Six dead in Jersey City shootout, including two cops. 

If only New Jersey had comprehensive gun control, and wasn’t next to a bunch of states with permissive gun laws…

Heartwarming holiday story.
Joe doakes

In more ways than one.

Not sure if Democrats get it yet – whenever they threaten to take guns away (and it’s become pretty much the norm over this past few years), they create a wave of new owners.

Which means “gun culture” becomes more ingrained in our society – at least the parts of the society that take freedom seriously. And it’s already pretty ingrained – maybe irreversibly so.

The Minnesota DFL – and of course, the likes of the “Reverend” Nancy North Benson – don’t dream of sugarplums and fairies.

They dream of making the US just like the UK.

“You must not defend yourself with something that can hurt someone”.

Apparently, all you need is love.

The Supreme Court, for the first time in nearly a decade, is hearing a significant Second Amendment case:

Faced with a defunct ban on transporting guns outside city limits, the increasingly conservative court majority could render a decision making clear what some justices believe: that the Second Amendment extends beyond the home, and that lower courts should view state and local limits on carrying guns in public with skepticism.
“This would be a strange case in which to go big,” says Joseph Blocher, a professor at Duke University School of Law and co-director of the Duke Center for Firearms Law. “Yet the stakes going forward are potentially huge.”

I heard Prof. Blocher in NPR yesterday. He seems to believe that the SCOTUS will find some excuse to turn this case toward expanding limits on gun rights.

I’m not sure if it was Pauline Kael syndrome, or playing to the NPR audience’s echo chamber, or if he knows something I don’t. I wasn’t impressed.

Gun rights groups were surprised in January when the high court agreed to hear the case. Gun control groups were surprised in October when the justices refused to jettison it, even after the city and state erased restrictions that were likely unconstitutional.
Both actions went against the court’s recent modus operandi when it comes to guns: avoidance. Since its 2008 and 2010 rulings striking down gun restrictions in the District of Columbia and Chicago, the court has refused to hear dozens of cases challenging lesser limits on who can own what types of guns, where they can be taken, what requirements must be met and more.

Expect a ruling in June.

…I was going to say “shark”, but it’s really just a 50-something ninny with ELCA Hair and a shark fin taped to their collar who identifies as a shark.

Minnesotans’ main concerns about healthcare – about which the MMA is putatively supposed to be concerned, itself – are affordability and access.

Naturally, they’ve made gun confiscation among their top priorities for the 2020 Legislature:

In the recent report outlining priorities for 2020, Gun Control is listed as number 2, above any policy that would drive down the cost of healthcare or increase access to patients.
The priorities outlined by MMA include:

2.    Prevent firearm injury and death 
a.    Expand criminal background checks to all firearm transfers and sales
b.    Enact a “red flag” law to allow law enforcement to protect those who may be a danger to themselves or others
c.    Authorize the use of firearm ownership data for public health research or epidemiologic investigation

Naturally, none of their proposals have anything to do with health.  

It’s a further step down the path toward “progressivizing” all institutions.  

“Hey, Mitch – why does anyone need a magazine with more than six or seven shots? Future president Joe Biden assures us two is all you need!”

I’m going to answer you with a question. Several, actually.

First: are you ever going to be attacked by someone who wants to kill you, then and there? If you answer “I have no idea“, that’s a perfectly valid, honest answer. Violent attacks – robberies, kidnappings, rapes, aggravated assaults, spree killings, terror attacks – are exceptionally rare. Rarer still if you have no criminal record, don’t associate with criminals, and don’t work in a business where a lot of criminals are part of the clientele. That accounts for the vast majority of people.

Not a single person who gets robbed, kidnapped, raped, suffers a home invasion, or is at a location where a spree killer decides to stage their blaze of glory, woke up that morning thinking “I bet I’m going to be the target of a violent incident today!“ Did they?

