Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Another school, another shooting, more people dead, this time in Sweden where a young man wearing a Star Wars mask attacked a school.

No, the killer didn’t do the shooting.  The killer was stopped by a good guy with a gun.  Who shot him.  In a school.

And stopped him from killing more children.  By shooting him.  In a school.

So does that make this the Good Kind of School Shooting?

Joe Doakes

No.  It makes it the kind of shooting you never hear about in the American media – shootings like these – that interrupt the narrative that “gun violence” is out of control.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Attack a pastor during Sunday worship service and get shot . . . by the pastor?

Gives new meaning to the phrase “The way to stop a Bad Man with a gun is a Good Man with a gun.”

The police are trying to decide whether to charge the pastor for violating the Gun Free Zone (Michigan law doesn’t allow guns in church).

Save a pile of lives, go to jail?

Joe Doakes

It’s one of the ugly conundra of self defense; no matter how, er, righteous the shooting, you’re only as safe as the most zealous prosecutor is in the mood to let you be.

Last week, we noted that Heather Martens – leader of “Gun Safety” group “Protect” MN, and serial liar – demanded $1,500 to discuss “gun safety” on my show, with me, someone with at least some track record of knowing the issue in some detail.

We also noted that she did appear on KARE11 to debate “gun safety” with Andy Parrish, a GOP strategist, who is not noted as a Second Amendment activist or someone with an especial command of the facts of the issue (which is not to disparage him; I don’t know any of his areas of expertise, either).

Today comes confirmation that Martens did not ask, or recieve, $1,500 from KARE11.

Why, it’s almost as if Martens knows that certain Twin Cities media outlets will paint her toenails on the air, and she’s avoiding having to deal with anyone who can point out her chronic, vocational mendacity.

I said “almost”.

I have no idea why.

After three years of trying to attack the NRA, what’s happened?

The NRA is more popular than Hillary Clinton or President Obama.

Many thanks to Dr. John Lott – partly for his piece in National Review yesterday expanding on the work that is rapidly ripping the guts out of the left’s meme that “a good guy with a gun” doesn’t save lives and that gun free zones are anything but safe-criminal areas…:

But the deterrent and life-saving effects of concealed-handgun laws on mass public shootings aren’t just anecdotal. Bill Landes of the University of Chicago and I gathered data on mass public shootings from 1977 to 1999. We studied 13 different types of gun-control laws as well as the impact of law enforcement, but the only law that had a statistically significant impact on mass public shootings was the passage of right-to-carry laws. Right-to-carry laws reduced both the frequency and the severity of mass public shootings; and to the extent to which mass shootings still occurred, they took place in those tiny areas in the states where permitted concealed handguns were not allowed.

…and partly for giving me a solid half-dozen more cases of “good guys with guns” that have interrupted mass shootings, to add to this blog’s rapidly-expanding “Good Guy or Gal With A Gun” page.

This morning, I did something that has become almost as rote and perfunctory as showing that Nick Coleman is wrong about…well, anything; I fisked a Heather Martens op-ed.   It’s one of many, many such efforts, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.

But buried at the very, very bottom of the op-ed was something…different.

And Finally, Something Remotely True, And Historic!  We may have witnessed some history, here – Heather Martens closes out with something that is both substantial and true.

Although not in the way she might think:

Journalists ought to do their homework,

Yes.  If they did, they’d cut Heather Martens off from any further attention.   I’ve built a long history on this blog, over more than a decade, now, of showing you something that’s almost up to the level of a Berg’s Law; that Martens has never, not once, said a substantial, true, original thing about Gun Rights or gun issues.

But she’s finally said something that I agree with wholeheartedly.  And so should every shooter:  she wants the media to…

…force the gun lobby and its friends to defend their indefensible opposition to important new policies, and stop misdirecting the conversation by setting up straw men to destroy.

I agree!  It’s time for Heather Martens and the Strib to get to the facts [1]!

So on behalf of my friends in Minnesota’s gun rights movement, I accept Heather’s challenge; to set up a debate between Heather Martens and any gun-grabber activists or lobbyists she wants to bring along, and a couple of us from the Gun Lobby:  perhaps Joe Olson, Andrew Rothman, Bryan Strawser and/or myself.

There, the journalists and activists can force us to defend the policies we support, live on camera!  Allow both sides to question, and cross-question, each other, live and without a net!

Heather Martens; for all of the flak I’ve given you over the past decade and change, this is your brilliant, shining moment.

This is too important to skip!

Heather Martens:  Challenge Accepted!

PS:  Naturally, we’ll charge admission, and donate the proceeds to a mutually agreed-upon charity.

(more…)

Just because Michael Bloomberg and all his money have decided to put Heather Martens on the sidelines in Minnesota’s Second Amendment “debate” doesn’t mean that the Twin Cities media isn’t dutifully lining up to give her a smooch on the hindquarters; she had an op-ed in the Strib on Sunday, in reply to an editorial by the Strib’s DJ Tice – one of few voices of relative reason on the Strib’s board.

Before we start, let’s remember the central fact about Heather Martens:

Heather’s Law:  It’s almost up to the level of a Berg’s Law, although Berg’s laws relate to universal behavior; perhaps Martens’ behavior is universal among gun-grabbers. The Berg’s Law committee will consider this during its next meeting.

At any rate; the central thing to remember about Heather Martens is this:

Heather Martens has never, not once, uttered or written a substantial, true, original statement about guns, gun rights, gun owners or gun law.

She may have said some true things about guns – but nothing she thought of herself (things like “8,000 people were killed by firearms” are true, but they’re other peoples’ stats).  She may have some some substantial or true things in her life – but not about guns or gun laws or even “gun safety”.

