This Comment of the Day from the stellar Harkins household—this is from Ryan Harkins–was just posted three days ago and it seems like eons. It responds to another one of my arguments that sufficient demonstrations of stupidity by lawyers even outside the practice of law should be grounds for disbarment—a suspension isn’t enough, because such a lawyer will not become smarter after a professional “time out.” I think the first time I suggested this reform to legal discipline was when “The View’s” token lawyer, racist Sunny Hostin, suggested that eclipses and earthquakes were caused by climate change. It upsets me just think about the fact that this idiot has a law degree.

Here is Ryan’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Interestingly, Being an Idiot Does Not, In The Eyes Of The Florida Bar, Make One Unfit To Practice Law”…

***

A basic and important rule of gun safety, perhaps the preeminent rule, is that you should never point a gun at anything you don’t intend to shoot. Playing around with a gun in the fashion that Medina did shows a disturbing lack of gun safety in particular, but of the principal normalization of deviance in particular.

To delve into a little bit of brain science, in following the cognitive-emotive-behavioral model, we start with a desire. Perhaps in Medina’s case, it was simply to have fun. But how would he possibly conclude pulling the trigger of an unloaded gun is fun?

There are a large variety of ways we can try to satisfy our desires. In the case of hunger, we could seek satiation from a myriad of venues. In the case seeking stress relief, we could seek out a movie, a game, exercise, or any of a host of other options. But there are options we can choose from that are unhealthy, dangerous, or even illegal. When presented with all these options, our brains experience a byplay between thought and feeling. Does this option satisfy? The emotions clamor for a particular avenue, and cognition weighs the risks and benefits. If I eat a salad, I might not feel satiated, but if I eat a Hardee’s Monster Burger, I’ll be consuming far too many calories. But the salad may not be very tasty, and the Monster Burger is delicious. Whichever way I choose, my brain will record the success or failure of the endeavor, and the next time I am hungry, I will have a precedent to fall back on. They byplay between cognition and emotion in subsequent encounters proceeds much more quickly. The Monster Burger was indeed delicious, filled me up, and I didn’t seem to suffer any negative consequences. So the next time, my brain is patterned to lean toward the Monster Burger because of the positive experience.

Where we start down the road into trouble is when we consider objectively bad choices to satisfy our desires, and then suffer no consequences for it. The O-rings were problematic on the Challenger, but we had numerous successful launches without the O-rings failing, so we thought we could keep pushing the envelope (to the point that a traumatized four-year old bit another child in day care and hid under a table after having seen the Challenger explode on TV). Or I was able to sneak that pack of gum into my pocket and walk out of the store without getting caught, so I think I can keep shoplifting. Or I scared my brother by pointing an unloaded gun at him and pulled the trigger, and the look on his face satisfied my desire for a good laugh from a prank well-played, leading me to believe I could keep pulling that prank.

Eventually, because our brains are wired to handle routine automatically, the cognition, which is the only internal factor that can put the brakes on deviant behavior, is cut out of the process. We choose the objectively bad behavior so many times without suffering any notable consequences that we jump straight from having a desire to acting in that deviant fashion. When people say they weren’t thinking when they did something wrong and bad consequences occurred, they aren’t lying, or at least are not lying about that particular instance. Thinking literally has been cut out of the process.

Often enough, it is a bad consequence that breaks us out of the cycle. That is why it takes headline-screaming accidents in industry to drive a safer culture. People don’t tend to examine the blast-resistance of office space until an explosion levels a bunch of flimsy trailer-offices and kills the occupants (see the BP Isomerization Unit explosion from 2005). That is why suffering legal punishment is so important for fighting crime, because the process of arrest, arraignment, trial, conviction, sentencing, and incarceration is so traumatic, so painful, that it gives the cognition ammunition to re-enter the process. That doesn’t mean that it will. It doesn’t mean that the cognition will win out, either. Ask addicts how much fear of another jail sentence overrides their desire for another fix when their desire is so intense that they would do anything to make that discomfort go away. But with punishment, reflection, and a willingness to engage the process, one can eventually break the cycle. Small bad habits are easier to break than addictions, but even addictions can be successfully fought.

I say all this to conclude that perhaps Medina, who according to the article had no prior ethics violations, can be given a second chance. When we fall into these deviance traps, and I assume he has since he’s pulled this stupid stunt ten times or more prior to this unintended discharge, it doesn’t necessarily compromise us in every aspect of our lives. He may be a very competent lawyer, and if he demonstrates (not through words, but actions) that he is taking this lesson to heart and looking at other ways he might be doing something stupid with then intent to fix them, then I would not want to see him utterly disbarred.

A second unethical stunt, though, would indicate a much deeper issue, and in that case, I would agree that disbarring would be earned, and he needs to get his life back under control.