Last week, we discussed the thesis of a couple of obscure academics, that the Paymar/Hausman/Martens gun-grab agenda in Minnesota failed last session because of racism – which would require you to believe that white metrocrat DFLers like Alice Hausman, Sandy Pappas and Michael Paymar are less anti-gun than Bobby Joe Champion and Rena Moran.

I posited a couple of counter theories.

And, today, we see that the liberal hamster governor of Colorado, John Hickenlooper, has a theory of his own; Coloradans just aren’t into all of those bungling, high-pressure outsiders coming to town from New York and trying to take their guns:

“Colorado is a state that people like to be themselves and solve their own problems,” the Democratic governor said in an interview with Capital Download, USA TODAY’s weekly video newsmaker series. “They don’t really like outside organizations meddling in their affairs, and maybe the NRA gets a pass on that.

“But (it is) probably not a bad idea” for gun-control groups, such as the one established by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, to curb their efforts if gun-rights activists collect enough signatures to force a recall vote on state Sen. Evie Hudak, a two-term Democrat from a suburban district north of Denver, he said.

If Republicans succeed in gaining her seat, Democrats would lose their 18-17 edge in the state Senate.

If this happens – and when the time comes, I’m going to send a few bucks to help ensure it does – it’ll be one of the biggest grassroots turnarounds in history.

And so I say “Heck of a job, Bloomie.  Keep up the good work.  Find another crisis not to waste!”

Earlier this week, the Joyce Foundation collected another installment on its payment for the MinnPost’s PR services in pursuit of disarming the American people – in this case, a “Community Voices” column by by Rebecca Lowen and Doug Rossinow, who are listed as “history professors at Metro State”.

Those who fail to learn from history, it’s fair to say, teach history at Metro State.

And if this reflects the current state of the victim-disarmament movement, it’d seem their strategy has shifted to “ad homina” and “making things up”.

(more…)

Of all the gun-grabbing leaders of the victim disarmament movement, few have the history of loathsome hypocrisy of Diane Feinstein.

When she was mayor of San Francisco, she issued an executive order revoking all civilian carry permits…

…but had herself issued a police permit first.  Fearful over an incident that had happened on the campaign trail when her life was threatened, Feinstein figured her life was worth defending, and unlike all the sheeple she ruled, she was competent to do it.

She’s baaaaack; she wanted some “assault weapons” for one of her potemkin news conferences, and she exerted influence on DC Police Chief Cathy Lanier, who – according to emails acquired by a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, got her subordinates to not only make it happen, but make it happen quietly:

Cmdr. Williams emailed Mr. Mentzer to put a “bug” in his ear that the police would “prefer that no mention of the fact that the weapons came from D.C. or were recovered by MPDC in the official language or speeches.” Mr. Mentzer replied, “By not mentioning where the weapons came from, we open ourselves up to the same charge against David Gregory.”

He was referring to the anchor of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” who knowingly procured an illegal 30-round magazine in the District as a stunt for his TV show, but was not charged.

The office of Senate Sergeant at Arms Terrance W. Gainer coordinated bringing the illegal weapons onto Capitol Hill for Mrs. Feinstein’s dramatic Jan. 24 news conference introducing her new “assault weapons” ban.

This shutdown is showing a lot of regular Americans that laws are for peasants.  If you’re a Second Amendment advocate, you’ve known this for decades.

Generally, whenever a lefty says “it’s time for a conversation about guns”, they mean “conversation” in the same sense that the crazy guy in the back of the bus means it; they talk (at full bellow), you shut up and listen.

Anthony Bourdain, of all people, sounds off with a useful contribution, by way of some notes about an upcoming episode of one of his foodie shows:

I suspect what people are going to talk about when they see our New Mexico episode is the sight of me; socialist sympathizer, leftie, liberal New Yorker, gleefully hammering away with an AR-15, an instrument of mayhem and loathing that also has the distinction of being America’s favorite weapon.

I like guns.

His next lunch in TriBeCa is going to be interesting.

But he carries on:

I like shooting them. I like holding their sleek, heavy, deadly weight in my hands. I like shooting at targets: cans, paper cut-outs, and—even though I’m not a hunter—the occasional animal. Though I do not own a gun—I would, if I lived in a rural area like, say…Montana—consider owning one.

And – this is really unusual – he actually holds up both ends of the conversation, from the perspective he already admitted to:

 Whatever my feelings about gun regulation—and my worries, as a father, about what kind of world my daughter will have to live in, I think I should have as many guns as I like. Even Ted Nugent should have guns. He likes them a lot. They make him happy—and as offensive as I may find a lot of what comes out of his mouth, I’m pretty sure, based on first hand experience, that he’s a responsible gun owner.

You, however, I’m not so sure about. And my next door neighbor. I’m not so sure about him either.

 He wants background checks.  As do, I’ll point out, not a few gunnies – who do you think supported the current NICS system, anyway? – provided it doesn’t turn into a tool for the world’s Michael Bloombergs to use against us.

But Bourdain notes exactly why it’s so hard to actually have the “conversation”:

The conversation so far has illuminated, instead of any substantial issues, mostly the huge cultural divide between those like me who live in coastal cities with restrictive gun laws—and that vast swath of America who live very differently. We don’t understand how they live. And they don’t understand how we could POSSIBLY live the way we live. A little respect for that difference might be a good thing. The contempt, mockery and total lack of understanding for all those people “out there” by deep thinkers and pundits who’ve never sat down for a cold beer in a bar full of camo-wearing duck hunters is both despicable and counterproductive. We are too busy expressing disbelief at the ways others have chosen to live to ever really talk about the nuts and bolts of making America safer and less violent.

No middle ground is possible when even the notion of a sane, reasonable person who likes to shoot lots of bullets at stuff is seen as so foreign—so “other”. Maybe we would be better off– safer, kinder to one another if we were Denmark or Sweden.

But we are not.

It’s worth a read.

Last week, when the first news of the Washington Navy Yard shooting broke out, I thought to myself “let’s sit out these first reports – because whatever the mainstream media reports for the first 4-6 hours will be not just wrong, but hysterical and the result of templates being filled in from the MSM/Democrat narrative”.

I wasn’t the only one:

In watching the coverage of the Washington Navy Yard shooting as it unfolded last Monday, I had to remind myself that most of the reports I was hearing would surely turn out to be incorrect, in some cases wildly so. And indeed this turned out to be the case. We were told, for example, that there was more than one gunman, and that one of them was armed with an AR-15 rifle. Even worse, both CBS and NBC identified the wrong man as the shooter before issuing retractions.

The first of these errors is the most understandable. In the rush to beat their competitors, the editing filters ordinarily in place are often put aside in favor of greater speed. Reports from the scene, no matter how unverifiable, are broadcast live so as to be first on the air. Again, understandable and even forgivable in most cases.

