Tragedy At Chicago Law Firm:
There was a deadly shooting at an office building in downtown Chicago today, and UPI is reporting that the shooting happened in the office of a law firm.
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1. Class action suits where consumers get cents-off coupons and lawyers get several million cash?
2. Charging a guy who makes $300 a week $300 an hour?
3. Charging him for a minimum 1/10 hour for a 30 second phone call to a busy signal? Five times?
4. Charging $1 a page "expense" for sending a fax when it cost 5 cents?
5. Dragging out a case forever because it's based on a hourly fee?
6. Probate systems where lawyers are required and fees are about 10% of assets, where a simple affidavit would in most cases be sufficient?
7. A criminal justice system where the goal of the parties is not to find the truth, but to see if there is a loophile that the criminal can use to beat the charge (if he pays enough to a lawyer)?
8. A divorce system that allows lawyers to sometimes get more of the marital property than that parties?
9. A tort system that lets lawyers get 40% of an award to a quadrapegic for lifetime support, for just a few months work?
Don't get me wrong, I'm an attorney (gave up the BS of practice to write books) and I would never condone murder, but our justice system is screwey and it's no wonder most people hate lawyers.
(2) I am indeed appalled at how far behind the times my own billings are, when I see other folks' tabs. Never yet saw a charge for calling a busy signal or sending a fax, but did once see a per-page charge for printing out word-processed documents.
I tend to me more of the "I'll note time on phone calls if it's more than 20 minutes and/or you really bore me." But then I don't have a big firm pressing me for X billable hours per year.
I am now defending on a motion for fees in connection with a motion for sanctions (cocounsel really screwed the pooch) in which the opposing parties seek $40,000 --for a discovery motion! And the judge, a big-firm type apparently, thought the application was a little on the lean side. Personally, I'd consider forty grand a nice return for the entirity of a complex case.
Just a thought but it might very well be that this is a personal matter. I mean lots of shootings are the result of family or other personal business, but then again if that is the case why attack a building with security guards.
That's going to totally screw up the murder stats by practice area, at least on a percentage basis.
Yep, he'd be a lot safer other states with less restrictive gun possession laws, where such shootings never occur.
That said, I don't see how a change in the laws would have saved lives in this instance. Most corporate offices frown, I think rightly, on the idea of their employees bringing guns to work. Knowing that your coworkers might be packing heat doesn't exactly engender feelings of safety. Know anybody at work who makes your blood boil? Conversely, anybody carrying a grudge against you? Guns should probably stay out of the office, where emotions can run mighty high.
After a few months, maybe emotions in the work force would not run so high anynore...
[No I am not serious, but I do find that those, whehether people or organizations, who talk most about emotions running high in the work place never consider that it might be a local effect that follows them around.]
The novel in which Heinlein said "An armed society is a polite society" is one of his sillier ones, and he supposed that the politeness flowed from a fear of others rather than a sense of responsibility, but the words themselves are true enough.
Agreed. In fact, just last week I was about to go on a homicidal shooting spree at a downtown IP boutique when I suddenly thought: what if Mr. Zhang in patent litigation keeps a glock stashed under his Dilbert tear-away calendar? If so, my planned murderous rampage could result in the otherwise unforeseeable outcome of harm to me.
Well, that got me worried. So I figured the best way to assess the likelihood of someone coming to work at his downtown law firm with a gun was to check on the state's gun laws. Wouldn't you know it -- they permit licensed individuals to carry concealed firearms. As you can imagine, I therefore concluded that the risks of the killing spree were simply too high to justify, so I put my weapons away and spent the afternoon playing Nintendo Wii tennis. Which is quite an adrenaline rush in its own right, I might add.
LOL. Brilliant.
So...Truth Seeker. You are aware that we're well beyond 2001-02 at this point, and 9/11 is no longer a valid reason to change everything that's ever happened in the world, right?
I agree that this would be unusual. But I wonder if this is a rational decision by employers -- has anyone actually studied the impact of permitting concealed carry at work?
More generally, has the presence of concealed carry ever been correlated with greater levels of gun violence? I.e., are there more street shootings in "shall issue" states, etc.?
Frankly I would think that the opposite occurs, and that concealed carry would lower the level of gun violence.
In any event, I note that there are several people mocking Cramer's comment, but they aren't showing up with any actual data.
Did Cramer provide any in his comment? Are you providing any, or just observing that others don't?
Waldensian:That's an easy one: No.
The confrontation at the 43-story Citigroup Center sent office workers fleeing and stranded commuters who use a train station in the building. The Cook County Medical Examiner's office identified the victims Saturday as Michael R. McKenna, 58, of Chicago; Allen J. Hoover, 65, of Wilmette; and Paul Goodson, 78, of Chicago. Hoover was a partner at the firm and McKenna was a patent attorney who rented space from the firm and also had offices in suburban Northbrook and in Hawaii. Goodson worked part time at the firm, sorting mail and making deliveries.
Jackson had McKenna's business card in his pocket, police said.
