Law & Law Enforcement

Ethics Quiz: Who’s Responsible When You Hand Your Child An Uzi and He Shoots Himself?

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The answer to the quiz, according to Massachessetts. authorities, apparently is that the organizer of the 2008 machine gun shoot at the Westfield Sportsman’s Club is responsible.

Christopher Bizilj, age 8, died when the Uzi submachine gun he had taken in his small hands suddenly tilted upward and backward as it fired, and a bullet blew off part of his head. The boy’s father, Dr. Charles Bizilj, signed a waiver before letting his son shoot the gun, acknowledging and accepting the risks, including the boy’s death.  But law enforcement officials applied the common but ethically-misguided principle of “the crime carries its own punishment” for the devastated father, thus shifting all accountability on the organizer of the shoot, Edward Fleury, who was prosecuted for manslaughter. Continue reading →

Marketing the Glock and Corporate Social Responsibility

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Dr. Chris MacDonald has a thoughtful post on this topic on the always excellent Business Ethics Blog. “The social benefits of selling handguns may be fundamentally contentious; in other words, reasonable people can agree to disagree,” he writes. “But I doubt that the same can really be said for marketing moves designed, for example, to foster the sale of high-capacity magazines (ones that hold 33 bullets instead of the usual 17).”

You can read the whole article here.

Tucson Aftermath: Don’t Let The Barn Door Close On Freedom, Please

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

In the wake of Jared Loughner’s attack, the “barn door fllacy” is in full operation as intensely, and foolishly as I’ve ever seen it. Everyone from social reformers to yellow-bellied Congress members are proposing changes and suggesting “dialogues” aimed at stopping Jared Loughner’s completely unpredictable conduct, which, they seem to forget, has already occurred. Almost always, when everyone rushes to lock the metaphorical barn door after the horse is gone, they make the barn and everything around it uglier, less useful, more expensive, and less respectful of basic human dignity and freedom: witness the TSA’s outrageous new pat-down procedures, designed to stop 2009’s exploding underpants terrorist, who was unsuccessful. Continue reading →

Eliot Spitzer, Playing to Form

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

The buzz out of CNN is that its struggling “Spitzer-Parker” talking heads show is on the ropes, and will soon be re-tooled, de-Parkered, or dropped altogether. Nobody who has tried to watch this virtually unwatchable program will be surprised to hear it, nor will anyone be surprised to see the show re-emerge as just “Spitzer” or perhaps “Spitz!” If that is the solution, it will be one more instance in which unethical conduct prevails over its good twin. This is show biz, after all.

It won’t prevail for long. Eliot Spitzer has revealed himself on the show as a selfish, unmannered bully, as well as an old-fashioned male chauvinist pig. Continue reading →

Now THIS, On The Other Hand, Promotes Political Violence:

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

The good news, I suppose, is that the Palmetto State Armory decided to take down its webpage advertising the “You lie!” etched rifle component, in belated recognition of the fact that promoting such a product after the Tucson shootings would be irresponsible and in terrible taste. Continue reading →

Who Is Setting The Stage For The Next Fatal Shooting? (Hint: It’s Not Sarah Palin)

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Irony of ironies: even as the news media is trying hard to blame the inflammatory words of conservatives for the Tucson massacre, its own conduct is increasing the likelihood of more carnage in the future. Continue reading →

Put A Picture Of This In The Dictionary Next To “Unethical Class Action Settlement”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Hewlett-Packard has been sued in a class action lawsuit, made up of a huge number of users of the company’s printers and ink cartridges, for a wide variety of problems. Here’s what the lawyers have come up with: a $5,000,000 settlement to be paid off in $2 and $7 coupons that can only be used at HP.com to purchase Hewlett-Packard products, and which can’t be transferred or combined, and will expire in six months. Consider: Continue reading →

Ethics Hero: John Green

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Appearing on the Today Show, John Green and his wife Roxanna were asked about their feelings about the tragic death of their daughter Christina, age nine, at the hands of Tucson shooter Jared Loughner.

John Green, grieving father, replied:

“This shouldn’t happen in this country, or anywhere else, but in a free society, we’re going to be subject to people like this. I prefer this to the alternative.”

With his last six words, he established himself as superior in mind, principles and character to all of the unscrupulous commentators and devious politicians who have attempted to use this terrible tragedy to stifle dissent.

John Green leaves all of us wondering if we could summon such perspective, rationality and nobility under similar circumstances.

 

Ethics Dunce: Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.)

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

I know that Ethics Alarms has been a bit relentless regarding the accusations and the innuendos against Sarah Palin and others in the wake of the Arizona shooting, but it is an unusually widespread out-break of unfair conduct, and the Ethics Dunces are coming in waves, and from all sides and sectors.

We have a sheriff on the scene, Clarence Dupnik, who seems determined to create the assassin’s defense for him, by claiming, in the face of much evidence to the contrary, that he was driven to violence by inflammatory political rhetoric. Watch Loughner’s crack criminal defense team run with that. We have the nation’s supposedly premiere news source, the New York Times, running a revolting editorial describing Loughner’s attack as political, when this is clearly not true. (An excellent condemnation of the Times piece by James Taranto can and should be read here). Not to be outdone, Rep. James Clyburn (S.C.), the third-ranking House Democrat, took the same low road. Referencing defeated G.O.P. Senate candidate Sharron Angle’s justly criticized “Second Amendment solution” statement from the campaign (it probably, and justly, lost her the election), Clyburn tied it to Jared Loughner’s attack. Continue reading →

Ethics Final For Barack Obama

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Is President Obama the fair, ethical, unifying, anti-partisan president of all the people that he promised to be in 2008, or is he a Machiavellian, undercover Chicago pol, willing and ready to use divisiveness and deceit to enhance his power, silence critics and advance his agenda? During the past two years, there has been ample evidence supporting both descriptions, but his address in Arizona Wednesday could settle the issue. If the President emulates his Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, using the massacre in Arizona as a political wedge the way Clinton used the Oklahoma City bombing—if he adopts the philosophy of former Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emmanuel that one should never waste a crisis—then we will know the dispiriting truth about Barack Obama. Continue reading →