Less so is the misidentification of the shooter’s weapon.

I’m going to guess that the writer (PJM’s Jack Dunphy) and I aren’t the only ones.

I’d love to ask a mainstream media figure – is your industry’s adherence to Democrat narratives (and in some cases money) worth the damage your credibility is taking among people who pay attention?

To:  MPR News
From:  Mitch Berg,Uppity Peasant
Re:  Re-Joyce And Be Glad

MPR,

Last week, in a similar open letter to the management at the news-blog MinnPost, I asked how they squared the fact that they were accepting sponsorship for their “news” coverage – let alone sponsorship from non-profit issue advocacy groups and the government that journalists are supposed to hold accountable – with professional journalism’s purported ideals and ethics.

These ideals are – we are told – set forth in the “Society of Professional Journalists’ “Code of Ethics“. 

Now – in 2011, MPR accepted a grant from the Joyce Foundation supporting the production of a series, “Following the Firearm“.   As Joyce notes…:

The Center selected reporters working in the Great Lakes region and awarded them fellowships to enable them to undertake in-depth investigative reporting projects. The fellows also attended workshops to learn from experts in gun crime and gun policy. MPR News reporter Brandt Williams spent four months researching the story. The four-part series looks at the sources of Minneapolis crime guns, sentencing for gun crimes, the impact of gun violence on the African American community, and the challenges surrounding firearm tracing.

Now, as has been noted in this space, the Joyce Foundation is the primary sponsor of gun control groups in the United States.  They donate a lot of money to groups like Michael Bloomberg’s “Mayors Against Illegal Guns“, the Violence Policy Center (whose “research” on Second Amendment issues is notable for its strident inaccuracy)…

…and the MinnPost, whose own “journalism” on the subject has been increasingly suspect for the past year or so; the MinnPost would seem to have turned into a PR firm for the “Gun Safety” movement.   

But enough about them; let’s talk about MPR.

The SPJ Code of Ethics’ “Accountability” section says that the journalist should…:

• Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.  So how does reporting news on a controversial subject that is directly sponsored by a group that is a generous advocate for one side of the story not a real conflict of interest?
• Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.  I’d say getting sponsored by a key pressure group – including having, according to Joyce, a parade of Joyce-approved “experts” paraded before your reporters – qualifies. 
• Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and shun secondary employment, political involvement, public office and service in community organizations if they compromise journalistic integrity.  Seems pretty self-explanatory.
• Disclose unavoidable conflicts.  Was there disclosure?  Yep, there was, to a point; Joyce’s involvement was noted, although Joyce’s stake in the issue – its funding of gun control groups to the tune of tens of millions of dollars – was, near as I can tell, not. Strikes me as avoidable. 
• Deny favored treatment to advertisers and special interests and resist their pressure to influence news coverage.  How does MPR News’ acceptance of sponsorship from a special interest group not qualify?

 Your series aired back in 2011 – and to be fair, it presented factual information without pushing a political point of view especially overtly.  But neither did it go out of its way – in my opinion as a news consumer, activist on the subject and one-time reporter – to present much considered dissent from material supporting Joyce’s desired narrative, either. 

Which would make for an interesting parlor discussion – not that MPR News is especially interested in parlor discussions with people outside the Journo tribe. 

But beyond that?  About a month after the Joyce-sponsored series ran on MPR, the MPR News website published a commentary piece by Heather Martens – director and one of very few members of “Protect Minnesota”, a gun-control group.  The piece was notable for its complete absence of fact; every single non-numeric assertion made in the “Commentary” was false.  Every single one.  

And since I can’t imagine MPR News would publish a commentary by, say, a 9/11 Truther, or someone who favors white supremacy on biological grounds at all, much less without some sort of dissenting comment, I thought it was odd that MPR News granted her the bandwidth they did.

“Protect Minnesota” is also sponsored – almost entirely – by the Joyce Foundation, which had underwritten MPR’s series the previous month. 

Am I connecting dots that don’t belong connected?

Perhaps.  But if MPR had allowed its reporting to be sponsored by the NRA, and then ran an unaccompanied op-ed by Ted Nugent, people would talk, wouldn’t they? 

I don’t expect an answer, of course; MPR News doesn’t like engaging people outside the tribe (as I found last year, when one of your executives mis-addressed an email telling an MPR News staffer not to engage with me, to me). 

But since MPR News spends such time and effort claiming the moral and ideological journalistic high ground – claims to which I’ve given public credence in the past – it’s worth asking. 

Even the SPJ Code of Ethics says so.

Sincerely,

Mitch Berg
Uppity Peasant

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

That wasn’t a mass shooting in Chicago, it was a gang war. Coming soon to a neighborhood near you, as soon as the high-speed rail line is completed.

“Senseless and brazen acts of violence have no place in Chicago and betray all that we stand for,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Friday. “The perpetrators of this crime will be brought to justice and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. I encourage everyone in the community to step forward with any information and everyone in Chicago to continue their individual efforts to build stronger communities where violence has no place.”

Pretty much exactly what President Obama said about Benghazi. That didn’t turn out so well for us either.

To:  Joel Kramer (CEO/Editor), Roger Buoen and Susan Albright (Co-Managing Editors) Don Effenberger (News Editor)
From:  Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  They Get What They Pay For

Esteemed Editors:

I was never much of a reporter.  I could always do the “who, what, when, where, why and how” of a story just fine, and earned a living at it, off and on.  But it was never really my thing.

But I do remember, when I worked in the business, that the fastest way to get a reporter, producer or editor up on their back legs was to suggest that journalism partner with business or government to do the job.  They would say – with righteousness rivaling any Baptist minister or Trappist monk – that Journalism’s mission was to be a check and balance on government, business, anyone with power.    To comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.   Any whiff of filthy lucre was to be kept on the other side of the thick wall and locked door that separated the Sales department from the newsroom. 

Media analysts – I’m thinking Garfield and Gladstone’s “On The Media” on NPR, and the whole Romanesko borg – go through gyrations worthy of a Talmud symposium sifting through the ethics of mixing journalism and money. 

Now, theMinnPosttalks a big game about journalism.  And you’ve certainly staffed your site with a lot of people with long pedigrees in the regional news business.  And Brian Lambert. 

But I’ve noticed on one issue that your site gets a fair chunk of money from from the Joyce Foundation.  The Joyce Foundation also bankrolls most of the major gun control organizations in the United States, including Mayor Bloomberg’s efforts and “Protect Minnesota“. 

