I am very much on the fence about this. My immediate reaction when I saw the article was disgust. It doesn't help that 30+ years ago I worked in New Haven for a couple of years and I remember hearing of this guy. At the time he was either just out of law school or perhaps still in law school, and he crossed swords with the agency that employed me. He was a bottom feeder then, and I suspect that once a bottom feeder, always a bottom feeder.

And yet, on further consideration, it came to me that maybe this isn't all bad. I know from interactions several years ago with the board of education about additions to my local high school that they aren't serious about security. They think they are, but in reality they pay lip service to the concept, go through some standardized motions, and otherwise ignore it. (One thing I criticized was putting glass sidelights next to the classroom doors. If you want to be able to lock the doors against a shooter, you might as well hang the key on a nail in the corridor. They "liked" the glass.) So it may take a couple of lawsuits such as this one to make school boards across the country wake up and understand that there's more to school security than "We have a plan."

Look at the "plan" that was in place at Sandy Hook. The reports I read said it was a new plan that was just implemented this year (WTF were they doing before?), specifically to "prevent" exactly this type of incident. Retired Army Colonel Dave Grossman preaches that central to any security plan is multiple layers. With that in mind, what did Sandy Hook have?

Layer 1: Lock the doors at 09:30. Done. But ... either the doors were glass, or there were glass sidelights, or both. So the shooter blasted the glass, reached in and opened the door. No armed resistance waiting inside, so as of layer 1 the score was Shooter 1, School 0.

Layer 2: Should have been an armed agent inside the front door. Instead, it was two unarmed female administrators. Shooter 2, School 0.

Layer 3: Lock down the classroom doors. Except that an interview I watched with a teacher's aide said that when they realized they should lock the door, neither the teacher nor the aide had the key. WTF!!! What kind of lock-down protocol doesn't give the people in the classrooms the keys to the doors? Score: Shooter 3, School 0.

What all this means is that they instituted this new "plan" because someone realized they should have a plan, and locking the doors is what most schools do. But they never stopped to think about the fact that "Locks are made for honest people," and that a real security plan has to account for what happens when (not if) someone isn't stopped by the locked front door.

So if a lawsuit makes schools everywhere wake up to living in a world full of terrorist sleeper cells, maybe in the long run that's a good thing. Notice that they aren't suing the town, they're asking permission to sue the state. I find that interesting ...