Erin Murphy – DFL bot rom Saitn Paul – declared that:

“Something is going to happen I don’t know if it is going to happen this legislative session,” she said. “I think Minnesotans understand the reach of the buy lobby and the NRA, I am happy to say that I have always gotten an ‘F’ from them and have never taken their money.”

The other DFL candidates for governor, state Rep. Tina Liebling, State Auditor Rebecca Otto and congressman Tim Walz, all are calling for tougher gun control measures, including limits on assault style weapons.

The next time some liberal hamster condescendingly coos “nobody’s coming for your guns”, just play them that video.  Or read them House File 3022.

They are coming for your guns.  It’s just not politically safe to say so (outside liberal enclaves like the Twin Cities and the WCCO newsroom) yet.

Otsego man breaks up a stabbing with his AR15:

Dave Thomas was getting ready for work Monday afternoon when he heard women screaming in his apartment building in Oswego.

Thomas, a gun instructor, peeked out the door and saw blood in the hallway. He went to his bedroom, where a handgun and an AR-15 assault-style rifle were lying on the bed. He picked up the rifle.

“I teach people how to defend themselves, and it was just a reaction to grab the AR-15,” he said.

Police said Thomas confronted a man who was stabbing another man in the apartment complex on the 100 block of Harbor Drive. The man with the knife ran off when Thomas threatened to shoot him.

“He was a half a breath away from getting his head blown off and he knew that,” Thomas, 41, said. “That’s why he put the knife down.”

Kendall County sheriff’s deputies arrived about 5 p.m. and arrested two people, the man suspected of stabbing his neighbor and a woman with him. The neighbor was treated and released from Rush Copley Medical Center in Aurora, according to the sheriff’s office.

“No good for self defense”< they keep telling us.

Suspect the victim might disagree.

In my sixteen years of writing this blog, punching bags have come and, mostly, gone.  Nick Coleman?  The MInnesota Monitor?  Mercury Rising?  Ken Weiner?  I’m still here.  They’re all gone.

But Lori Sturdevant?  She just keeps on ticking.

Maybe “ticking” isn’t the right word.  She keeps on scolding Minnesotans Republicans  for not acting like “Republicans” did (so says the myth Sturdevant pushes) in the sixties and seventies, where the MNGOP was basically Democrats in better suits, and in many cases ran to the left of the DFL.  This was, of course, at a time when Amerca, and Minnesota, had no competition; a time when the entire world was the US’, and Minnesota’s, market.    A time when business could thrive and pay confiscatory taxes and support hiring kids with high school diplomas to bolt headlight bezels onto Fords at the Highland Park plant for upper-middle-class wages with no worry about being uncompetitive – because there was no competition.

This is the world Lori Sturdevant pines for.

The “Good” Republican:   Dario Anselmo is the GOP rep from Edina.  As befits a Republican in a district that’s turning blue – clogged with refugees from Minneapolis’ accelerating failure, but who brought their brick-headed DFL politics with them – Anselmo is “purple”.  I get it – I get along with Rep. Anselmo OK, although I disagree with a bunch of his positions.

Including his very luke-coolness on 2nd Amendment issues.  Sturdevant points out that Anselmo is the son of Barbara Lund, a Duluth heiress who was murdered by her estranged husband in the early nineties.  His aunt it Joan Peterson, an erratic an impervious woman who has been one of the Minnesota gun grab movement’s leaders for a couple decades, now.

Anyway – Anselmo is a “moderate” Republican, which means “the example Sturrdevant wants the entire GOP to follow.   Now, I like Rep. Anselmo, and will hope he gets re-elected (he may actually be in line with Buckley’s Law, the most conservative candidate who can win in his district full of soccer moms and petty functionaries.

Reconstructive History:   But never let it be said Lori Sturdevant lets facts get in the way of her narrative – that the DFL is the same moderate party she grew up shilling for, and the GOP should strive for the same.

Anselmo says he likely would not be backing the universal background checks bill but for his family’s experience. He also sees gun violence from the perspective of a downtown Minneapolis property owner.