Her defenders – and there are no doubt a few people among the couple dozen who know she exists who aren’t Human Rights supporters who routinely eat her lunch – may try to dispute this – but I have yet to meet anyone up to the challenge of contesting it with me, least of all Ms. Martens.

But while most journalists would steer forever clear of a “source” that routinely, constantly, forever provides them with false, even risible, information, the Twin Cities media still beats a path to her door – often with comical results.

Lie #1:  Anyway, Martens writes in the Strib:

For two decades, the gun lobby has controlled the national policy of weakening U.S. gun laws. Its solutions haven’t worked. In the U.S., we have 88 gun deaths a day, most of them suicides.

Now, Martens is a perfectly fine human being, but when it comes to Second Amendment policy, she is a vapid trifle – which wouldn’t matter if she ever told the truth, or were even accurate.

But even Martens knows that over the two decades she mentions, gun crime has dropped by half – faster still in places with more “liberal” gun laws.

What makes this troubling is that the Gun Grabber movement seems to have switched to a “Lie About Everything And Hope The Low-Info Voter Buys It” strategy.

Lie #2:  Next, Martens writes:

Guns are poised to surpass car crashes as a cause of death.

Well, no.   They’re not, except if you read the stats in the most ludicrously tortured way possible.

Not Quite A Lie; Just Dumb:  Martens continues:

Yet Tice holds proposed gun violence prevention policies to a ridiculously high standard: Will they stop all gun deaths?

Given that the right to keep and bear arms is on par with freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly, security in your home, trial by jury and all the rest, the standard isn’t ridiculously high.

But since Martens wants to romp and play in the world of ethics:

A public-health-based standard asks instead: Does the policy measurably reduce gun death and injury?

Well, now we’re onto something.  Voilá – the policies pushed by gun rights supporters have helped reduce the gun death and injury rate by almost half, and they’re still dropping (outside certain cities paralyzed by pathologies of Democrat party governance).

If Martens is interested in “public health”, that would seem to be important, right?

Lies 3 and 4:  Onward:

Leading public-health expert Daniel Webster of Johns Hopkins University provides careful analysis based on research.

Well, no; as a generation of Second Amendment activists have shown, he crudely hammers public health fact into a form that fits a political agenda.

But let’s focus, here:

In a TEDMED talk, he aptly compares effective gun polices to the public-health-based campaign that dramatically reduced drunken-driving deaths in America without banning cars.

Webster notes three basic principles common to preventing both types of deaths:

1) Limiting access for inappropriate users: Just as a history of drunken driving can keep alcohol abusers off the road, effective gun policies prohibit access to guns by those with a history of violent or reckless behavior. Requiring a background check on every gun purchase stops prohibited buyers at the point of sale. Since the passage of the Brady Background Check law, 2.4 million sales to prohibited buyers have been stopped.

Some prohibited buyers – most notably Adam Lanza – have been stopped.  Many more perfectly legitimate buyers have come up with false positives.  But the beef comes next:

But gun-show loopholes and unregulated Internet sales let too many people legally avoid a background check.

And there are two lies.

First;  go to a gun show.  Try to buy a gun.  You’ll be asked for your carry permit, or (in Minnesota) your “permit to purchase”, or run through the NICS database that Martens mentions approvingly above.  You don’t buy guns at gun shows without a background check anymore without something indicating you’re clean.

Second?  “Internet Sales” – the legal ones – go through a federally licensed firearms dealer.  Where you take – taa daaaaa! – a NICS check!

Lie #5:    She continues:

2) Holding users and sellers accountable: Accountability for drunken drivers and those who sell alcohol to prohibited buyers has been a key to success. Gun dealers, too, should be held accountable for unsafe practices…The gun lobby, for all its disingenuous bluster about “enforcing existing laws,” has induced Congress to protect reckless gun dealers from lawsuits,

Well, no.  Congress has protected legitimate businesses from frivolous lawsuits designed to drive the firearms industry out of business through endless frivolous litigation. And it’s worked.  Much to Heather Martens’ disingenuous chagrin.

Not Technically A Lie – But Just Plain Wrong:  Martens decides to wax technical – or, more likely, copy and paste a Violence Policy Center chanting point:

3) Incorporating new technologies: For cars, it was air bags and seat belts. For guns, it is smart-gun technology (guns that can recognize their authorized user and operate only for them) and microstamping of bullets to identify crime guns.

Tell you what:  I’ll use a “smart gun” when the cops and military use them.

Or to put it in terms Martens might understand?  I’ll use a “smart gun” when she allows her daughter to be operated on using a procedure that is both highly experimental that that absolutely no reputable surgeons support.

Lies #6-9 – And They’re Dumb Ones: Martens turns the corner for what passes for her big finish:

Change is coming. Since Sandy Hook, community support for gun violence prevention has grown exponentially.

No, it hasn’t.

A recent Quinnipiac poll found a 93 percent national support rate for background checks before all gun sales.

It was a vague question that not only ignores the fact that something like 98% of all legal gun sales already have background checks, but counts on the survey-taker not knowing it.

It reminds me of the survey question gun-grabbers used to throw about; “85% of Americans favor gun control”.  But when you got into suggesting specific types of gun control, that “support” fell like a greased brick.  In the early eighties, at the height of the gun control movement.  Like all such questions, when you get into specifics, and start relying on actual information, that “Support” drops fast.

The historically underfunded gun violence prevention movement has attracted millions of dollars in new resources and thousands of newly engaged activists.

The gun control movement has always had liberals with deep pockets – including Michael Bloomberg, who could buy the NRA with pocket change.

What it doesn’t have is small donors.

Per-household gun ownership is declining,

(Blink blink blink)

driving the gun lobby to increasingly extremist positions.

Like, apparently, simultaneously noting the drop in violent crime rates and electing an extreme gun-grabber president who has brought more people into the shooting sports than any previous President has.

