So the next time some anti-gun talking head says “There’ve been 355 mass shootings so far this year”, remember – the figure comes from this site, “Shootingtracker.com“.  It’s a crowd-sourced site that allows pretty much anyone to report a “mass shooting” – defined as any event where three or more people (including the shooter) get shot.

Now, the media presents this as if every incident is a spree killing – someone setting out to kill innocent people at random (Columbine, Red Lake, the DC Navy Yard et al) or as acts of terrorism (San Bernardino, Chattanooga etc).

Of course, it includes many more mundane crimes; thugs shooting into crowded bars, family murder-suicides, and many, many criminal acts gone terribly awry.

And, it seems, one act in 2015 of whose genesis we’re not remotely sure.

Check out #345.  It was the shooting in North Minneapolis on November 23.

Now, you can find Mr. Scarsella’s motives repugnant – I certainly do, if they are as alleged.  And you can note, very correctly, that if Messrs Scarsella, Macey, Gustavsson and Backman wanted to claim self-defense, waiting for the Minneapolis Police to find them was the wrong way to do it.

But they do, in fact, seem to have at least a passing claim at self-defense, not something that can be dismissed out of hand no matter how much one may wish to.

So while it may be legitimate to count it as a “mass shooting” – a mass of three or more people were shot! – lumping it in there with San Bernardino, and the Navy Yard, and Umpqua, with their perps that fully intended to kill innocent people for purposes of either media immortality or political terror, is deeply dishonest – whether on “Shootingtracker.com”‘s part, or on the media’s.

It also introduces the question:  does it include other shootings, where a citizen interrupted a mass shooting with return fire?

I’ll be looking this over in coming days.

As carry permit applications, pre-purchase background checks, and gun and ammo sales roar to new all-time records, the NRA is being crushed with new and renewing members.

Scarcely a peep in the media (especially about the membership).

But one Democrat politician and “NRA member” “quits” – and the media is lined up out the door.

If I were a betting man (and I’m not), I’d wager good money that:

1. He was an “NRA member” for the same reason I “joined the teachers union” when I taught a semester at Metro State, and
2. Come his next campaign, he’s going to have at least one pic in his campaign lit, decked out in hunting camo with a duck gun.

But I won’t blame anyone for not taking any action on that bet.

That figure that the media and the anti-gun chanting-point-bots are jabbering about – where there’ve ostensibly been 355 “mass shootings” so far this year?

Yeah, it’s BS.

(more…)

The Anoka County Sheriff’s office has announced, to some fanfare, that they are lowering the fee for carry permits from $75 to $10 for people on active duty in the military.

Which, on the one hand, is great.

But then I had two thoughts:

Rights:  I support our military – especially their right to not be as undefended as a pack of hamsters when not covered by Rules of Engagement overseas.

But are they more entitled to their civil rights and liberties than the rest of us?  Should government be deciding which citizens have easier access to their Second Amendment rights, any moreso than one’s First, Fourth, Fifth or Fourteenth Amendment rights?

This is, in a way, a throwback to the bad old days, pre-2003, when a law-abiding citizens’a access to their Second Amendment rights – their ability to get a carry permit – was directly related to their clout and access to local government officials. It’s more benign, of course – it’s the same shall-issue policy once the fee is out of the way – but $10 is easier to cover than $75, no matter who you are.

That’s the danger when government gets into the business of doling out our freedoms to us instead of us doling its power out to it; it starts picking winners and losers.  And that’s what this is, even if we generally support this particular group of winners.

The Sheriff’s Nest Egg:  Sheriffs charge a wide range of fees around the state; Ramsey County is up around $100, along with most of the other Metro counties, if I recall correctly; others are much cheaper.

But the fee covers the cost of a department employee taking an application (which the applicant fills out), filing it, and at some point entering the applicant’s data into one or more databases to see if there’s a disqualifying hit.  Then the state prints and mails a card.

What’s the actual cost of this process, in terms of government time and materials?  Estimates vary – law enforcement is pretty tight-lipped about it – but it’s somewhere between $5 and $20.  And I’m no expert, but I’d say Anoka County has just given us a “tell” about the actual cost.

Which means plenty of Minnesota counties are putting away huge nest eggs of carry permit application fee money.   It’s become a tax on law-abiding citizens exercising their tights – not much different than the poll taxes that got ruled out of existence decades ago.

Congrats, Anoka County servicepeople, and enjoy your new benefit in good health.

But think about it, everyone.

The world is a constant churn of change; from style and music to mores and standards, nothing stays the same.

With one exception:  Markos “Kos” Moulitsas, ten years after saying “screw ’em” when four US contractors were slaughtered in Fallujah, is still a loathsome, wretched human being.

I’ve heard The Daily Kos called the cesspool of American media.  It’s half right.  The Daily Kos blog is the cesspool.  Markos Moulitsas and his contributors, and most of his readers, are the cess.

I’ve been offline for a bit, so I guess I’m just catching up, here.

My condolences to the victims of yesterday’s episode of workplace violence in San Bernardino.

Clearly, the avalanche of white-supremacist violence that the left, media and Administration (pardon the redundancy), and especially against the Planned Parenthood clinic just two miles away from the event, in our climate-change-afflicted nation, have been warning us about is coming rapidly to pass.

The real tragedy is this: if California merely banned magazines larger than ten rounds, as well as a much wider range of “assault weapons” than Federal law currently addresses, and instituted much more intrusive background checks than the rest of the country, none of this would have happened.

We can still be thankful that none of the victims, being in a “gun-free” government building, were able to resist, or who knows how bad it could have gotten?

