The latest Moms Want Action tweet. Like everything MWA says, it’s counterfactual…

…but let’s stick with appearances and play a game of “Where’s Waldo”, where “Waldo” = “a black person”.

\

See her back there? Peering over the shoulder of the woman with ELCA Hair, not that that narrows it down any?

White, upper-middle-class female, utterly entitled, and keeping a few minorities around as visual accessories.

There is no more perfect metaphor for the gun control movement.

This is a new Australian Army recruiting video.

Who are they training to fight?

Taliban?

ISIS?

The Chinese?

After three years of absurdly restrictive Covid regulations met by some strenuous civil and less than civil resistance, they are not just training to fight Australians – who are officially disarmed – but they are putting that out that as a feature for recruiting new soldiers.

Who puts this kind of campaign together?

More troublingly – who do you think this sort of campaign appeals to?

From. My. Cold. Dead. Hand.

To: All you Normies
From: The Elites
Re: Die, For All We Care

Proles/knaves/fyrds,

Your life, property and family, mere peasant, are not of enough value that we, your elites, should allow you a $500 handgun to protect them.

However, ours – we elites – are of such value that dropping double the income of a typical American household is perfectly fine:

Luxury real estate agent Branden Williams said protection dogs have become so popular among his mega-wealthy clients in L.A. that he’s now in the market for one himself, especially after a neighbor was robbed at gunpoint in Beverly Hills. Williams has tasked the same broker his mom used to buy her protection dog, a German shepherd imported from Germany, with finding him a suitable animal this year.

“I will say they’re not cheap; the ones I’m looking at are between $60,000 and $100,000,” he said. “It’s a whole other level of training; we’re not talking about doggy day care here.”

Just so you know the hierarchy of the universe.

(BTW – kudos to Lisa Bender, who at least got the spirit of things right, advocating gun control while getting private security on the taxpayer’s dime. Well done, Ms. Bender) .

Regards,

Your Betters

Whenever your “progressive“ friends condescendingly coo “nobody’s coming after your guns“, just remember that career bureaucrat and St. Paul, representative Dave Pinto is out there plying his trade:

School counselors.

Leftist ministers at “progressive“ churches

Marriage counselors, with six hyphenated last names.

These are a partial listthe people that today’s DFL wants to give control over your civil rights.

By the way – where to fight that mental health crisis, making half the population distrust the mental health industry.

Noticed a lot more people shooting at silhouettes waaaaaay down at the other end of the range lately?

Blame Elisha Dicken, the hero of last summer’s attempted spree killing in Indiana, who put eight out of ten shots into a would-be mass murderer at a range of 40 yards, under the stress of shooting at someone out to murder everyone he could see.

Massood Ayoob comments on the episode, the drill – and comments on some other attempted spree killings ended by good guys with guns….

…at ranges that seem like they’re from Davy Crockett tales.

Governor Klink released his gun control proposals yesterday.

Did he propose to push metro prosecutors to use the sentence enhancement for using guns to commit crime?

Perish the thought, simple peasant.

No, the usual California-stye gruel: magazine capacity limits, age limits, and most importantly gun registration [1].

It’s time to turn out.

The Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus is holding its annual “Lobby Day” on Thursday morning. Come on down to the Capitol. Members of the Caucus will meet you, show you how to find your Rep and Senator in the various office buildings, and help you represent gun owners, face to face, to our legislature.

The legislature takes these days seriously since they know that unlike the astroturf clutches of biddies with ELCA Hair that ProtectMN and Moms Want Action sends waddling around the place, we represent a hell of a lot of actual voters that consider the 2nd Amendment a litmus test. And there are a lot of us out there. Enough to flip a chamber or two in 2024? Yep.

Hope to see you there on Thursday morning!

[1] They’re called “Universal Background Checks” – but the only way to make them “universal” is to keep track of which guns have been background-checked. This creates a set of linked data points – or, as they’re called in the information management business, a “database” . Ringing a bell, yet?