We have begun winning at the state level — most recently in Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Washington, New York and Oregon, where background check laws have been strengthened without banning guns.

And crime has done…what?

But Wait:  There has been a disburbance in the force.

Heather Martens not only said something true and factual – but she had a good idea!

Coming at noon today.

Political movements rise and fall.  It’s part of political life in a democracy with a free market of ideas.

Of course, there’s nothing that the purveyors of central intellectual planning would like more than for the National Rifle Association to fade into obscurity. In this CNN article, the writer quite tangibly palpitates at the idea.

Could the National Rifle Association ever face a similar fate? Most Americans probably don’t think so. When a gunman murdered nine people at a community college in Oregon earlier this month, the President seemed to express what many Americans were thinking when he said, “Somehow this has become routine. … We have become numb to this.”

There’s a pervasive belief that any attempt to tighten gun laws would be futile because too many politicians are afraid to defy the NRA. But there are at least four examples from American history — including two snatched from recent headlines — where ordinary people and unforeseen events defeated a seemingly invincible lobbying group, and hardly anyone saw it coming.

Could the NRA vanish from political prominence? Of course.

But the article is wrong on three points:

Apples And Axles:   The author – John Blake – picked four groups as examples of “popular” opposition overturning “powerful lobbying groups”:  The “Anti Saloon League”, the “Tobacco Lobby”, the “Cuba Lobby” and AIPAC.

They’re all lousy comparisons:

• The “Cuba Lobby” became less relevant with the end of the Cold War.  Not to say they’re not right.
• The big defeats of the Cuba Lobby and AIPAC that Blake cites were the establishment of relations with Cuba, and the jamdown of the Iran treaty executive agreement.  Both were single-issue decisions by an ideological executive – in the case of the Iran “agreement”, very possibly a violation of the law.
• The “defeat” of the tobacco lobby was a result of decades of public health propaganda (which happened to be largely correct, outside the canard of “second hand smoke”) that didn’t need to be politicized to be effective (although it often was anyway), and cost billions and billions of dollars.
• The Anti Saloon League was opposed by an equally-large mass of countervailing opinion; this opinion took 15 years to get organized (Prohibition was nearly 100 years in the making); The ASL was, in fact, more analogous the gun control mement, and its opposition was more similar to the Second Amendment Rights movement between 1985 and 2000.

Which brings us to the second point:

NRA is the Vox Populi:  I’ve non-joke joked for nearly three decades now; the left has been jabbering about class warfare for a couple centuries.  And they finally got one; the battle over guns.  But they’re the patricians, and the Second Amendment movement are the uppity peasants.

As Jeffrey Snyder pointed out in his seminal essay A Nation of Cowards, that’s the reason the left has spent the last fifty years so knotted up about guns; not because they care about anyone’s lives, or “gun violence”; but because it’s the vox populi giving them a big bad veto, saying “the nannystate has its limits”.

In the early nineties, at the start of the Clinton Administration’s gun control efforts, the NRA reached a then-record membership of 4 million – people who paid a minumum of $35 a year for their memberships, frequenlty more.  At the time, the various gun grabber groups reached a peak strength of around 150,000 – at a time when “membership” meant, in most cases, saying “I’m a member!”.  The “Million Mom March” may have peaked out around 10,000 members, at a time when all a Mom had to do was…march.  Or indicate an interest in marching.

And focusing on the NRA is misleading in and of itself – because…:

The NRA Is Just A Part Of The Movement:  The NRA deploys some serious muscle at the federal level.  But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The Second Amendment human rights movement is a mosaic of dozens, maybe hundreds, of smaller groups that do most of the heavy lifting in the states, where most gun legislation takes place.  In Minnesota, the bulk of the actual work is done by GOCRA and MNGOPAC, with several other groups helping out in the various trenches as well.  The NRA has always been a utility player in Minnesota; they had almost nothing to do with Shall-Issue; they helped with the lobbying in 2012 through this past session, but they are part of a cast of groups, not the big gorilla.

Here’s the real measure of support; when GOCRA says “turn out to the capitol” to show legislators where the real political brawn is, hundreds of people from all over Minnesota turn out in a sea of maroon shirts; the Bloombergs might be able to get a couple of dozen wan-looking Highland Park “progressives” accompanying their half-dozen paid, mercenary lobbyists.   It has more in common with the people who rejected Prohibition than the people who enacted it.

And this process has only accelerated as the distribution of information has become more decentralized.  In 1993, the Gun Owners Action League (the predecessor of GOCRA) had to print and mails its newsletters at great expense, to a database maintained on heaven only knows what.  Today, grassroots gun rights groups can, and do, form around facebook pages and online discussion forums, and with a little work and diligence and messaging can actually go on to persuade the unpersuaded.

The same dynamic holds for the anti-gun side – but at the end of the day, all they seem to draw is liberal plutocrats with deep pockets, and people who look like they got lost on their way to a live presentation of “This American Life”.

Backwards:  So in its lust to silence the peasants, CNN has gotten things more or less inverted:  the NRA is not only utterly unlike the four “unbeatable lobbying groups” that they cite, but they aren’t even the real issue.

The real issue is this:  the part of America east of the Hudson and west of the Sierra Madre thinks the Second Amendment is at least a weird throwback, and at most a threat to their version of civilization.  Real Americans treasure the Second Amendment as all other civil liberties, and will fight for it as they have for the past forty years – without regard to the group that carries the flag.

SCENE:  Interior shot at local hardware store. Mitch BERG is grabbing a bag of sidewalk salt.  Suddenly, Avery LIBRELLE, holding a bag of various parts, steps around the corner.

LIBRELLE:  Hah, Merg!  Your statistical analysis is shit!

BERG:  Say that again like you’re having a civil conversation in polite company.

LIBRELLE:  Your statistical analysis is bad.

