A couple of years ago, it almost appeared as if the MinnPost – a creation of Minnesota liberals with deep pockets intended to serve as a DFL PR outlet – might do the unthinkable; engage in some responsible journalism on the issue of the Second Amendment and gun rights.

Oh, make no mistake; they did plenty of dross – the normally excellent Erik Black underwhelmed with some of his work, and let’s not talk about their “public health” angle.  But they also engaged freelance journeyman journalist Mike Cronin, who did some excellent, inquisitive, even-handed work on the subject – so much so that the MinnPost apparently stopped publishing it.

They’re back to classic form, with this bit from Kristoffer Tigue, who apparently hasn’t gotten the memo – which someone needs to pass along to him.  To wit:

Heather Martens has never, not once, said a single, original, substantive, true thing about the Second Amendment or the Gun issue.  

Just to elaborate a little, and yet as much as any journalist should need? If you use Heather Martens as a source, your credibility is shot, as it were, right out of the gate.

Just try to count all the lies, non-sequiturs and piles of complete buncombe that this article slops in front of the public.

A Steaming Pile Of Premise:  It’s hard to know where to start with this bit:

Eighteen-year-old Dae’veon has seen everything from assault rifles to handguns, and it wasn’t hard for him to find them. In fact, he’s owned several handguns, shotguns and even a submachine gun, he said. And all of it he bought without a background check, no questions asked.

Last year, Dae’veon, who agreed to talk if his last name was kept anonymous, was caught with a gun and charged with aggravated robbery.

That’s when he decided he needed to keep his head down, focus on school and try to turn his life around. But he knows if he wanted to, all he’d have to do is make a quick phone call to get another gun, he said. “It’s like going to the store to buy a pop,” he said. “You just call whoever you know that has a gun and tell them what you want to spend.”

So let’s stop and take stock, here; we’re being asked not only to believe that seventeen-year-old Dae’veon owned pistols and “assault rifles” (already illegal for juveniles) and a “submachine gun” (illegal for most everyone for about 80 years, now), but that he bought all of them (illegal for minors)..

…from “dealers” who didn’t give him a background check while carrying out acts that, as we’ve seen above, are state and federal felonies?

Why, perhaps if we passed a background check law, those dealers would have been able to gently chide young Dae’veon to wait until he was older?

Do people actually think young Dae’veon bought his little arsenal from a law-abiding citizen, much less Gander Mountain?

Earlier this month, two DFL lawmakers, Sen. Ron Latz and Rep. Dan Schoen, introduced a bill that would require background checks on all gun sales in the state, a measure supported by a number of advocacy groups and law enforcement associations, who say it could help prevent firearms from reaching the wrong hands — like those with criminal backgrounds or minors like Dae’veon. It too has received pushback from gun-rights groups.

And for good reason.  The bill is complete baked wind.  It asks us to accept two complete balderdash premises:   that criminals will follow laws, and that government will follow the rules.

Our Diligently Law-Abiding Criminal Class:  I’m going to be charitable, and assume the reporter, Mr. Tigue, just doesn’t know the issue all that well, and is reciting what he’s been told by one Bloomberg operative or another.

There are some tells, of course (emphasis added):

And yet, for all the disagreements over whether increased background checks will work, one fact is beyond dispute when it comes to guns in Minnesota. Like it or not, they are remarkably easy to acquire.

Well, no.   They’re mildly annoying to acquire if you’re a law-abiding citizen.  They may or may not be easy if you’re a criminal buying from other criminals.

Which is a distinction the gun grabbers really, really want to keep obscured.

In Minnesota, to legally buy a gun from a store requires that the purchaser be at least 18 and have a permit issued by the applicant’s county sheriff’s office — a process that also subjects the applicant to both a state and federal background check.

But here’s the wrinkle: For those who already have a permit and simply want to sell a gun to someone else, there’s no law requiring a background check.