Second: if the person decides to attack you with the lethal force we mentioned above, and you decide to defend yourself, how hard is it going to be the end the threat to your life?: impossible to predict, right? Many robberies, assaults and rapes, and even a few spree killings , have been ended by a good guy pulling out a gun, with no shots fired. Sometimes an attacker falls over unconscious, or dead, after a punch to the face. On the other hand there are records of people who’ve been shot 20 times and still had the strength to shoot, stab or hit before they bled out. I know one story of a woman who barricaded herself and her kids in an attic during a home invasion; when the guy broke into the attic, she shot at him six times at a range of 2 feet, hitting them five times in the face and head – and he lived without a lot of complications ( other than a lengthy prison sentence). Alcohol, drugs and mental illness all affect this as well – drunk people are harder to deter from doing stupid things; people who are extremely high may not experience pain, even pain from a gunshot wound. There are cases of people who were very, very high who never noticed they’d been shot until they bled to death.

So the question is: how many shots (if it’s a gun you choose) will it take to stop one person from following through on trying to murder you? The answer, given the evidence we have seen above, is “0 to 20 shots – maybe”.

Bear in mind that, under stress, almost nobody hits their target with every shot. Even at close range. Even if you practice shooting a lot (although that helps) the police, in self-defense situations, hit with an average of about one shot in every six. Put another way, the police fire an average of 17 shots to end an engagement.

So – you don’t know how many hits you’re going to need to end a lethal or threat to you (or your family, or innocent bystanders), and you don’t know how many shots that you fire are going to hit the person who is trying to kill you.

That’s with one attacker.

Which brings us to the third question

Third: how many people will be trying to kill, Rob, attack, rape or kidnap you?: The scenarios above are predicated on one attacker. Can you predict how many people are going to attack you?

In my city, a few years back, there was a series of home invasions. Four people would break into a house, violently subdue any occupants who were present, and take what they wanted.

Nobody died in that series of incidents – but other home invasions do lead to murder, almost always murder of unarmed people.

Remember – none of the victims woke up that morning thinking “I bet I’m going to have a violent home invasion today”.

Now – if you hear somebody kick in your door in at midnight, ask yourself – how many of them are there? Are they armed? Are they drunk or on some sort of mind altering substance that warps their perception of risk, danger, and/or pain? How will they react to someone resisting (or not resisting)?

You are not going to know. All you know is that there is a potentially lethal threat to your life down there. Maybe the sound of a pistol racking up will send all of them scampering from your house. Or maybe the sight of one of them falling over, gushing blood after you shoot one of them will send them running.

Or maybe you pull out your six shooter, and fire all six shots of the first attacker you see – leaving you holding an empty revolver while robbers two, three, and four come at you with baseball bats, ice picks and a shotgun.

So the answer to your question is “When we are responsible for defending ourselves, our families and our community from a violent threat to our lives and we can’t predict who is going to carry out that attack, how many of them there will be, and what it will take to deter/stop them, we want a magazine that is less likely to run out of ammunition before the attacker runs out of attack”.

I hope that answers your question.

On Facebook the other day, The “Reverend” Nancy Nord Bence went full-on gaslight:

“To face the reality of our gun problem, you’ll have to admit that you are the problem too. You’ll be forced to connect the dots between guns and your white theology, guns and your nationalism, guns and your Islamophobia, guns and your white supremacy, guns and your resentment of foreigners, guns and the people who so often shoot strangers in shopping malls and schools and churches and concerts—guns and you.”

That’s not “facing the reality of the ‘gun problem'”. That’s exposing the reality of American Tribalism, delivered with a nasal, smug upper-middle-class white ninny accent.

It’s a real-life example of what Dennis Prager says: “Conservatives think progressives are wrong; progressives think conservatives are *evil*. And you don’t bother talking, debating or reasoning with evil”.

Pass this around. People need to know the other side’s motivations.

This isn’t some crackpot. This is the moral and intellectual leader of the “gun safety” movement in Minnesota.

She’s one sick, twisted little person.

And another good guy with a gun saves the day:

From KSWO ABC Channel 7 in Oklahoma: “Multiple witnesses have said the gunman shot two people in a vehicle and a civilian with a gun confronted him, causing the gunman to turn the gun on himself. We are working to confirm that story with Duncan police.“

That’s why this “mass shooting” got no media coverage, naturally. It disturbs the narrative.

Why are progressives so anti-gun?

Perhaps because, subconsciously, they know Berg’s Seventh Law is for real.

