CHICAGO—The day after the Supreme Court cleared a path to overturn this city’s ban on handguns—among the toughest in the U.S.—frustrated city officials began Tuesday to consider new measures to circumvent the high court’s ruling.

At a tense City Hall meeting packed with citizens holding up photos of children who’d been shot, city aldermen discussed forcing gun owners to purchase liability insurance and to undergo criminal background checks and periodic firearms training. They also peppered a firearms-law expert and Chicago Police Supt. Jody Weis with questions while promising to pass something meaningful.

This story illustrates why I personally focus on the consequential arguments against gun control, not just on constitutional aguments.

At PsychologyToday.com.

David Segal has a great piece in today’s New York Times about the business side of medical marijuana (including a quote from yours truly). A few comments:

1. The attempts in Colorado, California and elsewhere to impose more regulation on dispensaries is nonsense; it’s just an attempt by the bigger players to limit competition.

2. The silliness of the medical marijuana approach is stunning. All it does it generate windfall profits for doctors who write presciptions willy-nilly. Even opponents of marijuana might agree that legalization is better than the hypocrisy of medicalization.

3. If Colorado’s experience so far is any indication, legalizing and taxing pot is not going to be the panacea for state budgets that some believe.

It was 2:30 Tuesday morning in Kabul, after a busy day of travel to Kandahar and meetings with top Afghan officials, when Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal was awakened by an aide with grim news.

“There’s a Rolling Stone article out,” the aide told McChrystal. “It’s very, very bad.”

Forty hours later, McChrystal had been relieved of his command, his 34-year military career in tatters. Apart from a terse apology, McChrystal has not discussed publicly the disparaging remarks that he and his aides made about administration officials and that appeared in the article.

On Friday, however, officials close to McChrystal began trying to salvage his reputation by asserting that the author, Michael Hastings, quoted the general and his staff in conversations that he was allowed to witness but not report. The officials also challenged a statement by Rolling Stone’s executive editor that the magazine had thoroughly reviewed the story with McChrystal’s staff ahead of publication.

I have no idea whether Rolling Stone played by “the rules” or not.

But any public figure should assume that everything said to a reporter might end up on the front page of a newspaper. It might not be fair, but that’s life. If nothing else, McChrystal and his staff were insane to give this reporter so much access.

Banks are expected to find ways to offset the impact of the new financial regulations on their earnings, though they face a potentially complex process of adapting to the new requirements, analysts said on Friday.

The share prices of some of the biggest United States banks, including Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, were higher in afternoon trading, hours after a House-Senate conference committee completed work on a bill that would toughen financial regulations.

Analysts pored over the specifics of the deal as they emerged on Friday and expressed a wide array of views about the impact it would have. Some saw the bill as more of a political statement than a practical measure that could prevent another financial meltdown. Others said banks’ costs would increase, but banks would pass the increased costs along to consumers.

That just about says it all.  The new financial regulation will make little difference to the operation of financial markets, for three reasons:

1. Financial institutions will innovate around the new regulations, as they have done for decades in response to past regulations.

2. Large financial institutions already regard their liabilities as having implicit insurance from the Fed/Treasury, whether or not they have explicit insurance via FDIC.  Nothing in these regulations will overcome that moral hazard.

3. The new regulation does nothing to clean up – i.e., eliminate – Fannie and Freddie.

In Room for Debate at the New York Times, along with Tyler Cowen, James Galbraith, Heather Boushey, and Mark Toma.

My comments on an essay by David Bernstein, at Cato Unbound.

At forbes.com.

At psychologytoday.com.

An examination by The New York Times highlights the chasm between the oil industry’s assertions about the reliability of its blowout preventers and a more complex reality. It reveals that the federal agency charged with regulating offshore drilling, the Minerals Management Service, repeatedly declined to act on advice from its own experts on how it could minimize the risk of a blind shear ram failure.

The libertarian skepticism of this kind of regulation is not based on blind faith in markets; it is based on open-eyed recognition of how regulation works (not) in practice.