Therein lies the problem, said Heather Martens, the executive director of Protect Minnesota, a group advocating for tightening gun laws. The lack of regulation around private gun sales makes it too easy for those who shouldn’t own guns to be able to get them, a complication that goes beyond the oft-cited issue of gun show sales.

“If you want to fill the trunk of your car with guns and drive to any street, park there and start selling guns, you can,” Martens said. “There’s no law against that.”

Remember – it’s Heather Martens.  She has never said a single substantial, original, true thing about the gun issue.  And she’s not starting today.

So while there’s no law against loading up a trunk with guns and trying to sell them,  there are laws against selling them to criminals, and minors.   If they sell a gun to someone who goes on to use it in a crime, and it gets traced back them them, there are nasty legal consequences.

You can even do it on line, if you want:

Technology has made things even easier. Many individuals also sell their guns online on websites like Armslist.com, where all people need to do is create a free account to gain access to people selling firearms all around the state.

Right.

Now let’s say you’re one of the people who sold a “submachine gun” (banned by the feds since the thirties) to a young Dae’veon (also a crime); in other words, someone who routinely commits gun-trafficking felonies.   Ron Latz’s background check bill goes into effect.

Are you suddenly going to start running background checks from the back of your car?

If you’re the guy fencing stolen pistols in the men’s room of a bar in Farmington, are you going to step outside and run a NICS check?

If you said “why, sure”, then you might be a Ron Latz voter who thinks Heather Martens makes sense.

The Star/Tribune’s editorial board is a group of people, apparently in their sixties and seventies, who seem to spend their days pining away for a time when the media could say anything they want without fear of being caught out in public by people who know better.

Those days are long gone.  Only the editorial board doesn’t seem to know it, or recognize it, as shown in last week’s editorial calling for, at the least, hearings on a “universal background check” bill.

And like everyone on the institutional left, they participate – with all the grace of a German jazz band – in the left’s only real tactic on the issue of gun control; Lie First, Lie Always.

Why, it’s almost as if Heather Martens, in addition to being a State Representative, is a Strib editor…

(more…)

…it’s easier to vote than it is to check out a library book.  Than it is to buy groceries.  Than it is to cash a check, to get a prescription, or to take out a small business loan, or to adopt a child who just needs love.

To:  Mitch McConnell and the entire GOP Senate Caucus
From: Mitch Berg, cranky peasant
Re:  Put Up Or Shut Up

Senator McConnell,

This is the proverbial “hill to die on”.

Come back with your shield, or on it.

That is all.

To:  Rep. Kim Norton, Rep. Heather Martens, et al
From:  Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  Your Sources

All,

Don’t say I never did anything for you.  This is as good as any case you’ve ever made:

Feel free to just cut the crap and quote this at will.

That is all.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Excellent recap of Minnesota self-defense law.  Crappy facts.

joe doakes

Which is one “excellent” better than you’re gonna get from anyone in the Twin Cities media.

Yesterday was Minnesota Gun Owners Lobbying Day – where Real Minnesotans came together to lobby their legislators to pass Second-Amendment-friendly legislation, and shun the stupid bills that Michael Bloomberg is paying for.

And since the legislature was busy talking about all the bills they were introducing, the other side – to the extent you could call it that – was also at the Capitol.

Let’s compare and contrast.

The Herd:  Here is the “group” from the pro-slavery group “Moms Want Action”.  

Count ’em.   That’s 26 people.  And most of them were being  paid, directly (DFL pols, people on the Bloomberg payroll) or indirectly (cops representing the Police Chiefs Assocation) to be there.

If one-third of the people in that photo above were not present for vocational reasons, and being compensated in some way for their time, I’d be amazed.

In other words, at the most Moms Want Action drew eight “activists”.  And that’s being generous.