Gun-controller shoots her kids, self:

Ashley Auzenne, 39, fatally shot Parrish, 11, Eleanor, 9, and Lincoln, 7 — and then herself — in their Deer Park home, local police said in a statement. Authorities found their bodies when they got a request for a welfare check and responded to the New Orleans Street home around 8:45 a.m. Tuesday.

Police also found a gun inside the home.

The Harris County Medical Examiner’s Office ruled the deaths a murder-suicide on Thursday, with Ashley Auzenne as the suspect, authorities said….Last November, Auzenne framed her Facebook profile picture with an “#End Gun Violence” banner.

And the reason? She got her way in her divorce – custody, apparently – but didn’t get everything she wanted:

She was concerned she’d not be able to move with the kids to her hometown, and would need to find a job and pay him rent if she stayed in their current home, he said.

And as we’ve noticed in the past, Auzenne was not the first prog to lose it and start killing helpless people with one of those guns they claimed to abjure (for everyone else)

Beneath all too many anti-gunners is a narcissist with a violence problem.

Anyone remember Dave Mindeman?

About ten years ago or so, he ran a blog – “MNPAct” – which was a website for putative organization Dave putatively ran.

Now, let me be clear: Dave was one of a small handful of “progressive” Metro-area bloggers from blogging’s heyday in the ’00s that didn’t and, to the best of my knowledge, still doesn’t belong under police surveillance; when my garage burned down, he didn’t feel compelled to disavow responsibility for it.

So there’s that. When you’re a conservative in the metro, you become thankful for the small things.

But that’s not to say Dave knows how to frame an argument any better than the rest of them ever did.

Example – last week, Dave felt the need to post this on Twitter:

Of course, Dave – confident as he seems to be in his side’s chanting points – didn’t know that Shannon Watts, like Nancy Nrd Bence (and Heather Martens before) has never, not once, said anything about guns, gun laws, gun owners, gun crime or gun statistics that’s simultaneously original, substantial and true; Lott’s “recent” testimony was 16 years ago.

I responded, natch – knowing, all along, I’d regret it, but such is the life of the contrarian.

It drew a “response” from Mindeman – one that was pretty clearly the fruits of a quick google for “John Lott Sucks” or some other “Dog Gone”-caliber thrashing about. Dave came up with…:

Mother Jones.

Now, if you are of a certain age, you might remember when MoJo was known for some capable journalism, even if it was always hard-left.

But the once-fabled counterculture investigative publication has fallen on risibly hard times; Babylon Bee doesn’t even bother parodying them anymore. What would be the point? (Interesting to see, by the way, that MoJo’s current “CEO” is City Pages hanger-on Monika Bauerlein).

Anyway.

The article – by “Writing Fellow” (read: glorified intern who’s hoping not to have to look for a job at Buzzfeed next) Gloria Exstrum, covers research Lott did on abortion and immigration, in addition to his usual gun research. I can’t comment on the abortion and immigration stuff – I cover my zone – but once it turns to the gun stuff, Exstrum’s article is proof that you never, ever use MoJo as a source on anything Second Amendment.

Exstrum writes:

Following the 2015 shooting at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado, President Barack Obama and former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid urged Congress to pass gun control legislation. “I say this every time we’ve got one of these mass shootings,” Obama said in a statement after the incident, “this just doesn’t happen in other countries.”
In a 2015 post on theCrime Prevention Research Center website, Lott’s group argues that “this claim is simply not true.”The analysis points out that, during the Obama administration, the United States ranks below several European countries in death rate per million people from mass public shootings. Predictably, conservative media outlets picked up the story, and Lott wrote a column for Fox News referencing his findings after the Las Vegas shooting.

So far so good. She got the basic assertions right – which is not something you can take for granted these days.

But here’s a challenge: try to figure out what the esteemed “writing fellow” is saying in response to Lott in this next bit. Honestly, I’m sort of at a loss, here:

However, as a Media Matters for America analysis points out, Lott’s claims only focus on public mass shootings involving machine guns, a criteria which excludes deadly incidents like the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre and the Pulse nightclub shooting.

