Star/Tribune Editorial Board: "2+2=5, Minnesota!"

Over the past year, the willingness of the Star-Tribune's editorial board to lie...

...no. That does not do the Strib justice. The sheer bald-faced eagerness they show in their facility at lying to the people to try to influence public opinion on their pet issues is, for lack of a better word, impressive.

In a nauseating kind of way.

Their editorial take of the DFL's legislative machinations to deny the legislative will of the people in re the Minnesota Personal Protection Act goes beyond spin, behond whitewash, beyond intentionally selective puff piece.

It's an out-and-out misrepresentation, of a piece with their behavior throughout the 11-year saga of the Minnesota Personal Protection Act.

The editorial begins:

Every once in a while, the world's dunderheads trip over a rock. Their best-laid plans fall to pieces, and their backroom deals get lost on the way to center stage. That's the story with this year's attempt to revive the 2003 concealed-weapons bill, struck down just weeks ago by the Minnesota Appeals Court.

Wrong already. The law - concealed carry - was not struck down. Merely the vehicle by which the law got past the Senate metrocrat's maneuvering, an omnibus bill identical in concept to those used for the vast majority of this state's spending bills.

The court scotched the law because its passage involved unlawful legislative maneuverings. Shrugging off the court's scorn...

Again, a lie.

The court did not "scorn" the substance of the law, ruling without prejudice on the actual substance of the reforms. Not even close.

House backers of the hidden-weapons plan conjured a slick new trick to slip it past a wary public and back into the statute books.

By moving for an open vote on the floors of both houses, where our openly-elected representatives could vote on the bill!

Just like they did when they passed the bill two years ago!

Pretty tricky, those Republicans!

The deal would have been sealed in a jiffy -- if only each actor had played his proper part.

But that's the problem with running the Legislature like a totalitarian regime ["Damn those totalitarian Republican bastards - wanting the Senate to vote on bills! Have they no shame?" - Ed]: Sooner or later, those in charge will run into the brick wall of human nature. Just as the gang is preparing its latest "reform" for a midnight vote, some free-thinking lawmaker gets in the way. Imagining he's operating in a democracy, he'll start wondering aloud about obscurities like "fairness" and "the public good."

"Fairness".

Like sidetracking a bill that already passed both houses of the Legislature, two years ago, on open floor votes taken by the peoples' elected representatives, and bottling it up in Senate committees, where a small minority of the legislature - the Metrocrats, all of them anti-gun jihadis whose fearmongering resides in a strange place far beyond reason or, apparently, the need to know, much less tell, the truth - can exert power far beyond their actual numbers or electoral influence. To delay and stall a bill that has been an unqualified success.

That kind of fairness. That kind of public good. That kind of "respect" for the people's wishes.

When lawmakers first passed the so-called "concealed-carry" bill back in 2003, they didn't seem to care that most Minnesotans actually opposed the plan.

According to media push-polling that stated the law's provisions so inaccurately to the point of injecting the left's prejudices into the survey. Yep.

They didn't fuss with findings from a University of Minnesota poll noting that most citizens favored granting liberal gun-carrying permits only to applicants who can prove a special need.

We didn't elect them, did we?

Neither were they worried about cutting corners and pasting the concealed-weapons measure onto an entirely unrelated bill.

Again, like the vast majority of our spending bills.

Eventually, when a pathological liar gets on a roll, they work their way so far around the subject that they come back to the truth:

Why didn't they bother, and why weren't they worried? Because their passion for the Minnesota Personal Protection Act -- as the bill was so coyly called -- actually had nothing to do with a yearning to keep Minnesotans safe. The real reason for lawmakers' abiding devotion to this bill was fear: Anyone who fought it, lawmakers knew, would become a target of progun groups like the National Rifle Association.

You bet your ass they will.

Legislators (outside the DFL-addled core of the metro) who opposed concealed carry reform fared very badly in election after election. And they knew it, which is why most outstate DFLers finally joined with the pro-reform forces. They know that, fraudulent push-polling and bought-and-paid-for studies be damned, that opposition to the bill was going to hurt them.

With voters. You know - the people the Strib is lying to.

The editorial has turned their full pathological circle, swept past a brief truth, and now heads back into bald-faced falsehood:

That's the real reason Minnesotans were saddled with this law -- and the reason they may be burdened with it yet again. The "personal-protection" arguments the plan's backers invoke are as hollow as ever. In its short Minnesota life, the concealed-weapons bill hasn't proven itself in any way valuable. It certainly hasn't made Minnesotans safer: In 2003, the state's violent-crime rate went up. And though establishing causality is tricky, common sense and hard research both suggest that concealed-carry laws don't suppress crime.

Show us the hard research, Star/Tribune.

There is none. Only feeble attempts to impugn the research of John Lott, which is of course a keystone of support for concealed carry nationwide. The vast majority of states now have "shall-issue" laws; not one has ever repealed one in a legislature; Minnesota's highly-questionable court decision is the only example of such a law being taken out of force, and it was not via the will of the people or their elected representatives.

In any case, there's no question that putting more hidden guns into more Minnesota pockets is dangerous: All sorts of research shows that a gun is far more likely to be used against its owner or his family than against an aggressor. That alone is reason to leave the suspended measure languishing in limbo.

And the Strib lies again.

The only "research" was a decade-old New England Journal of Medicine study that, quoted carefully out of context, showed that guns in the home were likely to be used against their owners, acquaintances, or families. The omitted context, of course, was that the study counted

• suicides
• "acquaintances" like fellow drug dealers, gang members - anyone the shooter "knew" in any capacity!
• Justifiable homicides, including shootings of abusive ex-significant others

...as "acquaintances" and "members of the family!

What the Strib doesn't note - and presumably doesn't know - is that if you leave out suicides, shootings in homes where there is alcohol or drug abuse, or in homes where at least one family members has a criminal record, and then incorporates the most conservative statistics on self-defense and deterrence (from the FBI), that the number of crimes deterred to every suicide, accident or wrongful shooting is upwards of 400 to 1.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is it.

If he had his way, House Speaker Steve Sviggum would propel the plan from limbo to law in a moment. But as luck would have it, this is where the rock and the dunderheads come in.

Let me take a moment's break from exposing the serial lies of this piece to ask: "Dunderheads?" Isn't this the paper that whines about the lack of civility in our discourse?

Just checking:

As he greased the skids for the speedy revival bill in the House, Sviggum struck a deal -- or thought he did -- with Senate Majority Leader Dean Johnson, DFL-Willmar. Likely weary ["Likely"? Really? And the Strib editorial board knows this precisely how? They can't get any of the empirical facts of this debate correct, and in a decade never once have - but they attain clairvoyance in reading Dean Johnson's motivations? Perhaps if they shared their mind-reading secrets with the rest of the newsroom, it'd benefit everyone! - Ed.] of listening to concealed-weapons claptrap, Johnson initially agreed to forgo hearings and take the House-passed bill straight to the Senate floor for a vote. But after his fellow DFLers observed that they're also "small-d democrats," Johnson had second thoughts. He told Sviggum the bill would be reviewed by a Senate committee, and that senators might well opt to amend it.

That's a crushing blow for a guy who likes his gun bill just the way it is, and who thought he had a deal. But for democracy and its millions of fans, it's a shimmering triumph.

The Star/Tribune is the worst newspaper in America. Their editorial board are the most craven liars in any position of responsibility, anywhere.

I'd invite them to appear with me on the NARN show tomorrow, where this topic will be a key point of discussion. But I know they won't have the cojones to appear.

Serial, pathological liars never, ever do.

Posted by Mitch at April 29, 2005 12:23 PM | TrackBack