And along with this financial link, the MinnPost’s coverage of Second Amendment issues has gotten more and more slanted, and not a little bit risible in the bargain:

• Doug Grow has positively fawned over Heather Martens and Jane Kay (of “Moms Want Action”, another astroturf anti-gun group that gets money from the same pool of liberals with deep pockets that bankrolls Protect MN and, I suspect, the MinnPost); his coverage has been less “journalism” and more “holding a rhetorical slumber party”.  His piece on Rep. Hillstrom’s counter to the Paymar/Hausman gun grab bills – one of which Martens, a lobbyist, read into the record, a bizarre flouting of House rules – was so devoid of fact I concluded it could only have been written in advance. 
• I’ve got nothing but respect for Eric Black as a journalist – but his coverage of Second Amendment issues and their Constitutional history this past year has been a fount of inspiration for us on this blog. 

The MinnPost gets big bucks from Joyce, and starts a wave of anti-Second-Amendment (I’ll be charitable) cheerleading.  Coincidence?

Which leads us to this week, and Susan Perry’s piece on an academic “study” on gun violence.  It was a puff piece about a junk study…

…and it was sponsored – as noted in the story’s headline – by UCare.  An arm of the government of the State of Minnesota.  Now, leave aside that that government is currently controlled by the extreme metrocrat wing of the DFL party.  Here’s the question:  if journalism is supposed to hold government accountable, should be finacially beholden to government?

Or does that only count when it’s not a DFL sacred cow being promoted?

Because when your “journalism” is being done at the behest of issue-oriented non-profits and the government you’re theoritically supposed to hold accountable, isn’t it really just public relations?  Or campaign media?

Thanks,

Mitch Berg
Uppity Peasant

 The MinnPost – a non-profit-run institutional blog established the the intention to get a jump on the next wave of institutional journalism – gets a whole bunch of money from the Joyce Foundation.  Joyce also bankrolls Minnesota’s “largest” gun grabber group, “Protect Minnesota”, and Michael Bloomberg’s “Mayors Against Illegal Guns”, as well as paying academics to deliver the conclusions they want. 

Is that financial relationship related to the fact that the MinnPost has, whenever the subject of guns and the Second Amendment is at hand, turned itself into a risible propaganda organ for the gun-grabbing extreme left?

From Eric Black’s recycling long-obscure legal theories about the origins of the Second Amendment to Doug Grow’s naked puff-piecemongering in support of Heather Martens’ checkbook advocacy group, the MinnPost would seem to be working hard to earn the $50K or so they got from Joyce. 

The latest?  Susan Perry, a “Health” reporter who has pulled her weight in the past on theMinnPost’santi-gun beat. 

Confederate soldiers! With guns! Defending slavery! This is what the MinnPost think you, the law-abiding gun owner, genuflect to.

Yesterday came this piece, entitled…

Well, no.  We’ll get to the title in a bit.  But I’m going to pull a quote from the end of the story first.  I’ll add emphasis for weasel words and a particularly dim strawman:

“Although correlation is not synonymous with causation,” write Bangalore and Messerli, “it seems conceivable that abundant gun availability facilitates firearm-related deaths. Conversely, high crime rates may instigate widespread anxiety and fear, thereby motivating people to arm themselves and give rise to increased gun ownership, which, in turn, increases availability. The resulting vicious cycle could, bit-by-bit, lead to the polarized status that is now the case with the US.”

“Regardless of exact cause and effect, however,” they add, “the current study debunks the widely quoted hypothesis purporting to show that countries with the higher gun ownership are safer than those with low gun ownership.”

So – seventeen paragraphs into a nineteen paragraph article, we hear that the reasearchers aren’t actually drawing conclusions (in attacking a “widely quoted hypothesis” that nobody quotes at all). 

Which is a bit of a letdown for a story whose headline…:

“Idea that ‘guns make a nation safer’ is debunked in study”

…fairly screams “We’ve got a big big big conclusion here!”

 The Rhetorical Slalom Between The Strawmen: I’ll throw this out to the shooters in the audience.  Was this premise…:

The idea that “guns make a nation safer”

…as new to you as it was to me?

Anyway – the “premise”…

…is not true, according to a study published today in The American Journal of Medicine.

In fact, the study found just the opposite: Countries with a low rate of gun ownership have significantly fewer gun-related deaths than those with a high rate.

Right.  In the same way that areas where couples marry have higher divorce rates than areas where they just shack up. 

The study – and Perry’s piece – are honest, in a very dishonest sense; they scrupulously point out that gun death rates are, mirabile dictu, lower in places fewer guns.  But the “study” is equally scrupulous in avoiding apples to apples comparisons, or correlating their conclusions to any data that doesn’t fit inside their razor-thin premise…

…which is to attack a case (“Nations with few guns have higher gun crime rates!”) that, for the life of me, I’ve never heard a single credible person make – about nations, anyway. 

Cherry-Picked:  Perry notes that…

The U.S. leads in gun ownership — and gun deaths

The analysis found that the United States has far and away the highest rate of gun ownership, with 88.8 privately owned guns for every 100 people (“almost as many guns as it has people,” Bangalore and Messerli note)…The United States also has the highest firearm-related death rate: 10.2 deaths per 100,000 residents…At the other end of the spectrum are Japan and the Netherlands. Japan has a gun-ownership rate of 0.6 guns per 100 people, while the Netherlands’ rate is 3.9.

Those two countries also had two of the lowest death-by-gun rates: 0.06/100,000 for Japan and 0.46/100,000 for the Netherlands.

But neither Japan nor the Netherlands is fighting a “Drug War”; neither nation has policies that have turned their inner cities into shooting galleries, controlled by people who have nothing to lose by resorting to violence to protect their markets, using entry-level employees who grow up in a culture that glorifies violence and ignores consequences. 

Neither Japan nor the Netherlands has a major geographical region dominated by a culture that was practicing duelling and honor-killing and treating violence as a way of life long before there was a United States – a culture whose crime rates are, at worst, on par with the worst of the inner cities. 

Indeed, both Japan and the Netherlands are extremely homogenous countries; homogenous societies tend to be pretty placid – until they have to flirt with heterodoxy (ask the Koreans and the Ainu in Japan, or the Indonesians in the Netherlands).

Indeed, Perry’s article points – unwittingly – at the truth:

The only country that was a bit of an outlier was South Africa. It had a relatively low gun ownership rate of 12.5/100, but a high (the second-highest, just below the U.S.) gun-related death rate of 9.41/100,000.

And of the countries on the list, South Africa is the only one with a significantly – indeed, pivotally – heterodox society.  One with massive urban dysfunction, to boot. 

Which might lead the rational observer to conclude – or see a correlation, anyway – that guns don’t kill people; societal dysfunction does.

Math Is Hard, And Psychiatry Is Harder:  But let’s look at the “gun death” numbers Perry actually does deign to report – the relative gun murder rates in the US, the Netherlands, Japan and…:

[…the] United Kingdom also ranked low on both lists. It has a gun-ownership rate of 6.2 per 100 people and a gun-death rate of 0.25 per 100,000.

