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.

The Perpetual Progressive Campaign

So, the elections are over -- for a too brief interlude.

The grumps who have been complaining all along that there is no longer a breathing space between elections are right. Forward! as they say in the progressive Beltway. In our time, politics itself has become a form of electioneering. That’s what is wrong with it. President John Kennedy governed; President Barack Obama campaigns.

Campaign finance reform was supposed to settle some of these problems.

Karl Kraus, a great German critic and a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, use to say that psychoanalysis WAS the disease it purported to cure; so with campaign finance reform and other political bromides. There are only two ways to shorten the political season. The first is borrowed from Shakespeare, with an important revision: “First thing we do is shoot all the lawyers,” Shakespeare’s Dick the Butcher said. A modern Butcher might be inclined to say the same of politicians, a good number of whom are lawyers. The second less dramatic solution is to term-limit politicians. While this more practical measure may not eliminate political corruption –neither does campaign finance reform, by the way – it will distribute political corruption more fairly among yet uncorrupted new political recruits and weaken the stranglehold incumbents have on political office.

One reporter wrote in a story about Mitt Romney’s failed campaign that the campaign for governor of Connecticut begins the day after Romney’s concession speech. And so it has. Governor Dannel Malloy has claimed that Obama’s victory in some sense vindicates his own political program.

That is a weak argument. In Connecticut, there was little to no turn-over in the General Assembly following the election, although Republicans in the state made some of Malloy’s questionable initiatives the center piece of their own campaigns. Actually, Republicans have been too cautious in their criticisms, and programs are vindicated, ultimately, by their consequences.

Mike Lawlor’s early release program, for instance, is a ticking time bomb. Once a prosecutor for the State's Attorney Office in New Haven and later co-chairman of the General Assembly's Judiciary Committee from 1995 to 2011, Lawlor is Malloy’s undersecretary for criminal justice policy and the chief architect of Connecticut’s early release Earned Risk Reduction Credits program.

It’s only a matter of days, weeks and months before another violent criminal let loose early under Lawlor’s ill-conceived program murders another store clerk: So far, that has happened twice since the program was launched, ineptly and without proper political vetting. Republicans are right to insist that early release should apply only to non-violent criminals. But Malloyalists operating under a one party regime tend to be hard-headed about their palliatives. Like most politicians, they are effectively reproved only after the plane has crashed into the mountain.

Some parallels may legitimately be drawn between Malloy and Obama.

Both are chief executives; both are progressive Democrats. During the early part of Obama’s first term, Democrats controlled the White House and both Houses of Congress. Malloy, the first Democrat elected governor in more than twenty years, presides over a General Assembly controlled by Democrats. Obama has yet to produce a budget, and this has alarmed some people who believe that state and national budgets define both political programs and the nation’s destiny. Malloy stiffed Republicans during his first budget negotiations, as did Obama, and hammered out a budget in collusion with SEBAC, the union organization charged with negotiating contract terms with the governor and Connecticut’s ex officio third party. Malloy, the Malloyalists, the Democratic dominated General Assembly and union representatives pushed through a “fair share” budget that relied – unfairly, say its critics – on the largest tax increase in state history, following close on the heels of the second largest tax increase in state history, the Lowell Weicker income tax. Obama is promising a “fair share” budget as well. So far, he has not been able to pass any budget. Both in Connecticut and in the nation, recent elections have not substantially changed political configurations. These are the obvious parallels.

There are important differences as well.

Here and there, one glimpses hints, foggy intimations, that Malloy is not willing to surrender the WHOLE of Connecticut’s government to progressive sans culottes who favor the despoliation of the rich, the one percent of those in the state who believe in a kind of egalitarianism that differs only in degree from that of Sylvain Marechal, the utopian socialist who declared in his Manifeste des Égaux (Manifesto of Equals, 1801) "Let the arts perish if needs be. But let us have real equality!" Antoine Lavoisier, the "father of modern chemistry," was executed during the French Revolution in 1794. The revolutionary judge who sentenced Lavoisier to death proclaimed, "The Republic has no need of chemists." Such was the purity of egalitarianism, a modern construct, at its headwaters.

Here in Connecticut, we yet tremble before such perfection. Hope and change beckons.