K. Parker, the difference as I see it is that prospective police officers must pass a battery of psychological tests before they are allowed to wear the badge and carry a weapon. These tests are far more extensive than those required for most civilian jobs precisely because, inter alia, police officers are allowed to carry firearms. This screening and evaluation probably goes far towards explaining why cops seldom engage in rampages like the one at Wood, Phillips, et al. Furthermore, I would assert that persons who are sufficiently unstable as to use a firearm against coworkers are not as likely as we would hope to be deterred by the possibiility that others in the office might also be armed.
I'm not advocating against stronger security measures for office buildings - quite the contrary. I worked in a large office building near the Citigroup Center for several years, and building security was extremely lax. Despite the presence of turnstiles and metal detectors for large pieces of luggage, anyone could have brought a weapon or explosive device into that building and, if they worked in one of the offices, delivered it to any floor they chose. But again, I don't think the idea that all of my coworkers might be carrying guns would be more comforting than the idea of any single one of them carrying a gun. It only requires one person deciding the sacrifices are worth the momentary reward to have a situation identical to that which happened here in Chicago, armed coworkers be damned.
I've only heard of one study, which I can't cite from memory, but perhaps someone else here can cite. Analysis of crime statistics in Florida showed that the crime rate for armed violent crime (homicide, armed robberies, etc.) was higher for off-duty cops than for citizens with concealed carry permits. IIRC.
I would speculate that the reason might have to do with factors other than police employment: other demographics of the two groups might come into play e.g., age. Or the difference might be so slight as to be statistically insignificant. Or maybe there is a built-in selection factor for the kind of organized, rule-following personality that is willing to go through the red tape, background checking, forms, etc. necessary to the CCW process.
In any case the proposition that these civilians are by nature less honest, or more aggressive, or confrontational, or careless than police officers is not correct.
I think the generalization we can draw here is that "People are mostly good. We can trust them. It is not necessary to try to make them helpless for their own good."
They guy in Chicago doesn't really prove much on either side, except that law breakers will break the law.
When you mention to a policeman in Ariz. who's stopped you for a traffic violation that you're carrying a concealed weapon they might likely reply, "doesn't everyone?" It's a good thing IMHO to have the choice. It's not the rank and file police that are against CC but the politically appointed Chiefs and elected Sheriffs and not all of them.
I haven't taken a close look at the data so I don't know how compelling it is but it's quite plausible that it shows concealed carry reduces the number of shootings. However, what the skeptics were mocking is the idea that it somehow deters suicidal madmen from taking their hostages. This sort of suicidal assault is going to have very different psychological dynamics than a normal gun crime.
Also as far as coworkers packing heat making people feel more or less safe this is a matter of perception not reality. You can cite studies all day about why they should rationally feel safer but it doesn't make it so. I mean this very blog has repeatedly posted scare stories about organizations/schools/buisnesses trying to ban people from carrying weapons, generally because it makes them feel unsafe. After all if you are correct that gun ownership reduces crime then it must be an irrational fear/dislike of guns that results in all the gun control laws
As for police, most people parse armed police very differently than they do other people with guns. I don't know if armed police are any less likely to abuse their guns than anyone else but they certainly have a different psychological impact than an armed lawyer.
Also I'm not so sure if people are being as irrational as has been suggested on this matter. In areas where people accept that packing is dangerous and unjustified those people who do choose to pack are going to be relatively more likely to be crazies. So knowing that someone is choosing to pack when they don't have to and knowing that they are doing so as a job requirement are two very different things.
Following on your final paragraph, my biggest problem with banning licensed carry in the workplace is that it's viral: many (if not most) of the places that forbid firearms also ban them in their parking areas. So the rule-following individual isn't disarmed just in the security-checked, metal-detector-equipped office building, but rather from the moment they leave home till they return.
It's when you put that up against the well-documented lower-than-average criminal record of permit holders that I lose all my sympathy for the folks made nervous by the mere presence of firearms.
Agree with TruthSeeker's point 1: If the payoff is in cents-off coupons, then so should be the legal fee.
But I'd rather pay a lawyer 0.1 of his hourly fee than the last guy that cleaned by furnace. After coming 2 to 4 hours late and griping about the soot (that's why I called him, and that's why I paid for two vacuum bags) and so forth and doing only part of the annual service, I asked him why he charged me twice the hourly rate for less than an hour and a half of work, he told me that his firm doesn't bill for fractional hours. And three days later the stack control failed, so he charged me more full hours, plus travel time, plus a 1.5x Sunday multiplier.
It turns out that murder in the U.S. is not randomly distributed. About 1/3 of U.S. murders are committed by minors (some as young as 11) who have generally not matured enough to be responsible. This is pretty consistent, year to year.
About 5% of U.S. murders in 1992 were committed by mentally ill people who have stopped taking their medications. (That's at most 1% of the population committing 5% of the murders.) There's no reason to believe that this has changed since then.
About 45% of U.S. murders in 1971 were committed by people with previous felony convictions (and a fair fraction of that were murder convictions). This has probably not much changed.
The background check to get a carry permit is what knocks all of these high risk people. Yes, there are murders committed by concealed carry permit holders--but the number is astonishingly small. I've read perhaps a dozen cases over the 25 years since Florida started the current trend of non-discretionary issuance--and in many of these states, 2-5% of the population has a permit.