BERG:  That’s a little more like it.  Care to get more specific?

LIBRELLE:  Tuesday on your blog, you said that urban gun violence correlates with Democrat-controlled cities.

BERG:  Yep.  Because when you run through the numbers, both homicide and violent crime rates are statistically much higher in cities controlled by Democrats.

LIBRELLE:  Hah!  Those were crap statistics.

BERG:  They were from the Department of Justice.

LIBRELLE:  Well, look at this!  Stats from the CDC!  And lookie there!  All those red counties with higher gun death rates than all those blue cities!  Hah!  You are an idiot and stupid and your head is full of poop!  Hahahahahaahahahahahaahaha!

BERG:  Yeah, Avery – we’ve dealt with this same exact chart on this blog before.  You don’t see how this is a non-sequitur, don’t you?

LIBRELLE!  It’s science!

BERG:  Yeah – it’s also comparing apples to axles.  My story yesterday covered homicide and violent crime rates.  This chart covers all gun deaths.  You do see the difference, don’t you?

LIBRELLE:  I see that you are a stupid idiot.

BERG:  “All gun deaths” also counts suicides, Avery. Suicides are between 65-70% of the gun deaths in this country. And it’s a form of suicide “preferred” by rural, white men, mostly lonely and socially isolated, very frequently deeply depressed and/or terminally ill. It’s especially prevalent in…the rural west.  And, being prevalent in lots of sparsely populated rural western and southern counties, it means that the gun death rate will look very high – and it comparably will be.  But that’s not the homicide rate.  Which, you will note, is almost nonexistent in most of those rural, western counties with a high “gun death rate”.

Suicide is a tragedy – but no worse than any other form of suicide (the US’s suicide rate is much lower than many countries that control guns strictly).   And it’s morally not the same as murder – which is taking someone else’s life, by definition against their will.  Which was what my story covered.

So, Avery – what does this mean.

LIBRELLE:  It means that you hate women and science and are a racist…

(LIBRELLE, gesturing expansively, knocks an elbow against a shelf.  A gallon can full of paint falls, conking LIBRELLE on the head)

BERG:  (Rushing to LIBRELLE’s assistance)  Are you OK?

LIBRELLE:  (head lolling about in mild delirium) What it really means is that it’s my statistical analysis that is “shit”, and that I should really stop playing at being a “fact checker” until I learn how to do the job, because I make myself look like an ignorant laughingstock.

HARDWARE STORE ATTENDANT:  (Rushing from the counter) Is h…,er sh…is this person OK?

BERG:  Just having a moment of clarity.  It’ll pass.

(And SCENE)

There were four terror attacks – all with knives, cars and axes – in Israel yesterday.

In one, a Palestinian man rammed a bus stop full of mostly elderly Jews, and climbed out of his car to finish one of them off with an ax.  (WARNING:  Watching someone getting murdered with an ax is just as disturbing as you might expect it is.   You’re been warned).

It was then…

…that a good guy with a gun – an Israeli with a legal permitted handgun – shot the terrorist.

As has been noted here before, the Israelis have slipped a bit into the madness of gun control – but thankfully not too far.  We’ve seen many examples of good mensches with guns ending terror attacks.

There and here.

It’s timely, and it’s quite frankly too good to care whether it’s apocryphal or not.

After every mass-shooting incident, both sides in the Second Amendment debate sound off.  The left believes “commonsense gun control” leads to less crime.  The right believes “more guns equals less crime”.

Both sides tend to leave it at the level of chanting points, without ever really submitting evidence, much less proving anything [1].

So I thought I’d give it a shot.  What brings more “gun safety” – more guns, or less?

Definition Of Terms:  To start with, I took crime data from the states and the the 70 or so largest US cities – places with over 250,000 people.

For lack of a better measure, I used each state’s governor s the bellwether of the city’s political makeup – which may not be academically perfect, but as a practical matter it’s as useful a measure of each state’s sympathies as we have.

States of Affairs:  And the murder rates break down like this:

• Democrat States: 12.2 murders per 100,000
• GOP States: 11.0 murders per 100,000 (all figures henceforth will be per 100,000).

Well, that looks pretty even; that’s like an 10% variation.  Hardly outside the margin of error, really (although as we discussed some time ago, there’s plenty of variation there, too).

The differences in violent crime, robberies and aggravated assaults and rapes and the like, are a tad more dramatic – but only just:

• Democrat States: 841.18
• GOP States: 749.12

Democrat states have 12% more violent crime.  Again – could be just statistical noise.

Urbanity:  But if you’re from Minnesota, or most states with a large urban area that controls half the population, you know that state politics don’t tell you everything.  In places like Illinois, Wisconsin, Oregon, Washington, Michigan, Iowa, even New York and California, solid-blue cities float in huge placid prosperous lagoons of red.

Again – I broke out “control” by the city’s current mayor, or in the case of the few cities using  Manager/Commission government, the control of the commission.

So when you break out the murder rates of American cities of over 250,000, they come out more like this:

• Democrat Cities: 12.9
• GOP Cities 7.77

So the murder  rates in cities that have mayors from the Democrat Party are 60% higher than in GOP-run cities.

OK, that’s significant.  And the violent crime rates are similarly skewed:

• Democrat Cities: 875.3
• GOP Run Cities: 561.0

There is 56% more violent crime in cities run by Democrats.

More Guns, Less Guns…:  But when cornered by Gun Rights supporters, gun control activists punt to the line that “it’s all about the availability of guns”.

The only true measure of the availability of guns is “can you find one that you can afford without breaking the law?”

But I figured I’d meet the left and the gun grabbers halfway on this one; I measured all cities by the “Brady Campaign Scorecard” rating of the state in which they reside (which is a little unrealistic, since some cities have “tougher” gun laws than their states; I’ll work on that).