Drone photo courtesy Dustin Doyle

The Pack: Meanwhile at the foot of the Capitol Mall, there was a different crowd – distinguisted by being an actual crowd.  It was GOCRA’s “MNGOLD” group – or as the sensible refer to them, the “Real Americans”.
I was proud and honored, by the way, to have been invited to be the Master of Ceremonies.   We were joined by an array of speakers, each of them authorities in their area of the issue; Speaker of the House Kurt Daudt (who pledged a lonely death for all of Bloomberg’s bills this session), Oleg Volk (who talked about life without freedom in his native USSR), Rep. Jim Nash, a second-Amendment leader in the House, Professor Joe Olson, the longtime leader of GOCRA, as well as GOCRA president Andrew Rothman and Rep. Tony Cornish, who noted “a bill won’t get passed if it never comes up for a hearing” – which, in his committee, none ever will.

I counted about 170 people – mostly younger, almost exclusively working people, outdoors in temperatures that hovered below 40 degrees as the rally started,  taking a few hours off from their mostly private-sector jobs to come and fight for freedom; most of the crowd, clad in their maroon GOCRA t-shirts, went straight in to the Capitol to buttonhole their legislators and let them know the votes they expected (and to thank the good ones for the pro-freedom votes they made, if applicable).

And not a single one of them was there because it was their job (other than the state’s NRA rep).

That is, conservatively (how else) about seven times the crowd of unemployed/underemployed wannabe social justice warriors and other layabouts that came out to work toward your enslavement.  Or more like 20:1, if you just count people there voluntarily.

If it’d been a Saturday – or a vital hearing – the odds would have been 2-3 times as strongly in the Real Americans’ favor.

Welcome to hell, pro-slavery activists.

Earlier this week, we wrote about the story of a Hmong man on the East Side of Saint Paul who was beaten badly by a crowd of youths.   The attack ended when the man’s wife came out of the house with her gun (and her carry permit).

Kudos to WCCO for being the sole news outlet that didn’t bury the lede.

Come on down to the Capitol (lower mall) today at noon for Minnesota Gun Owners Lobbying Day.

There’ll be a few speakers – I’m MCing – but the important part is each of you.  The whole idea is this; we, the people, are going to head into the Capitol and lobby our legislators to support good gun bills, and oppose the stupid ones.

This has a huge effect on the legislature.  Having hundreds of the good guys in their maroon Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance (GOCRA) T-shirts, all over the place really starts a few of ’em thinking (especially when they compare the crowds to the pathetic drizzle of nattering crones who show up for ProtectMN, Code Pink and Moms Want Action rallies).

So I do hope to see you down there.

High noon!

TANGENTIAL QUESTION:  I wonder how much street crime there’ll be around this rally?

East-side Saint Paul man jumped by group of teen thugs stabbed in the eye with a stick, missing being blinded by mere millimeters.

The attack took place in an alley behind Geranium Avenue, near Payne Avenue. “When I got hit, I got dazed a little and fell to my knees, but I got up and continued to fight off my attackers,” Chang said.

Chang shouted to his sister-in-law, who had been in the vehicle with him and locked herself inside, to phone his wife and ask her to come out of the home with a gun.

Both Chang and his wife have permits to carry, and she came outside with a gun, Chang said. The attackers ran off.

I read these stories – gangs of youths roaming the neighborhoods, beating people to within an inch of their lives, like Ray Widstrand a couple of years ago – and wonder when the left will start to apply their old warhorse, “if it saves one life…”.

There’s one, right here.

When/if the police finally catch the person responsible for this shooting, at the corner of my neighborhood on Saturday night, what do you suppose the odds are that he bought the gun at a gun show, or from a law-abiding citizen in any location?

