The request for permission to sue Connecticut, filed on behalf of one of the children who survived the massacre at Newtown, could open up quite a quiver of questions. The filing was first reported in the Courant newspaper, which is issued at Hartford. The Courant reports that an attorney at New Haven, Irving Pinsky, has filed a notice with the state’s claims commissioner, J. Paul Vance Jr., who, the paper reports, must decide on whether to lift the state’s sovereign immunity from most lawsuits. Mr. Pinsky, the Courant reports, is asking for $100 million on behalf of a six-year-old girl who, he suggests, was traumatized by the horror in which 20 pupils and six women were slain at the Sandy Hook Elementary School.

It is not our purpose here to belittle any of the trauma and suffering experienced by Mr. Pinsky’s client. Nor do we gainsay Mr. Pinsky’s motive for moving so quickly. According to the Courant, he wants to “freeze” the evidence before the insurance companies get involved. Our purpose is but to think through the questions of law and policy. We have been wrestling with these questions since the early 1990s, when Pan American World Airways was sued because terrorists blew up Maid of the Seas in 1988 over Scotland, killing all aboard. Our instinct at the time was that the lawsuits would be more justly aimed at Libya. The courts did find Pam Am liable, however, after a long quest that exposed some astonishing lapses on the part of the airline, which eventually went out of business.

That’s just by way of saying that experience has taught us to tread cautiously. Mr. Pinsky is quoted by the Courant’s reporter, Hilda Munoz, as saying that the state Board of Education, the state Department of Education and the education commissioner “failed,” in Ms. Munoz’s paraphrasing, “to take steps to protect the minor children from foreseeable harm.” She quotes Mr. Pinsky as saying he hopes to be able to prove that the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary were foreseeable. “Usually a fellow like Adam Lanza would have been known as a potential problem to the police,” she quotes Mr. Pinsky as saying in respect of the killer. The reason for seeking to freeze the evidence, Mr. Pinsky is quoted as saying, is so that investigators can “see what happened and why the school was not protected.”

Could it be that the lawsuit contemplated against Connecticut will throw into a more positive light the proposals made by the National Rifle Association? Protection of schools by armed guards is not mentioned in the Courant’s story, but it is at the heart of the proposal put forward after the shooting by the NRA’s executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, who was promptly ridiculed by the liberal newspapers. In the wake of Columbine, could the failure to provide armed guards at the school be construed by a court as negligence, given that, as Mr. LaPierre said, the best way to stop a bad man with a gun is a good man with a gun?

And what about the role of the administration and governance of the local school? Once the state board of education is brought in as a defendant in a lawsuit, will it be possible to shield the local authorities? We don’t know who is who in Newtown or whether a class action would emerge, but we wonder whether members of a devastated community could end up, in effect, in a lawsuit against themselves. If a lawsuit finds Connecticut at fault, could it turn out to be for not permitting constitutional carry of weapons, as does Vermont, which has the lowest rate of gun homicides in America? It may be that the answers to these kinds of questions will be sought in a generation-long legal epic of the sort that unfolded when Pan Am was sued by survivors of those killed in the attack on the airline. Or it may be that the claims commissioner of Connecticut will look at such a prospect and nip the lawsuit in the bud.