For a “writing fellow”, Ms. Exstrum is either a terrible researcher, a lousy reporter (evidence toward this: using “Media Matters” as a source), a substandard writer, or – who knows? – maybe any 2-3 of the above. Whatever it is, I have read this sentence a dozen times, and I can’t figure out what she’s trying to say. But I’ll give it a try, here:

Is she saying Lott excluded mass shootings involving machine guns?   Well, yeah – there’s never been mass shooting by a legally-owned machine gun – meaning “fully automatic weapon” – in US history, at least not since the 1934 National Firearms Act (shaddap about the Valentine’s Day Massacre).  Lott “excluded” them because history and fact “excluded” them.  They don’t exist in the past 85 years, to say nothing of the six year time frame of the study Ms. Exstrum is yapping about.  

Is she saying that the overseas shootings used “machine guns” – well, no, the raw data points out that non-US mass shootings used a variety of firearms – the vast majority of them subject to stringent gun control, by the way, which would tend to reinforce Lott’s point, not Exstrum’s.   The list below includes incidents with “machine guns” (notably the 11/13 Paris massacre, carried out with military-grade AK47s – which are as illegal in France as they are here) , semi-automatic weapons, even manual repeaters:

Is the dispositive point that Lott focuses on foreign “public” “mass shootings?”    It makes no sense – Lott’s list of shootings in the US from 2009-2015 includes all sorts of locations – almost all public, mostly “gun-free zones”:

LIterally, there is no way to read “writing fellow” Exstrum’s sentence that makes it jibe with the facts.

I’m open to suggestions, here.

Exstrum also wrote – sort of – about Lott’s foray into police-on-black-citizen shootings:

In a 2016 study, Lott and co-author Carlisle Moody, a professor at the College of William & Mary and a member of the Crime Prevention Research Center’s academic advisory board, argue that white police officers do not unfairly discriminate against black suspects. In a Fox News op-ed about the study, Lott says, “Many people incorrectly believe the police are racist.”

To which she adds:

Of course, ample research has concluded that black suspects are much more likely to be shot by police than white ones. But the study nonetheless received coverage from the National Review, Breitbart, and the Washington Times, with Breitbart saying Lott’s research “runs against the claims of groups like Black Lives Matter.”

 “Ample research”.   Is anyone but me seeing a google search for “shooting black people consensus” as Ms. Exstrum’s “research”?

Of course, there’s ample research on the other side as well – including this one, by Harvard professor Roland Fryor – that confirms at least the broad outline of Lott’s conclusion.  Fryer happens to be black, and also happened to have started his research believing he’s find the opposite conclusion – so this finding, against interest (where “interest” <> intellectual honesty). 

Conclusions  Er, don’t start a land war in Asia, and don’t use MoJo as a source against someone who’s been paying attention? 

Mayor Carter, presiding over the worst murder rate in almost a quarter century (even as crime outside the metro continues to fall) is holding a series of meetings:

In the midst of an uptick in gun violence in St. Paul, Mayor Melvin Carter announced on Monday that he’ll host three community meetings about public safety.
Carter said last week he’s considering proposing a supplemental public safety budget to the City Council. The Council is slated to vote on next year’s city budget in December.
The community conversations will be at the following St. Paul locations:
Thursday, Nov. 7, 6:30-8 p.m., Central Baptist Church, 420 N. Roy St.
Tuesday, Nov. 12, 6:30-8 p.m., Rice Recreation Center, 1021 Marion St.
Saturday, Nov. 16, 1-2:30 p.m., Arlington Hills Community Center, 1200 Payne Ave.

I’m going to go out on a limb, and guess that ending pre-emption and “universal” background checks will be the only subjects seriously discussed.

Oh, look – the Trib has another badly worded poll intended to elicit results to be used as blunt-force DFL rhetoric. In this case, on Minnesotans’ views on gun registration – AKA “Universal Background Checks”

And yes, it’s dishonest. I add emphasis:

A strong majority of Minnesota voters support universal background checks on all gun sales and a ban on semiautomatic military-style rifles like the AR-15, a new Star Tribune Minnesota Poll has found.

It’s not “gun sales”. It’s all transfers; lending or borrowing, inheritance, any transfer at all.

And – again – there is no way for “background checks” to be “universal” without trackjng the various transfers through a firearm’s lifetime.