Y’know, if only we had universal background checks, perhaps guns wouldn’t get onto “the street” like this:

That’s right – if we can only get law-abiding citizens to submit to proctological exams, that’ll solve it.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Gun control advocates snicker that men own guns to compensate for having small genitals, and that 20,000 men commit suicide by gun each year because they won’t seek mental health treatment.
Item 3 on President Obama’s list of new proposal says anybody who does seek mental health treatment loses his right to own guns.
In other words, men who seek help will be castrated.
Amazingly, this is not encouraging men to flock to mental health treatment centers.  Perhaps this newest proposal is ill-considered?
But it’s for their own good!  We must take away their guns so they don’t get into trouble!
Uh huh, that’s what they told the tomcat on the way to the vet.
Joe Doakes

If you wanna run with an analogy, why not commit to the bit?

I had too many jalapenos on my burrito last night, and dreamed that I’d read a letter to the editor in a 1942 edition of the Strib that read something like “Aren’t Americans racist for going to war against Germany, when the Deutsche-Amerikanische Bund is preaching rapprochement with Germany?”

I wanted to yell “But one country declared war on us, while the Bund, ill-advised as their ethnic sympathies turned out to be, were exercising their First Amendment rights!”…

…but I couldn’t.  Because blogs didn’t exist in 1942.  And either did I.

But I woke up – both extant, and with my blog humming right along – and, given the nightmare I’d just awoken from, was almost overjoyed to read this bit of intensely flawed reasoning in an op-ed by Jesse Zettel.

In the past week, there has been much talk of whether Apple should help the FBI gain access to a smartphone of one of the San Bernardino, Calif., shooters. At stake is whether we are willing to sacrifice some of our freedom for some security.

The correct answer – someone tell all seven Presidential candidates – is no, we should not be.  But that’s not really the subject, here.

In the past when the question was about guns, our answer has been a resounding no. Now that the question is about our privacy, there seem to be a lot of people saying yes.

Ah, yes – the group of people that I’ll call the “omnisicent ‘a lot'”; that group of People Not Like Me that we’re assured exist and confirm your thesis, notwithstanding their being your personal anecdote.

How many people do this?  A lot of people… – oh, snap.  Now I’m doing it!

Carry on.

On “The McLaughlin Group” last weekend, Pat Buchanan cited a Latin phrase “salus populi suprema lex,” meaning “the safety of the people is the highest law.” He doesn’t say that when it comes to guns.

He’s leading up to something, here.  I can almost taste it.

We’ll come back to that.

In other words: We will not give up our freedom to easily access weapons of war for the sake of safety, but we might be open to giving up our privacy.

We’re dealing with two different “omniscient a lots” here:

• “A lot of people” erroneously believe that you can “hack” just one iPhone to get at information.  Some – Trump – echo Buchanan’s statist beliefs.  Others – Marco Rubio among them – don’t know how software architecture works (and, admit it, most likely either do you).   They’re not malicious, stupid, or closeted fascists – they’re uninformed.
• Another “lot of people” think that by controlling the access of law-abiding citizens to gun, you make society “safer”.  They are equally ill-informed, although since the truth is out there and doesn’t require any technical background to understand, they are more likely to be willfully ignorant, stupid or malicious.  Not all of them.  Just a lot of them…oh, there I go again.

Back to Mr. Zettel:

If part of what the FBI wants to find in that phone is how the shooters got the guns, it need look no further than a Wal-Mart or a gun show.

The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant knows that this is where to get guns, and it tells its followers as much.

Easy access to guns is the Trojan horse of our time. ISIL didn’t have to send a shooter. It didn’t even have to provide the guns: Our own laws did that.

Shall we continue that train of thought?

If the FBI wants to know where terrorists get bomb fixins, they need look no further than any farm supply store.

If they want to know where they get the material to incinerate people, they need look no further than a gas station or a propane vendor.

If they want to bring down three skyscrapers, they need to look no further than the nearest airport.

If they want to create a ghastly wave of up-close-and-personal terror, they need only visit the cutlery section at Target.  It’s happened.  (note to Mr. Zettel – guess how that particular wave of terror got stopped?  You’re not gonna like it)

And the next victim of these misguided laws may well be our privacy.