UPDATE:  Oh.

UPDATE:  As always we follow the 24 hour rule here in SITD.

But – and I’m strictly speculating here – am I the only one who thinks it’s odd that the killer or killers (news reporters are conflicted on that point) didn’t stick around to go out in the usual blaze of media glory, but shot up the meeting and drove away in a “black SUV?”

Another mass shooting in California.

That is to say, a state that has every restriction that gun owners want (or admit to wanting so far):  magazine limits, background checks on private sales, the works.

A state that does its best to prevent a “good guy” from getting a gun.

How could this possibly be?

Watch for the media and the “President” to try not to waste the crisis – and for a lot of lies from both.  And above all, remember the 24 hour rule with media coverage.

Some years ago, an anti-gun group published a “study” showing that the rate of gun deaths was higher in red, square, stereotypically conservative flyover states where guns were plentiful and available to the law-abiding.

Of course, it’s a misleading point – in keeping with the gun control dictum to “Lie First, Lie Last, Lie Always”.  The vast majority of gun deaths are suicides – and this is especially true in the rural west, as a disproportionate number of people, usually older, male, depressed, often very ill, decide to check out via the most reliable means they have available, their firearms.  It’s tragic; it’s also not the same as murder, robbery, kidnapping, rape, aggravated assault or other violent crimes committed against others.   And it doesn’t take many suicides in a thinly-populated rural western county to send that per capita death rate soaring.

But no mind; fake as it is, this particular narrative made the usual rounds:

• Through the various far-left blogs that pretty much exist to recite the left’s chanting points
• To the various gun grabber groups, whose only real source of “information” is the chanting points they’re fed by their superiors in the “progressive” food chain
• And finally, mainstream “news” organizations.

And so – barely a decade after having been chastened to a fine sheen for using fraudulent sources, CBS News is still in the business of mindlessly parroting fake chanting points.

Yesterday, we noted that Rep. Kim Norton – the soon-to-be retired legislator from Rochester who’s going to be pushing the various gun-control bills that the DFL is copying and pasting from their benefactors at Bloomberg – accused people who oppose US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s “idea” of barring anyone on the government’s double-dog-secret “Terrorist Watch List” from buying guns, of “supporting allowing terrorists to have weapons”.

No, I’m serious.  In an incredible display of the kind of logic that most adults were shamed out of using back in fourth grade, Norton accused Bryan Strawser of the MN Gun Owners Political Action Committee of supporting guns in the hands of terrorists:

And this introduced an interesting question: what does it take to get on the list?

From that noted conservative tool, the HuffPo, we learn that this watch list is something of a roach hotel; easy to get in, impossible to get out.  I’m abridging the copy from the HuffPo, which you should read in its entirety:

1. You could raise “reasonable suspicion” that you’re involved in terrorism. “Irrefutable evidence or concrete facts” are not required.

In determining whether a suspicion about you is “reasonable,” a “nominator” must “rely upon articulable intelligence or information which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts,” can link you to possible terrorism. As Scahill and Devereaux noted, words like “reasonable,” “articulable” and “rational” are not expressly defined. While the document outlines the need for an “objective factual basis,” the next section clarifies that “irrefutable evidence or concrete facts are not necessary” to make a final determination as to whether a suspicion is “reasonable.” So how could intelligence officials be led to put you on the watch list?

Funny they mention that:

2. You could post something on Facebook or Twitter that raises “reasonable suspicion.”

 

According to the document, “postings on social media sites … should not be discounted merely because of the manner in which it was received.”

Someone who doesn’t like you reports you to a governnment bureaucrat, who thinks “what the heck, better safe than sorry!”, and will never be held accountable for it…

…and boom!  There you are!

(Whoops – can I say “boom” anymore?)

And if you think government wouldn’t do that?  Do you really think Lois Lerner was the only bureaucrat to abuse her authority for political ends?

3. Or somebody else could just think you’re a potential terror threat.

The guidelines also consider the use of “walk-in” or “write-in” information about potential candidates for the watch list. Nominators are encouraged not to dismiss such tips and, after evaluating “the credibility of the source,” could opt to nominate you to the watch list.

In other words, there are no checks and balances.

And these next two…:

4. You could be a little terrorist-ish, at least according to someone.

(Given the liberal fad of “Swatting” conservatives – calling the police to report a conservative is dealing drugs and child porn and guns out of their houses, to draw a swat team, it’s not an idle threat).  Or…

5. Or you could just know someone terrorist-y, maybe.

…should make your blood run cold, when you remember #6:

6. And if you’re in a “category” of people determined to be a threat, your threat status could be “upgraded” at the snap of a finger.

The watch-list guidelines explain a process by which the assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism can move an entire “category of individuals” to an elevated threat status. It’s unclear exactly how these categories are defined, but according to the document, there must be “current and credible intelligence information” suggesting that the group is a particular threat to conduct a terrorist act.

And the Obama Administration has designated vast swathes of people who disagree with him as potential terrorists.

If you’re a pro-lifer?  Second Amendment activist?  Tax protester?  Land rights, Tenth Amendment, open-government, anti-war?  You name it – you could find yourself on the watch list for any reason.

Or…no reason at all:

7. Finally, you could just be unlucky.

The process of adding people to the terror watch lists is as imperfect as the intelligence officials tasked with doing so. There have been reports of “false positives,” or instances in which an innocent passenger has been subject to treatment under a no-fly or selectee list because his or her name was similar to that of another individual. In one highly publicized incident in 2005, a 4-year-old boy was nearly barred from boarding a plane to visit his grandmother.

