Good Cop: Pine County Sheriff, a Real American, tells Barack Rex to go pound sand:

On a day when President Obama was preparing a slate of proposals to stem gun violence in America, Pine County Sheriff Robin Cole said he would consider any new federal regulation on guns to be illegal and would “refuse to carry it out.”

“We will not enforce that,” Cole told the News Tribune of any potential federal regulation that could lead to confiscation of firearms.

Obama is expected to announce proposals today including limits on the sale of assault weapons and strengthening background checks, but not confiscating existing guns.

Bad Cop:  Chaska Police chief and long-time anti-civil-rights douchebag Scott Knight barks on command for the Administration.

No, I’m not going to quote him.

Why, oh, why indeed?

So how does America solve the “gun problem”? [1]

Well, to part of America, we treat the law-abiding gun owner like a criminal (in Maryland, a state that has strict gun control and includes the city of Baltimore, which is a crime cesspool not all that much better than Chicago) and even use the media to bully them for their legal, law-abiding activity, while demanding their indulgence for their dithering indolence as you think of more ways to punish the law-abiding for the sins of the insane, the evil and and depraved…

…so that, if we’re lucky, all of our towns can be more dangerous than Afghanistan.

If Chicago keeps up this pace – 22 dead in two weeks – it’ll hit well into the mid-500 murders, topping last year’s grisly 500-and-change total.  Bear in mind, the 22 dead in the first few weeks of the year came in a cold, traditionally low-crime month.

So yeah, let’s get all of Rahm’s ideas down.  Stat.

In case I haven’t mentioned it before – a billion thanks to Professor Joe Olson and the rest of the crew at the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance for ensuring Minnesota’s carry permit law was written so that carry permits are not public records.

While the safety of the individual carry permittee wasn’t the primary reason, the depraved indifference of some – many – journalists to the safety and well-being of people who oppose their editorial agenda, and their families, is reason enough to say “Thanks, Joe and GOCRA”.

We’re a lot luckier than the poor saps in New York, the legal, law-abiding carry permit holders whose names and addresses were published by the in-the-bag-for-the-left News Journal.

It’d seem that the information has been used to target the law-abiding citizens for attack.  A White Plains (NY) homeowner targeted by the News Journal was burglarized; his gun cabinet was singled out:

A White Plains residence pinpointed on a controversial handgun permit database was burglarized Saturday, and the burglars’ target was the homeowner’s gun safe.

At least two burglars broke into a home on Davis Avenue at 9:30 p.m. Saturday but were unsuccessful in an attempt to open the safe, which contained legally owned weapons, according to a law enforcement source. One suspect was taken into custody, the source said.

The News Journal’s interactive online map of…:

• law abiding citizens, who…
• …passed a stringent background check, and were…
• …issued carry permits by the State of New York…

…served no news purpose whatsoever; under any other circumstance, a list of demonstrably law-abiding people who’ve obtained a legal document under normal processes is the very definition of “dog licks dog”, journalistically speaking.

Since there’s no news purpose, the only reason for the “story” was politically-motivated badgering of law-abiding citizens.

Which is an interesting juxtaposition; in producing a “story” about people exercising their Constitutional rights in a thoroughly law-abiding manner, the News Journal, with the blessing (or silent acquiescence, which is the same thing) of much of the American mainstream media, abused their First Amendment rights; isn’t pointing a big red “Burgle Me!” sign at citizens the very definition of “fighting words?”

The gun owner was not home when the burglary occurred, the source said. The victim, who is in his 70s, told Newsday on Sunday that he did not want to comment while the police investigation continues.

Police are investigating what role, if any, the database played in the burglars’ decision to target the home, the law enforcement source said.

Prediction:  under political pressure from Andrew Cuomo, the police will play down any connection they find.

Don’t believe your own lying eyes, peasants!

The News Journal should be sued out of existence.  If the homeowner (and the other citizens whose privacy was frivolously gang-raped by their idiot media) decide to file a suit, I’ll be happy to send a buck or two to their legal attack fund.

John Edwards was right; there are two Americas; one that has to follow the regular laws, and one for the big people.

NBC’s David Gregory skates on his “30 round magazine’ pratfall.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

 It seems to me that if there was a clear violation of the law, then the Prosecutor should prosecute it. The arguments in mitigation (clean record) go toward the sentence.