The assumption:  A “high” Brady rating, an A or B, implies “tougher” gun laws and, by extension, fewer guns (for the law-abiding).

And the numbers break out like this (“winners” will be in bold type):

Violent Crime by Brady rating

So the big variables seem to be not so much the availability of guns or the strictness of gun control laws, which doesn’t seem to be correlated with any rises and falls in murder or violent crime rates.

But being controlled by the Democrat party?  There’s a straight line correlation there.

Now, I’m not saying that Democrats cause crime.  Democrats bleed just like the rest of us do.

But the pathologies that one-party “progressive” Democrat rule inevitably brings do seem to be correlated with higher murder and violent crime rates.

Correlation doesn’t mean causation.  But it suggests a possible path to causation.

[1] I know – the Second Amendment crew does submit evidence, and has proven its case to everyone but our idiot media.  I’m just saying it for purposes of argument.

SCENE:  Avery LIBRELLE is switching a regular cucumber label to an organic cuke when he sees Mitch BERG picking out a piece of ginger root.  LIBRELLE walks over to BERG.  

LIBRELLE:  Hey, Merg!

BERG: Huh?  Oh, sh…hi, Avery.  What’s up?

LIBRELLE:  We won a huge victory over the NRA!

MITCH:  Oh yeah?

LIBRELLE:  Yeah!  Now, people won’t be able to kill people in schools!

MITCH:  Er, Avery?  Guns are already illegal on school grounds. It’s federal law.  Of course, the only people it affects are people with carry permits.   It’s already illegal for anyone who doesn’t have a California permit to carry a gun in public, much less on school grounds.

LIBRELLE:  Right!  So they can’t go nuts and shoot up schools!

MITCH:  And your example of a person with a carry permit shooting up a school is…who?

LIBRELLE:  Hundreds!

MITCH:  Name one.

LIBRELLE:  It’s settled science.

MITCH:  OK.  One example?

LIBRELLE:  It’s settled.  That means the information has been sealed.  Anyway – this is a huge win.

MITCH:  Because now, people who carried guns legally, but not on school grounds, and who never have caused any problems at schools much less killed anyone, are double-barred from carrying guns…

LIBRELLE: Yep!

MITCH:  While the criminals continue to do as they please.

LIBRELLE:  Hey! Trigger warning!

MITCH:  Huh?

LIBRELLE:  “Criminal” is racist!

(And SCENE).

Watch Mitch Berg ANNIHILATE More Liberal Hamsters!  Mind Blown!

UPDATE:  A key “source” in the piece I fisk has turned out to be fraud.  See the Update at the bottom of the story.. 

One of my long-time stalkers – who’s been tweenting about me at least ten times a day for the past six years, which may be as perfect a definition of “a wasted life” as I can imagine – has been spamming the Northern Alliance’s hashtag on Twitter and Facebook with…well, random collections of factoids gathered from Googling, apparently.

And in so doing, he introduced me to yet another article in Raw Story – aka “liberal-friendly news even dumber than The Awl.”

This time, it’s entitled (with that usual online news biz subtlety) “‘It’s insane’: Combat veterans shoot down NRA ‘fantasy world’ of ‘good guys with guns’”

Now, we’ve pretty well  shredded Raw Story – whom I suspect just sold a ton of ads to “Everytown” or “MoveOn”or some other group that’s trying to run a PR war against the NRA, given the enthusiasm with which they’re reporting gun issues generating half-informed anti-gun content.

But even by Raw Story’s dubious standards, this is a dumb piece.  So dumb, in fact, that I’m not going to fisk the whole thing (as I did earlier this week).  Because while it’s a deeply stupid piece, it does touch on a key theme you need to know when you try to engage gun-grabbers.

Because like pretty much all aggressive, inflammatory anti-gun “journalism” cribbing fromn other left-leaning news sources today, it’s made up of:

• Appeals to ridicule
• Non-sequiturs
• Strawmen

Har De Har Har:  Officialdom – cops, soldiers, paramedics, bureaucrats – always, always believe that nobody could do their jobs.  Sort of like union teachers believe homeschoolers can’t possibly, y’know, teach kids:

The NRA’s chief spokesman, Wayne LaPierre, infamously claimed following the Sandy Hook child massacre that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” — but Rivera and other combat vets say that’s ridiculous.

“I think they would absolutely panic,” [Sgt. Rafael Noboa y Rivera] told The Nation. [Editor’s note: Rivera served as Raw Story’s associate publisher in 2013.]…“I think there’s this fantasy world of gunplay in the movies, but it doesn’t really happen that way,”…

Well, thanks, Sergeant Obvious.

To be fair (something Raw Story will not), it’s entirely possible there are law-abiding shooters out there who do think it’s like the movies.

But you don’t go through any sort of concealed-carry training with any such illusions – any more than any cop or soldier.

But while we’re on the topic of cops and soldiers…:

“When I heard gunfire [in Iraq], I didn’t immediately pick up my rifle and react. I first tried to ascertain where the shooting was coming from, where I was in relation to the gunfire and how far away it was. I think most untrained people are either going to freeze up, or just whip out their gun and start firing in that circumstance.”

Right.  In combat, where the situation is fluid and confusing and the adrenaline and stress are overwhelming, lots of training is required to survive, much less make sure you don’t kill the wrong person.   And for police work, where there generally isn’t an “enemy” and situations can be incredibly ambiguous (ambiguous enough that police departments grant cops a lot of qualified immunity for the inevitable, inadvertent, accidental shootings of the wrong people in the line of duty), lots of training is a legal, moral and tactical imperative.

However…

Complete The Thought, Now…:  …self-defense is not combat, and it’s not police work.