And there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.  There’s no due process; there’s noplace to file an appeal.

You’re screwed. Your liberties can be held hostage by any petty bureaucrat, any ex-spouse, anyone who really, wants to mess you up in the most passive-aggressive yet damaging way possible.

So I’d like to ask Kim Norton (if she takes questions, which she does not) – how many of our civil liberties does she believe should be subject to a secret list with no due process or accountability?

Liberals hate civil rights.

Oh, not the civil rights that involve snarking at religion or aborting babies or waving ones’ privates about in public.  Those are pretty sacrosanct on the left.

But actual rights that matter?  Life, liberty, personal property, economic freedom, freedom of conscience, freedom from dependence?  Not so much.

And whenever The People get more of those freedoms, the left – Chicken Littles, all – get very, very nervous.

A change in Kansas law now will allow students and staff with carry permits to bring their legal firearms to school.

Some folks get it:

As Kansas moves toward a time when guns will be as welcome on university campuses as laptops, students are starting to take notice and talk about how they’ll handle that day when it comes.

For many, it’s no big deal. For students who grew up in a largely rural state, surrounded by guns, having the student at the next desk carrying one in pocket or purse doesn’t feel particularly unfamiliar or uncomfortable.

And others – following in the tradition of generations of legislators, pundits and non-profiteers – insist that, notwithstanding thirty years of such predictions

Others are predicting disaster when any student or employee over 21 can carry concealed on campus, without a permit or training in how and when to deploy a deadly weapon…Kennedi Grant, a junior from St. Louis who also is involved in the group, said marginalized students feel danger on campus already without concealed weapons and that “adding that to the mix will only cause more chaos.”

Grant, a journalism student [no cigar for guessing that – Ed. ], said allowing concealed firearms on campus increases the likelihood of a shooting. “It’s not even a matter of if anymore, it’s become a matter of when,” she said.

See also: Every single jurisdiction where the law-abiding citizens have won the right not to be defenseless sheep, and their solons wet their collective (heh) pants.  I’ll direct you in particular to Minnesota’s own “debate” on the subject in 2003, where Senator Wes “Lying Sack of Filth” Skoglund predicted gang-bangers getting carry permits and shooting people up at random (because they weren’t doing that before, and aren’t doing it now, and it’s because they can’t get carry permits, clearly).

(Has anyone noticed how very afraid of Black people our Democrat legislators seem to be?)

Of course, it never happened; it didn’t happen in the idiot Twin Cities, and it won’t happen in sane, sensible Kansas.

But we knew that.

We’ve gone around and around with Representative Kim Norton of Rochester.  Norton, who is retiring from the Legislature after this coming session, is going to be carrying Michael Bloomberg’s water; she’ll be sponsoring, so we’re told, a number of gun control bills.

Not that you can get a straight answer out of her; although she went into great detail in the Rochester Post-Bulletin in which she called for a “conversation about guns”, she also told anyone who wanted to engage in dialog (as opposed to echo-chamber monologue) that she really had no idea what she was going to put into any bill, and had nothing to talk about.

Which is kind of hilarious, if you think about it.

Of course, on Twitter over the holiday weekend, she found a specific proposal to support – from Bloomberg’s chief streetwalker in the Senate, Kirsten Gillibrand.

And her response (below) to MNGOPAC leader Bryan Strawser is one for the record books, and one that every Rochester voter should take up with Ms. Norton:  That’s right – for opposing denying civil rights to people who wind up on a non-transparent, easily-abused, unsupervised grab bag of names collected so willy-nilly it’s become the stuff of folk legends, for which the Feds don’t have to tell why, or even whether, you’re on it, Rep. Norton, one of the DFL’s inner circle thought leaders, equates you with a terrorist.

Remember when Democrats were opposed to mysterious starchambers handing down secret lists of enemies, with no transparency or accountability?  I’ll bet Rep. Nortdon does.

This is today’s DFL.

Question:  Do you suppose anyone in the media will question Rep. Norton on this?

There was a shooting at the 4th Precinct demonstrations, late Monday night.  Three men, described by BLM as “white supremacists” – and in retrospect it appears they were, although to be fair some elements in BLM call everyone  a white supremacist – shot five protesters.  Thankfully, none of the injuries are “serious”, although let’s be honest, if I get hit by a bullet, it’s freaking serious.

But it’s the left we’re talking about, here.  It’s a crisis.  Waste not, want not.

How’s That Again?:  The three shooters – apparently identifiable as “White Supremacists” by dint of wearing masks, were being “escorted away from the protest”, according to the media’s accounts, or (according to these two people in, er, masks), “escorted” rather more aggressively:

Anyway, the three men – whose arrest the Strib reports – ran, and then opened fire, hitting five.  It took about 12 hours for the police to catch them.

They were apparently white men, some of whose Facebook pages bespeak some kind of Caucasianist sympathies, we’re told.

More on the accused later.

Until then, let’s talk about what happened during those 12 hours:

Thanks, Betsy!:  Now, if you’re not in the Twin Cities, let’s set the stage for you; Mayors Betsy Hodges of Minneapolis and Chris Coleman of Saint Paul have done everything possible under, and beyond, the law to accomodate Black Lives Matter.  They’ve allowed BLM to repeatedly block freeways and mass transit during rush hour; they not only let BLM block Snelling Avenue for four hours during the State Fair – one of the busiest days of the year – they gave them a full, aggressive escort on their march.  And they’ve tolerated a protest around a police station that has at times blocked access, teetered on the edge of violence, and required drawing police from other parts of the city for nights on end.  Rumor has it the police leave mints on the pillows of Rashad Turner and Nekima Pounds-Levy.