Take it in another context – suppose I went to a school and threatened to shoot a bunch of schoolchildren with a .22 revolver, then claimed I did it to make a point about the silliness of the assault weapons bill. I have a clean record. I was making a political point. I only threatened them for a short time. I passed up other options to make my point. Should I get a pass as David Gregory did?

Or is the “break-the-law free” card only for Democrat VIPs?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

On guns?

It’s the VIP thing.

As tireless a defender of the Second Amendment as I am, I do much prefer the times when the lefty politicians waste their crises once and for all, and just leave us alone.

But we’re not there.  Not yet.

So as a bit of a weekend mental apertif, I though I’d run the two Second Amendment videos of the week.

They’re below the jump (because one of them seems to launch automatically)

(more…)

NRA membership is booming:

The National Rifle Association has gained more than 100,000 new members in the past 18 days, the organization told POLITICO’s Playbook on Thursday.

The number of paid new members jumped from 4.1 million to 4.2 million during that time.

“Our goal is to get to 5 million before this debate is over,” the NRA told POLITICO’s Mike Allen.

The number is a record.

Another record?  For the first time, I’m one of them.  After decades of being a Second Amendment activist, I finally pulled the trigger and joined.

“We are willing to talk to policymakers about any reasonable proposals and plans,” an NRA official said in the Playbook report, regarding the upcoming meeting with Biden. “However, the NRA is hearing not just from Beltway elites and the chattering class, but real Americans all over the country that are hoping the NRA is not going to compromise on any of the principles of the Second Amendment, nor are we going to support banning guns. But we’re willing to listen.”

We’ll listen – but we’d be deluded to expect much in the way of common sense.

By the way, the piece comes from “Politico”, which writes:

To join the NRA, one must pay $25. In return, new members may choose to receive a “Rosewood Handle Knife, Black & Gold Duffel Bag or Digital Camo Duffel Bag,” the Playbook report said.

Huh.  I got a member card, a subscription to one of the house magazines, a sticker, and  an NRA shooting cap.  And I paid $35.

Must have been a Black Friday special…

I got a lot of emails yesterday about Slow Joe Biden’s hint that the President is going to start regulating guns by executive order.

I briefly got angry.  Then I remembered – it’s politics.

Obama won by appealing to the nation’s legion of addlepated and intellectually-overpraised – but he’s no dummy himself.

The talk of “gun control by executive order” is real enough – but it’s not the real order of business.

 Vice President Joe Biden revealed that President Barack Obama might use an executive order to deal with guns.

“The president is going to act,” said Biden, giving some comments to the press before a meeting with victims of gun violence. “There are executives orders, there’s executive action that can be taken. We haven’t decided what that is yet. But we’re compiling it all with the help of the attorney general and the rest of the cabinet members as well as legislative action that we believe is required.”

The threat is real – but it’s still a distraction.

The economy is sputtering; Obama is dealing with the slowest recovery in history, and even a few of the low-information masses who voted for him are figuring out that all is not as they were told. He’s got to dominate the narrative – and that means getting the masses of middle-Americans who underperformed for Romney to distract themselves with an emotional hot-button issue.

Which isn’t to say “fake” issue; Obama does want to ban guns, and if he can find a politically-palatable way to do it, he will.

The proper response is “go for it, and watch every single red-state Democrat go down in flames” – but to focus on what Obama is trying to distract from; the economy, the deficit, and the debt.

In other words, to walk and chew gum at the same time.

As this last election showed, 50.3% of our neighbors can’t.  It’s up to the rest of us to save the Constitution and the economy and the country.

I’ve said it before: being a Second Amendment supporter is a lot like the movie  Ground Hog Day.  You – or rather, your opponents, the gun-grabbers – just keep repeating the same memes, over and over again.

Over 25 years of being an activist, if I’ve heard…:

• “The founding fathers couldn’t have foreseen weapons today!”
• “You oppose gun control?  So felons should have guns, then?”
• “Gun owners must be compensating for something…”
• “Yes, I know you keep refuting the statistics, but the statistics I have prove that gun control lowers crime!”

Oh, yeah – another one is “it’s impossible for a normal human to tell what the Second Amendment actually means”.

Such is the tack of Linton Weeks, writing in an op-ed space at National Public Radio.

