"Repeal" Watch - The local "Repeal Concealed Carry" movement is losing momentum faster than Britney Spears. And I don't think Madonna's going to give them a big smooch onstage to rev things up for them.

However, in the great North Dakota football tradition, I'm going to pile on; I'm going to make it a regular practice to fact-check some of the local conceal-repeal websites.

Let's take a look at repealconceal.com.

As expected, they covered last week's big "story" - the guy in Anoka that shot his brother's car 11 times. Let's go over what the website says about the story, and stop when we get to an egregious error:

Only eight days after getting his permit to carry a concealed handgun,

Well, that didn't take long, did it?

The permit was completely irrelevant to the story. The shooter - Damian Peterson - was on his own property. This sort of shooting happens all the time, in every trailer park, small town, slum and even places like Anoka. The only thing that makes this shooting remarkable - and the only reason it made the news - was that Peterson had a permit.

Had this shooting happened in the parking lot of a restaurant or the Metrodome, or someplace where a law-abiding citizen would not have been carrying a gun four months ago, then this story would have been news - and this blurb would have been at least incrementally more accurate.

Damian Peterson got into an argument with his brother, fired 11 rounds into a car, including one while it was fleeing the scene.

Nobody disputes this - including Peterson, who, unlike an actual criminal (the type that regularly carry firearms, permit or not) cooperated with the police.

He had also called the police (remember them? The ones we're supposed to trust to prevent crime?) and tried to get them to keep his drunk brother off the road. He shot the car (he says) to keep his brother from driving, not in some depraved road rage incident. The incident is proof only of Peterson's lack of judgement, not proof that he was completely off his rocker and shooting wildly. In other words - he was wrong, just not in the way that the Repealers wish he were.

This occurred in a neighborhood where families have children playing nearby.

If memory serves, the incident happened at night, in an area that was rather isolated from the rest of the neighborhood. There has been no report of children anywhere near the incident.

While either I nor, it seems, repealconceal can confirm or deny the presence of children, if children weren't anywhere nearby, this sort of statement could be fairly categorized as "cheap manipulation".

Despite receiving gun safety training, Peterson still believes he should still be legally entitled to carry his weapon in public.

According to Joe Olson, president of Concealed Carry Reform Now, "no one has ever claimed that permit holders would be perfect."

Quoted out of context. The rest of Olson's quote: ""But there are always exceptions, and this gentleman is a moron," he said. "There will be people who will do stupid and illegal things and the law is set up so they lose their permits, which sounds like it worked just fine in this case." The addendum is important - as we shall see shortly.

However, for years, Olson's website has led readers to believe that all permit holders are impeccable citizens with statements such as this: "Men and women issued permits are responsible, competent adults. They are the kind of folks who remain stopped at a lonely stoplight at 3am because they are habitually law-abiding."

And then repealconceal shows us nothing - besides this badly out-of-context case - to dispute that.

Read CCRN's website for yourself.

Beyond that, the site contains the usual phalanx of strawmen:

Concealed-carry laws have been passed in 34 other states, but Minnesota's flavor of concealed-carry is particularly extreme, especially with respect to businesses.

repealconceal then goes on to show exactly no reasons why our law is "extreme". Our law is thoroughly middle-of-the-road. Someone like repealconceal might consider Alaska or Vermont "extreme" (no permit is required at all), while concealed-carry activists think Michigan's law is extreme (lots of law enforcement discretion, selective and expensive training, etc). The "Our law is extreme" argument has never, to my knowledge, been backed up by a single fact or figure.

* Guns are allowed in parks.

But outside of manipulative strawmen like "CHILDREN play in parks, nobody has showed why this is a bad thing. People carry guns in parks all the time; it's just that very few of them have carry permits, and most of them have criminal records.

Let me put this another way; Concealed Carry activists fought hard over the past seven years to get a law that would specifically state where people could not legally carry their permitted firearms; without this specificity - if the law were written with lots of "oopses" built in, waiting to create a new class of inadvertent criminals - the law would be worse than useless. Opponents seem to feel we should have the opposite - a list of places we CAN carry (and that the list should include our basements and that's about it.

