Asleep At The Switch

Joel Rosenberg tackled the same KARE11 "Investigation" that I did yesterday.

The "investigation", he finds, is as full of holes as the "8" ring after a go-around with a large-bore pistol.

I asked a number of questions yesterday, and deferred the answers until this installment; the payoffs follow.

Rosenberg notes a number of key facts about the shooting itself - the "What", "When" and "How" of the shooting - that KARE11's reporters omitted from the report:

Although you wouldn't know it from the KARE story -- [alleged shooter] Ourada...either went home or was driven somewhere to retrieve his handgun.

That's kind of important, isn't it? It's not like he was carrying, drunk (and we'll get to that in a moment) and murdered a man out of drunken irritation in a moment of irkedness. Nope. He apparently wasn't carrying, was drunk, got obnoxious, was kicked out, and went somewhere (home, perhaps; and who drove him there? The story doesn't say), while drunk, got a gun, and came back and killed the bouncer.

As we noted yesterday, when he "got obnoxious" he not only got threatening (normal with morons in bars), but used his permit as a prop for his threats, apparently waving it around like a badge (says one story).

Note to everyone: If you see anyone waving their permit around trying to threaten people, call the police. It may not be a violation of the law in and of itself, but it's extremely bad form; if someone's that big a moron, at least the action should be on record.

Back to things KARE11 missed:

Just horrible, sure. But what did his permit have to do with that? How could him not having a carry permit have prevented him getting drunk, becoming obnoxious, getting kicked out of a bar, going somewhere (home, perhaps? And, again, who drove him there?), while drunk, getting a gun, and coming back and killing the bouncer?

I dunno, either. The story doesn't tell us, probably because there was no connection between his permit and the murder.

The KARE11 piece missed an awful lot of facts.

More on that later.

Rosenberg explores a few issues that I just nodded at yesterday - the many ways that KARE11's story tacitly absolved David Lillehaug and Hennepin County sheriff Pat McGowan for some key mistakes of their own.

As re: Lillehaug:

This was left out of the story: at the time that Ourada killed Walsh, it wasn't illegal to carry while intoxicated. Honest. There was no statutory prohibition on carrying while intoxicated before the first Personal Protection Act went into effect on May 28, 2003. When, on June 12, 2004, Judge Finley overturned the MCPPA on a technicality over how it was passed, the old law (pre-2003 law) was in effect, and there was, once again, no legal prohibition against carrying while intoxicated until the day after Governor Pawlenty signed MCPPA2 back into law. That was quite literally weeks after May 12, when Ourada killed "Big Billy" Walsh...It was legal for Ourada -- and anybody else who could legally carry a handgun in public, openly or concealed, including permit holders, people without permits carrying at their homes, people without permits carrying at their places of business, people without permits carrying between their homes and places of business -- to carry while intoxicated, because the law that would have made that unlawful that had been thrown out by a court.

So many things were legal because of the tossing of the 2003 MPPA. Permits under the 1974-2002 law, which was in force from June '04 until the MPPA re-passed, were issued:

• without required training
• without systematic background checks
• On the whim of sheriffs and chiefs of police, rather than via objective criteria
• With no recourse for homeowners, business owners or anyone else to bar carriers from their property (thus creating a do-it-yourself safe zone for criminals, but hey, I'm all about free choice)
• With no statewide uniformity...

...and, as Joel notes, with no expectation that one must be sober while carrying.

Hmm... who was the lead attorney that brought that lawsuit before a judge, urging him to throw the law out? Who is the lead attorney, who -- as a byproduct of some other intention, sure -- asked the legal system to make drunk carrying lawful?

That's easy: it was David Lillehaug, who is prominently mentioned in the KARE story -- but whose role in making it lawful to carry while intoxicated is never mentioned in that story.

Again: I'm sure that wasn't his intent, but that was the effect.