How can something apparently so simple — a 27-word sentence — be so confusing? What is so hard to understand about “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”?

As it turns out, after more than 200 years of intense scrutiny by people more versed in The Law than you and I — and in the face of seemingly endless American gun violence — the meaning of the Second Amendment continues to baffle and elude. In this case, the country’s Founders have left us to founder.

…

Is it a sweeping constitutional guarantee that individuals have unfettered access to guns, or a practical agreement that allows for citizen armies in times of extraordinary national need?

According to Weeks, the the answer is as imponderable is “what is the nature of God”, or perhaps “how does NPR consider itself unbiased?”.  And like all imponderables, one turns to the humanities:

Maybe it would help everyone to think about this complicated dictum in a more slant way, hold it up to the light and look at it from different angles, the way poets approach other tough concepts — such as love, hate and injustice.

A Tone Poem

After all, says U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, poetry has the “ability to help us deal with difficult things.”

Follow the hilarity on your own time.

But Mr. Weeks’ piece is pretty clearly aimed at NPR’s core audience – liberals who consider themselves smarter than average, and are nonetheless low-information voters.

Because the Second Amendment has been analyzed for centuries – and especially for the past couple of decades – by two groups of people who make sense of words:  grammarians who work with words, and lawyers, who work with words that are written in the form of laws.

Grammar Got Run Over By Nena Totenberg

The Second Amendment – “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”, is two clauses.

“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state”, the first clause, makes no sense standing on its own.  It’s called a “dependent clause”.

“the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”?  That makes sense standing on its own.  It’s an “Independent Clause”.  The sentence really says “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be abridged, because a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state”.

Even a tone poet can follow that, right?

It’s Just Like Shakespeare Said

Of course, that leaves two words undefined:  “Militia”, and “people”, as in “right of the people”.

Of course, in the First Amendment, there’s no question what a “right of the people” means; it means religion, press, assembly and speech refer only to churches, newspapers, legislatures and broadcasters.  Right?

Of course not.  “Right of the people” refers to “the people, as individuals”.

But Let’s Cut The Crap

Mr. Weeks’ thesis – that the Second Amendment is an inscrutable bit of language – isn’t entirely without merit.  No less a legal luminary than Dr. Sanford Levinson wrote about this twenty years ago in “The Embarrassing Second Amendment“, noting that the Second is a singularly poorly-written bit of law.

Poorly.  Not indecipherably.

Levinson – a card-carrying gun-hating liberal – concludes that the Amendment means…

…exactly what we shooters have always said it means.  It’s a right of the people, not the National Guard.  And the fact that the Founders never envisioned the AR15 or the HK91 or the Glock is no more important than the fact that they never envisioned radio, TV or the Internet.

Levinson’s article led, indirectly and circuitously, to the Supreme Court saying…exactly that; that the Second Amendment is pretty clearly understood, in the Heller decision.

Which gives Mr. Weeks’ question a pretty cut and dried answer, albeit one that NPR would like to make sure doesn’t get much airplay.

Liberals complain that if people have the right to keep and bear arms, then angry, unstable people with no regard for human life will use them to kill people for no reason.

And they were right!

In a segment on Piers Morgan’s CNN program, sports columnist for the Daily Beast, Buzz Bissinger, shockingly states:

“I don’t care what the justification is that you’re allowed in this country to own a semi-automatic weapon – much less a handgun. But what do you need a semi-automatic weapon for? The only reason I think you’d need it is, Piers, challenge Alex Jones to a boxing match, show up with a semi-automatic that you got legally and pop him.”

Abby Huntsman (Huffington Post) : “I’d love to see that… [laughter] in uniform.”

Piers Morgan: “I’ll borrow my brothers uniform.”

Maybe the NICS database needs to screen for Obama voters and left-leaning pundits?

Or maybe teachers?

To: PIers Morgan, who is English, rather than Gay
From: Mitch Berg
Re: Conservatives

Mr. Morgan

I’d say “Alex Jones represents conservatism in the same way Bill Maher or Mike Malloy represent liberalism”…

…but I suspect you don’t see anything wrong with either of them.

Which is, I guess, at least part of my point.

That is all.

To: General Stanley McChrystal (USA Ret)
From: Mitch Berg
Re: The Founding Fathers Had It Right

General,

Before I begin – thanks for your decades of service.