Each of those transactions over time is a data point.

In the world of IT, we have a term for tracking data points; a database.

You can not call this anything but gun registration – and given the DFL’s tack on guns, you can not look at it as anything other than a prelude to confiscation.

Not. One. More. Compromise.

Beto O’Rourke takes a quick break from dishing up the hopey-changey to go all tough-guy.

Democrats will take your guns by force.

Q: "exactly how are you going to take away weapons from people who do not want to give them up?"

Beto O'Rourke: "That weapon will be taken from them. If they persist, there will be other consequences from law enforcement." #DemDebate pic.twitter.com/tbBb8WYhFn

— Trump War Room (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TrumpWarRoom) October 16, 2019

Come to think of it, he looks a little like a young Janice Reno.

“Black Boys with Guns” teaches afro-american yoots how and why, as well as why not, to use guns:

I can only imagine the caterwauling to ensue from the social justice mafia.

SCENE: Mitch BERG is taking in a glorious fall day walking around Lake Como when, unbeknownst to him, a Tantric Protest class in the pavilion building lets out. Before BERG can react, he’s confronted with Cat SCAT (the designated “fact checker” at the (possibly fictional) progressive blog “”MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com“), Edmund DUCHEY (roprietor of that blog, and a person who was badly scarred by a childhood in which he was routinely bullied – by much younger children), Gutterball GARY (another of DuChey’s co-bloggers, who describes his hobbies as bowling, heckling people, and shouting really loud) and Avery LIBRELLE. Berg can’t get away before they notice him.

SCAT, DUCHEY, GARY and LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Uh…hi, er, all of y…

SCAT, DUCHEY, GARY and LIBRELLE: The founding fathers never envisioned “assault rifles when they wrote the Second Amendment.

BERG: Huh. Forget for a moment that the British “Tower” Musket was the AK47 of its day – reliable, easy to train, with a high rate of fire. And the Kentucky Rifle was the sniper rifle of its day – hard to learn, a little fickle, but capable of killing people at undreamed-of ranges. Forget about all that for just a moment.

SCAT, DUCHEY, GARY and LIBRELLE: Consider it forgotten.

BERG: No doubt. Know what else the founding fathers did?

SCAT, DUCHEY, GARY and LIBRELLE: We’re not constitutional lawyers.

BERG: True. They required all citizens to keep one of the “assault rifles” of their day, and a battle or two’s worth of ammunition, at home, ready to go at a moment’s notice.

SCAT, DUCHEY, GARY and LIBRELLE: (Nothing).

BERG: Nothing.

GARY: I’m going to hide peep through your windows until I can find something about you to write about.

BERG: So – no change, then?

AND SCENE

Creep pulls a knife and a bottle of bear spray on a real estate agent at an open house.

Agent was in – but the victim was out:

The incident took place in Commerce City, Colorado, on August 4. According to a report by 9 News, the man – later identified by authorities as 43-year-old Ernest Robert Chrisman – arrived at the open house at about 11:30 am.
“He asked the right questions,” said Hetzler. “We talked about loans, what he had to qualify for.”
After picking up a brochure, Chrisman asked to see the upstairs. Once he and Hetzler reached the master bedroom, Hetzler said Chrisman took out a knife and a piece of rope that had bear spray dangling from it.
“He said, ‘This is a knife, this is bear spray.’ After he said, ‘This is bear spray,’ he asked me to take off my ring and get into the closet,” said Hetzler.
At this point, Hetzler began to fear for her life.
Hetzler has a concealed carry permit and had her gun with her at the open house. She drew her firearm, preparing to defend herself.
Chrisman responded to her actions by soaking her with bear spray.
“I couldn’t see,” said Hetzler. “My skin was burning, my eyes were on fire, I couldn’t see, so I fired.”
She fired in his direction. Chrisman quickly fled from the home.

Shooting blind is not ideal – but all’s well that ends with a likely rapist and possible murderer in jail.

“Gun Crime” in major cities is hijacking headlines from coast to coast.

Surely, one might think, crime – fueled by ugly black rifles – is soaring.