Most Illinois counties say they will refuse to enforce Governor Pritzker’s unconstitutional “assault weapon” ban:

Edwards County Sheriff Darby Boewe wrote in a statement that part of his duty is to protect the right to keep and bear arms.

“The right to keep and bear arms for defense of life, liberty, and property is regarded as an inalienable right by the people,” Boewe wrote. “Therefore, as the custodian of the jail and chief law enforcement officer for Edwards County, that neither myself or my office will be checking to ensure that lawful gun owners register their weapons with the State, nor will we be arresting or housing individuals that have been charged solely with noncompliance of this act.”

The statement was drafted by Illinois Sheriffs’ Association Executive Director Jim Kaitschuk, according to ABC News, and sent out to sheriff’s departments to use or make edits if desired.

DuPage, Sangamon, and Iroquois counties are among the 74 departments that have released similarly modified statements. Iroquois County Sheriff Clinton Perzee said he would not use his jails to detain people exercising their civil rights, according to the Lake and McHenry County Scanner.

Just your periodic reminder that, outside America’s moldy blue core cities, gun control is largely dead.

Largely .

Like the villain in “Scream”, it will keep bouncing back until we finally cut the head off.

Last week, an armed robber at a Taqueria in Houston, Texas got tuned up by a guy with a gun.

I desperately want to call him a “good guy with a gun“. pinky swear, I do. An armed robber f**ked around, and he found out.

Warning: not for the faint of heart. Somebody dies in this video.

Remember; to claim self-defense (and win a trial, if it comes to that), you have to show five things:

You are innocent (or not the aggressor)

You reasonably fear, death are great bodily harm

That threat is immediate.

you use only the force needed to end that threat.

It’s Texas, so there is no duty to retreat

My two cents worth:

• The first four shots are perfectly good
• Shots five through eight might be explainable, by a decent lawyer.
• Shot number nine? Looks like an execution. AYou’re going to need a very good lawyer indeed.
• Leaving the scene afterwards? Could be problematic.

This show – two self defense lawyers discussing the case – is two of the better hours. I’ve seen on the subject. It’s well worth a watch.

It’s a cautionary episode, indeed.

Among the welter of new laws going into effect at every level of government this past week are two one must suspect the MN DFL “trifecta” will trot out sooner than later; gun insurance.

San Jose passed a municipal ordinance requiring gun owners carry liability insurance.

Notably, the kinds of coverage mandated by the ordinance would not cover the overwhelming majority of firearms incidents that tend to be the subject of public concern. To start, homeowners and renters policies only extend coverage for injuries to third parties. Generally, this would mean guests, contract workers, or other visitors to the insured’s property, or in some cases, to third parties who were injured by the insured off-premises. Injuries to other members of the household would not be insured. Thus, the paradigmatic example of a tragic firearms accident—a child gets hold of an unsecured firearm and injures his or her sibling—would not be covered.

Naturally, this depends on the integrity of the state’s insurance regulators. After New York’s attack on the NRA’s carry insurance program, it’d seem that trust is misplaced, at least in all “Blue” states.

Depending on one’s point of view, the new law in New Jersey would appear to be even more insidious, or comically incompetent; it doesn’t specifically rule out insuring illegal activities with guns:

As to whether it would violate New Jersey insurance law to extend coverage to criminal acts, the question is—as it is in many states—somewhat complicated. But ultimately, the state Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld exclusions for “expected or intended” injury as barring coverage, including in Voorhees v. Preferred Mutual Insurance Co. (1992), SL Industries v. American Motorists Insurance Co. (1992), and Harleysville Insurance Cos. v. Garitta (2001). Moreover, in 1990’s Figueroa v. Hartford Insurance Co., the Appellate Division of the Superior Court of New Jersey held that an injured party could be collaterally estopped from suing a third-party’s insurer to relitigate questions of intent where that intent had been settled in a previous criminal action, such as by a guilty judgment or plea.