And, truth be hold, this post is less for you than it is for the rafts of liberals who’ve signed on as famboys this past 24 hours.

But the founding fathers knew that the military (as an institution, not as individual soldiers) is one of the things we needed to guard against to preserve our clvil liberties.  The standing army was every bit as big a boogeyman to the framers as the AR15 is to Andrew Cuomo.

And just as a cop or a county attorney or a federal prosecutor would love to toss the Fourth Amendment into the scrap heap (to the extent, let’s be honest, that it hasn’t  been), let’s just say your input is appreciated, but not really needed.

It’s not really against type, let’s just say.

That is all.

To: Bank Of America
From: Mitch Berg
Re: Just Right To Fail

Dear Bank Of America,

When you spent much of the past four years currying favor with the Obama Administration, and feeding the hand that fed you (not to mention buying up Countrywide, which was cozier with the left than most), I merely shook my head; it reinforced the “plutocrats are the biggest liberals” pattern.

But this?

Bank of America has reportedly frozen the account of gun manufacturer American Spirit Arms, according to its owner, Joe Sirochman.

In a Facebook post dated December 29, Sirochman wrote the following:

“My name is Joe Sirochman owner of American Spirit Arms…our Web site orders have jumped 500 percent causing our Web site e-commerce processing larger deposits to Bank of America. So they decided to hold the deposits for further review.

“After countless hours on the phone with Bank of America, I finally got a manager in the right department that told me the reason that the deposits were on hold for further review — her exact words were — ‘We believe you should not be selling guns and parts on the Internet.’”(emphasis added)

According to Unlawful News, this isn’t the first time Bank of America has targeted a customer involved in the firearms industry.

McMillan Group International was reportedly told that its business was no longer welcome after the company started manufacturing firearms – even after 12 years of doing business with the bank.

I had no choice in becoming a customer; my mortgage got sold to you.

I spent years boycotting stores in Minnesota that posted that law-abiding carry-permittees weren’t welcome – and ten years later, the signs are mostly gone.

What do you think five million of us nationwide can do?

That is all.

The left, the media and the Obama Administration – pardon the redundancy – have done their level best this past month to resurrect the spectre of gun control aimed at the law-abiding civilian.

According to more and more polls, they’ve failed:

A recent Rasmussen Reports poll found that 54 percent of American adults would feel safer if their child’s school had an armed security guard.

And it seems Wayne LaPierre’s speech has exposed a vein of tough-minded pragmatism afoot in the country:

The same poll found that among parents of school-aged children, support for armed guards is even higher. Sixty two percent of such parents would feel safer with an armed security guard at the school, while 22 percent would feel safer if their child attended a gun-free school.

And some bi-partisan common sense:

And even as the gun banners seek to blame and attack NRA for the actions of a killer, Gallup’s poll reveals that NRA still has a 54 percent favorable rating among Americans. It is worth noting that, as of January 3rd, the Real Clear Politics average of President Obama’s approval rating is slightly lower, at 53.4 percent.

This is a big lesson for Second Amendment people; don’t panic.  And stay active.  It’s because of a generation’s worth of relentless activism that we’ve taught Americans – real Americans [1], anyway –  the truth about this issue.  America has grown up over the past forty years – from being led around on the issue by the in-the-bag media, to having independent thought and reasoning.

And there’s a lesson there for conservatives, the Tea Party and the GOP; people can learn the truth, and truth and reason can outflank the media.  But it takes time, determination, money, patience and courage.

The Second Amendment movement and all its component parts – and the NRA is the biggest single component, but by no means the only important one – has grown into the most successful grass-roots political efforts over the long term since the Abolition movement.   And it’s gotten there by relentless effort, and by realizing the battle is a marathon, not a sprint.  The rest of conservative America needs to remember that.

The orcs will never waste a crisis; there’ll be other atrocities, and the left will exploit them.  Now is no time for complacency.

But panic is equally out of place.

(more…)

Brian Rosenberg is the president of Macalester College in Saint Paul.  Macalester is, to put it mildly, a training ground for the regional “progressive” “elite”; the Twin Cities’ non-profits, MPR, and government – especially the DFL – are clogged with Mac grads of all ages.

Which is just fine.  They have that right.

But Rosenberg, with all due respect, would seem to be proof of Dennis Prager’s dictum, which I’ll paraphrase; it takes a university education to be this ignorant.