One would be wrong:

FBI crime stats show the “estimated rate of violent crime was 368.9 offenses per 100,000 inhabitants.” That is a 3.9 percent reduction in the rate when compared with 2017 stats, but the real lesson emerges when we look long term.
For example, Bearing Arms reports that the 2018 rate of violent crime was barely above the 1971 rate of 396 offenses per 100,000 inhabitants.
Ironically, one of the greatest differences between 1971 and 2018 is that there are exponentially more privately-owned firearms now than there were when the 1970s began. Rather than leading to more violent crime, as the left would suggest, the existence of millions of millions more privately-owned guns correlated with a lower rate of violent crime.

OK – but what about Minnesota?

Yep. Down. In a state with nearly 300,000 people with permits to carry – more per capita than Texas – violent crime, homicide, even property crime are down even more sharply:

The Minnesota Department of Public Safety Bureau of Criminal Apprehension on Monday, July 8, released its Uniform Crime Report for 2018…Incidents of violent crime were down 6.7% in 2018 as compared to the year prior, with murder, aggravated assaults and robberies down from 2017 levels, the report showed. And rape and involuntary sex trafficking reports increased in 2018.
Property crime offenses also decreased in 2018, with burglary, larceny and arson offenses shrinking compared to rates in 2017. Motor vehicle theft, by contrast, increased for the third year in a row…

But…but…guns!.

104 Minnesotans murdered last year, 59 were killed with a handgun. 

Which is, if I recall correctly, a lower per capita rate than 2016. I’ll look it up. I’m also going to guess nearly none of those were people with no criminal records, with carry permits.

…that the thing that most enables and foments “progressivism” is a complete ignorance of history, I cite as evidence this story – which, I hasten to add, is not from Babylon Bee.

Liberals are thrilled with the notion that law enforcement should be able to petition the court to seize firearms owned by potential bad guys. The evidence presented would be rumor, innuendo, gossip, accusation.  The standard of proof would be “he’s more likely than not, to do something bad someday.”
If Sheriff Bull Connor petitions the court to seize guns from suspected troublemakers using the red flag laws as his authority, but 99% of the people he flags are African American males between the ages of 13 and 30 (on the grounds that they tend to be the most likely to shoot up the neighborhood), will liberals continue to be thrilled?

Joe Doakes

Those who take the “Liberal” thing seriously probably will.

“Progressives”, on the other hand, won’t care. It’s about neither safety nor equality. Sometimes you gotta break eggs to make an omelet. Some of those eggs are black.

But sometimes, Twitter loves me:

There is also not one sane law abiding g gun owner who believes giving up their legally owned guns will save any lives. Red Herring rejected.

— Mitch Berg (@mitchpberg) September 19, 2019

Man uses AR15 to repel a violent home invasion:

The masked teens — a 15-year-old and two 16-year-olds — approached three residents around 4 a.m. Monday at the front yard of a home just outside Conyers and tried to rob them, the Rockdale County Sheriff’s Office said.
One of the would-be robbers took out a gun and fired shots at them before one of the residents returned fire, authorities said.
“The victims of the attempted robbery were all uninjured, but the three attempted robbery suspects were all shot during the exchange of gunfire and succumbed to their injuries, one on scene and two at a local hospital after being transported,” the sheriff’s department said in a news release.

Many media outlets are omitting the fact that the teens went into the robbery blazing away with handguns, trying to spin this story as “Man kills teenagers with a black rifle1”.

Given the increasing number of home invasions and group robberies (see also: downtown Minneapolis) going on, it’s useful to remember that military weapon designs are designed, not to “kill as many people as possible”, but to not ever jam, and not run out of bullets before your attacker runs out of attack.

Mission accomplished.