And yet, when the chips were down, Minneapolis NAACP boss Raeisha Williams knew exactly who to blame:

No word if the suspects are sleepers for the MPD.

What?  You Thought There Was Going To Be An Article About Habitual Lying That Didn’t Include Heather Martens?: Heather Martens of “Protect” MN blamed carry permittees for the shooting.

The suspects apparently are not carry permit holders.

I’m not going to quote it. I’m not going to link it.  Heather Martens doesn’t deserve the attention of any sentient being (which may be why the media gives her so much credence).

But if you’re in the media?  Ask yourself why you keep citing this idiot.

A couple of factoids to start with, first:

• For over a decade, now – since law Enforcement’s disastrous response to Columbine – law enforcement “active shooter” doctrine and training has emphasized resisting active shooters.  Their attacks are almost always more or less meticulously planned; resistance throws the plans off, and disrupts the shooters’ fantasy state.
• Homeland Security, in the wake of all earlier advice about staying calm and going along with terrorists’ demands flying out the window on 9/11, now advises people to resist hijackings, if they can.
• Nonetheless, major urban police chiefs – including Saint Paul’s chief, Tim Smith – poo-pooh the idea that a “good guy with a gun” can ever have a positive effect on a dangerous situation.  They are, of course, universally appointees who serve at the pleasure of Democrat mayors and city councilors, so it’s to be expected they’ll repeat their masters’ lies, even though the truth is out there in black and white.

With those out of the way, let’s get to the story:

Tear ‘Em Up!:  The chief of the Washington Police Department is urging the public to “take down” active shooters:

 “Your options are run, hide, or fight,” the D.C. police chief said. “If you’re in a position to try and take the gunman down, to take the gunman out, it’s the best option for saving lives before police can get there.”

Now, that sounds both commonsensical and in line with current law-enforcement thinking on the subject (as we noted above).

Now, there are many ways to “take down” a gunman.  If you’re a highly trained ninja, there’s all sorts of ninja fu.  Or you can charge at them and hit them with a bottle, a tablecloth, a book, or a WWE sleeper hold.

Or those diligent civilians could use the most effective means of self-defense there is; a firearm.  A legal handgun.  Police know as well as anyone else that someone resisting a lethal force attack with lethal force is four times as likely to survive as someone who who resists with non-leethal force, and seven times as likely as those who don’t resist.

Civilians can – and do – avail themselves of this constitutional, legal and deadly effective means of defending themselves against crime, whether lowly street crime or a would-be mass-shooter.

Half-Baked:  Or at least they can in most of the United States.  But not if they’re in DC.

Lanier – police chief for a city that still actively fights against civilian gun rights – is apparently endorsing the “good guy with a gun” idea that the National Rifle Association and every other gun rights group (and, incidentally, current police training regarding active shooters these days) endorses – only without the gun.

In other words, she’s advising people to do battle with murderous maniacs – only without the means to make it anything but nearly suicidal.

She’s endorsing every part of the “Good Guy with a Gun” scenario but the gun – the part that makes it work.

ISIS – or someone claiming to speak for them, anyway –  released a list of American cities they plan to attack.  The ostensible “list” has, in some cases, the parents of something that was compiled by throwing darts at a map.

And when I saw the list, I couldn’t help but remember this scene, from Casablanca:

Which led me to this bit, from a piece Kevin Williamson has out today on NRO:

he Sunday after the shootings at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, I attended Mass at a Catholic church in a very conservative suburb in a Western state where gun rights are in the main unquestioned. As he spoke about the massacre in Charleston, the priest, who showed no sign of indulging himself in ecclesiastical theatrics, grew genuinely angry — that such a thing had been done at all, and that it had been done in a sanctuary among Christians at prayer. Later I asked him what he would have done if it had been his church. “This congregation?” he asked with a little smile that was meaner than you want a priest’s to be. “Probably administer his last rites.”

I thought about that good pastor as reports of the horrors in Paris came in. There was the usual sentimental outpouring on social media…All of that is useless, of course, but one feels the need to do something. But the only thing one can really do is the one thing that Parisians cannot do: shoot back.

With that in mind, I noticed one of the cities on the “target list”;  Minot, North Dakota.

I had to laugh.

Go ahead, Abu.  Go to North Dakota. On any eight random months, your thin, low octane Levantine blood will freeze as solid as the coolant in the 74 Fiat Spyder.

Casing your targets?  North Dakota isn’t quite as overwhelmingly caucasian as it was when I grew up there – but if you wanna case your targets in Minot, you’re gonna stand out from the crowd in a way that you don’t in Chicago or Minneapolis.  It’s not that big of a place.

And North Dakotans are strapped, Abu. #8 in the country in terms of guns per capita.   The oil workers will rip you into long thin strips; run afoul of the wrong farmers, and they will be picking pieces of you out of cattle stools for months.

Perhaps you think all Americans are like University of Missouri students, or Yale university social justice warriors, or espresso guzzling Manhattan lumbersexuals.  Go ahead.  Come to NoDak.  Not only would you die a lonely, painful death – from freezing, if not from crushing return fire – but the media would never know your attack, and demise, happened.  Your deaths would be lonely, and utterly unheralded – even within the state.

Just saying, Abu – f**k with North Dakota, and you might want to go back home and take a chance with the French Air Force.

———-

More seriously?

I had the pleasure of talking with Peter Johnson of Archway Defense over the weekend, on the show; I’ll urge you to listen to the whole hour; it’s pretty good.