As we pointed out in Monday’s piece, there are 3-4 criteria that a civilian – not a soldier in combat, or a cop on duty – must follow for a shooting to be considered legal self-defense [1].  And “hearing a shooting, and running to engage the shooter”, depending on your state and the zeal of the prosecutor, might very well violate two of them (“The Threat Must Be Immediate” and “Duty to Retreat”).

There’s a flip side to that; while hearing gunfire in the distance is chock full of nasty, lethal ambiguities, there are certain situations that are not ambiguous at all:

• Having a car pull up next to you (let’s say, for sake of argument, you’re a 120 pound woman), and a man climbs out and says “get in the car, bitch”
• The sound of someone trying to kick your back door in
• The sight of someone with a knife, approaching you and demanding money
• Someone right year you, walking through the mall or your church or your workplace, calmly shooting people, one after the other.

None of these situations are remotely ambiguous.  You don’t need military training, or police experience, or even to have an IQ above 75, to know exactly what is going on.  You need nothing special in terms of knowledge to know that each of these situations is an immediate threat to your life.  Right now.  

And you don’t need any special training (although practice and drilling and, yes, training certainly help) to respond.

Which brings us to the next non-sequitur:

Stephen Benson first learned during Navy SEAL training that carrying a gun would be more likely to expose him to gun violence.

That lesson directly contradicts the message promoted by the National Rifle Association and increasingly cited by gun owners as their motivation for buying a firearm, reported The Nation [There’s a freaking shock].

“It’s insane,” Benson said, recalling how his military training exposed the lie behind the most persistent pro-gun argument.

“We put on our issue .45s, and our instructor said, ‘Gentlemen, the first and most important thing you’ve done by putting on that weapon is you’ve increased your chances of being in a gunfight by 100 percent,’” he said.

[By the way – this last couple of paragraphs tripped my BS detector.  And as Joe Doakes showed in the comments, my BS detector is better than Raw Story’s, or my stalker’s.  See the UPDATE below]

After which the SEALS (who are not, to the best of my knowledge, “issued” .45s, although it’s entirely possible Mr. Benson went through “SEAL training” before 1985) did what?  Learned de-escalation techniques and put the guns away?

No – they learned how to win gunfights.  It’s their job.

For civilians, it is a non-sequitur; if you carry (concealed, usually – not openly, inviting a pre-emptive strike), it should decrease your chance of ever getting into a fight of any kind, since avoiding fights becomes an imperative.  It also decreases your chance of being defenseless against a lethal threat.  To zero?  No – sometimes it just doesn’t work, But the record is good: hundreds of justifiable homicides a year; tens of thousands of defensive gun uses, mostly with no shots fired; crime rates lowered with no gun use needed at all.

Said No Law Abiding Civilian Gun Owner, Ever:  The rest of the article is more of the same; this sort of thing:

“Unless it’s constantly drilled into you, it’s very hard to maintain discipline in those situations,” [former ATF agent and Vietnam veteran ]  told The Nation. “You’re immediately hit with a massive thump of adrenaline…conscious thought shuts down because you’ve been taken over by your nervous system, and your nervous system is saying, ‘Holy sh*t, things just got really bad.’”…“Someone can always say, ‘If your mother is being raped by 5 people, wouldn’t you want her to have a gun?’ Well, okay, if you put it that way, I’d say yes — but that’s not a likely scenario.”

Well, duh.  It’s not likely to happen to anyone’s given mom on any given day.  But if it’s any given mom, and that mom doesn’t wanna get raped, is Mr. Benson saying that there’s any ambiguity in the situation requiring any special training ?

Any at all?

 “The question is: If you see someone running out of a gas station with a gun in their hand, do you want an untrained person jumping out and opening fire?” the former ATF agent said. “For me, the answer is clearly ‘no.’”

Far be it from me to question the qualifications of an ATF agent – an elite, utterly-qualified federal agency that gave guns to narcotraficantes  but the “answer is clearly no” to any citizen with a carry permit and no badge, too.   Jumping out and firing at people who aren’t a direct threat to you can get you in trouble with the wrong prosecutor – and even, sometimes justifiably, the right ones.

Look – we get it.  If you have a heart attack as you’re walking down the aisle at Target, you’d like the first person to come along to be a cardiologist, not a receptionist with a cell phone and a six-months-old Red Cross first aid card.  If you’re is stranded in a blizzard, you’d like it to happen as you pull up to a Embassy Suites with a trunkful of “Free Evening With Champagne” coupons rather than in the middle of the prairie with a candle, a bag of Snickers bars and a space blanket.  And if you’re stuck in a room at your church when a pasty-faced forty-something loser in a “Minnesota Progressive Project” t-shirt barges in with a .25 automatic, you’d like there to just happen to be an off-duty cop with a service  Glock in the room with you rather than some random guy with a carry permit.

But if the only thing standing between you and personal extinction is that secretary, that candle and those snickers, or tha pudgy projectile-sweating middle-aged guy holding a pistol in his shaky hands, are you going to say “No! I choose death on priciple, you mere pretenders!”

I’m gonna guess not.

Especially since – all the derision from Raw Story The Nation notwithstanding – the regular schlemiel’s record is pretty good, all in all.

UPDATE:  Mr. Benson, the “SEAL”, who gave the spiel about the “Instructor” in “SEAL Training” that “warned him” about the risk of “gunfights” if he”carried a gun” like “SEALs” do, tripped my BS detector even as I quoted him.  I thought Mr. Benson sounded more like Heather Martens than Marcus Luttrell.

And as Joe Doakes pointed out in the comments– my BS detector is pretty darn good after all .  Mr. Benson, the “SEAL”, is a fraud.  He duped The Nation:

The original story identified a source as a combat veteran and former Navy SEAL. A records search has since revealed that he significantly exaggerated his military record. His comments have been removed from the article, and the headline has been changed. We apologize to our readers.