John Hinderocker posted an article on Powerline on September 3 called “Some Comments on Guns,” in which he praises an earlier column posted by Paul Mirengoff called “A Conservative Plan to Reduce Shootings and Other Homicides.”
Good, we agree there are conservative ways to handle the problem. But then Hinderocker loses his mind and endorses red flag laws.
Plainly, he’s never been up close and personal with acrimonious divorce cases; with law enforcement’s arbitrary denials of gun permits; with petty bureaucrats lording over groundlings; with entitled leftists entrenched in the deep bureaucracy of every local government office; with judges who think they’re God and you’re dirt because you hold the wrong political opinions, voted for the wrong political party, are a white male caught up in the liberal feminist system.  I confidently predict red flag laws will be administered exactly the same as Orders for Protection, handed out like Kleenex, because judges will be terrified that someone will do something stupid and they will get blamed for it.  If Hinderocker had experience with that system, he’d be scared spitless of giving those people the power to disarm him, without a hearing, based on rumor and gossip.
I was tempted to argue reductio ad absurdum:  Most Methodists are white people.  Many Methodist congregations condemn certain sex acts.  Many Methodists also own guns.  Clearly, Methodists are a white supremacist hate group and a danger to historically oppressed victim groups.  Society must ban Methodism to protect those potential victims.  Just a pilot project, to test it out and see how well it works to reduce crime.  We can move on to Lutherans later.  Absurd, right?  And plainly unconstitutional. 
Except today’s atheist liberal left wouldn’t think the argument is absurd, they would jump on it with enthusiasm.  But they wouldn’t want the Lutherans next, they’d want the Catholics next, because they’re even bigger haters. Banning religion would be right up their alley.  How can you argue that your rights are entitled to Constitutional protection, when the people you’re trying to convince don’t believe the Constitution should protect you or your rights?
There’s a reason the Second Amendment doesn’t say ” the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall only be infringed a little.”
Joe Doakes

There is a temptation among some conservatives who have experience with big negotiations to think that this is something where a rational agreement can be reached.

Not with our opponents, it can’t.

You want to lose, and lose huge, next year?

Go wobbly on guns.

Dance with the ones that brung you, or accept the consequences.

That is all.

Yesterday I was listening to “All Things Considered” on the way to something more interesting.

The subject was “what are we doing to combat the kind of fake news that, we are told, affected the 2016 election”.

The guest – one Paul Barrett, an adjunct professor at NYU who lectures about election security for some reason or another – said that one thing that could help might be for social media companies (and, one might suppose, media companies in general) to “act more aggressively against provably false information”.

I couldn’t agree more, although I suspect that’s not the kind of cynical deception they’re thinking about.

Let’s start with sanctioning people who passed on Dakota County Attorney Jim Backstrom’s provably false claims about gun rights issues, especially proposals to reform self-defense laws – a trail of lies that continues today.

Professor Barrett also says individuals need to be more skeptical about what they read and see online. This is something no conservative in the Strib’s coverage area needs to be reminded about.

SCENE: Mitch Berg is walking through the Midway. He rounds a blind corner, and nearly runs into Avery LIBRELLE.

LIBRELLE: Merg!:

BERG: Oh, gooooouuuuuuuaaaaaaahhhey, Avery. How you doing?

LIBRELLE: Fine. Just one my way to the Midway Walmart to buy handgun ammunition.

BERG: Hey, Avery – remember when you proposed using the government’s “terrorism watch list” to keep people from owning guns?

LIBRELLE: I must have.

BERG: You did. And do you remember your response?

LIBRELLE: No.

BERG: You said I, and gun owners, were being “paranoid”.

LIBRELLE: You are.

BERG: Not so much:

The [San Francisco] board of supervisors passed a resolution on Tuesday officially labeling the gun rights’ group a domestic terrorist organization.
District 2 Supervisor Catherine Stefani, whose district includes the Marina and Presidio, wrote the declaration stating that the NRA “spreads propaganda that misinforms and aims to deceive the public about the dangers of gun violence.”
It said the NRA “musters its considerable wealth and organizational strength to promote gun ownership and incite gun owners to acts of violence.”
“All countries have violent and hateful people, but only in America do we give them ready access to assault weapons and large-capacity magazines thanks, in large part, to the National Rifle Association’s influence,” the declaration read.

:

BERG: In other words, you people label everyone you disagree with “Terrorists”.

LIBRELLE: Well, if the San Francisco City Council says so. It’s science, after all.

BERG: Of course. Hey, Avery?

LIBRELLE: Huh?

BERG: I’m an NRA member.

LIBRELLE: [Turns and runs in a wild-eyed panic]

BERG: [Whispers to self]Well, thanks for that, anyway, San Francisco…

And SCENE