* Guns are allowed at the State Fairgrounds.
* Guns are allowed in city hall meetings.

Again - people carry guns in city hall meetings all the time. They happen to be criminals for the most part.

And if one of them - the criminals - opened fire, the permittee under Minnesota law would be crazy to return fire under most circumstances.

* Non residents can carry concealed guns.

Which is a matter of common sense; if a person is considered law-abiding, sober and sane, and has passed a skills course and background check, why should their permits not be recognized?

* Sheriffs may not deny an permit to somebody who has been acquitted of a crime. (This and the above provision mean that someone like O.J. Simpson could come to Minnesota and carry a concealed gun.)

I've pointed this little strawman out to the person who runs repealconceal. He knows it's wrong.

* Businesses can not prohibit guns on their private property unless they post signs at each entranceway and verbally notify each customer.

Another strawman. Businesses must post a sign (so people KNOW they're breaking the law) and verbally notify anyone that missed the sign.

An official legislative estimate states that this law will increase the number of people licensed to pack heat on Minnesota streets by 750%, from 12,000 now to 90,000.

Let's assume for a moment that 90,000 documentably law-abiding citizens with permits is a bad thing (and I don't assume this): the fact is, the number of permits issued so far is nowhere near that pace. The figure comes from an "official legislative estimate" that Wes Skoglund's been throwing around all year - but nobody has even once showed us where that figure came from. Saying "it's official!" doesn't mean it's accurate.

Even CCW activists admit the number of CCW permits will rise to about 50,000. Needless to say, gun sales are going to increase. Some portion of those guns will be stolen, and get into the hands of criminals.

Read: We need to base policy on the potential actions of deviants?

Here's the most important part of this equation: Most Minnesotans feel that this law will make Minnesota a more dangerous place!

So?

Most Alabamans in 1960 "felt" desegregation would make Alabama a more dangerous place. They were misinformed, weren't they?

Now, we get into the "if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with skoglund" part:

This law circumvented most normal procedures in the legislature. It was tacked on to an unrelated bill.

Baloney.

It went through "normal procedures" every year for seven years. It went through committees for seven years. Every year, it gained votes.

And the writer of this website obviously assumes the reader doesn't know much about legislative process; legislation is "tacked on" to "unrelated bills" all the time - but it's done according to a procedure that ensures clarity and open debate.

It didn't go through the normal committee process.

Again, the writers states this as if it's an abnormality. It passed the committees it had to

Supporters did make a point of keeping the bill out of committee in the Senate, where all the relevant committees are controlled by metro DFLers with anti-gun agendas. When the likes of Skoglund and Ellen Anderson bleated "why can't we take this back to committee and talk about it", it was pure spin for public consumption; they knew as well as CCRN that it was a tactic to kill the bill, even though the votes were there to pass the bill, and had been for at least a session before the current one.

In other words, it was the Senate DFLers who tried to jiggle procedure to flout democracy, as they had for the previous seven sessions. This time, CCRN had lined up the votes to beat the DFLers' stonewalling...

...democratically.

It didn't have very much public debate.

The bill was debated publicly and exhaustively for seven years.

It was opposed by a broad base of organizations (over 300 groups, including churches, three major statewide police associations, city councils, and health and education groups),

Strawman.

The bill was opposed by a large number of groups representing a narrow band of special interests; liberal, anti-gun churches, politically-motivated police chiefs, DFL-dominated city councils, and unnamed "health and education" groups that were largely closely alighned with the DFL. To say that they represent more people than...

...the NRA, Concealed Carry Reform Now! and the Republican Party of Minnesota...

...is disingenuous to say the least.

The site also cites information from the Brady Factory Campaign that is years out of date, grossly factually-challenged - and very long. We'll deal with that in a separate post.

Opposition to concealed carry is the same now as it was then, and the same as it is for all gun-control legislation; a mile wide, and usually an inch deep. Except for zealots like Citizens for a Supine Safer Minnesota, most really don't see much impact from guns one way or the other.

The "Repeal" movement is, I suspect, likewise a group of people that is impressed enough with their own zeal (and relative clout at the Capitol) that they feel they're more powerful than they are.
posted by Mitch Berg 9/18/2003 06:04:01 AM