Which sounds good…

…until you remember that neither of Dave Pinto’s bills would have prevented Barbara Lund’s murder; the Gun Violence Protective Order bill would have done nothing; there were no domestic violence charges against Russell Lund.  From a PiPress article at the time:

Kim Lund would not say whether her father had ever flashed a violent temper or physically abused Barbara Lund. She said the slayings stunned her family.

“The problem is we don’t know what happened,’” she said. “We have to wait for the criminal justice system to do its role.”

And ‘Universal Background Checks” would have prevented neither the Lund murder nor the crime that vexes Anselmo around his Warehouse district bar, the “Fine Line”.   Criminals don’t take background checks now, and they won’t when they’re “Universal”.  .

Lori The Parrot:  The rest of the column is proof that the only things Lori Sturdevant knows about the issue, she was told over drinks at Murray’s by her friends in the Gun Grab “movement”, and seeks only to serve their ends:

The gun issue, too, seems to be swelling into something bigger than the perennial partisan wedge it has been for decades. Gun violence is so pervasive — especially when one counts suicides as well as homicides — that many Minnesotans now see it in personal terms.

Gun violence is down 50% in 20 years.  Gun violence is schools is down 75% in that same time.

In 2016, more than 38,000 Americans died gun-related deaths.

2/3 of which were suicides, not one of which would have been prevented by any of the DFL’s bills.

What’s more, a new generation is rising and — even in rural places — claiming a campaign to stem gun violence as its own.

Well, that’s the word the media is trying to get out – go counter the fact that the “new generation” may be more pro 2nd Amendment than mine. Which is saying something.

The Phantom Right:   Sturdevant trips into my new favorite topic:

They’re recasting the argument in personal and moral terms, asking whether someone else’s right to own a semiautomatic weapon should outweigh their right to go to school without being shot and killed.

They’re asserting a right to safety.

That may not be in the Bill of Rights. But woe be unto any democratic government that fails to secure it.

Which is a fraction of the woe that betides a “democratic government” that gets  this simple fact wrong:

There is no “right to safety”, 

No more than there is a “right not to get hit by lightning” or “right not to have a fire break out in your kitchen”, or “right not to get t-boned by a drunk driver” or “right not to get robbed”.   There is no right to t-bone people, and there’s certainly no right to rob people.    It’d be absurd as claiming that lightning or fire had a “right” to strike you.  And yet there is no “right” to be free of any of these things.

There is only a responsibility to protect  your family, your property, your community and your self from nature – natural and human.  And that includes a responsibility to protect the students that society has ordered be gathered in your care, or else.

Of course, Lori Sturdevant represents – shills and parrots for, really – a party and movement that has sought only to erode the notion of responsibility on every front, not just safety, for much longer than Sturdevant’s been in public life.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

It is disheartening to see so-called Liberals calling to disband and outlaw the National Rifle Association.

The North American Man-Boy Love Association is allowed to exist, despite being an explicitly pedophile lobby group. The Ku Klux Klan is allowed to exist, despite being an explicitly white supremacist Lobby group. The Catholic church is allowed to exist, despite being firmly against homosexual marriage. But the NRA – the nation’s oldest civil rights organization – is beyond the pale.

It’s almost as if Liberals today never heard of freedom of speech, don’t believe it should exist, and have no commitment to intellectual diversity or fundamental constitutional values, they simply want power over the rest of us.

Oh, wait, never mind.

Joe Doakes

“Almost” as if they’ve never heard of freedom of speech.

If i didn’t know better, I’d say Joe was turning into a pollyanna.

…that make shootings like Parkland so…

…um…

…oh.

The 19-year-old school shooter who killed 17 in Florida on Valentine’s Day had 150 rounds of ammunition in 10-round magazines.

And when you have four uninterrupted minutes and the cops aren’t inclined to intervene, they may as well have been five round magazines.   Loading is loading.

But then, gun control is not about saving lives.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Democrats introduce bill to outlaw “assault weapons” which is broad enough to cover pretty much all semi-auto rifles and pistols.  Where’d they get the language?  Did a lobbyist help?  Wasn’t that an outrage when Republicans did it?

