All The Weight Of The World

When it comes to gun owners' rights, Nick Coleman is neither fish nor fowl. He's taken his little thwacks at gun owners - his classically-bad 1980's column where he fired an AK47 and then spent six column inches pinballing between whinging about the moral ramifications of semi-automatic guns and the moral gravity of it all, his endless puff pieces about anti-gun activists - but Doug Grow was always worse. Praise by faint damnation, indeed, but the truth.

I wondered who'd be the first Twin Cities lefty columnist to work the system for a cheap column.

I needn't have.

But along the way, Coleman introduces a few things into the column that I'm amazed to see in the Strib. Coleman is actually relatively reasonable and even-handed on the subject.

I bet Wes Skoglund is gonna have a cow.

Side note: I, for one, will glad when the Strib's current crap...er, crop of copy editors is packed off to the nursing home, looking at the slugline for Coleman's column:

A reluctant gunslinger feels the gravity of his new permit to pack

Gunslinger?

Pack?

It really parodies itself.

Onward to Coleman:

I thought it might be amusing to obtain a permit to carry a handgun, and to write about it on a slow summer news day. But now that I've done it, I'm afraid it doesn't seem so amusing anymore.

Yes, friend, that's a gun permit in my pocket. And on my shoulders? That's the weight of responsibility. No fun at all.

So does this mean that we can look forward to less glib flippancy about what a bunch of irresponsible wastrels we carry activists are?

Because we all have the same sense, too. Legal carry is no joke, it's not fun, and it's no laughing matter.

Coleman's bona-fides:

I have a love-hate thing with guns, but I am not one of those people who think all our problems will end if we melt all the guns into bad sculptures that can be erected as monuments to the politicians who commissioned them. When I was a kid, my dad (who shot a lot of crows while working on a highway crew in northern Minnesota) gave me a single-shot .22 caliber rifle perfect for shooting cans and bottles at the dump. My high school had a rifle range, and, later, I ambushed deer that I made into sausage.

But guns on the street are not recreational. When I drove to Robbinsdale to take a gun permit class at Bill's Gun Shop, I navigated through north Minneapolis, passing a corner where I had seen a murder victim on the sidewalk a few months earlier, as well as a day-care center where bullets have come through the windows. Bad guys have lots of guns. Letting the good guys carry them, too, makes sense.

I had to read that a couple of times.

I guess the fact that nobody edits Coleman has finally benfitted the world. That's right, Nick (and Nick's bosses), it does make sense.

But I hate that it has come to this.

That's a curious phrase.

Why?

In Minnesota, until 1974 - the Minnesota over which Nick's father presided as a very powerful politician, speaker of the House if memory serves - one needed no permit at all to carry a handgun in Minnesota, concealed or otherwise. How did crime then compare to today?

Were people any worse, morally, then than now? And by "people" I mean "law abiding folks who carried firearms for self-defense", by the way...

My instructor...walked me through the law and explained the Color Codes of Awareness.

Usually, he said, we exist in Condition White, oblivious of our surroundings and unconcerned for our safety. In Conditions Yellow and Orange, we become increasingly aware that something is wrong and danger is present. In Condition Red, we are ready for fight or flight. And if we have a gun permit, we are ready to shoot.

But only as a last resort. Sgt. Whaley told me that the smart thing is recognizing and avoiding trouble, not confronting it.

"Learning to shoot is not hard," Sgt. Whaley told me. "This is not about shooting. It's about self-protection. It's about avoiding situations."

Because "situations" come with consequences...State law (statute 609.065) says taking a life is justifiable when "necessary" to prevent "great bodily harm or death" from being inflicted. I have family I would protect at any cost. I can say yes.

But you have a duty to retreat from danger, if possible. You have to avoid voluntarily entering into confrontations. You need to choose non-lethal options, if available. And the threat must be immediate and carry the likelihood of death or great bodily harm.

It boils down to this: "If possible, don't use a gun. Run."

Whatever my criticisms of Coleman, I'm glad that the Strib finally acknowledged the fact that carry permit training is very sobering and useful, and turns out permittees who bely the "packing" and "Gunslinger" BS that their lazy copy editors (and, mostly, columnists) indulge in.

I guess - sound the alarm - I have to compliment Coleman so far.

We got down to the nitty-gritty: To carry a handgun, you must show you can shoot one.

You must shoot 50 rounds at a silhouette of a bad guy, receiving five points for each shot in the kill zone. Twenty shots are taken at a distance of 15 feet from the target, 20 shots from 25 feet, and 10 from 50 feet. Ten shots also must be fired one-handed, and, at each distance, you must re-load after five shots and fire five more within 60 seconds.

I scored 236 out of 250 -- 94 percent. A passing grade is 70 percent. My mom could do it.

Heh. I shot 96% - although as I admitted at the time, Stevie Wonder could have shot eighty. But good effort, Nick.

I still have some choices to make. Should I get a revolver or a pistol? A 9-millimeter, or a .38 Special that loads .357 Magnum rounds, for greater stopping power? I haven't made up my mind. But I'm not in a hurry. My wife might shoot me if I bring home a gun.

She has memorized the statistics about gun owners being more likely to shoot a family member than defend one, and she knows all about the legal guns that get stolen and end up being used in crimes. She really hates guns. And she's an excellent shot.

She's been to gun school, too.

Maybe she needs to go to journalism school. The "statistics" she's "memorized" about "gun owners being more likely to shoot a family member" are twaddle, and were proven so over a decade ago. If you leave out families with criminals, alcoholics, addicts and drug trade workers, and screen out "family members" who are abusing their spouses and "acquaintances" who are drug customers, a law-abiding schmuck like, well, Nick Coleman is about 400 times as likely to deter a crime as to be a victim.

But no matter. Welcome to the club, Nick.

Do you know what people at your newspaper, and people like Wes Skoglund, have been saying about people like us?

Posted by Mitch at August 7, 2006 08:02 AM | TrackBack