Why is it that the ability of gun manufacturers to sell weapons of war is held sacred, while our own privacy is considered negotiable?

Let’s put that strawman out of our misery; the smart people support all freedom – the right to privacy and the government’s obligation to observe due process, as well as the constitutional, civil, human right to keep and bear arms.

Mr. Zettel – to invert his thesis – is clamoring to give up our right to defend ourselves from criminals and terrorists and our government, while exalting the right to privacy.

I wonder if the next time there is a mass shooting in this country (and there will be more), we will be willing to look at the easy access to guns that makes these shootings so commonplace, rather than searching for other freedoms we might be willing to give up instead. Something has to give. After all: “salus populi suprema lex.”

Here’s another Latin phrase.  It’s more applicable to this “debate”: Ne contumeliam mea intelligentia; argumentum est puerile et infans.
.  

There’s a new sheriff in town at “ProtectMN”.

She’s got size two shoes to fill.

And they’ll be having a party to talk about it tonight:

Dear Heinrich,
Come meet the new Executive Director of Protect Minnesota and learn how YOU can help prevent gun violence in our state. The Rev. Nancy Nord Bence is excited to meet you, share important information prior to caucusing on March 1, and hear your ideas for the growth of our coalition. Wine and appetizers will be provided.

After “Protect” MN’s last decade in the legislature, one might think the appetizer would be “crow”.

But I imagine they’ll be knocking back the vino, all right.

DATE: Thursday, February 25, 2016
TIME: Open House from 6:30-8:30pm

I’m pretty sure you need to be on the guest list to show up.

It’s right in the middle of the AM1280 Debate Party, so I won’t be able to attend.

Coincidence?  I think not.

LOCATION: Protect Minnesota Offices, 2395 University Ave W, Suite 204, St. Paul MN 55114. (That’s in the Security Building on the corner of Raymond and University.) Street parking is free after 5pm. Come to the entrance on Raymond Avenue and our doorman will let you in.
Hope you’ll join us!
The Rev. Nancy Nord Bence

www.protectmn.org

Welcome to the battle, Reverend Nord Bence.  I’ll extend you the same invitation I’ve been extending to your predecessor, Heather Martens, for the past decade; you can come on my show any Saturday afternoon and talk “gun safety”.  Hopefully you’ll be less pusillanimous than your predecessor.

And just to show you I’m all about the same goals you are, I’ll do this for you:

Audience Participation:  What advice do you, the smartest comment section in town‡, want to give Rev. Nord Bence?

Go!

‡  Well, most of you, anyway.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Most recent report from Centers for Disease Control concerning death by gun violence not helpful . . . to Liberals.

A buddy mentioned:

“I took note of the drownings.  The Boy Scouts have always considered water as the most dangerous place for scouts.  The Director of the Waterfront is always the most responsible position in camp.  Not the Director of the Shooting Range, or the Archery Range.  Not the Director of the High Climbing Tower, or the Food Service, or even the Medical Oversight person.  Waterfront is the place where most kids die in summer camps.  But not in Boy Scout camps.”

Water doesn’t drown people.  People drown in water.  Teach the people to be safe and the water is safe.  What an amazing concept.  Too bad it doesn’t apply to other activities like driving or hiking or . . . firearms.

Joe Doakes

Accidental shootings are almost 100% preventable – just like accidental drownings.  You just have to extend the effort.

A law-abiding citizen with a carry permit killed a would-be robber in Brooklyn Park Monday evening.  The Brooklyn Park PD just confirmed that the shooter was a citizen with a carry permit, and the decedent was attempting to rob the citizen.

The person targeted for robbery has “a valid permit to carry a handgun” and was not arrested, said Deputy Police Chief Mark Bruley.

Officers recovered both guns at the scene as they continue to investigate the shooting.

Police have yet to disclose the identities of those involved in the confrontation.