It was the greatest affront to democracy in history (to the DFL) when they said the American Legislative Exchange Council did it in 2012 (at least, in their messaging to their ignorant droogs).

But yes – Linda Slocum’s gun grab bill was copied and pasted from something emailed from New York.

I couldn’t make it to the hearings today down at the Senate Office Building –
but the guys at the MN Gun Owners Caucus have been sending pictures.

And the story they tell is heartening.

The good guys outnumber the Dreamsicles pretty heavily; the MN Gun Owners Caucus has adopted a black T-shirt design, and brought a ton of them to the event.

See for yourself:

There’s a story behind the picture: as always with these sorts of situations, you have to remember that the shooters are almost invariably working people who have to take time off from jobs and families to spend their day waiting in line and watching hearings. The Dreamsicles are overwhelmingly people who do advocacy for a vocation or an avocation; “progressive” clergy, non-profiteers, community groupers, seniors, and lots and people with no real work conflicts.

The level of effort required for the good guys to outnumber the orcs is incredible. And year in, year out, we do it.

And the media are starting to notice, and account for it in their coverage. There’s a way to go, of course, but it’s a start.

OF course, the point is the actual hearings. Rob Doar – the VP and Political Director of the MNGOC – led off the testimony for the good guys.

He shredded a load of fabricated figures the orcs had just put out. They never, ever learn.

News so far: “Universal Background Checks” failed 9-7 on a partly line vote. More to come.

We’re not out of the woods. Indeed, it could be said the latest round of this fight has just begun – because these hearings were launched by the DFL, via an abuse of House rules, to give them some campaign pictures for the fall’s election.

So stay hard, stay hungry and stay alive, Real Americans. One more verse, same as the first.

UPDATE: “Gun Violence Protective Orders” – the DFL’s version, issued by decree with no due process – failed 10-6. Rep. Marion O’Neill just shredded DFL Rep. Dave Pinto; I can’t wait for the video.

Continue full steam ahead! Nothing to see here.

Nothing at all.

Move right along on your march to a blue tomorrow.

If you read the headlines – and the shrill gun-control groups who provide them to the media – you’d think it’d never been more dangerous to be in a school.

And usual when getting  your information about the Second Amendment, guns, gun crime, gun laws and gun facts, yoiu’d be wrong.  Schools – like the rest of society – are safer now than they were twenty years ago:

Four times the number of children were killed in schools in the early 1990s than today, Fox said.

“There is not an epidemic of school shootings,” he said, adding that more kids are killed each year from pool drownings or bicycle accidents. There are around 55 million school children in the United States, and on average over the past 25 years, about 10 students per year were killed by gunfire at school, according to Fox and Fridel’s research.

Yes, yes, one is too many,   But if the rate of shootings in schools is off by 3/4, and the rate in general socieity is off by 1/2 in the same time, then schools are getting safer, faster.

Which is of course why Big Left is pushing the “More Dangerous Than Ever” meme – because it’s not about making kids safer.  It’s about the culture war.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

We are told ordinary citizens don’t need guns, we shouldn’t try to defend ourselves, we should leave it to the professionals who have training and experience to do the job safely and correctly.

In other words:  “Trust us, we’re from the government and we’re here to help.”

The School Resource Officer who hid outside the school instead of engaging the shooter inside, resigned in disgrace.  He’s not the only Deputy who hid and waited.  The Coral Springs PD walked past three more cowering deputies to go into the school looking for the shooter.  And that’s after years of warnings were ignored.  No wonder the sheriff wants to blame Trump and the NRA for this disaster. The officer who resigned may be the only honorable person in that whole department.

And I’m not sure he’s being justly blamed.  Think of the TSA screeners at the airport.  All federal law enforcement people, supposedly there to protect the public from terrorists. They put on a big show of confiscating a two-inch pen knife and badgering anybody making jokes about bombs, but imagine the Florida shooter had skipped school to show up at the airport.  Imagine he had started shooting at people standing in the rope line, or taking off their shoes.  How many of those TSA screeners would have charged the gunman?  I suspect the answer is “none,” because they’re not warriors, they’re window dressing, and everybody knows it.