Of course, Raw Story doesn’t favor us with that factoid in their copy and paste job.  And my not-very-smart stalker is probably gonna find it a surprise as well.

(more…)

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

America was founded on the belief that people were endowed by their Creator with certain rights, including the right to life, which carries with it the right to defend one’s life from those who would take it.  A gun-free zone denies effective self-defense which jeopardizes the right to life; it is an unjust law.

The classical philosophers from St. Augustine and Abraham Lincoln through Thoreau, Martin Luther King and Gandhi agree we have a moral duty to disobey unjust laws.

Turns out, guns are common on that Oregon college campus despite the gun-free policy.   Lots of classical philosophers there.  Good for them!

Wonder how long before someone complains that students who carry on campus make others feel “unsafe” so the school must expel them?

Joe Doakes

Just you watch.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo presides over a state that led the nation in attempting to ratchet up gun control after the Sandy Hook massacre.  It also includes New York City, where gun crime is surging in the wake of those restrictions (and, to be fair, Bill DeBlasio’s hapless attitude toward law enforcement, which is rapidly undoing the progress of the Giuliani era).  While the “surge” isn’t close to seventies-era levels (when 2,200 a year were being killed), it’s still shaping up to be much worse than the 300 or so from the Giuliani and Bloomberg eras.

Anyway – Cuomo’s proposed solution:  More gun control.

And to get it, he wants to shut down government to get the GOP to go along:

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo reiterated his call for Democrats to shut down government in order to force Republicans to support gun control.

Cuomo first issued this demand on September 26 while speaking at the funeral of ex-aide Carey Gabay, who was shot and fatally wounded in one of the numerous shootings surrounding the Labor Day J’Ouvert celebration in Brooklyn.

The New York Daily News quoted Cuomo saying:

If the far right is willing to shut down the government because they don’t get a tax cut for the rich, then our people should have the same resolve and threaten to shut down the government if they don’t get a real gun control law to stop killing of their innocents.

Cuomo doubled down on this demand following the heinous October 1 attack on innocents at Umpqua Community College, saying, “I’d love to see the Democrats stand up and say, ‘We’re going to shut down the federal government or threaten to shut down the government if we don’t get real gun control legislation,’”

Opportunity knocks.

The NYTimes’ “Room For Debate” feature – which generally gathers a bunch of liberals and a token conservative or two to laboriously discuss issues – currently features the question “Is the NRA Still Invincible”.

This time, the series features a piece by Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds, who notes, quite correctly, that it’s a matter of trust – and that as people trust government less and less, they are forced to trust themselves more and more.

“But that’s just paranoid!”, the left will respond.  “Government is…all of us”.

No it’s not.  Government is a bureaucracy that serves, primarily, itself.   And its actions, and indeed its statements, are less and less trustworthy as we go.

“Huh? What do you mean?”

As Reynolds points out – in 2008, Barack Obama pointed out that “we’re not coming for your guns”.  Last week, though, he listed as his model for gun control Australia – which carried out a gun confiscation that was incredibly draconian by Western standards.  And even when they stay out of the realm of specific proposals, it doesn’t help that whenever they open their mouths, they’re lying.  Every time.  No exceptions.

Is the NRA invincible?  It’s irrelevant; in many states (Minnesota included) the NRA is a marginal player.  It’s the people that make the Second Amendment human rights movement a juggernaut.  Not invincible, mind you; we came within a cat’s whisker of losing the Second Amendment 40 years ago.  We can’t let our guard down like that ever again.

Check Out Paragraph Nine.  Mind Blown.

The website “Raw Story” is, in general , almost as useless as Buzzfeed; at least Buzzfeed has some really cool recipes, which Raw Story utterly lacks.

Raw Story (henceforth RS) is as useless as “The Awl”.  There.  Got it.

Anyway, they ran a piece last week about the Oregon shooting that claimed that guns were useless for defending against mass shootings because…

…one shooter has a solid sense of physical and legal self-preservation.

But they sure think they’re onto something, as evidenced by their cool-handed, measured, sober headline:

Armed vet destroys gun nuts’ argument on mass shooters by explaining why he didn’t attack Oregon killer

So let’s look at the story and see what gets “destroyed”.

(more…)

Random thoughts after a pretty awful day yesterday:

Incongruity: So if #BlackLivesMatter, why do they only make the news the relatively small percent of the time when there’s a white shooter?

X Marks The Lack Of Spot: Speaking of shooters, MNGOPAC has a little reminder for everyone that’s jabbering about “commonsense gun control”:

They should add a line for “repeal gun free zones”.

It wouldn’t necessarily result in a green check box.  We’d need a third tick mark; a blue question mark labeled “would probably deter killers, give victims a chance“.

We Need More Like This:  Sheriff John Hanlin – the Douglas County Sheriff in whose juridiction the shooting took place – has long sparred with gun control hamsters.

And yesterday, his office refused to name the murderer – doing his best to deny the human roach the infamy and publicity he desired.

I’ll urge prayers, or whatever your worldview calls for, for Chris Mintz, an Army veteran who was shot seven times trying to save others during yesterday’s mass-murder in Oregon.

While the details are still sketchy, it appears Mintz was shot repeatedly trying to either protect others, or to stop the murderer during his killing spree.  He’s still in very serious condition with seven gunshot wounds, in the back, abdomen, hands and apparently legs.

Mintz is, by all indications, a hero.

And hopefully via the grace of God he’ll come out of this a living hero.

But to paraphrase the vacuous suit that 52% of our low-information neighbors put into office, heroism is not enough.

Chris Mintz is a big, strong guy – he’s apparently done some cage-fighting – trained to a peak of physical power.  And he was laid low – hopefully temporarily – by a coward with a firearm.

But another hero – a 110 pound woman, a 70 year old man, a handicapped guy in a wheelchair – would have had a decent chance of taking the coward down even with a feeble little pocket .380.