The bad news:  the terrorists are learning yet again to use our strengths against us.  Rather than flying would-be terrorists to Afghanistan or Somalia for training, and giving western intelligence another set of data points and drone targets, they’re distributing information on attack preparation, bomb-making, and close-quarters combat (against the unarmed) via the internet – and doing a great job of it.

The “good” news?  They look for undefended targets.  Whether lone-wolves attacking Fort Hood, or the Chattanooga military offices, or the Washington Navy Yard, or bigger, better-financed, paramilitary operations like the various Paris attacks or the Nairobi Mall attack or Mumbai, the terrorists seek out the helpless to slaughter.  They avoid places where anyone could trip things up.

Yet another reason to flout, en masse, the Mall of America’s idiotic and dubiously legal gun ban.

I’ve recently became aware of “Muggeridge’s Law” – I have an article coming up on the subject.  Muggeridge’s Law states that it’s impossible to be funny, since one’s most hamfistedly satirical “predictions” will inevitably be borne out in fact.

When I first heard the news of the terrorist attacks in Paris, I thought – I kid you not – “some gun grabber group will blame this on the NRA”.

Muggeridge reared his head; the ghouls at “Moms Want Action” struck over the weekend:

http://twitter.com/MomsDemand/status/665294443638075392/photo/1

I won’t bother asking if “Moms Want Action” is aware that the terrorists used plenty of explosives, or that their guns were the kind of fully-automatic AK47s that are illegal in Wyoming and Kansas, much less France, where the law-abiding citizen can’t easily get permission to own, much less carry, a handgun.   They don’t know the difference, and if they did, they wouldn’t care, because their  goal isn’t to convince people who know what they’re talking about (99% of whom are pro-Second-Amendment), but rather to Lie First, Lie Last, Lie Always to keep the uninformed in line.

I won’t even ask if they’ve noticed that this is the the third major terrorist attack in gun-free Paris involving guns and explosives this year; the death toll among them all is hovering close to 150 – almost as bad as Chicago – and there’s no way we’re done.

The Twin Cities gun grabber groups don’t want a conversation, much less an open debate.  They made this clear last month.

I’m about done waiting for them to come to the debate.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Let’s talk numbers.  Exact numbers change constantly so we’ll use round numbers.  We’re talking Big Picture here.

There are 300 million people in the country.  There are 30,000 gun deaths per year: 19,000 suicides, 10,000 murders, 500 “accidental discharges” and the rest are undetermined.   Round numbers.

2/3 of gun suicides are White men middle-aged or older who already own their firearms.  More than half of the 10,000 murders are committed by young Black men, mostly killing other young Black men.  The vast majority of them were committed with pistols and the killers did not purchase their firearms legally.

Liberals don’t care about Old White Men committing suicide (given how much they blame us for everything wrong with society, that might be considered a feature of gun violence, not a bug).  They don’t really care about Young Black Men shooting each other in Chicago ghettos because Liberals don’t live in ghettos so it doesn’t threaten them.

The scary thing for Liberals is the 20-something White male with mental health “issues” who comes on campus with a gun, or to the shopping mall, or the movie theatre.  Suicide is personal to the victim, no threat to me; violence in the ghetto might as well be in Africa – out of sight, out of mind; but random violence where I live is intolerable.  So Liberals propose to ban all guns everywhere to get at the one or two crazies who cause the problem they’re really concerned about.   Same theory as grade school: one kid farted but wouldn’t own up to it so the entire class lost our recess privileges.  Liberals never grow up, I guess.

Of course, it never occurs to Liberals that the threat is not crazy people with guns, but crazy people.  Why not lock up the loons and leave me alone?

Or, if we’re going to toss out Constitutional amendments, why not the First Amendment?  Maybe potential mass shooters are inspired by news accounts of actual mass shooters and aspire to similar fame? The electromagnetic spectrum is public domain, legitimately under the control of the federal government.  Paper and ink move in interstate commerce.  Make a new law: nobody can broadcast a report of a mass shooting, not on radio, television, cell phone, newspaper or the internet. When the novelty and fame disappear, copycats will disappear and Liberals will be safe.

Makes as much sense as their idea.

Joe Doakes

It does indeed.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The gun control debate is a language problem: Liberals don’t speak “Logic,” they speak “Fear.” Or, if you prefer the old terms, “Dialectic” and “Rhetoric.”

Old White men committing suicide are no threat to me, I don’t fear them and don’t care if they have guns. Gang-bangers killing each other in the ghetto are no threat to me, I don’t fear them, let them keep their guns. Policemen shooting Gentle Giants, domestic abusers shooting spouses, children accidentally shooting themselves, none of those are threats to me, I don’t fear them, I don’t care about their guns. I include those deaths in the total of “gun violence” because it makes the problem sound more pressing so I can convince ignorant people to let me solve the problem that really concerns me.

A 20-something White male with mental health issues, inspired to become famous by copying other mass shooters, who has access to guns and to my church, school, shopping mall or movie theatre – that guy’s a threat to me. That guy, I fear. That guy’s guns, I want to take. If the only way to do it is taking everyone else’s guns, well, that’s how we did it in grade school: when one kid farted and nobody would own up to it, the entire class lost our recess privileges. Why expect different behavior from adult Liberals?

Joe Doakes

Collective Guilt is a hallmark of authoritarians and totalitarians everywhere.

The good guys have apparently gotten into Heather Martens’ head.

GOCRA and MNGOPAC figured prominently in Martens’ “Give to the Max” day fundraising plea:

By giving today, you make it possible for the voice of reason to be heard at the Capitol despite the intimidation.

Intimidation?

The stories we could tell.

And will, someday.