But fully half of the US “gun death rate” is suicides.  And the suicide rate in the US (12/100,000) is half of Japans (21.7/100,000), and equal to the UK’s (11.8), and both the US and UK are 50% higher  than the Dutch, at 8.8/100,000. 

We’re not sure if the “study” concluded that guns and depressed, mentally-ill or chemically-addled people don’t mix, or not.  Perhaps the Joyce Foundation will write a grant to study that?

No?

Is This A Strawman, Or A Begged Question?: Perry’s piece continues:

Their conclusion: “There was no significant correlation between guns per capita per country and crime rate, arguing against the notion of more guns translating into less crime.”

This is the third time in Perry’s piece the “notion” that anyone is comparing national gun rates to crime – at least in nations with working legal and law-enforcement systems, which is what the “study” is limited to. 

And for the record, I’m at a complete loss as to a single credible pro-gun advocate who’s made that claim – between nations.  The variables – societal heterodoxy, cultural conditions, criminal justice issues, different judicial systems – are far too complex to make such a case in an intelligent way. 

But when you start eliminating variables?   By just considering different firearms ownership rates in the US?  It’s not rocket surgery – even I can do it, even though I don’t have to because John Lott et al already did.  At worst, in the United States, places with higher legal gun ownership are very generally safer. 

And that’s just a correlation.  I’m not ascribing causation.

And unlike Susan Perry, I’ll admit that without any obfuscation.

So Let’s Summarize:  Susan Perry’s article reports on a non-comprehensive study whose own authors admit it’s a non-“debunk”-ment, that reached no meaningful conclusion about a premise that nobody advanced. 

Follow The Money:  We mentioned the Joyce Foundation – which bankrolls both the MinnPost and the state’s “largest” gun control group. 

One might ask – is it possible to expect honest “journalism” from a publication that has a financial interest in reporting an organization’s slant on the news? 

I’ll ask – because as Perry’s article notes in its heading, in addition to the Joycers…

This content is made possible by the generous sponsorship support of UCare.

So not only is the MinnPost an organ of an anti-gun extremist group, it’s also on the payroll of…

…the State of Minnesota.

Edward R. Murrow would vomit.

As you know, I am a Second Amendment activist.   This blog has always reflected this; indeed, the first post on this blog was a gun rights article.  It’s one of my most active topics. 

So consider that when I say this:  Starbuck’s CEO was right to ask gun owners to please not carry openly in his chain’s stores.

It’s his business – and annual “Starbucks Appreciation Days” aside, the vast majority of his chain’s clientele is going to be people on the political center-to-left – people who, rightly or wrongly, find firearms disconcerting. 

Bear in mind he’s not posting his stores to tell concealed carriers to keep their guns out; he’d just appreciate Real Americans not rattling the ninnies among the center-left masses who stop by every day for their Frangelicaccinos. 

That’s it. 

The Bill of Rights enumerates our rights to speak, publish, assemble, worship and keep and bear arms.  That means you have the right to give a pro-Vikings speech in front of a Packers bar, to march your Communist Re-Enactor club through a suburb full of Holodomor survivors, hold a southern Baptist revival meeting outside a mosque, or carry your firearms into a gathering of Vegan Nuns for Cesar Chavez.  Not only are none of them good ideas, all of them are just plain bad manners. 

Along those lines?  There is no genre in libertarian alt-media than the bobbleheads who film themselves walking down the road with an AR-15 slung over their shoulders, almost literally begging for a cop to pull over and ask what he’s doing, allowing the bobblehead the opportunity to lecture the cop on what the law really says.  The bobblehead is right – but it’s still stupid.

OK, I’m being hyperbolic.  David Frum is not an idiot.

But he is no more accurate than any other liberal on Second Amendment issues – as we see in his Daily Beast insta-opinion on the Navy Yard shooting, which is chock-full of enough ripe inaccuracy to be a Heather Martens piece.

He tries to diagnose gun violence in America:

Yet the gun enthusiasts do have one point on their side: for all the horror of these massacres, they are only a small part of the story of gun violence in America. Most casualties of gun violence will not die at the hands of a mentally disturbed killer seeking random victims. Most gun casualties occur in the course of quarrels and accidents between people who would be described as “law-abiding, responsible gun owners” up until the moment when they lost their temper or left a weapon where a 4-year-old could find it and kill himself or his sister.

It’s a convenient theory.  It fits nicely with the narrative – that it’s the presence of guns, not the people, that’s the problem.

It’s utterly wrong.

“Most” gun casualties, as in “the vast majority”, are suicides.  All of which are tragic; seeing to peoples’ mental health and preventing suicide is important.  But it is in no way the same as street crime.

Of those?  Most occur as a result of “quarrels”, all right – quarrels between rival gangs, or between drug dealers arguing over turf, or adolescent gang wannabees who feel “disrespected”, or small-time hoods who lose their temper or their control and turn crimes of convenience into crimes of passion. 

While Frum isn’t Heather Martens or David Bloomberg or Doug Grow, he does share some of their congenital illogic about the issue:

As David Hemenway notes in his study Private Guns, Public Health, Americans have experienced similar debates in the recent past. “Cars don’t kill people; bad drivers kill people,” could have been the slogan of the auto industry when it resisted safety regulation in the 1960s. The garment industry could have argued: “Flammable pajamas don’t kill children; careless smokers kill children.” And so on. Every accident has many causes, of course, and public safety progresses by addressing each one. To reduce car fatalities, we both installed seat belts and cracked down on drunken driving. Child deaths by fire have been reduced both because pajamas are safer and because adults smoke less.

 Are we supposed to believe that David Frum, a leading public intellectual of the center-center-center-sorta-right, doesn’t know the difference between “making a product do its main job – carrying people, clothing children – safer against the vagaries and tragedies of normal life” and “misuse of a product that is designed to violently poke holes in things”?

I’d certainly hope so. 

Likewise, better mental-health provision would contribute to the reduction of gun massacres. But America’s uniquely grisly record of gun death cannot be addressed without addressing guns.

“Addressing guns”, like “we have to doooooooooooo something”, is one of those vague, generalized blandishments that shows the writer is out of ideas. 

And after this past year, I suspect the anti-gun movement is exactly that.

Whenever there’s a big story involving firearms, you can be sure the media will be ready to provide comic relief.

Like Piers Morgan’s reference to Aaron Alexis and his “legally purchased AR15 shotgun“. 

Or the NY Daily News (“Like MSNBC, Only In Print!”) front page story about the AR15 Alexis owned…

…even though it appears that not only didn’t he have one, but didn’t – as was reported yesterday – steal one from one of the base police he murdered after all. 