At a minimum, it can therefore be said that New Jersey insurance law broadly permits exclusions for intentional acts in personal liability policies and that state courts have shown deference to criminal proceedings as dispositive in settling questions of intent (which isn’t necessarily true in all states.) Given that backdrop, a broad reading of A. 4769’s text would appear to require the state’s firearms owners to obtain coverage that does not actually exist, particularly in the wake of regulatory actions to shut down the NRA’s Carry Guard program. That would amount to a de facto ban on firearms ownership, directly contravening the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, even before applying the Court’s more recent Bruen test.

I can see the MNDFL majority copying and pasting either law.

Anti-gun groups peddled influence in the Centers for Disease Control to gundeck research that showed defensive gun uses by civilians are common. It’s just bad for business, if you’re a gun grabber.

The decision to remove a CDC-commissioned report from the agency’s website on gun statistics at the apparent behest of gun-control advocates may further strain its relationship with Congressional overseers, especially pro-gun Republicans who are set to take control of the House next year. The relationship between the two, already frayed over the Coronavirus pandemic, could reach new lows not seen in decades. During the 1990s, Congress put restrictions on CDC funding in response to officials openly working with gun-control groups to try and ban handguns.

“We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes,” Mark Rosenberg, director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention, told The Washington Post in 1994. “It used to be that smoking was a glamour symbol–cool, sexy, macho. Now it is dirty, deadly–and banned.”

Kleck, Professor Emeritus at Florida State University’s College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, stood by his research. He said the CDC did not reach out to him for his perspective before making the change. He argued the removal of the reference to his estimate was “blatant censorship” and said it was evidence of the politicization of the agency.

Kleck – a Democrat – has been a Thomas Becket to the gun grabbers’ Henry II for three decades now. Seems the grabbers have decided to cut out the middleman.

First Covid, now putting a finger on the scale re guns.

I’m building a list of alphabet agencies some future GOP administration is going to need to gut, using the Marines if necessary.

UPDATE: Becket. Not More. Blah

I used to think DFLers merely counted on voters being ignorant.

I was young and naive.

They actively promote ignorance:

Senator Morrison is an M.D, so she certainly isn’t stupid. She must know that the imponderably vast majority of those “children”. are boys aged 14+ who are involved in crime, mostly murdered by other young men like themselves, likewise started on the wrong path bright and early in life.

She must know that the only things that actually work to prevent that sort of carnage are:

• Using the sentencing enhancements for gun crimes that so helped in cleaning up New York City thirty years ago – the type that Mike Freeman and John Choi never use on criminals of any age, and that Mary Moriarty hahahahahahaha I can’t even finish the sentence with a straight face.
• Intervening with youth at risk of going into The Life.

Certainly she’s had this shown to her. There’s no way that hasn’t happened.

So she’s counting on promoting ignorance.

Look for a lot of that this session.

Democrats: “crazy paranoid wing nuts! Nobody’s coming for your guns! It’s all just propaganda to enrich the NRA and the gun industry!“

Also Democrats:

“OK, we’re coming for 70 to 80% of your guns. But you’re still paranoid!“

So you read the headline of this Strib article, and you think perhaps straw-purchased guns are turning up more often, or maybe that some people out there with clean criminal records are going out to Fleet Farm, picking a gun from the display case, conducting a completely legal and above board purchase, and then embarking on the life of crime.

But then you read the lead, and it’s…

…about stolen guns being used in crime.

That were purchased legally, at one point or another.

I’m not sure if they’ve thought this through.

Unless some enterprising gang conducts a heist from the loading dock add Glock USA, literally every firearm available in the United States was legally purchased at one point or another.

“Even the Mauser KAR 98K grandpa brought back from World War II?“

Well, yeah, the German government purchased it from Mauser in the 1930s or 1940s, and give it to some soldier, from whom your grandfather got it by means fair or foul.

I don’t mean to make light of what is, honestly, a fairly scabrous campaign on the part of big left, the anti-gun movement and the media; the latest chanting point is “there’s a very fine line between legal guns, and legal gun owners, and criminals“.