And I’m going to speculate that the law-abiding citizen who did the shooting won’t get his name released, because of the danger he’d face from the rest of the community.  It’s been true with several of the justifiable homicides we’ve seen – the Evanovich shooting and the Broadbent incident last summer among them.

Bruley said the man who died “goes back and forth between Brooklyn Park and Minneapolis. He’s an individual we’ve known from previous contact. He certainly hangs out around here.” Bruley declined to say more about that contact entailed.

I’m going to guess it involved the fact that he was just in the middle of getting his life turned around.   It’s a theme in this sorts of episodes.

State Rep. Pat Garofalo, R-Farmington, said the outcome of this shooting validates a 2003 law in Minnesota that allows people to carry a firearm in public.

“A loss of life is a tragedy,” Garofalo wrote. “But when a criminal pulls a gun, they risk ending their life. Concealed carry works.”

As of early this year, there were more than 221,000 active permit holders in Minnesota, according to the latest data report from the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.

The total has grown by more than 20,000 in the past six months. Now, about one in 19 eligible Minnesota adults has a permit to carry, according to Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance.

The number is up over 5% of eligible adults – which, in some parts of the state, likely means there’s a better than one in ten chance that someone you might want to try to rob can end you.

The odds are better in the Metro, if you’re a robber; most don’t grow up in a (law-abiding) gun culture; there are fewer ambient, social chances to get into shooting, much less self-defense.  Less than 2% of eligible adults have carry permits in the Metro, where the crime rate shows they are the most needed (and, I’d argue, also shows their lack).

Condolences to the victim’s family; he may have run off the rails, but he was someone’s kid, brother or parent.

And best of luck to the shooter, whoever you are.  And thanks.

 UPDATE:  Is this predictable or what – the Strib always shuts down story comments when a good guy uses a gun against a bad actor.

Wonder why that is?

UPDATE 2:  By my count, since 2005, that makes five human lives saved via the ability to resist violence with a legally-carried handgun:

1. A bouncer shot a knife-wielding drunk outside a Minneapolis bar.
2. Another bouncer shot another knife-wielding drunk outside Grumpy’s in Northeast Minneapolis
3. An unidentified man shot Darren Evanovich behind the Cub Foods on East Lake street in 2011, after Evanovich and his sister pistolwhipped a fifty-something Latina cleaning lady and stole her just-cashed paycheck.
4. Another unidentified man shot Lauventai Broadbent last August, one of a small gang of teenagers who tried to rob the citizen using guns they’d stolen earlier that day on the East Side.
5. Yesterday’s episode.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Which of these Obama administration gun control proposals is NOT a thinly disguised money-laundering scheme to give federal dollars via grants to Liberals who will donate it right back to the DFL?

Joe Doakes

Is that a trick question?

Jesse Hughes – lead singer of the band “Eagles of Death Metal”, the band that was playing at the Bataclan in Paris the night of the Paris Massacre – says what every gun rights activist already knows; the only response to bad guys with guns is good guys with guns:

“Did your French gun control stop a single [expletive] person from dying at the Bataclan?” Hughes said. “And if anyone can answer yes, I’d like to hear it, because I don’t think so. I think the only thing that stopped it was some of the bravest men that I’ve ever seen in my life charging head-first into the face of death with their firearms.”

The left’s answer, inevitably, is a series of academic postulates that wither as fast as the crowd at Bataclan under reasoned scrutiny, to say nothing of real-life events.

Dear MOA: With all due respect: QQQQ.

The only reasoned response?  You, and you alone, are responsible for your and your family’s protection.  And while the world is demonstrably safer than it was, 20 and 70 and 200 years ago, human nature means that evil, some time, some place, will be waiting for someone, somewhere – whether in the form of a lone mugger, a couple of rapists,  a gang of terrorists, or a government full of gangsters.

By the way – there’s been four terror-related mass shootings, and ten terror attacks altogether, since the Charlie Hebdo massacre, with a total death toll of 152, and 388 injured.