Same as the School Resource Officer.  He might be a sworn peace officer carrying a pistol but God help him if he shot a kid causing trouble , if he pulled a weapon on one, or even spoke sharply to him.  Jesse Jackson would be on the first plane and Gloria Allred would be in the seat right next to him.  The school hired the guy to be Officer Friendly.  They can’t expect him to suddenly turn into Rambo and they would have been horrified if they thought he might.

The deputy who resigned is a trained professional, all right.  But what’s he trained for?  Sensitivity to gender issues?  Minimizing racial arrest disparities?  Reducing truancy?  He was great at those jobs.  Don’t blame him for failing to do a job he wasn’t hired for, wasn’t temperamentally suited for, that nobody wanted him to do.

Joe Doakes

In the seminal essay “A Nation of Cowards” – an essay that may not have created an entire generation of Second Amendment activists, but certainly helped them focus their thinking –  Jeffrey Snyder wrote:

Is your life worth protecting? If so, whose responsibility is it to protect it? If you believe that it is the police’s, not only are you wrong — since the courts universally rule that they have no legal obligation to do so — but you face some difficult moral quandaries. How can you rightfully ask another human being to risk his life to protect yours, when you will assume no responsibility yourself? Because that is his job and we pay him to do it? Because your life is of incalculable value, but his is only worth the $30,000 salary we pay him? [In 1993 – Ed.]  If you believe it reprehensible to possess the means and will to use lethal force to repel a criminal assault, how can you call upon another to do so for you?

Adults who are kibitzing about the cops – but not calling for school sfaffers to assert their moral right, power and obligation to protect the children in their charge and themselves – are hypocrites.

And yes, I said “moral obligation”:

One who values his life and takes seriously his responsibilities to his family and community will possess and cultivate the means of fighting back, and will retaliate when threatened with death or grievous injury to himself or a loved one. He will never be content to rely solely on others for his safety, or to think he has done all that is possible by being aware of his surroundings and taking measures of avoidance. Let’s not mince words: He will be armed, will be trained in the use of his weapon, and will defend himself when faced with lethal violence.

I think this essay needs to circulate again.

Donald Trump’s proposal to allow teachers and school staff with carry permits to carry their firearms in school has drawn the predictable firestorm of uninformed knee jerk responses.  It’s a gun issue, that’s just how it goes.

It’s also provoking a slightly, if you will, off-target response from some shooters.

Don’t get me wrong – of course it’s better to have an armed staffer in the room, with the potential to respond, when and if the shooting starts.  Armed citizens have ended three school shootings (Pearl Mississippi, Edinboro Pennsylvania and the Appalachian Law School); there’s nothing superhuman about spree killers, or for that matter inherently less capable about school staff.

But here’s the bigger point.

Trouble:  As we’ve noted based before, spree killers – as studied by the FBI after the Columbine massacre – plan theire attacks for months, sometimes years. One of their key planning criteria– is resistance likely?

For example, James Holmes– the Aurora movie massacre shooter– had a choice of six theaters when he was planning his attack. He didn’t pick the biggest seater; He didn’t pick the closest theater; he picked the one feeder in the area that was a “gun free zone”.

Likewise, as we’ve noted, spree killers (as well as terrorists, for that matter) tend to avoid targets where resistance is possible   .Example – after Israel started allowing teachers to bring guns to school after a series of kibbutz school massacres in the 1970s, the number of school massacres drops to zero without any further ceremony.

In other words–The deterrent effect of knowing that people might have guns,Is enough to deter the attack.

It isn’t that what we’re looking for?

Or is that all just too logical for the American left?

As I’ve pointed out in the past – when you listen to Dreamsicles talking about the relatives they’ve lost to “Gun Violence”, you can listen long and hard…

…and hear not one word about a perpetrator.  At a Dreamsicle meeting, all guns are self-animating.

No perps.  No criminals.  (No black victims, outside of those killed by cops).