Of course, with the owners, there is almost invariably not. The overwhelming majority of people who commit crimes with guns have significant criminal records and aren’t allowed to touch, much less own, a firearm.

With the guns? I mean, as long as you gloss over theft (or the federal felony of straw purchasing), it’s both technically true and complete balderdash.

Mike Freeman on why he doesn’t bother prosecuting straw buyers:

So let’s sum it up.

Minneapolis has an epidemic of shootings because:

1. The city is full of illegal guns, because
2. the DFL county prosecutor doesn’t prosecute gun crimes, in part because…
3. the DFL-controlled House hasn’t increased the penalties, and also because…
4. the DFL-controlled City Council, Mayor and the state’s DFL Attorney General think public safety is a “privilege” and crime is society’s fault

The common factor is the DFL.

That’s a direct quote from Mayor Frey, from a presser yesterday.

I could shred that statement myself, using facts and stuff

Or I could let Keith Ellison do it, far more delightfully, starting around :12 seconds into this video:

When Keith Ellison‘s BS detector explodes, spewing shrapnel about the room, you know you’ve got a problem.

Keith Ellison presided over, and in someways encouraged, the greatest outbreak of lawlessness, and certainly the greatest collapse in the rule of law, in Minnesota history.

But never let it be said he doesn’t know who his real enemies are:

After this past two years, your attorney generals real targets are the law abiding gun owners of Minnesota.

In the first 150 odd years of the Minnesota State Fair, law abiding citizens were discouraged, and perhaps even told in as many words not to bring guns to the Minnesota state fair.

And yet they did. From statehood until 1974, law-abiding Minnesotans didn’t need a permit to carry a firearm, so it’s completely preposterous just say not a single law abiding citizen brought their firearm to the fair.

And we know that in the “shall issue” era, people might have brought a gun or two. In fact, I know of at least one radio station where every single staffer at the fairgrounds may have had a legal firearm, and a clean criminal record to go with it.

 And in that 150-odd years, there were countless fights…

… and exactly one incident with a gun, an armed robbery probably five or six years ago – an incident that happened about the time the fair stepped up the “gun free zone“ signs and rhetoric. If you guessed that the perpetrators were legal gun owners, actually entitled to hold, much less own, a firearm or carrier in public legally, you would have guessed wrong.

So that’s the first 160 years of Fair history..

Then, last year (before the Covid-addled 2021 Fair), the Minnesota State Fair announced that they were going to put some teeth behind the “gun free zone“ designation, putting up metal detectors and searching fairgoers. They took that policy to court, and prevailed (so far).

The official policy of the Minnesota State Fair is that law abiding citizens should be defenseless against whatever miscreancy any ne’er-do-well wants to carry out.

After about 160 relatively tranquil years, it took exactly 10 days for some party pooper to settle his argument – probably over a fish story or a bet on a Gophers game, I bet – with a gun that just couldn’t possibly have been there, because it’s a gun free zone.

There is a lesson here that we can, and should, apply to the sort of spectacular violence that has the white middle-class part of our society so exercised, the mass shootings in places like schools and government offices and schools and grocery stores and schools.

If you want to deter violence, nobody actually needs to carry a gun. All that’s needed is the knowledge that nothing prevents good people from protecting themselves.

Criminals aren’t as a rule the brightest people – but they have a sense of self preservation.  in the months after Minnesota past its “shall issue“ carry permit statute in 2003/2005, something weird happened: an alarming number of bars that posted themselves as “gun free“ wound up getting robbed. Most of those signs – especially in the less than posh neighborhoods – disappeared from bars by about 2006.

There are two lessons in last nights story:

1) The Minnesota State Fair board values the anxieties and aesthetics of its white, upper middle class governing board and political circle more than your safety.

2) an ounce of prevention is worth all the self righteous politically correct hubris in the world.

160+ years of law abiding citizens carrying firearms on the fairgrounds: zero shootings.

Two years (one of them after Covid) of security Cedar and at law abiding citizens: the first ever shooting on the fairgrounds (an increase in violence around the fairgrounds).