In Zürich, where handgun carry permits are relatively plentiful?  Holding steady at zero and zero.  While correlation doesn’t equal causation, it fits a pattern that we see here in the US, and that they saw in Israel in the seventies; terrorists (like delusional mass-shooters in general) avoid places where there might be resistance.

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is at a large gas station in Minnetonka, MN.  Having just bought gas, he’s looking for a new windshield wiper.  He turns down the aisle marked “Windshield Wipers/Condiments/Magazines Showing People Getting Hit In The Groin”, and notices Gutterball GARY – a blogger at the (possibly fictional) progressive blog “MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com“, who describes his hobbies as bowling, heckling people, and shouting really loud – reading a magazine.  

BERG tries to backpedal out of the aisle, but GARY notices him. 

GARY:  Hey, Merg!   You’re stupid!

BERG:  Nothing my mother doesn’t say.

GARY:  The Second Amendment is not an individual right!

BERG:  Well, the Supreme Court in the Heller and McDonald cases disagreed, and made it both a precedent and incorporated it to the states.

GARY:   You’re stupid and you have no idea what you’re talking about!  Justice Burger said the Second Amendment was “a fraud on the American public.”

BERG:  So?

GARY:  He was a conservative!

BERG:  Maybe compared to Nixon, who appointed him, but not really.   And he was really arguing a strawman; he was saying the Second Amendment doesn’t preclude regulation…

GARY:  Burger disagrees with you!  And he’s from Minnesota! It’s further proof you don’t know what you’re talking about!  Ha ha ha ha ha ha!

BERG:  Um,…

GARY:  …ha ha ha ha ha!

BERG:  Say, Gary?  In what case did Burger  write that opinion?

GARY:  Huh?

BERG:  Was that statement from a Supreme Court, or even an appelate, case?

GARY:  Huh?

BERG:  The thing Burger said?

GARY:  You’re stupid!

BERG:  Right.  It wasn’t part of a case.  It was a personal opinion, in a 1990 PBS interview.  It was of no more legal weight than you or me talking to PBS.

GARY:  He was a conservative, and he disagrees with you, and he’s a Supreme Court judge, so you’re stupid!

BERG:  Huh.  So because a “conservative” SCOTUS justice had a personal, private opinion that dissents from conservative and libertarian orthodoxy, I’m stupid.

GARY:  Yeah!  Ha ha ha ha…

BERG:  um…

GARY:  …ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

BERG:  So who said this:  “Certainly, one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of the citizen to keep and bear arms. … The right of the citizen to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America but which historically has proven to be always possible.”

GARY:  That sounds like Ted Nugent!  Which means you’re an anti-semite!  Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha…

BERG: Actually…

GARY:  ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

BERG:  Actually it was Hubert H. Humphrey.  A “progressive”, a former Vice President and Senator, and the greatest politician Minnesota ever produced.  And it’d seem he disagrees with  Justice Burger.

GARY:  Who cares what an anti-semite thinks?

BERG:  Oh, the Nugent thing?  Pfft.  I didn’t even like Ted Nugent as a guitar player all that much; I certainly never appointed him my spokesperson.

GARY:  Nope!   Nugent is on your side, so you’re an antisemite!

BERG:  Ah.  So if someone were to say “With Iraq no threat, why invade a sovereign country? The answer: President Bush’s policy to secure Israel. . . . [S]preading democracy in the Mideast to secure Israel would take the Jewish vote from the Democrats.”

GARY:  Sounds like Nugent or some other ReTHUGliCON.

BERG:  First – I’m always amazed to hear people actually talking in caps.  Second – no.  It was Democrat senator Fritz Hollings.

So – does that make you anti-semitic?

GARY:  You’re stupid.

BERG:  Natch.

And SCENE.  

Panera is the latest large chain to succumb to the blandishments of “Harpies For A Criminal-Safe World” “Moms Want Action” (_{a fully-owned subsidiary of Michael Bloomberg}).