The Media.  On Second Amendment issues, they are the real low-information voters.

Just remember:  when there’s a mass-shooting going on, and seconds count, you can depend on the authorities to respond in minutes:

D.C. police quickly deployed an “active shooter team” within seven minutes of reports of shots fired, Ms. Lanier said.

The Navy Yard – a “gun free zone” but for any security on the site – was as defenseless as Fort Hood. 

A carry permit holder would have reduced that time from “seven minutes” to “as long as it took to get his or her firearm out of its holster”.

There’s been a shooting at the Washington Navy Yard – headquarters for the US Navy’s procurement bureaucracy.  Recent experience shows us that nearly every first report on these sorts of things is wrong – but current reports indicate 4-6 13 dead.

And nobody remotely close to being an “authority” has even begun to speculate on who the shooter/s were and why they did it; one dead shooter is apparently a former Navy employee (Nope, NBC retracted that) 

I urge everyone to direct your prayers, or whatever thoughts your worldview admits, toward the victims, their families, and everyone involved in this tragedy. 

Now:  It’s time to place your bets.  We’re taking bets in several categories:

The Obama Pool:  How long until The One tries to link this shooting to the defeat of his gun-grab agenda? 

Bobblehead Roulette:  At what time will the first Twin Cities leftyblogger issue a post blaming the shootings on the NRA?

The Martens Parlay:  At what time will Representative Heather Martens (DFL-67A) release a statement blaming the shooting on the failure of the Paymar gun grab bills and/or the Colorado recall?  (UPDATE 6PM:  She did it!)

Black Gun Bingo:  At least one initial report says “assault weapons” were used in the shooting.  Who will be the first lefty pundit to claim that if only “assault weapons” were banned, this (apparently) multi-party, coordinated assault would not have taken place?

The Elephant In The Room Pool:  How many mainstream and left-leaning alt-media outlets will mention that a) the Navy Yard is in Washington DC, which retains among the most draconian anti-gun laws in the country, and that in addition b) the Navy Yard, like all military facilities, is a “gun free zone?”  (Note:  “Zero” is already taken.  Pick a different number).  Bonus question:  how many will blame the shooting on Virginia’s more liberal gun laws, without asking why the atrocity didn’t take place in Virginia? 

UPDATES:  Adding a few as I go here:

Tea For Three:  Current reporting says there may have been three gunmen  (Nope.  Just one gunman).  Which media outlet will be the first to blame the Tea Party?

Numb3rs:  How many reports will the major media have to retract about names of victims (1 so far), shooters (UPDATE 6PM:  At least once), number of shooters (UPDATE: Twice!) , motives, number of victims (UPDATE 6PM:  Many times)…

The “T” Word:  Some early reports claim this might be a workplace shooting – as in “disgruntled workers”.  But if there are indeed multiple shooters?  The idea of a “team of disgruntled workers” doesn’t pass the sniff test, does it? 

Place your bets!

The Gun Grab Orc movement – led by DNC chairbeing Fran Drescher Deb Wasserman-Schulz – has been pleading “voter suppression” for their resounding defeat in Colorado this past Tuesday.

And they were right.  It was voter suppression that doomed the Senators Morse and Giron in the recall elections.

Their suppression of voters dissenting against them.  David Kopel writes at Volokh:

As it turns out, Morse and Giron sealed their fates on March 4, the day that the anti-gun bills were heard in Senate committees. At Morse’s instruction, only 90 minutes of testimony per side were allowed on each of the gun bills. As a result, hundreds of Colorado citizens were prevented from testifying even briefly. Many of them had driven hours to come to the Capitol, traveling from all over the state.

That same day, 30 Sheriffs came to testify. They too were shut out, with only a single Sheriff allowed to testify on any given bill. So while one Sheriff testified, others stood up with him in support.

Admirably, Morse had urged his Committee Chairs to be polite and courteous to all witnesses, and they were. But President Morse did not follow the standard practice of the Colorado legislature, by which any citizen who wishes to testify is allowed to be heard, at least briefly. The patient endurance of Colorado legislative committees which have heard hour upon hour of testimony on bills about gay rights, motorcycle helmets, and other social controversies is a tribute to our republican form of government.

This, Kopel argues, was a key facet in the recall:

When Morse shut that down, and Chairperson Giron went along, they crossed the double-red line of Colorado government. Had the seven gun control bills (one of which I testified in favor) been heard on March 4-6, instead of being rammed through committees on March 4, the recall might never have happened. It’s one thing to lose; it’s another to thing to lose when you didn’t even have the opportunity to present your reasoning.

Even Michael Paymar wasn’t that stupid. 

And Morse may have been an even bigger coward than Representative Heather Martens (emphasis added):

While the gun control bills were before the Senate in March, President Morse urged his caucus to stop reading emails, to stop reading letters from constituents, to stop listening to voicemails, to vote for the gun bills and ignore the constituents. Giron, presciently following this strategy, had allowed citizens to raise Second Amendment concerns at a single town hall meeting, and thereafter refused to discuss the issue at public fora.

The battle in Colorado turned on many issues;

• Blue-collar Democrats joining the GOP to flush the orcs – as they often do, even in Minnesota.  It’s hilarious; the Demcrats have always been the party of class warfare – but of all hot button issues, it’s the gun issue that is the most strongly divided by class, rather than partisan identification.  And the Democrats are the party of the patricians, every time.
• The Colorado GOP running a flawless campaign.  The Minnesota GOP needs to study this.
• The gun movement turning out the manpower (even as they were outspent by at least 7:1 – 8:1 in Pueblo).  As we’ve seen in Minnesota, passion and relentless work ethic defeats money – at least on this issue. 
• Outrage over the Democrats’ arrogant hijacking of the process to jam down an oppressive law that was against the spirit of democracy in Colorado – even a Democrat-led Colorado – at the behest of carpet-bagging east-coast plutocrats.

More of this.

Over the past year, we Real Americans were asked “Why do you neeeeeeed an ugly military-grade firearm?” – and before we could answer, were promptly told “You really don’t!”.

There are many answers, of course.  The best of them is “I’m a law-abiding citizen buying a legal product that will never be used to commit a crime of any kind, so it’s none of your business, and go piss up a rope”.  But “serving as the ultimate deterrent to government overreach” is right up there.

And somewhere down the list – for Americans – is this answer; deterring, and if necessary doing more, to the scumbags that prey on society’s honest and hard-working people

An audacious band of citizen militias battling a brutal drug cartel in the hills of central Mexico is becoming increasingly well-armed and coordinated in an attempt to end years of violence, extortion and humiliation.

What began as a few scattered self-defense groups has spread in recent months to dozens of towns across Michoacan, a volatile state gripped by the cultlike Knights Templar, a drug gang known for taxing locals on everything from cows to tortillas and executing those who do not comply.