And no imponderable human frailties.    It’s not the mental illness  – it’s the gun.  That’s one of the latest memes from the grabbers; “it’s not the insanity – it’s the guns!“.

And like most such memes, it’s just not true.

Growing up in North Dakota, I saw a house that had its roof ripped off by a tornado once.

The homeowner darted out into the street, turned, and . yelled “What about my right not to have the weather destroy my property?”

Uncannily, just a week later a friend was driving through a parking lot when an intoxicated and uninsured driver jammed down the gas backing out of his post – t-boning her, and causing a lot of uninsured damage.

She implored all and sundry – “what about my right not to have an accident?”

A few years later, when I moved to Minneapolis, a co-workers house was burgled; he lost a lot of valuable stuff.

I remember watching him rending his garment (I’d heard about it in the New Testament, but had never actuallyi seen anyone actually rending anything, much less rending it so decisively asunder) beseeching all of heaven and earth – “what about my right not to get robbed?”

If you’re thinking none of those actually happened – well, you know me too well.

But someone just as stupid is happening now, as it happens after every mass shooting (of white suburban kids).

In discussing the moral, legal, constitutional, policy and practical effects of the Second Amendment and proposals regarding gun laws, many of us are forthright about saying we’re standing up for a civil right that, in its turn, protects other civil rights.

Too many times, they respond “What about our right not to get shot?”

If you’re one of them, let me break it down for you.

Your “right to not get shot” is exactly the same as your “right” not to get hit by a tornado; nonexistent. Nature has no mind; it obeys laws of physics, not morality or ethics. And. being not human, it has no mercy, much less moral scruples. But you do; it is your responsibility to not just have homeowners insurance to repair the damage, but to protect your family from the effects of bad weather.

Your “right not to get shot” is even more similar to the right not to get backed into by an idiot. It, too, doesn’t exist – there is no “right to back into . you”, but that’s not the same as a right to be immune to accidents, carelessnes and stupidity. You do have a responsibility, though, to ensure your safety and thqat of your family when you drive; wear seatbetls, carry insurance, drive defensively, the works.

The “right not to get shot” has the most in common with the ‘Right not to get burgled’but human nature, frailty and carelessness does. be sure, the burglar has no right to rob you – but that, by itself, stops nothing . You have a responsibility, though, to protect yourself, your family and your property from the burglar.

So let’s recap: there is no “right not to get shot”.

There is a responsibility to protect yourself, your family, your community and your freedom from what we can broadly call “evil”, though – anything from street crime to mass murder to tyrannical overthrow.

Now, if you’re a teacher, you have options for how you carry out that responsibility. I’m the last person who’ll ever tell you how you’re “supposed” to do it.

You also have a right to learn what’s the best way to carry out that obligation. And at some point or another, “agitating for legislation” and “virtue-signaling . your stances” might be useful (or at least “feel-good”) responses.

But if – heaven forfend – you are in a school with a bunch of your community’s kids, and someone starts shooting? Your effective options for carrying out that responsibility diminishes to a very concise list:

• Run. (not an option unless your charges can run with you)
• Hide – and hope that the killer won’t trip upon you and your room full of screaming children.
• Fight. You can fight a lot of ways, of course; throwing books and chairs and erasers at the shooter might by you some seconds. Throwing 120 grains of hollow-point pain at him may just buy your children a lifetime of looking back at a psychological trauma rather than a lifetime measured in seconds.

Choose wisely.

The mainstream media is, if not predictable on Second Amendment issues, at least prone falling into patterns.  The usual ones are:

• Broad-based ignorance of – and at worst, incuriosity about – the actual facts of gun related issues, beyond the chanting points provided by the anti-gun groups that dominate the “thinking” in most reporters’ social circles.  It’s not malicious, it’s just uninformed, or lazy, or sometimes entitled.
• Occasional bursts of good solid reporting  – like Pat Kessler’s excellent piece on Channel 4 last week pointing out what this blog has been telling you for a couple years now; while Minnesota has a very high per capita rate of carry permittees (almost triple the rate estimated when the Legislature passed the law), our crime rate is among the lowest in the country.
• Inevitably, the overwrought editorial or op-ed demanding a repeal of the Second Amendment.