In the wake of Sandy Hook, Rosenberg has “taken a pledge”.  Like most pledges made in public (or at least on MinnPost), it’s smug, self-righteous and…

…and betrays what on the surface might seem like a brick-thick ignorance about how a representative republic works – but, when looking at Macalester’s record, might be better viewed as contempt for it.

(more…)

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I propose a poll:

Step 1: Are your children presently attending a school in St. Paul?

1A. Yes – go to Step 2.

1B. No – go to Step 3.

Step 2: Choose one

2A. While my children are attending St. Paul school, I want my children protected by people carrying guns, for example police officers. Go to Step 3.

2B. While my children are attending St. Paul school, I do NOT agree want my children protected by people carrying guns, for example, police officers. Go to Step 3.

Step 3: Thank you for taking this poll.

Joe Doakes

It was a moot point when my kids were in the schools; the high schools all have cops on the scene, and nobody asked the parents what they felt about it.

I wonder if anyone told Rachel Maddow?

WELCOME, Instapundit readers!

———-

My neighbor AVERY LIBRELLE is concerned about gun violence.

We met at a local coffee shop, where we spoke over the sound of a group of locals that was keeping alive the tradition of out-of-tune folk music played by large, enthusiastic groups of the tone-deaf.

LIBRELLE:  We need to ban high-clip bullets and assault weapons!

ME:  Ugh.

LIBRELLE: “Ugh?”  What?

ME:  Oh, I’ve only been having this argument for 25 years.  For starters, they’re called “high-capacity magazines”.  A “clip” as a general term for “anything that holds bullets” is a bit of Hollywood slang.  Really explaining it requires me to get all pedantic about how guns work, and I know you don’t care, and explaining it really takes me off the topic, but here – let me show you this:

“Clips”, pretty much by definition, are not “high-capacity”.  To talk much more about it would be to go onto a tangent that only gun geeks really care much about.

LIBRELLE:  Well, the media uses them interchangeably.

ME:  Uh, yeah.

LIBRELLE:  Anyway – you can not show me a reason anyone needs a…what?  High-capacity “magazine”?

ME:  No, I can’t show you one.

LIBRELLE:  I knew it.

ME:  I can show you several. (more…)

You’re at a community council meeting in the gymnasium of your kids’ school.

As one of your neighbors drones on about easements for new curb construction, a gawky-looking 20-something man in a black trench coat with an unsettling look of demented purposefulness on his face walks into the meeting.  He walks to the front of the room and draws an AK47 from under his trench coat, and shoots the leader of the group, who slumps against the cinder-block wall, leaving a slick of blood streaked down to the floor.

“Hey!” says the guy in the seat next to you, a fortyish man with an impeccable gray beard and John Lennon glasses who works for a social-service non-profit, “he can’t do that!  This is a gun-free zone!”

The killer turns his gun on the crowd, and fires a shot into the mass of panicking people in their folding seats.  Pandemonium erupts as a geyser of blood and tissue sprays over the crowd from what used to be an obese fiftysomething woman’s head.

The man sitting next to you dials 911 on his cell phone as the crowd frantically gets up and tries to get out one of the three available doors.  As the man patiently answers the dispatcher’s questions, the young fellow fires again, blasting a hole in the chest of an elderly man who had been there to ask about putting a “Yield” sign on his corner.  He slumps to the ground.

Your brain activates your body’s “fight or flight” reflex pumping adrenaline into your system.  As the hormone takes over your brain, you focus with tunnel vision on the shooter; the cacaphony of the screaming crowd dies away – you are unaware of any noise at all, in fact.

You have, however, drilled a bit in the basics of how to respond to a lethal-force threat; you’re dimly but practically aware that you are not a willing participant in this episode, that you have a very real chance of sharing the fate of the speaker, the old man and the obese woman (death or maiming), and – since you live in a “stand your ground” state – you don’t need to futz with trying to retreat under fire.

You stand up and move to the side, stand clear of a small group of panicky women who are trying to extricate themselves from the mass of folding chairs and scrambling people, and draw your legally-permitted SIG-Sauer P250 9mm Compact (with a 13 round magazine) from the inside-the-belt holster at your back.  And you shoot.

