The Sweet Smell of Desperation

The Sweet Smell of Desperation - While Conrad DeFiebre led the Twin Cities media market in providing actual fair coverage of the Personal Protection Act, the Star-Tribune's editorial board still lurks in the pleistocene.

Their latest editoral is - I won't mince words - craven, cowardly, and beneath contempt.

The hullabaloo that the new Minnesota Personal Protection Act has caused is just the beginning. The law is riddled with contradictions and infringements on rights that may take years to sort out. Indeed, wags have begun to call the law the "Full Employment for Lawyers Act of 2003."

"Riddled?" Indeed? I've heard one contradiction, easily settleable by changing one word.

Authors of the act say they did not intend that property owners have to both post signs banning guns and tell each person entering their establishments of the ban. The double requirement was a simple drafting error, they said, fixable with a mere change of one word. But their protestations ring hollow; they were challenged repeatedly about that provision during debate of the act, and they refused to consider amendments to fix it.

This is a lie of omission.

At no point in the debate did the DFL propose fixing the offending word. No, to the DFL, the only way to fix one word was to shunt the bill into a conference committee. This was the tactic the DFL had used to kill the bill, even though it had the votes to pass, in 2001. The GOP knew better than that - while they had the votes to pass the bill into law the moment the gavels rang down on the '03 session, they knew that the metro-DFL-controlled committee structure in the Senate was an impenetrable swamp. Knowing that the "compromise" the Strib favored was no compromise at all, but legislative suicide, they played to their strength - an open vote. This, they did. And the DFL wants everyone to forget it.

The authors of this new law meant it to say precisely what it said when they passed it and when Gov. Tim Pawlenty rushed to sign it. They were full of their power finally to enact this law. They wanted emphatically to make clear that the "right" to carry pistols trumps all other rights.

And here, the Strib careers into paranoia.

Re-read that sentence. "Trump all other rights?" Indeed?

Who writes this stuff?

The law declares that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution confers the right of individuals to bear arms -- something to which the U.S. Supreme Court has never agreed.

Because - the Strib omits mentioning - the Supreme Court has never considered the issue!

Note to the Strib Editorial Board - the Supreme Court doesn't troll the nation looking for issues to tackle; they're a Court, not the Justice League of America. People bring cases to them.

Constitutional scholars, including liberal Laurence Tribe, however, do agree that the Second Amendment is an individual right - something the Strib Editoral Board doesn't see fit to inform the readers.

And, curiously, in pursuit of a radical assertion of that "right," the folks behind this new Minnesota law trample on other rights.

Take private property rights, for example. That's something most supporters of gun rights typically feel passionate about. But this gun law prohibits the owners of a rental property, for example, from denying tenants and guests the right to carry pistols. The tenant's statutory gun right trumps the owner's constitutional property rights.

Consider the irony, here: where was all the tender concern for landlords' property rights when some wanted to deny rentals based on religious or lifestyle issues?

The "property rights" of businesses condemned by eminent domain in support of projects the Strib supported, like light rail and the Metrodome, which bordered on unlawful takings?

Where is the concern for the "property rights" of inner-city landlords who are statutorily unable to evict drug dealers from their properties?

The Strib's new "concern" for property rights is as sincere as their treatment of the Personal Protection Act is fair and balanced.

Then there are churches, which have a passel of problems with this new law. Churches are sanctuaries, places of worship, employers and, often, landlords. Many church leaders and members believe as a matter of faith that guns have no place in a church, and they also don't want signs plastered on their doors banning guns. As Bishop James Jelinek of the Episcopal Church observed, "The front door of an Episcopal Church has special meaning. Many front doors are painted red, a color which invokes the blood of Christ and signals a 'sanctuary.'"

The Strib's newfound concern for the rights of churches is commendable.

So will the Strib now leave the Catholics alone for excluding women from the pulpit, to name one example? Or are church's rights only important when they further a left-wing agenda?

The churches argue, and are going to court to prove, that their First Amendment rights to freedom of belief are greatly abridged by this law.

And the churches whose meaningfully-colored portals are defaced by, say, ADA-mandated wheelchair ramps - will they have a right to ignore or challenge the law? Will the Strib support them then?

They worry that the law prohibits them from requiring that renters ban guns from the areas of church property they use. They worry that they are unable to ban weapons from their parking lots. They worry that, as Jelinek says, "the state of Minnesota is requiring us to speak the words chosen by the state."

As, in many more politically-correct areas, they already are - without complaint.

Given the onerous signage burden, some businesses are throwing in the towel and throwing open the doors to gun carriers. But some have begun to worry, and consult attorneys, on whether they would become liable for damage caused by a gun if they don't prohibit them. That's just one of the many tangled knots this law weaves.

No, it's one of the tangled bits of spin the Star Tribune editoral board is publicizing, uncritically and without even the faintest patina of fairness.

That's because it is a really stupid law that rights no wrong, cures no ill. It was pushed by a crowd that trumped up a "need" for self-protection to push the fringe ideological belief that every law-abiding American has an absolute right to carry a pistol.

A "fringe" belief, the Strib Editors don't feel fit to tell you, that is in effect in 34 other states, in which half of the population of the United States live. Not one of them has repealed their law, despite the jeremiads of the naysayers.

But the Strib won't tell you any of this. Why? Because to borrow their turn of phrase, they are a stupid group of smug, suburban whites who tell no truth that interferes with their own, exceptionalistic, paternalistic, racist worldview.

Even if true -- and that has not been established -- the right to carry would have about as much relevance to modern life as bloodletting has to modern medicine. This has been a time-wasting debate about a bad idea.

Perhaps it has no relevance to modern life on the mean, gated streets of North Oaks, where Strib editors traditionally live. But deterring the crime that plagues the inner cities - the worthless banger scum that kill our children as they sit in our living rooms, that riddle our cars and our babies as they wait at gas stations, that pepper our neighborhoods and houses with bullet holes like the hole in the window two feet from where I'm sitting as I write this (even though - gasp - they don't have permits and never passed a background check!) is just a tad relevant. And shall issue laws do deter violent crime. Not that the Star/Tribune will tell you.

The sooner the entire law is repealed, the better.

The sooner the Star Tribune editorial board switch to more appropriate careers - say, spit-shining Matt Entenza's ass - the better the Twin Cities will be.

I hereby invite any member of the Star/Tribune editoral board to debate me on this issue, in a forum of their choice. Not that any of them has the balls to have their ignorance, lies and hypocrisy jammed back down the piehole they came from.

Yes, I'm tired and cranky. What's it to you?

Posted by Mitch at May 30, 2003 02:39 AM