That latter usually comes from the “elite” level of the media – the NYTimes, the WaPo and the like.

So it was with a chuckle I read about an episode from the Civil War, when “journalists” had to be made of sterner, more realistic stuff.

It was right after the draft – and its  onerous exemption provisions, allowing the wealthy to pay for substitutes – was instituted.  Mobs began rioting – and one of their targets was the New York Times.

At the time, the Times was a Republican paper, and supported Lincoln, abolition and the war.  The rest of New York City, then as now, was Democrat – and was also fairly squarely against abolition, since much of New York’s economy was based around cigars and textiles – which depended on cheap tobacco and cotton, which depended on slavery (which is why I relish the times when smug little liberal moppets try to rip on “slave states’, knowing that NYC prospered more from slavery than anyplace else).

But I digress.

The rioters descended on midtown Manhattan.  And there, the publishers of the NYTimes were waiting:

The riot quickly spread through adjoining parts of the city, with rioters attacking leaders of the Republican Party and their property, as well as “such symbols of privilege and power as police stations, arsenals, and the homes and shops of the wealthy,” Gilje wrote. The offices of abolitionist New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley were attacked twice. The New York Times was defended by its staff, who wielded several Gatling guns borrowed from the Army. Manning one of the Gatling guns was millionaire speculator Leonard Walter Jerome, Winston Churchill’s maternal grandfather and a major investor in the paper.

The paper’s publisher issued rifles to the staff – there was apparently a cache of firearms in the Times offices – and an armed skirmish line of reporters, printers and other staffers were all that stood in the way of the mob burning and looting the Gray Lady…

…and, in the end, deterred that attack.

So – the news media used the Second Amendment to protect the First Amendment.

Huh.

The DFL is trying to suspend the rules to try to jam down some gun control legislation while nobody’s paying attention.

They’re doing this because they know that once all the Civil Rights activists show up at the Capitol, it’ll be no contest.

If they get away with it, it’ll mean they can get a vote with

• No committee hearings
• No  public debate
• No chance for gun owners to counter their arguments

This is an attempt at a Chicago-style jamdown.

Bryan Strawser from the MNGOC explains what’s up.

Call your legislator today.  Not just today – now.  If you don’t know who they are, find out here. Tell them you do not support new gun control initiatives.  Tell them all legislation should go through the committee process with opportunity for public input. No suspension of the rules to ram through an anti-gun agenda!

Mass shootings are neither more frequent not more severe in the US than in other countries.

“But we’re only counting western first-world countries, Mitcih”.

OK.  Let’s count Western first-world countries:

Yep.  Including counties full of white people – the only ones the gun grabbers really care aboiut.

“But that’s death rates, which get skewed by small numbers of attacks in small countries!”

Right, because France, Belgium and Canada are small countries.

OK, let’s look at the actual frequency of mass shootings, per capita – which makes all countries the same

Huh.  So the US i s down the list even in terms of episodes per million people…

“Well you’re a racist”.

Clearly.

My entire adult life, I’ve considered the Bill of Rights inviolable – with the idea that they’re timeless principles, without which the idea of “Freedom” is pretty much meaningless. I took to heart the saying attributed to Ben Franklin – “He who would trade freedom for security deserves neither”.

But recent events have caused me, after much difficult thinking, to have a change of heart.

It’s time to change one of the Amendments in the BIll of Rights. Not *repeal* it – just change it. *To save lives*.

As David French notes in the National Review – the answer -or as close as we’ll get to an answer – on school schootings has to do with paying attention to those around us who are losing it.

As this story shows – it can work; a grandmother turned in a grandson who was exhibiting some troubling signs:

According to police in Everett, Washington, the grandmother of Joshua Alexander O’Connor called 911 after finding disturbing journal entries that described how the 18-year-old was planning to attack his high school.