Exactly as happened on December 11, 2012, just 120 miles north of Umpqua Community College, when Nick Meli confronted a man intent on mass-murder at the Clackamas Mall in Portland. Meli and his Glock didn’t even need to fire a shot; the man, intent on mass murder and who’d already killed two innocent people.  The killer saw Meli, realized the jig was up (as happens with most mass-murderers when confronted with unexpected lethal force), and slunk away to kill himself.  Exactly as has happened at many other episodes, where a “good guy or gal with a gun” ended a mass shooting before it became too “mass”.

Victory for the good guys.

But Umpqua is a gun free zone.

How’d that work out?

PS:  Heroism under fire seems to be in the water out there; one of the heroes from last month’s French train episode was from the same area in Oregon.

A shooting at Umpqua Community College in southwestern Oregon has apparently claimed 10.

First things first; I’ll urge prayers, or whatever your worldview calls for, for the survivors, and the families of the victims.

And I urge you not to believe anything the media has to say about it for the next couple days.

But it bears noting that Umpqua is – you guessed it…:

The community college is a gun-free campus.

“Possession, use, or threatened use of firearms (including but not limited to BB guns, air guns, water pistols, and paint guns) ammunition, explosives, dangerous chemicals, or any other objects as weapons on college property, except as expressly authorized by law or college regulations, is prohibited,” the college’s security policy states.

How many more innocent lives will be sacrificed to the false god of gun control?

UPDATE: Well, this is kinda interesting:

[Korney Moore, an 18 year old student] said she saw her teacher get shot in the head, apparently after the gunman came into the classroom. At that point, Moore told the newspaper, the shooter ordered everyone to get on the ground. The shooter then asked people to stand up and state their religion and then started firing, Moore said..

Huh.

I’m sure this fellow was a real person – but there are so many things about this email to the Rochester Post – Bulletin, and Minnesota’s anti-gun social media is so packed with people who run multiple “sock puppet” identities, that it’s hard not to wonder if he isn’t a plant.

As Joe Doakes noted in the comments re yesterday’s story about retiring DFL representative Kim Norton’s plans to push more pointless, time-wasting anti-Second Amendment legislation in the next legislative session, it would be not only funny, but the perfect response, for some member of the House to rise up and propose a kill-all amendment that would repeal the requirement to register kayaks.

Who in the House could make this happen?

While campaign finance laws would no doubt forbid offering a beer to the representative that offered the amendment, I’ll certainly offer a drink to someone else in your honor.

For democracy!

Minnesota’s gun-rights movement has carried out probably the best single grassroots political reformation in recent state history; over the course of 20 years, Minnesota has gone from being an anti-gun state that flirted seriously with Chicago-style gun bans in the eighties, to being a state with a decent shall-issue law and a reasonable chance of debating “Stand your Ground” and even “Constitutional Carry” in coming years, provided some elections break the right way.

More than that?  The pro-Second Amendment human rights movement in Minnesota is a bipartisan front; Republicans throughout the state have joined with DFLers through most of greater Minnesota – who’ve learned, in some cases the hard way, that most of Minnesota outside the 494-694 ring hold their Second Amendment human rights in high regard.

To the point where the DFL apparently has to keep their lobbying to Metrocrats and DFL machine-players who have nothing to lose.

Like Rochester DFL rep Kim Norton, who’s leaving the House after this next session, and wants to go out in a blaze of big-government, criminal-coddling glory, apparently.

Gun rights supporters are none too pleased with Norton’s announcement that she’ll push for stricter gun laws during her final legislative session next year…

Norton, who is not running for re-election in 2016, said she has received about 50 emails so far. The vast majority of those emails are from people who do not live in her legislative district. She said she has no intention of giving up on her plan to introduce a bill tightening gun rights. Among the ideas she plans to push is one prohibiting guns in the Capitol complex saying, “I don’t feel safe at work.”

She added, “Many of my constituents have asked for change.”

Rep. Norton; it’s entirely possible you’re not safe at work.  Same as everyone else in the Rice/University neighborhood, which has become one of Saint Paul’s sketchiest.

But it’s not because of the people who were covered by the Capitol carry restriction (carry permittees had to notify the Capitol Police if they planned to carry in the Capitol complex) – who are absolutely no danger to anyone, legislator or not.  It’s because of the same, common criminals who threaten all the rest of us, and who don’t bother getting permits or notifying Capitol police, any more here than they do in Chicago.

In other words, your proposal is as useless as any other gun control measure – and utterly pointless as well.

Speaking of which:

The good guys have responded:

The Minnesota Gun Owners Political Action Committee sent out an email urging its supporters to email the Rochester DFLer and tell her they oppose her efforts. In an interview with the Post-Bulletin earlier this month, The gun rights group’s email begins, “Just when you think anti-gun politicians in Minnesota have gotten a clue, one pops up and proposes what they call ‘common sense gun law changes.'”

In an interview, the group’s political director Rob Doar said his organization has serious concerns with the idea of establishing any sort of gun registration system…He said the idea also raises privacy rights concerns, with there being a potential for the data to be hacked. He noted that Canada decided to scrap its firearms registry because it proved to be expensive and ineffective.

Minnesota’s gun grabbing DFL legislators have been beaten senseless, session after session after session, for well over a decade and a half now.Apparently they don’t get the hint.  From MNGOPAC:

Norton is still working on crafting the bill but said her legislation will focus on making it easier to keep track of gun ownership. She noted that if she sells her kayak to someone, she has to register who she gave it to and questions why the same laws don’t always apply in the case of firearms.”

Dear Representative Norton: you’re retiring from office after the session. It’s probably a good thing.

It’ll be interesting to know how the person the DFL endorses to try and hold your seat stands on this.