But let’s move on to the fun part:

We need your support, because this other group says whatever it wants. I quote [from, I believe, a MNGOPAC fundraising email]:

“Let’s remember what Protect Minnesota advocates for: bans on common hunting rifles and shotguns, licensing of gun owners, mandatory inspections by your county sheriff for ‘safe storage,’ court orders to seize your firearms without a hearing, and on and on!”

It seems that Protect Minnesota is scary to those who think assault weapons are “common hunting rifles and shotguns” and will believe whatever accusations this group invents.

Now, let’s recap:  Heather Martens has never, not once in her career, said a single, original, substantive true thing about gun owners, gun crime, or the Second Amendment.

And she doesn’t start with this email.  “Assault Weapons” like the AR15, the Mini-14,  and SKS are exceptionally common hunting weapons.  The de facto licensing and mandatory inspections were parts of the bills that Protect MN supported – indeed, that Martens, a paid lobbyist, read into the record in lieu of Rep. Hausman, in a clubby little violation of House rules. The seizure without hearings was part of the various Domestic Abuse proposals pushed at the state and federal (by Sen. Klobuchar) level, and supported with robotic monotony by Martens and “Protect” MN.

She does swerve toward truth, briefly – but that, inevitably, undercuts her case without her knowing it, bless her simple little heart:

They are a small minority [Which routinely turns out 30 times as much public support as “Protect” MN – Ed] that makes “controversy” to stop any kind of public policy to reduce gun violence — even when the vast majority of Americans support such policies. But something scares me in their email: That they raised $51,000 last year.

Which is, likely, 50 times as much as “Protect” MN raised from the general public last year (they get $300K from the Joyce Foundation and other big institutional donors – read “Liberals with deep pockets”).

The people – real people, Real Minnesotans, Real Americans – support the Second Amendment.

And I’m not sure why that “scares” Heather Martens. It’s the only thing keeping her employed.

13-year-old boy grabs mom’s gun, kills armed robber:

The boy said he heard a vehicle pull up behind his house, then heard someone trying get inside a few minutes later. At that point, the teen picked up his mother’s gun and went to the back door of the home.

Authorities said the boy told them he fired the gun through the door and the person outside fired back. The boy fired several more shots, apparently wounding the suspect. . . .

A burglar who shot back? The term for that is “armed robber”.

A note of caution – trying this in metro Minnesota would be only as safe as the most zealous prosecutor will allow it to be.

But let’s not quibble now; the good guys won one.

15 years ago, Maryland implemented one of those “common sense gun control regulations” that gun-grabbers like “Everytown for Gun Safety” babble about, and that Real Americans warned was going to be a boondoggle and a waste of time and resources better spent on policing.

Every [legally] gun sold in Maryland was test-fired; its spent casing was scanned, bar-coded, and stored away for future reference.  There is some valid science to the process – every gun leaves a unique pattern of scratches on its shell casing when it’s extracted, a trait that has led to some crimes being solved (when analyzing the casings of guns used in crimes).

But the process added $60 to the cost of every gun sold in Maryland [legally] over that time.

Maryland just scrapped the program, after spending millions (and extorting millions more from taxpayers), and, as predicted by Real Americans, solving exactly zero crimes:

“The Maryland ballistics database has been a failure from its inception,” Amy Hunter, spokeswoman for the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, told FoxNews.com. “The program has been effectively defunct for several years. Funding has been discontinued, and the personnel associated with the program have been reassigned, yet the requirement persisted and its costs were passed on to the consumer. The NRA-ILA supported the repeal and is pleased it’s now in effect.”…Throughout its run, the Maryland database helped investigators a total of 26 times, but with each case, they already knew which gun was in question, state police officials said. New York had followed Maryland’s lead and created a database of their own, but funding was pulled in 2012 when that program proved ineffective.

And doesn’t this sound just like certain gun grabbers in Minnesota to you?:

Some backers say the program could have worked if authorities had stuck with it, claiming that handguns used in crimes are typically as old as 20 years or more.

“If you squeeze civil liberties long enough, eventually you’ll catch a bad guy, probably, we think”

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

When President Obama and Candidate Hillary succeed in imposing their Australian plans to confiscate pistols and ban ammunition, dealers in banned substances will have an easier time supplying their customers: everyone will use the same caliber ammunition.  “Hey man, I’ll take some weed, a couple hits of coke and throw in a box of nines.”   One stop shopping, like having a Wal-Mart in the trunk of a tricked-out Buick.  Handy.

Let’s not kid ourselves, we know what’s at work here and it has nothing to do with ballistic science.

John Browning gave the world true pistol stopping power when he invented the .45 ACP and nothing invented since is as effective at delivering raw knock-down power in a controllable low maintenance hand-held package.

But it takes a big hand to wrap around the .45, a strong grip to control it, and strong will to calmly place 7 shots in vital spots rather than spray-and-pray in a panic.  The .45 is fine for well-trained soldiers which is why special forces love it; not so good for small FBI chicks which is why the feds first adopted the watered-down .40 S&W and now are going to the even softer 9mm.

I don’t dispute that modern 9mm home defense hollow points work better than 9mm military ball ammo.  They should: they’re designed for a different purpose.  The military round wounds a guy so his buddies must carry him to the field medics, taking three soldiers out of a battle that my soldiers then win by attrition.  The home-defense round puts a guy on the floor now, because I have no soldiers and can’t afford to suffer any attrition.  So sure, the modern 9mm self-defense round works better than the old 9mm military round.  But is it better enough to switch down from the .40 S&W, must less the venerable .45 ACP?

Let the argument begin.