Law enforcement – up to an including the Army – is of no use in protecting the citizen:

The army deployed to the area in May, but the soldiers are mostly manning checkpoints. Instead, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto is facing the awkward fact that a group of scrappy locals appears to be chasing the gangsters away, something that federal security forces have not managed in a decade.

They include a 63-year-old pot-bellied farmer mindful that he can run only 30 yards; a skinny 23-year-old raised in Oregon who said he had never used a gun before; and a man who wears a metal bowl stuffed with newspaper as a helmet. A 47-year-old bureaucrat, who is sure that she will be killed if the gang retakes her town, said of her decision to join the cause: “I may live one year or 15, but I will live free.”

“Hey, you can’t fight an army…” – and the narcotrafricantes are surely an army, if only an army of thugs – “…with your deer rifle!”

Volunteer fighters who have been using old hunting rifles and even slingshots are increasingly armed with silver-plated AK-47s, armored trucks and other bounty that they said they have seized from the cartel. And although the self-defense groups had been operating independently, they are coalescing under the leadership of a tall, white-haired surgeon who once worked for the Red Cross in California.

Read the whole thing.

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When politicians suffer reverses, they do their best to spin them into…well, not as bad a loss.  It’s human nature, and it’s Politics 101; never let them see you sweat.

For example, here in Minnesota, after Representatives Paymar, Hausman and Martens’ gun grab bills imploded (during a session in which the DFL had complete control of the governor’s office and both chambers of the legislature), the gun grab orcs did their comical best to spin the results as a victory – with the criteria for “victory” all basically involving “doing the stuff people do in campaigns whether they win or lose”.

The Orcs – a term I used to refer to gun-control advocates, in the full sense that JR Tolkein intended for the word – are doing their best to spin Tuesday’s defeat in Colorado into something else.

It’s a lie, naturally.  Michael Bloomberg – the de facto leader of the Gun Grab movement in America today – bet big on this recall, spending $350,000 of his own money to try to keep the two seats.  The orcs outspent the Real Americans 6:1 in terms of officially-released spending numbers, and by some accounts that’s conservative; most of the orc money came from out of state, and much of that was laundered through local non-profits to make it look less lopsidedly carpetbaggy.

But make no mistake – for the Gun Grab movement, this was not just a defeat; it was a debacle:

…registered Democrats outnumber Republicans in the two districts where voters cast ballots (though Morse’s district is more of a swing district than Giron’s more Democratic-leaning territory). And the anti-recall side easily outraised the pro-recall interests. The Democratic losses are a reflection of the fact that enthusiasm was squarely on the opposite side of Morse and Giron.

“The National Rifle Association Political Victory Fund (NRA-PVF) is proud to have stood with the men and women in Colorado who sent a clear message that their Second Amendment rights are not for sale,” the NRA’s political arm said in a statement.

While the long-term significance of the election will assuredly be be debated, it’s hard to argue against the proposition that lawmakers in other states will have Colorado somewhere in their minds the next time a push to tighten gun laws begins ramping up.

In the larger debate over gun laws, Tuesday was another victory for the NRA and its allies, who earlier this year demonstrated the power they wield in the campaign to prevent the passage of tighter gun restrictions in Congress.

So let’s recap the year so far:  after being handed two grisly, horrible mass murders to exploit, the Gun Grab movement – on a raft of Bloomberg cash – managed to jam down some meaningless restrictions, none of which will have even the most obtuse effect on crime, on the law abiding citizens of a couple of coastal liberal cesspools, and Colorado.

In response, most of the rest of the country – including liberal cesspools (for the moment) like Minnesota – responded with an epic outpouring of grassroots dissent against the media narrative that Bloomberg paid for, leading to a raft of victories for freedom; sheriffs and legislatures throughout the country nullifying proposed federal laws in advance, the Illinois legislature facing down Orc governor Quinn, and finally Colorado.

UPDATE:  This has also been in the news; Public Policy Polling, the left-leaning polling firm that got the big kudos for being closest among the major polling shops in the 2012 election, suppressed its pre-recall poll that accurately predicted Giron’s stunning 12 point defeat:

Public Policy Polling (PPP) sparked controversy Wednesday after the left-leaning firm declined to release a survey it conducted last weekend that accurately forecasted the successful recall of a Democratic state senator from Colorado.

The survey PPP conducted, but did not release, showed Colorado District 3 Sen. Angela Giron (D) would be recalled by a 54 percent to 42 percent margin.

“In a district that Barack Obama won by almost 20 points I figured there was no way that could be right and made a rare decision not to release the poll,” Director Tom Jensen wrote in a post on the firm’s website. “It turns out we should have had more faith in our numbers because she was indeed recalled by 12 points.”

This is baked wind, of course.  It had nothing to do with “not being right”; it just didn’t sufficiently fluff the narrative – which PPP is still trying to get perked up:

“If voters made their decision based on the actual pretty unobtrusive laws that Giron helped get passed, she likely would have survived,” the firm wrote. “But the NRA won the messaging game and turned it into something bigger than it was- even if that wasn’t true- and Giron paid the price.”

Real Americans – the kinds from both parties that flushed Angela Giron on Tuesday – know the real truth; Chicago didn’t become Chicago overnight.  Every “unobtrusive” law that punishes the law-abiding and leaves the criminal untouched is just another step toward Michael Bloomberg’s dream.

I’m happy to note that freedom and liberty won a round last night.

The recall effort against two gun-grabbing anti-civil-rights fops in Colorado succeeded wildly last night.  Colorado state reps John Morse and Angela Giron were flushed from public life by their voters:

The election, which came five months after the United States Senate defeated several gun restrictions, handed another loss to gun-control supporters. It also gave moderate lawmakers across the country a warning about the political risks of voting for tougher gun laws.

You can tell it’s the NYTimes writing this piece; they think “moderates” in the west don’t already know better.  

The recall elections ousted two Democratic state senators, John Morse and Angela Giron, and replaced them with Republicans. Both defeats were painful for Democrats – Mr. Morse’s because he had been Senate president, and Ms. Giron’s because she represented a heavily Democratic, working-class slice of southern Colorado.

The Giron race ought to make outstate DFLers who supported the Paymar gun grab – I’m looking at you, Shannon Savick – sit up and take notice; Real Americans aren’t amused by your noodling.

Even better?  The avalanche of liberal money didn’t do the job (emphasis added)!:

While both sides campaigned vigorously, knocking on doors, holding rallies and driving voters to the polls, gun-control advocates far outspent their opponents. A range of philanthropists, liberal political groups, unions and activists raised a total of $3 million to defend Mr. Morse and Ms. Giron. Mr. Bloomberg personally gave $350,000.