And as Joel points out, it's not just a case of the unintended consequences of a lawyer winning a case for an otherwise disinterested client; Lillehaug has been (and remains) prowling the state for two years, looking for test cases, anything at all, to take to court in his zeal to disarm the law-abiding and make the streets safe for the state's thugs.

While KARE11 mentioned that Lillehaug has been an opponent of the MPPA, they spent little time elaborating. Nor, of course, did they explain why he's taking the legal route:

Now, if Lillehaug and company don't like the law as it is, and want it not only repealed, but to make carrying while intoxicated illegal, they have a simple method that they can try: they can go back to the legislature, and have one of their tame representatives (Skoglund or Slawik), say, introduce a bill that would do just that.

I know that's a lot of work, and would be very unlikely to be successful. After all, the MCPPA has worked well, and repealing it is a longshot -- they'd have to argue, in committee after committee, and then on the floor of both Senate and House, that they were right and the rest of us were wrong. And then they'd either have to persuade Governor Pawlenty not to veto their bill -- if it passed -- or a supermajority to overturn his predictable veto.

Next, Rosenberg goes after the holes in the story that let Pat McGowan drive his squad car away from culpability (emphases added):

But that's all minor, compared to the whitewash of Sheriff McGowan of Hennepin County.

The law very specifically allows a sheriff to deny a permit application if the sheriff, after an investigation that must include an electronic database search, but can be very extensive, determines that there's evidence that the applicant is "substantially likely" to be dangerous to others, or to himself, if given a carry permit. Investigating applications is, to put it simply, the sheriff's job, and as the BCA report demonstrates, he claims to have spent, from May through December 2003 alone, more than half a million dollars doing such investigations, claiming $461,957 in "labor costs." Did KARE ask him how many deputies he had working, fulltime and overtime, on fewer than three thousand permit applications, most of which required nothing more than a quick computer database search? Why not?

Apparently, they didn't ask, and let him plead poverty, despite the gold-plated costs of his program, which is even more drunken-sailor spend-happy than Ramsey County, the #2 contender.

That amounts, by the way, to $153 per permit.

Let's look at where the money goes:

• The permit application fee is $100. Now, we don't know how many permit applications Hennepin County turns down - Rosenberg notes "In Ramsey County, 3% of permits are turned down, and thus elegible to appeal.". Let's say 3% are suspicious in Henco, too. So that means for roughly 2,910 permit applications, the costs involved are the time for a department employee(s) to check the paperwork of the application (form, training certificate, driver's license, etc), make sure the I's are dotted and the T's are crossed, and tap the applicant's name into the computer to see if there's a record; usually, for people who bother to apply for a legal permit, there's nothing more involved than a parking ticket. A very generous estimate of the cost to the county: an hour, altogether. At a capitalized cost of $50 an hour, the county's way ahead on the deal - $150,000 of the $300,000 they collected.
• Of the 3% turned down - 90 applications - let's go hog wild and say that half of them hire a lawyer and take the county to court (and I doubt the ratio is that high). There, they take on an assistant county attorney, funded by 1/45 of the $150,000 left over - roughtly $3,300 per case. The cases aren't rocket science; the ACA shows the judge why the permit was denied, and how that allows the county to deny the application. Not a ton of work, even for a county attorney.

Is my math right? Maybe not - I'm winging it here. But I doubt I'm winging it as bad as Sheriff McGowan is. As Rosenberg says,

McGowan can deny as many applications as he chooses to -- it's just that, if it goes to court, he has to pay the costs of his mistakes.

And he's complaining that he has to pay the cost of his mistakes out of his half million dollar carry permit program budget? He's complaining that he has to pay for abuses of his authority out of his huge carry permit budget, funded by the fees that applicants pay?

That's outrageous, but what's more outrageous is that the KARE "investigative" team either didn't ask him about that, or didn't report his answer.

If you're a Second Amendment supporter, you'll want to read the rest of Joel's piece; it includes some actions that we all need to take to hold McGowan and KARE11 accountable for this hatchet job on both their parts.

Posted by Mitch at June 15, 2005 07:58 AM | TrackBack