Joe Doakes

The amount of training it takes to overcome the natural human response to an adrenaline dump is amazing – and they’re finding out that people who get through selection for units like the SEALs, Delta, the SAS and the like are born with a biochemical trait that allows them to drive, rather than be driven by, adrenaline.

All by way of saying – being a regular schlub who is most definitely driven by adrenaline, I’ll take a big magazine over big caliber.

If I have to choose.

Which, currently I do not.

And let’s us good guys and gals all bear down and keep it that way.

In yesterday’s piece, where we caught Heather Martens lying about a 911 call in Colorado in a fundraising letter to fellow liberals with deep pockets, she also noted:

P.S.: During the past few weeks, Protect MN has appeared on KMOJ and KARE-11. The Star Tribune recently published an op-ed from Protect MN in the Sunday opinion section. Your support makes it possible for our voice to be heard.

It’s been established that the KARE bears didn’t pay $1,500 for the pleasure of Martens’ presence; she had demanded that amount to have a “conversation about guns” on the NARN.

I’m curious – did she charge the Strib or KMOJ (a lower-power community-FM station in North Minneapolis)?

I’ll be checking in with KMOJ later today.

Heather Martens – “Director” and likely sole member of “Protect Minnesota”, and sometimes ad-hoc legislative representative from House District 66A – has sent out a fund-raising email.

Because trying to squat on peoples’ civil rights isn’t cheap, even if you do it badly.

And in this email, Martens – who has never, not once, uttered a single, substantive, original true statement about the Second Amendment, gun owners or guns in her career – gives us a little surprise.

Here’s the fundraising letter:

Dear Friend,
In Colorado on Halloween morning, a woman called 911 when she saw a black man walking down the street. During the six-minute call, the dispatcher lectured the caller on the fact that it is legal in Colorado to be a black man walking in public. Then black man started shooting people. He murdered three people before being killed by police, when they finally arrived on the scene.
Can you support Protect Minnesota on Give to the Max Day, to fight the laws that enable such black people to perpetrate such tragedies?
[Several paragraphs of bla bla bla about PMs purported accomplishments]
Thank you for all you do,

Heather Martens
Executive Director
Protect Minnesota: Working to End Gun Violence

“Wait – did Heather Martens actually send out a letter saying that a woman called in to report a black man walking down the street?”

Of course not.  Even a director at a PC non-profit can’t get away with that – unless they’re talking about Ben Carson or Tim Scott.

No – where you see references to “black man” in the letter above, fill in “a man carrying a gun”.  Here’s the actual fundraising email from Martens.  In the episode Martens writes about, a woman called 911 about someone openly carrying a firearm.  The 911 operator told the woman that it’s legal to open-carry in Colorado…

…and something else.    This story has a twist at the end.

Put a pin in that.  We’ll come back to it.

Then, six minutes into the 911 call about a man carrying a gun, something illegal happened – the man started shooting.  People died.  It was a tragedy.

But here’s the rub; Martens wants the police to respond to someone doing something they have every right to do, in a place they have every right to do it.  And they want them to do it when they know full well that the overwhelming majority of people who open-carry firearms are utterly and completely legal, and will never break a single law.

Martens thinks the police should respond to her fear, her paranoia, and her bigotry about people doing what they do, utterly legally, because of her paranoid assumption that a guy with a gun is a crime waiting to happen – which is not even a little bit different than assuming a black guy is a crime waiting to happen.

And that alone is reason to mock the hapless Martens.

But there’s more.  Heather Martens also lied.

Details, Details:  Buried further down in the fundraising letter, we see this little bon mot; emphasis is added:

:45  Naomi Bettis calls to report that she sees a man on her street carrying a big black rifle and  several cans of gasoline.  Over six minutes of conversation, she relays to the dispatcher the activities and a description of the man, noting that he had gone into another building and then emerged also carrying a handgun. She tells the dispatcher that she is “scared to death.”

So it turns out that Ms. Bettis not only called in to report the legal and overwhelmingly unremarkable fact that the man had a gun, but also the fact that he was carrying gasoline and acting suspiciously.

As, by the way, she should have.

And then the dispatcher responded…:

The dispatcher relates to her “It is an open carry state, so he can have a weapon with him or walking around with it.   But, of course, having those cans of gasoline it does seem pretty suspicious, so we’re going to keep the call going for that.”

So in other words, the police responded to Ms. Bettis’ call, exactly as if they’d have responded to the killer’s legal behavior.  The dispatcher acted correctly, and the police responded to the part of Ms. Bettis’ call that actually addressed something objectively and legally worthy of a response given the facts at the time, exactly as they’d have done if carrying the gun had been the  act they responded to.

Martens lied about the content of the phone call, and about the police response, to give the misleading impression that Colorado’s open carry law led to the deaths of innocent people.

It’s misleading, and it’s cowardly.  It’s a lie.

And yet the news media uses her as a source, without question.

Question For The Media:  It’s not a new one.  It’s the same one I ask every time Martens pulls a stunt like this.

When I was a reporter, we learned that when a source burns you, especially multiple times, you stop using them as a source.  At the very least, you get lots of corroboration.

Heather Martens has burned you.  She’s burned you  so often that the parts of the Minnesota media that care about accuracy and credibility have quietly started downplaying, or burying, her side of the story below that of credible sources like Joe Olson, Andrew Rothman and Bryan Strawser.

But if you’re one of those who still puts Heather’s stuff out there unquestioned, I have to ask you – why?

Ignorance?  Call me.  Email me.  I’ll show you the problem.

Not ignorance?  Then I really wanna talk with you.