There are so many upsides to this election.  The personal rebuke to The Nanny Mayor is in the top three.

Mr. Morse’s hand was on the tiller during much of that debate. A former police chief, he said he found himself in a position of not just rounding up votes, but actually explaining the mechanics of guns to fellow Democrats. He brought a magazine to show his colleagues how it worked. In an emotional speech in March, as the debate reached its peak, Mr. Morse stood on the Senate floor and spoke of gun violence and “cleansing a sickness from our souls.”

(Koff koff Jim Backstrom koff koff).

Cleanse this, ex-Legislator-boy.

And in this is a lesson that conservatives need to re-learn – and teach our idiot consultant class – every two years, rather than every 30; grass-roots activism works:

Angry constituents around Pueblo and Colorado Springs started to ask one another what they could do. In living room conversations and on Internet message boards for gun enthusiasts, the idea for a recall campaign against gun-control supporters began to jell.

“We’d never been to a rally or town halls,” said Victor Head, a plumber in Pueblo who borrowed money from his grandmother to kick-start the recall against Ms. Giron. “We’d never done much politically other than voting.”

Colorado is one of 19 states where voters can recall state officials, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, and no evidence of fraud or official misconduct is needed to gather the signatures necessary to schedule a special vote.

I personally don’t favor recall elections for anything other than fraud, official misconduct or criminal activity, as a matter of policy.

But then, attacking the Bill of Rights is official misconduct.

Anyway – two down.  Thousands of orcs to go.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Unconstitutional and ineffective. Pretty much sums up his whole administration.

First, military surplus rifles have been imported for years and sold out of the NRA magazine. They’re not automatic weapons, they’re antiques. German Mauser rifles. Russian sniper rifles from the Siege of Stalingrad. M-1 rifles we left behind in Korea. Now, we’re going to ban anybody from bringing them into the country? Why? Who does the rule affect? A few people who collect antique rifles. It will have absolutely no impact on crime.

Second, the ATF received 39,000 requests to transfer restricted weapons to gun trusts last year. Restricted weapons are machine guns. Transfers of machine guns require ATF approval, a fee, background investigation, etc. It’s not the same as buying a regular gun, it’s a big deal, even if the transfer is simply from me to my son. So some smart lawyers came up with the idea of putting the gun into the trust. The trust owns the gun, not me, so the beneficiaries of the trust can use it but the trust continues to own it.

Not one single person who was killed in America last year, was killed by an ATF-registered machine gun. The new rule affects collectors, not criminals. It will have absolutely no impact on crime.

Joe Doakes

Barack Obama: afflicting the afflicted, comforting the comfortable.

It was twenty years ago this month that one of the most seminal essays in the history of the broad “Liberty” movement in American politics was published.

The essay was “A Nation Of Cowards”, by Jeffrey Snyder, in the fall edition of “The Public Interest”. And in those days just before the commercial dawn of the Worldwide Web, it was a sensation among people who supported the human rights enshrined in the Second Amendment.

Twenty years ago, I was pretty downcast about the future of the Second Amendment. Things did, indeed, look fairly dire. The nation had been through 25 years of nonstop anti-gun propaganda. Guns were banned outright, or subjected to extensive niggling regulations that made them effectively illegal for private citizens, in much of the country. Carry permits in most of the US were to some degree unattainable, the province of of the well-connected and the official.

And beyond that? The idea of “liberty” in conservative politics seemed to be ever less in fashion.

And then came “A Nation Of Cowards” – a fiercely intellectual demolition of the anti-gun-control arguments that did for the moral case against victim disarmament what Sanford Levinson’s “A Nation Of Cowards” did for the legal case; set the standard, and galvanized a decade and a half of activism that turned the battle around.

And today, we need the article more than ever.

And so I’ll reprint it in its entirety below. If you’re a lawyer for any publication involved, sure, whatever, send me a cease and desist, and I’ll take it down.

But until then, read it.

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I feel like smacking an MSNBC host like a piñata.  A Piñata full of crap. 

In this case, it’s MSNBC contrib Joy Reid, who said on the air:

“There’s this sort of neo-Confederate thread that runs through this pro-gun movement and NRA movement,” she said this afternoon while discussing the recall elections for Democratic state lawmakers in Colorado that were spurred by their support for gun-control legislation.

Confederate Soldiers! This photo (courtest of the Joyce Foundation-supported MinnPost – is what the Big Left thinks you, the law-abiding gun owner, are. Hey, it was in the MinnPost – and they’re Real, Badge-Carrying Journalists!

 

 Reid also argued that gun-rights advocates and the National Rifle Association are hypocrites because they oppose the new restrictions on gun rights signed into law by Colorado governor John Hickenlooper while advocating for states’ rights and the Tenth Amendment.

Perhaps someone could explain to the ingenious Ms. Reid that it was Coloradans that are voting on the pushback against Hickenlooper are, well, from Colorado.  The NRA is a private organization; the Tenth Amendment doesn’t regulate its activities. 

But it’s great to see an MSNBC drone invoke the Tenth Amendment!

“The NRA will come in, helicopter in and undo [those laws],” she said.

If the NRA had the power to make and unmake the law, this might be a better nation. 

But it’s not actually the case.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

A man was beating his girlfriend with a metal rod outside their Florida apartment. A neighbor saw it and spoke up. The man then attacked the neighbor. She shot him. He died. No charges were filed. Police said she had the right to defend the domestic abuse victim (Defense of Others) and also the right to Stand Her Ground to defend herself. Result: abuser dead, girl friend recovering, neighbor free to go.

That result could not happen here.

Minnesota is a Duty To Retreat state. Girlfriend had a Duty to Retreat from her boyfriend as he was beating her with the metal rod, if she could safely do so. Neighbor, when exercising the right of Defense of Others, “steps into her shoes” meaning if the jury decides girlfriend could have retreated, then girlfriend could not shoot abuser to stop his attack and neighbor can’t either.

When neighbor intervened and abuser attacked her, she had her own Duty to Retreat, if she could safely do so. And since abuser wasn’t originally attacking neighbor but only attacked her when she tried to stick up for domestic abuse victim, that makes neighbor the instigator of the confrontation between neighbor and abuser.

Lesson to learn: do not intervene to protect domestic abuse victims. Let the abuser beat her as long and as hard as he wants. Let the police clean up the mess when they arrive.

That’s the law in Minnesota, courtesy of Governor Dayton and DFL Rep. Paymar.

Joe Doakes

“Gun laws” aren’t about keeping people safer. They’re about keeping people subservient.

That’s as opposed to laws aimed at curbing crime, rather than people’s politically-incorrect lifestyle choices.