Correlation doesn’t necessarily equal causation. But in this case, I’m pretty sure it does.

It is alleged that there was a shooting incident Saturday night at the Minnesota State fair.

On the one hand, there is footage of… something.

On the other hand? This cannot possibly have happened. The state fairboard banned guns, and a state court upheld that decision.

So clearly, there were no guns at the fair.

I’m not sure who these people think they’re fooling.

The school district in rural Spirit Lake, Minnesota is going to have armed staff on premises

“It’s really our obligation and duty to do whatever we can to protect them. And we talk about school shootings, and you have an active shooter, a killer, in your building, the number one way to save lives is to address the killer immediately,” Spirit Lake Community School District Superintendent David Smith said.

This being Minnesota, they are doing with an extra special bureaucratic twist; they are selecting (secretly, and anonymously) 10 staffers, and putting them through some extra training.

Which is way better than nothing; merely knowing that the school is not a “gun free zone“ will go a long way toward detering any potential nonsense.

This being Minnesota, again, there will be dissent:

“I believe there are better ways to go about it, and all kinds of security measures that can take place as opposed to adding more guns into a school building,” said Harold Prior, a Spirit Lake resident and former school administrator.

I always want to delve into the vast self-defense experience of people like Mr. Prior and ask them what they think is “better ways”.

But I will take this – to my knowledge, the first school district in Minnesota to openly lose the “gun free zone“ label – is at least a move in the right direction.

I stay pretty relentlessly civil, especially when discussing politics. There’s enough pointless anger out there.

But I’m going to say this, and I don’t care what you think about it: If you are part of the lefty social media mob that thinks “Kyle Rittenhouse is a murderer”, you are a flat-earther.

Complicated stuff follows. Stay with me, progressives.

You think someone’s trying to kill you. You shoot them – maybe fatally, maybe not. You’re arrested. The DA presses charges – assault, homicide, whatever.

To even be allowed to *argue* self-defense for assault or homicide, you have to show a judge evidence, to a legal standard, that:

• you reasonably feared being killed
• That threat was immediate – it was literally them or you, right then and there.
• you were not the aggressor [1]
• you used ONLY the force needed to end that lethal threat.
• in many states (including MN, but not WI), that you *reasonably* tried to get away [2].

That’s *before* the trial. If your evidence on any of those 4-5 criteria doesn’t stack up, you’ll be a defendant in a murder trial, not a self-defense trial.

Once you’ve gotten past that? On to trial!

And there, if the prosecution disproves any of those 4-5 factors beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury? You’re going to prison – for assault if nobody died, and murder if they did.

That’s a pretty high burden of proof for a “Murderer” to skate past. (Don’t think so? That’s just ignorant.

“But the judge was biased”

No, he wasn’t.

Rittenhouse may not have been a hero [3]. And if you think the whole episode is stupid and unfortunate, I don’t disagree – although in a moral society, the burden should fall on those who set out to damage and destroy others property.

Either way calling Rittenhouse a “murderer” is ignorant at best. And there’s an implied clause after “at best” [4]…

…but again, I try to stay civil.

I try. But I’m only human. It can’t last forever.

[1] And no, doing something you have every legal right to do does not make you an aggressor. Rittenhouse had a right to be where he was, and to carry a rifle. Don’t like it? Take it up with the Wisconsin Assembly.

[2] Where “reasonable” is defined by statute or, much more usually, in a stack of case law references that you have to be a lawyer to understand.

[3]But after seeing the mayhem that the entitled children of the politicalclass got away with scot-free in Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis and Kenosha, it’s not hard to understand why some people think he is a hero.

[4] And that implied clause may or may not but definitely does include the thought that a whole lot of the “Rittenhouse is teh murdererer” crowd think rioting and rioters are justified, which is a pretty problematic view.