Because they don’t give the faintest whiff of a rat’s patoot about gun safety.

When I was a kid, someone came into the school and gave us a quick demo and (IIRC) a film strip on actual gun safety.  It included a couple of simple rules that any kid can remember – and that I still do.  If you’re a kid, and you see a gun – your friends bring out their dad’s hunting rifle or grandpa’s WW2 pistol – and your parents aren’t there:

• Stop
• Don’t touch
• Run away
• Tell a grownup

That’s it.   That’s gun safety for kids.

There’s no way of knowing how many kids in my elementary school’s lives were saved by that lesson; not a single kid in my school died in a gun accident.  Zero.  There was a drowning, a couple car accidents, an alcohol poisoning, and a suicide right after graduation – but no gun accidents.

And this, in a part of the country where there are likely more guns per-capita than on bases for some branches of the military.

It’s a pretty standard program; many hunting groups, along with the NRA, teach gun safety in schools.

Y’know – because it keeps children from getting killed, accidentally.

You’d think moms (not to mention fathers) would be all over it.  And in the parts of our society ruled by common sense, they are.

But not I Moms Want Action (a wholly owned subsidiary of Michael Bloomberg’s “Everytown For “Gun Safety”, the billionaire’s gun-grabber group),   To them, “gun safety” is, in their own words, “atrocious”:

Moms Demand Action’s Jennifer Hoppe recoiled at the news that Forest Hills was teaching children about gun safety. She said, “It’s atrocious to put the onus of gun safety onto children — this is an adult problem. Every gun that’s gotten into the hands of a child has first been under the control of an adult. A program that tries to dodge that is disingenuous.”

In a further effort to make her point, Hoppe added, “Accidental gun deaths among children are not ‘accidental,’” suggesting that the focus should be on how they are “preventable” if adults store guns properly.

Which is the sort of calm, cool, rational logic we’ve come to expect from Moms Want Action.  No, seriously.

Because in a world where our leftist entertainment industry gives money to gun-grabber groups with one hand, while glorifying consequence-free violence with the other, there are plenty of irresponsible parents out there, leaving guns in easy reach of kids.  And that is certainly a moral, and often literal, crime – which is nice, but what does your kid do when he or she comes face to face with their kids, acting like kids?

Question for you, Jennifer Hoppe, Jane Kay, Michael Bloomberg and Heather Martens:  would you be happier if your kid knew to stop, run away and tell an adult, or would you prefer the county attorney sort it all out after the funeral?

The article points out something I’d missed.  Usually, when a gun-grabber yaps about wanting a “conversation about guns,” what they mean is “you shooters shut up while we shriek at you”.

But Mark Kelly – wife of Gabby Giffords, and certainly no gun-rights advocate – actually indulged in that rarest of treats; he actually conversed about guns, complimenting the NRA’s exceptionally-effective child safety program.

The results were…predictable:

Ironically, it was just months ago that Huffington Post went comparably apoplectic after gun control proponent Mark Kelly praised the NRA’s Eddie Eagle program for its effectiveness with children. On April 14, Kelly tweeted: “I don’t agree w/ the NRA on some big issues, but they deserve a lot of credit for teaching kids about gun safety [via] Eddie Eagle.”

The reaction from the left was predictably emotionally-thud-witted, intellectually barren and morally bereft.

Dear Moms Want Action:  the blood of every child accidentally killed for want of commonsense gun-safety education is on your desiccated talons.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I’ve often thought about writing a book.  I started one in college – the draft has long since disappeared.  I write blog posts that could be expanded into a book.  And I know a couple of people who’ve written books, I could get tips and advice from them.  But every time I start, it turns into a lot of work and I am not known for my patience.

Maybe a book of short stories centered around a common theme, like “The Martian Chronicles,” self-publish on Amazon and retire on the royalties? Still too much work.  What if I crowd-sourced it?  What if Shot In The Dark readers each took one story idea and ran with it?

Story One: Chad is a 20-something White male who suffers from mental illness but won’t take his meds because he doesn’t like the way they make him feel.  When the voices in his head get too loud, he does crazy stuff that gets him arrested.  But by the time of his commitment hearing after the 72-hour hold, he’s back on his meds and coherent, his parents swear he’s gentle and kind, his ACLU lawyer argues he’s not a threat to himself or others, and the judge releases him.  Until one day when he’s off his meds, a girl in a coffee shop snubs him as a “nobody” and moments later he sees CNN talking about somebody who shot up a school who’s now famous.  The voices convince him to pursue fame by committing his own massacre.  How he plans and executes the crime . . .

Story Two:  Patricia, the mother of one of the people Chad killed, is media-savvy and politically connected.  Her incessant television appearances produce a groundswell of Right-Thinking people who convince the President to issue an Executive Order repealing the Second Amendment and appointing her Gun Czar with authority to rid the United States of privately held firearms.   How she plans and executes the seizure . . . .

Story Three: Charlie, a farmer near St. Cloud, who owns shotguns for bird hunting and rifles for deer hunting, hears about Patricia while eating breakfast at the local diner but thinks little of it until Deputy John pulls his squad car up to the farmhouse saying “I’ve gotta take your guns, Charlie, it’s the law.”  What happens next . . . .

Story Four: Dante, the owner of a recreational pharmaceuticals distribution franchise in Frogtown, sees Patricia on the television while eating lunch at White Castle and frowns.  How will he defend his territory from poachers and his profits from thieves?  How he circumvents the law . . . .

Story Five, Six, Seven – you get the idea.

Joe Doakes

Hmmm.

Writing a book via semi-crowdsourced blog posts?

It’s almost crazy enough to work…