For better or worse – and I think it’s largely “better” – I’ve tried to keep a high level of cultural literacy, not only about the US but around the world.  At most, I’m a jack of many cultural trades, and goodness knows a master of none, but I do try. 

One positive upshot is that I know – again, for better or worse – that different cultures see things differently than we do, sometimes for reasons that may baffle us, but that make perfect sense to them for reasons that, again, baffle us. 

Downside?  You find out that many foreigners are just as stupid as many Americans are.

Earlier this week Chris Lane, an Australian baseball player going to college in Oklahoma was murdered by a couple of teenagers; the teenagers were reputedly bored and looking for something to do, and murdering Lane apparently scratched that itch for them. 

And in a burst of non-sequitur worthy of Heather Martens or Jim Backstrom, Tim Fischer – a former Austrialian deputy Prime Minister and a prime mover in the disarmament of Australians during their spasm of gun control in the nineties – has urged a boycott of the US by Ozzy tourists:  

“Tourists thinking of going to the USA should think twice,” Fischer said.

“This is the bitter harvest and legacy of the policies of the NRA that even blocked background checks for people buying guns at gunshows.

Fischer is toking from the same bong that Jim Backstrom and Heather Martens are bogarting:

• While I’ve seen no information as to where the “youths” got the gun, I’m going to suspect that it was via a source that would not be subject to a background check in any state, or any country, anywhere in the world. 
• For that matter?  The shooters were all, every last one of them, minors.  None of them can legally own or carry a firearm.  The NRA is all about keeping guns away from people who legally must not.  And five’ll get you ten there’s at least one criminal record among the bunch.
• Take a look at the few policies that actually have had a positive effect on violent crime; the NICS database in the form it was enacted, sentence enhancements for using guns in crimes, and of course concealed carry.  All the ones that actually work were supported by the NRA.  Every. Single. One.

Fischer keeps dragging on the bong:

“I am deeply angry about this because of the callous attitude of the three teenagers (but) it’s a sign of the proliferation of guns on the ground in the USA,” Fischer continued.

“There is a gun for almost every American.”

And yet the crime rate plummets.

And yet the crime rate is lowest in the places with the most  guns in the hands of the law-abiding, and highest where that right is the most abridged.

Oh, make no mistake; there are parts of the US I don’t advocate Ozzy tourists coming to.  Places where the culture has been so degraded by the devaluation of family, of social institutions, and cultures that glorify violence and devalue human life – which describes Moonshine Holler, Kentucky and Meth Circle, Suburbia as much as Crack Boulevard in Detroit. 

The NRA didn’t bring us any of those, Mr. Fischer.

A woman with a carry permit breaks up a robbery at a Denny’s in Houston:

At around 4 a.m. Thursday, a man who does not want to be identified, said his brother was robbed by six men with guns at a Denny’s off the Gulf Freeway in southeast Houston.

“I don’t know if it was random or someone set him up. Because he got his own label,” said the victim’s brother.

His brother’s wife was in the restroom at the time, but when she exited the restroom she saw the group of suspected robbers. Police said that’s when she pulled out her gun and shot at them.

“She said she came out of the restroom and saw my brother on the floor. That’s when she started doing what she gotta do. She got a license and she’ll do anything to protect her kids and my brother,” he said.

Police said there was a shootout, but it is not known how many shots were fired at the time. However, police said the gunshots did hit cars in the parking lot.

No word of any charges filed against the woman; if there were, I suspect we’d have heard of it.  

But Texas has a “Stand your Ground” law.  Law-abiding citizens involved in otherwise legitimate self-defense shootings (i.e. in which they are not willing participants. 

The “elites” don’t get it.

Us proles?   We’re smarter.

As we noted last week, Rep. Michael “The Kia Hamster” Paymar is proposing a bill to ban citizen carry at the Capitol complex.

Keep this in mind:  to carry at the Capitol, a citizen (as opposed to a law enforcement officer) must have a valid carry permit – which means that they…:

• have passed a background check
• passed a training course that certifies they know the law and the pract
• are over 21
• have no record of remotely serious violent behavior
• are among a population that is two orders of magnitude less likely to commit any crime at all than the general public

…and have notified Capitol Security that they – a legal citizen – intend to carry in the Capitol complex within the limits of the law. 

There’s no reason for this, of course.  State Capitol police happily admit they’ve never had a whiff of a problem with a legal carry-permittee carrying a firearm at the Capitol.  No outbursts, no threatening behavior, no nothing.

Oh, Paymar and his metrocrat pals funneled out a fake meme in the in-the-bag media that legislators were feeling “intimidated” by all the citizens with firearms in the hearing rooms.  I don’t doubt that there were a few metrocrat ninnies who do wet their pants at the sight of a firearm alone. 

But Paymar was deflecting – trying to draw attention away from the fact that his proposals were getting creamed.  Even in a legislature controlled by Metrocrats.

What would be less humiliating for a legislator:  to claim that a mob with guns killed your bill, or the fact that even your own party deserted your cause? 

That is the only reason Paymar is proposing this change in the law. 

It’s stupid, of course.  Andy Aplikowski writes:

There were how many murders overnight in the Twin Cities? We have rampant gang warfare being carried out on the streets, but the highbrow lawmakers and bureaucrats are more focused on taking guns out of the hands of peaceful law abiding citizens. They are far less dangerous than violent criminals

We know that.  So does Paymar.  This proposal isn’t about facts. 

———-

The Real Americans that stymied Paymar last spring are not sleeping through this.  We’ve got work to do on Tuesday:

The Advisory Committee on Capitol Security will hold two meetings to consider changing current law to ban concealed carrying of firearms by permit-holders in the state Capitol.   The first meeting will be held this Wednesday, August 14, from 11:00 am to 12:30 pm at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul on 75 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. in Room 107.  This meeting will focus on discussion of current law and policy, and there will be no public testimony heard at this meeting regarding firearms on the Capitol Complex.  To view the agenda for this meeting, please click here.

On Tuesday, August 20, this committee will meet again from 10:00 am to 11:30 am at the Minnesota State Capitol in St. Paul on 75 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. in Room 107 to discuss policy changes to current standards regulating firearms on the Capitol Complex.   Please attend this meeting and OPPOSE these changes to current law that would ban concealed carry in the state Capitol.  Public testimony will be heard (though time may be limited).  If you wish to testify, please submit your name in writing to angela.geraghty@state.mn.us.  To view the agenda for this meeting, please click here.

Please plan to arrive at least an hour before each meeting.  Remember, with a permit, concealed carry is lawful in the Minnesota State Capitol and other state buildings in the area if you have notified the Commissioner of Public Safety of your intent to do soin advance

Tuesdays are rough – they probably are for most of us in the private sector, and as little as the DFL knows about the private sector, they surely know that.

But I’m going to do what I can. I hope you will too.