I'll say this for Irving Pinsky, the New Haven, Connecticut, personal injury lawyer who earlier this week filed a notice of a $100 million claim against the state on behalf of a student who survived the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary: The guy has a thick skin. He's been doused with a stream of vitriol for the notice of claim, which, under Connecticut's administrative procedures, must be filed as a precursor to suing the state. Yet he's unscarred. "You'd think I was a Nazi," Pinsky told me Wednesday morning, after an appearance on CNN. "If everything people wished for me came true, I'd get five different kinds of testicular cancer."

Pinsky withdrew his claim Tuesday but said he's only pulling back to evaluate evidence he has received in the last couple of days. He is not, by any means, abandoning the possibility of bringing a suit against the state. "You follow the evidence," said Pinsky, who maintains his motives are pure. "I'm doing a good thing. I'm pushing like hell for better security in our schools."

Perhaps Pinsky is not the publicity hound or ambulance chaser the haters on his Facebook page make him out to be. (And to his credit, Pinsky himself suggested I look at the comments on his page.) On the other hand, his explanations for the purported suit against the state aren't particularly credible. Pinsky told me, as he has told other reporters, that he wanted to protect the state investigation of the shooting from insurance adjusters who would "shape the evidence." I can understand why a lawyer who specializes in car crashes and slip-and-falls would be skeptical about insurance adjusters, but when I pressed him about the likelihood of insurance investigators manipulating a case that's receiving nationwide scrutiny, Pinsky conceded that insurers are more likely to be involved with claims against the estate of Nancy Lanza, the murdered mother of gunman Adam Lanza, than with claims against the school, Newtown or Connecticut.

So how, I asked, does his notice of claim against the state assure the integrity of the official investigation of the Sandy Hook shootings? Pinsky said that insurance adjusters might try to deflect claims against Lanza's estate by shifting blame to the town or the state. But he still couldn't explain how his threat of a $100 million suit against the state would prevent such an attempt. "I wanted to get at the evidence as best as I could," he said. He told me that he filed the notice of claim -- on behalf of an anonymous student who supposedly heard sounds of the massacre over the school's intercom -- because "it's much harder to get evidence" without bringing a suit. I pointed out that under Connecticut's procedures, he would not be permitted to actually file a complaint in superior court without the approval of the state claims commissioner, whose authorization Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen seemed to regard as highly unlikely. Pinsky said that even without subpoena power, he has obtained new evidence from witnesses who have come forward since word of his notice of claim got out -- but he refused to elaborate on that supposed evidence or to say how it implicated the state. (For the record, I asked the AG's office whether insurance is even a factor for the state in the Newtown shooting; she said in an email that the state has coverage for certain claims, mostly auto-related, and is self-insured for others.)

Pinsky insisted that his goal is to avert another school shooting, an avowal that smacks of self-justification. "You know this is going to happen again," Pinsky told me. "We have to get (prevention) started somewhere." The theory of his purported suit is the state's failure to assure the safety of students at Sandy Hook. I asked what measures he believes the school -- which kept its doors locked and had a security guard -- should have taken; Pinsky suggested video monitors with a feed to the local police station or unspecified "equipment to neutralize" high-powered weaponry. You won't find any call for new safety procedures in the notice Pinsky filed, though. There's no mention of injunctive relief, and, as the state AG noted, a $100 million personal injury suit isn't the most effective vehicle for debating public policy.

Nor is there anything in Pinsky's professional history to suggest that he's a credible advocate for statewide school safety reforms. Pinsky is not a civil rights lawyer or a children's advocate. He is, plain and simple, a personal injury lawyer -- and one whose license to practice in Connecticut was suspended from May 2003 to December 2006. According to the report of a statewide grievance committee, Pinsky committed misconduct in the mid-1990s when he gave a client $6,000 but failed to keep the client informed about the progress of his personal injury case. (Pinsky's defense, according to the report, was that he felt sorry for the client, whose claims were barred by the statute of limitations.) Pinsky told me he continued to practice while his Connecticut license was suspended because he's also licensed in New York. He also said he regrets the incident that led to the suspension.

At best, Pinsky seems to have rushed to stake a potential claim against Connecticut when the people of Newtown (and the rest of the United States) are still staggering from the death of 20 first-graders.

Of course, there are lots of lawyers who file ill-considered cases, so why am I singling out Irving Pinsky? Because I keep thinking about how he would justify his notice of claim to those 6-year-old kids. There's an old adage that you shouldn't do or say anything you wouldn't want to see reported on the front page of The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal. Thankfully for those of us in the news business, people ignore that rule every day. And clearly, the Pinskys of the world are happy for even critical attention. But what if you were judged not by adults inured to dubious deeds but by children with a more concrete sense of right and wrong? I'd bet that most first-graders would tell you it's wrong to profit from someone else's sadness.

There's already too much cynicism in this country about the motives of plaintiffs' lawyers, the vast majority of whom act honorably to bring justice to the injured. There would be a lot less if every plaintiff's lawyer had to answer to a murdered 6-year-old.

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