You fire several times – because of the adrenaline, you lose count at 1.  But your training guides you; of the five rounds you do fire, two dig into the cinder-block wall behind the shooter.  The next catches him in the right shoulder.  Your fourth shot drills through the top center of his chest, severing his trachea.  The fifth hits him in the lower-right abdomen, drilling through a mass of soft tissue and ricocheting out into the tile floor.

The second hit interrupts the shooter’s air flow and dazes him.  The shooter drops the rifle (and its 27 remaining rounds), and slumps to the floor, lying in a rapidy-expanding pool of blood.  He bleeds out, and is non-responsive when the paramedics arrive.  He’s pronounced dead at the emergency room.  In his trench coat was a bag with nine more magazines – 270 rounds – and a pistol.

Question:  The original speaker, the obese woman, the old man and the shooter are dead.  Are there three homicides, or are there four?

Well, that’s easy enough.  There are four people dead.  Four homicides.

Question 2:  Are those four homicides the same?   Or was one – that of the shooter – in balance, a net moral good, if not an unalloyed, morally unambiguous one?

How you answer that tells us a lot about how you perceive this next story.

(more…)

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Not every high school needs a cop on-site to protect students from firearms. St. Thomas Academy students know very well how to handle their weapons, their rifle team is going to the national championships. Go Cadets!

Joe Doakes

It’s amazing they aren’t all dead, what with all that contact with guns and stuff.

But congrats, Cadets!

But Joe?  Be careful.  The DFL can fix that.

To:  The Saint Paul City Council
From: Mitch Berg, one of your few remaining ATMs
Re:  Your work ethic

The Saint Paul City Council, having saved the downtown economic scene, balanced the city’s budget without gang-raping the city’s few remaining productive taxpayers, preventing a free-fall in property values…

…sheesh, I’m sorry.  I was laughing.  But it wasn’t the mirthful laugh of the happy and carefree.  It was more the resigned hacking cough of the guy in the engine room of a ship whose captain just keeps on ramming icebergs, since he’s still technically “afloat”, just to see what’ll happen.

Where was I?

Oh, yeah.  The City Council wants to ban scary guns, provided that they’re just the ones in the hands of the law-abiding Minnesotan:

At the Wednesday, Jan. 2 council meeting, they amended their annual request to lawmakers to include a crackdown on semi-automatic weapons and high capacity magazines.

They join a chorus of municipal bodies, politicians and Hollywood celebrities clamoring for tighter gun laws in the wake of the horrific school shootings in Newtown, Connecticut.

Let’s summarize here:

• The council of a stagnant city with a shriveling business base and whose only real resource anymore is “cheap-ish housing in a crap market” has…
• …wasted city time to pass a meaningless resolution to…
• …punish the vast majority of gun owners, the scrupulously law-abiding ones, because of…
• …something they didn’t do, urging an action that…
• …has never, ever, not even once, had a positive effect on violent crime, but indeed is positively linked to higher violent crime rates.

Last week:  the Lower Hudson Journal News – an anti-gun rag in metro New York – published an interactive map of all legal carry permit holders in Rockland and Westchester counties of New York.

This week?  They’ve hired armed guards:

A Clarkstown police report issued on December 28, 2012, confirmed that The Journal News has hired armed security guards from New City-based RGA Investigations and that they are manning the newspaper’s Rockland County headquarters at 1 Crosfield Ave., West Nyack, through at least tomorrow, Wednesday, January 2, 2013.

According to police reports on public record, Journal News Rockland Editor Caryn A. McBride was alarmed by the volume of “negative correspondence,” namely an avalanche of phone calls and emails to the Journal News office, following the newspaper’s publishing of a map of all pistol permit holders in Rockland and Westchester.

“Negative correspondence?”   You mean, threats?

McBride had filed at least two reports with the Clarkstown Police Department due to perceived threats. However, the police did not find the communications in question actually threatening. Incident-Report 2012-00033099 describes McBride telling police she was worried because an email writer wondered “what McBride would get in her mail now.”

Police said the email “did not constitute an offense” and did not contain an actual threat.

When did American journalists turn into such pansies?

(It’s a rhetorical question.  It happened about the time they decided to be high priests of information in the employ of the left).

You, the peasant, shouldn’t have guns; they, the patricians, must – to protect themselves from you, the peasant.

See how it works?