All summed in one (since deleted) tweet:

I do know who needs to hear this; when someone brings a gun into a supermarket, shoot the security guard and then it doesn’t other people, and no one can lift a finger until the cops arrive, that’s not really much of an endorsement for gun control.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emailed in re the Indiana mall shooting, and the Good Guy with a Gun that ended it:

Holy crap! Nice shootin’, Tex.

Seriously.

OK, first things first: having to shoot someone in self-defense is the second-worst possible outcome to a very bad situation.

With that out of the way?

To elaborate on Joe – within fifteen seconds of the demented troglodyte [spree killers seek fame, so I won’t name him] starting a shooting spree where he killed three people, and clearly intended to kill as many people as possible, 22 year old good samaritan and good guy with a gun Elisha Dicker moved his girlfriend to safety, and then engaged the murderer, firing ten shots, hitting the would-be spree killer eight times.

At a range of 120 feet. With a handgun.

While under life-or-death stress.

That is incredibly impressive.

And just try to find the story in the mainstream media.

That, as usual, isn’t nearly as depressing as some of the other responses from leftyworld on social media:

• “If ‘good guys with a gun’ were of any use, they’d kill the bad guy before they killed ANYONE'”
• “Ack-shyu-ally, good samaritans are *only* non-violent. If he were a *real* good samaritan, he’d have only carried a first aid kit.”
• “Wouldn’t it be better if *nobody* had a gun?” (I try to ask them how they get the guns out of the hands of the Sapirmans of the world *first*. They never answer).
• “It’s still another person dead…”

Remember – their votes count as much as yours.

Depressing, huh?

The New York Times sounded off with an unctuous “Ack-shyu-ally”, saying good guys with guns ended about 3% of spree killings. That’s too low – but if you leave out shootings that happen where civilians aren’t allowed to have guns at all – schools, government buildings, bars in Florida, churches in Texas – and the fact that maybe 3-5% of the population actually carries even in permissive states, thats a pretty good percentage.

I’m looking forward to doing the analysis on that sometime soon, here.

The list of good guys with guns who’ve ended mass shootings is long, and full of the kind of people this brutally imperfect, evil-riven world needs more of. Dominic Rozier. Nick Meli. Jack Wilson, Stephen Willeford, Jeanna Assam. And now, Elisha Dicker.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Gun registration will not be used to facilitate government confiscation of private firearms.

It will be leaked so everyone in the world knows who has a gun to steal, who to SWAT and who to Red Flag.

Joe Doakes

And in Minnesota, where Carrie permit records are not public information, the antis have already promised to use any red flag law to SWAT Second Amendment activists.

Ask not why we Second Amendment activists are so absolutist. Ask why anyone who cares about their civil liberties isn’t.

Bystander in the St. Louis area shoots a serial violent armed robber:

A man who police say went on a “violent crime spree” at three gas stations was shot and killed by a customer armed with a gun, Missouri police say.

It happened around 3:20 a.m. on Saturday, July 16, in St. Charles, just outside St. Louis. The St. Charles Police Department said the 26-year-old robbery suspect, who is from St. Louis, died at a local hospital after being shot by a witness.

While I expected the knife wielding robber was “just getting his life together“, I’ve had no written confirmation.

All I know is, it’s been a good week for the good guys.

Berg‘s 18th law is still in effect – but initial reports indicate that an armed “Good Samaritan“ in Indiana killed a spree killer early in his attack:

The Greenwood Police Department confirmed Sunday that a lone shooter, believed to be an adult male, entered the food court of the mall around 6 p.m. with a rifle and several magazines of ammo. The suspect then shot into the mall, killing three people and injuring two more.

GPD also confirmed Sunday that the shooter was shot and killed by a Good Samaritan who was armed with a handgun. The man who shot the suspect, identified as a 22-year-old from Bartholomew County, had a legal gun permit and is fully cooperating with police.

I’m pretty sure Indiana is a constitutional carry state with no “legal gun permit” needed – but why quibble?

This is how mass spree shootings get stopped.

UPDATE: Aaaah, social media. Where people who can’t tell the difference between a firing pin and a bipod are suddenly experts on close quarter battle tactics and self-defense law.