write a dumb law is to pass a bill uninformed by certifiable data.

Following the massacre of school students at Sandy Hook Elementary school, U .S. Senator Chris Murphy, newly sworn into the Congress, issued his first media release of the New Year in the course of which he vowed to fight “to strengthen Connecticut’s economy” and “grow jobs in science, technology, manufacturing, and defense.”

And with a nod in the direction of bloodstained Newtown, the junior U.S. Senator from Connecticut pledged “to be a leading voice in the national conversation to end the kind of gun violence that shattered precious young lives and devastated a community in Newtown, Connecticut just three weeks ago.”

On the same day young children who survived the massacre in Sandy Hook attended their first day of school in Monroe, a Hartford paper disclosed that an authoritative report on the mass shooting in Sandy Hook will not be forthcoming anytime soon.

That report – to be issued under the combined aegis of Danbury State's Attorney Stephen Sedensky III, Newtown police, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Connecticut State Police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the United States Marshals Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives – would contain the authoritative data on the basis of which legislators might be able to write laws that could, in Mr. Murphy’s words, “end the kind of gun violence that shattered precious young lives and devastated a community in Newtown, Connecticut just three weeks ago.”

The number of investigatory fingerprints on the upcoming report necessarily will slow the issuance of definitive data. The horror of Sandy Hook is in danger of turning into a sort of Rorschach blot in which every interpretation offers a benefit to the political interpreter. Both Mr. Sedensky and State police authorities have refused to set a date for the finalization of the multi-agency report. Connecticut’s General Assembly has about six months to write preventative legislation. There are some legislators in the General Assembly who think, reasonably enough, that effective legislations should await a final report.

“First the verdict,”says the Queen of Hearts in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass” --“then the trial.” The General Assembly ought not to be an Alice in Wonderland topsy-turvy world in which the foundational data upon which rational legislation must rest follows legislation produced by lawmakers with one foot firmly planted in the clouds.

We should try to retain a sense of modesty and be willing to entertain the thought that no rational or even effective piece of legislation can be extruded from such a senseless multiple murder.

Two Democratic state legislators, Sen. Beth Bye of West Hartford and Rep. Bob Godfrey of Danbury, have a bill in the hopper that would place a tax on bullets. No doubt such a tax would generate yet more revenue in a state hooked on spending that seems incapable of producing a balanced budget, but the tax is impractical and possibly unconstitutional. The additional tax money might or might not be used to pay off state debt, but why should anyone suppose that taxing the lawful purchase of bullets in Connecticut would assist in preventing future mass murders in a state in which enlightened legislators, arguing that capital punishment had little deterrent value, recently abolished a death penalty following a horrific mass murder in Cheshire?

A newspaper in NewYork, driven by the slaughter in Sandy Hook, rushed to publish the names and addresses of legal firearm owners, rather as if they had been child molesters, and the newspaper also published a map showing areas in which gun ownership is heavy or light – a boon, one might reasonably think, to criminals in New York contemplating house robberies. The destruction of privately held firearms in both England and Australia has led to alarming increases in home robberies and assaults, especially among older folk deprived of an effective deterrent.

Before legislators pass any pointless and silly bills seeking to prevent the unpreventable, they should, at the very least, await the multi-agency report on the Sandy Hook Crime and a further study promised by Governor Dannel Malloy.

Any comprehensive report should carefully investigate a possible connection between lawfully prescribed behavior modification medicine and such crimes as occurred in Sandy Hook. There is solid research showing a causal connection between psychiatric medications and mass murders. At least one story about Adam Lanza indicated that he was on medication.

The great German critic Karl Kraus use to say that psychiatry “was the disease it purported to cure,” an exaggeration one may permit to social critics. But the connection between psychotropic drugs and crime detailed by David Kupeliann in a convincing piece in World Net Daily is more than coincidental.

At the very least, the General Assembly should wait upon certifiable facts captured, one hopes, in the promised studies, before it leaps into the void in an effort to show various constituencies that legislatively “something must be done.” Connecticut’s General Assembly not only should think before it leaps; as befits the state’s version of the U.S. Congress, which some have called the greatest deliberative body on earth, it should deliberate openly on matters of pressing importance before it passes pointless legislation.