Bakery-cafe chain Panera Bread has joined a growing list of retailers including Starbucks and Target  by announcing that customers should leave their guns at home.

It makes no difference to me – I have eaten at Panera exactly thrice, and the last two, it was because someone else was picking up the tab.   I never ever really want an $8 grilled cheese sandwich that bad.

In the weeks and months leading up to this policy announcement, Panera Bread sought advice from Michael Bloomberg-backed Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, now part of the former Mayor’s $50 million Everytown nonprofit.

Behind every dumb decision about guns…

“Panera deserves our thanks and our congratulations for taking this important step, and I applaud the company for proactively consulting Moms Demand Action as it developed and implemented its policy,” said the group’s founder Shannon Watts, who has herself become the focus of ire from open carry activists and the NRA in recent months following efforts to see retailers and restaurant chains change their firearms policies.

And everyone deserves Moms Want Action’s(_{a fully-owned subsidiary of Michael Bloomberg}) thanks for taking this action, which will end “gun violence” at Panera restraurants nationwide…

…oh, wait.   Never mind.

I’ll admit it; I’ve gotten into a bit of a rut when dealing with the left and media (pardon the redundancy).

Especially when they talk about “reaching across divides”.  Whenever people on the left talk about “Reaching” across one “divide” or another (let’s leave aside the fact that divides are always of their making), the best one can hope for is that they’ll act like Jane Goodall – ideological anthropologists, here to furrow their brows and write about the Conservatives in the Mist.   At worst, they come to mug for their fans and exude their self-perceived superiority and laugh at the locals.

Both efforts pretty generally backfire when the subject is firearms and the Second Amendment.  The mugging and smugging usually gets undercut by a lot of unforced errors.  And once in a while, the lefty has a Road to Damascus moment and sees the light.  Yes, it happens.

(more…)

Yet another guy with a gun ends yet another violent felony.

Here’s hoping the investigation ends with a finding of “Justifiable Homicide”.

January:  the Real Americans of the Second Amendment movement watched President Obama’s tearful, angry, and utterly theatrical broadside about guns, gun owners and gun manufacturers, noted that nearly everything he was “proposing” was existing law already, and said that the President’s big “effort” was nothing but a shallow bit of political grandstanding calculated to make it look like he planned to, as his supporters wailed, “dooooooooooo something”, without actually signing the political death warrants of every Democrat between the Hudson and the Sierra Madre.

February:  The New York Times notices the same thing.

Lesson:  the Real Americans of the Second Amendment movement are smarter and better-informed than the media.

Joe Joe Doakes from Como Park emails about an appeals court ruling of interest to Second Amendment supporters:

This article focuses on the important point:  the battleground for Second Amendment rights is in the court-created rules, not the Constitution.

If firearms ownership is a constitutionally protected fundamental right, then any law infringing that right must pass “strict scrutiny” meaning the law must be narrowly tailored and the least restrictive means to further a compelling government interest.  This is the same level of scrutiny given to restrictions on speech and religion and very few laws can meet that test.  Which is as it should be – the whole POINT of constitutionally protected rights is to prevent the government from infringing on them.

The lower court applied “intermediate scrutiny” which is a lower standard: laws can infringe on rights if the law furthers an important government interest in some way that is substantially related to the government’s interest.  This is the level of review given to sex discrimination laws: it’s easier to pass because the right being protected is not as important in the constitutional hierarchy.

The Court of Appeals got it right.  Firearms belong with speech and religion on the top of the hierarchy of rights the Founders wanted to protect.

Yes, I know, the Court of Appeals is still applying the idiotic “home defense” notion instead of recognizing the Founders intent that the citizenry be as well-equipped as the government in order to resist tyranny; but that’s a battle yet to come.

Joe Doakes

But only if we keep the Supreme Court in rough balance.

Which is one reason why I will plug my nose and vote for Donald Trump if he’s nominated.