“Officers were also told the grandson had a rifle stored in a guitar case. As officers reviewed copies of the journal, they were alarmed at the statements and detailed plans to shoot students and use homemade explosive devices at ACES High School,” a statement from Everett police read.

“I need to make this count,” O’Connor reportedly wrote, according to the Daily Herald. “I’ve been reviewing many mass shootings/bombings (and attempted bombings) I’m learning from past shooters/bombers mistakes.”

Huh.  Why, it’s almost like media coverage stokes their ambitions or something.

Of course, Ms. O’Connor’s grandma actually got through to someone who could do something about it.  Unlike those who called the FBI with a raft of warning signs about Nikolas Cruz,   but heard nothing back…:

The YouTuber, 36-year-old Ben Bennight, alerted the FBI, emailing a screenshot of the comment and calling the bureau’s Mississippi field office. He also flagged the comment to YouTube, which removed it from the video.

Agents with the bureau’s Mississippi field office got back to him “immediately,” Bennight said, and conducted an in-person interview the following day, on Sept. 25.

“They came to my office the next morning and asked me if I knew anything about the person,” Bennight told BuzzFeed News. “I didn’t. They took a copy of the screenshot and that was the last I heard from them.”

Well, at least not while there was something that could be done:

FBI agents contacted Bennight again Wednesday, after a 19-year-old named Nikolas Cruz allegedly opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in South Florida, killing at least 17 people.

Too busy chasing Russians, apparently.

Nik Cruz fired at his victims for three uninterrupted minutes at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

He had an AR-15-pattern rifle (a Smith and Wesson M&P15) – but with three uninterrupted minutes, he could easily have killed that many people with any garden-variety handgun, a hunting rifle, a shotgun – anything.

Unless…

…unless one person – a teacher, a principal, a freaking janitor – had put some lead in his general direction.   Broken him out of his narcissistic reverie with even the imminent threat of lethal resistance.

One lousy shot.  Just one.

Think of the lives that oculd’ve been saved.

But no.  To assuage the neo-religious faith that disarming the law-abiding hinders criminals, every adult in the building, like every adult at every school shooting (with two exceptions – here and here). ever.

I’m done playing nice with the gun grabbers.

CNN howls that a “gun industry lobbyist” “helped write” a “deregulation” proposal:

The white paper was produced by Acting ATF Deputy Director Ronald B. Turk and dated on President Trump’s inauguration day, January 20, 2017. It says the agency should consider allowing gun dealers to sell across state lines, loosen restrictions on gun noise suppressors, and pull back on its scrutiny of gun shops.

“If I am missing the mark on a major issue or disregarding a major discussion point any feedback you have would be appreciated,” Turk wrote to the lobbyist, Mark Barnes, on January 9, 2017. “My hope is that the agency can demonstrate flexibility where appropriate and identify areas for further discussion, recognizing that solving everyone’s concerns on each side would be difficult.”

CNN also whimpers:

The documents on the drafting of the white paper, as provided by the ATF, do not reflect any input from gun-control groups.

Which stands to reaason; they are jointly and severally worthless; they provide no factual, moral or political value to any policy discussion on the issue. None of them.

But their beef is that a “gun lobbyist” provided policy feedback to the ATF – reminiscent of the chorus of catcalling from the ignorant six year ago about the “American Legislative Exchange Council” providing model legislation to legislators, exactly as dozens or hundreds of other policy think tanks do.

Even – although the “think” is a bit of a stretch – gun grabber groups, as we discovered five years ago when the DFL, emboldened by their electoral sweep in 2012, copied and pasted reams of gun grab legislation from California, Maryland and Connecticut.

You’d think CNN would check those sort of facts…

…oh, I slay me.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

This article illustrates the poverty of local gun reporting.

Granted that this crew sounds like a bunch of losers who probably ought to be off the streets, a few points about Minnesota law:

It is legal to own night vision goggles.

It is legal to make your own firearm as long as you don’t sell it.  Homemade firearms do not require serial numbers.

It is legal to own a silencer, and to make one yourself, as long as you get the federal tax stamp. Possession itself is not illegal.

It is legal to own a semi-automatic replica of a submachine gun, such as the Uzi that fires one shot per trigger pull.

It is legal to own a real machine gun, if you have the tax stamp.

It is also legal to own a decommissioned rocket propelled grenade launcher (it might be legal to own a firing one, as long as you don’t have the ammo for it, I don’t know).  The article doesn’t say which they had.

It is legal to have as many rounds of ammunition as you like.

It is legal to have a separate fire-proof room to store firearms and ammunition.  And it’s legal to conceal that room from burglars.

An altered serial number on a gun is a crime and being a drug user in possession of a firearm is a crime. Those crimes are buried beneath the breathless recital of all the non-crimes.

There might be actual crimes here, or it could be a couple of minor offenses and a whole lot of politically correct posturing.  It would be nice to have more intelligent reporting so we could tell what’s going on.

I’m not holding my breath.

Joe Doakes

Reporters are supposed to be relentlessly curious, and to try to understand the things they report about.   And on many issues they are – including, with some reporters, at some times, on the issue of firearms and 2nd Amendment rights.

But most of the Twin Cities media is no more interested in finding the actual facts than, say, a giggly insecure snarkblogger from somewhere outside Montivideo might be.

A citizen with a carry permit interrupts a robber attacking a cop:

“Had he not been in the right place at the right time, who knows what would have happened,” Cpl. Cory Waters told the media. “But he definitely stopped the attack from continuing and becoming much worse. He might have even saved either one of their lives. It could have gone really bad, even for the suspect.”

More, faster.

There’s been a plea in re the stabbling at the Mall of America back in November:

Mahad Abdiaziz Abdiraham pleaded guilty last week to two counts of first-degree assault in connection with the Nov. 12 knife attack that injured two brothers in a dressing room at the mall’s Macy’s store.

The brothers, ages 19 and 25, suffered serious injuries from Abdiraham’s 8-inch knife.

According to KSTP-TV, Abdiraham’s attorney read a statement in court Thursday giving Abdiraham’s reasons for the stabbings.

In the statement, Abdiraham said he was motivated by a “call for jihad” and added that Americans will not be safe as long as “your country is at war with Islam.”

Time to deport all the Somali?

Well, maybe not

He has also been previously arrested for stabbing two staff members with a pen at an in-patient psychiatric unit, according to the criminal complaint in the Mall of America case.

I’m going to complain about religion here.

No, not Mr. Abdiaziz’s Islam – the guy sounds like he might not be wired to code, ifyacatchmydrift.

No, I’m talking about the religion of security theater that has made the MOA, at least officially, a Safe Zone for criminals; people in possession of enough rational faculties to think of such things know that anyone that follows the rules at the MOA is going to be unarmed and incapable of resisting someone with an, ahem, eight freaking inch knife.

Which is why if I did own any guns, and did have a carry permit, I would either never ever go to the Mall, or casually disobey the signs.  Not that I have a gun – they terrify me, and I’d never shoot anyone.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Concealed carry permit holder shoots a man dead, to stop him from beating a liquor store employee to death.

I love a story with a happy ending.

Joe Doakes

We’ll see how this shakes out – I don’t think John Choi wants Ramco residents feeling too empowered.

But so far, so good.

In more than a few self-defense shooting cases, from Trayvon Martin to this week’s episode in Rochester, people who oppose – and just don’t get – the right of self-defense point at the episode and smile like a toddler than just filled their diaper and chant “He was unarmed!”.

So was the perp in this case:

After the fender-bender, Falce and a man police identified as Alonzo Leron Smith got out of their cars, exchanged words and motioned at each other. Smith then delivered a single punch to the face and Falce fell backward, his head hitting the pavement.

“We believe that he was knocked unconscious almost immediately and he never did regain consciousness,” San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said at a news conference.

In Minnesota in 2016, among the 80-odd homicides were at least five “one punch kills” – punches where the victim fatally smacked their head, or suffered a fatal aneurysm or concussion from the punch itself.

Punches and kicks kill ten times as many people as “assault rifles” in an average year – 500 to somewhere around 50.