Remember when Obama was a “moderate” on guns? When he spent a couple of years trying to show Americans he wasn’t that kind of Chicago pol?

Yeah, I didn’t either.

In 1994, the backlash against Clinton’s raft of gun laws was a key part of the Republican Revolution that swept the country; the likes of Newt Gingrich wanted us to think it was all “Contract with America”, and that was the marquee event to be sure, but for a whoooole lot of people, it was the Democrats voting for (and some GOPers caving to) the anti-gun panic that drove votes.

Remember Rod Grams’ defeat of Ann Wynia?

Does Al Franken remember it?

Bad:  The Obama Administration and the Senate’s Diane Feinswine (Hypocrite, CA) think they have the momentum to push more victim disarmament [1]

Worse:  The GOP may prove them right.

Republicans control the House and, thus, could be expected as the party of Second Amendment rights to be ready to stop whatever the president and the Democrats come up with in the Senate. But the Doc Thompson radio show has posted what it is says is correspondence with a source in one of the Republican congressional leaders’ offices. The emails were apparently exchanged between December 27 and 30.

Click below to view the entire scan:

The crucial email is the one sent at 3:06 pm on the 27th. The source notes that Newtown would not have been prevented if Feinstein’s bill had been law, but allows that the Republicans may assist in banning “high-capacity magazines” and move on background checks, along with mental health and enforcement of existing law.

I use the term “victim disarmament”, since none of Feinswine’s proposals would have the faintest effect on criminal use of firearms; they’d place the entire burden on the law-abiding.  As always.

The Newtown killer may have been stalled by the NICS — some reports say that he attempted to buy a gun at a sporting goods store but failed — but he clearly was not stopped. He apparently stole his guns from his mother, killed her, and then went on his rampage. His mother had no criminal background and owned the guns legally. The Webster, NY shooter was a known career felon and could not have bought his guns legally. So, as criminals do, he found a way around the system. He either stole the guns he used from his neighbor, or he used her as a straw purchaser to get the guns for him. His neighbor, Dawn Nguyen, has been arrested and charged with being his straw buyer two years ago. She reportedly says that Spangler stole the guns, but he was with her when she bought them, and she never reported them stolen.

OK, let’s get down to brass tacks.  Any Republican that betrays the Second Amendment can count having their electoral head held underwater until the political convulsions stop.  I’m speaking purely rhetorically, here.

Any Republicans entertaining ideas of going along with any Democrat ban should realize that they’re being played by the Democrats and the media, again.

If you are a Real American – ergo, a supporter of the Second Amendment, as defined in the Constitution, reiterated in Heller, and incorporated on your masters the states by McDonald, you need to call your representatives.

Here in Minnesota, they are:

Timothy Walz
1529 Longworth House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-2472
Contact:
http://walz.house.gov/

John Kline
2439 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-2271
Contact form:
John Kline contact form

Erik Paulsen
126 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515-2303
(202) 225-2871
Fax: (202) 225-6351

Betty McCollum
1029 Longworth House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-6631
Contact form: email form

Keith Ellison 
1027 Longworth House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-4755
(202) 225-4886 fax
Contact form:
Keith Ellison contact page

Michele Bachmann 
412 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-2331
Contact form:
http://bachmann.house.gov/Email_zip.htm

Collin C. Peterson
2159 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
(202) 225-2165
Contact form:
http://collinpeterson.house.gov/email.htm

Chip Cravaack  (for another couple of weeks, anyway)
508 Cannon House Office Building

(202) 225-6211
Contact form:https://cravaack.house.gov/contact-me/email-me

Please contact Walz and Peterson because they’ve always run as 2nd-Amendment-friendly Democrats; they need to be kept honest.

Contact Kline and Paulsen because I’m not aware that either has really had a 2nd-Amendment hot potato on their legislative plate.  While I have every confidence that neither of them are idiots, they need to know how their Real American constituents feel. Over and over again.

As to Rep. Bachmann?  Contact her to thank her for being a stalwart on the issue, and for spitting tacks at those who’d say nay.

And Ellison and McCollum?  They might as well know that we Real Americans outnumbers the pants-wetting class and their ilk.

  (more…)

I long for an end to this latest spasm of gun-control debate.

Oh, it’s not going to come any time soon, since the President has hitched his and his party’s wagon to the cause – which makes me deliriously happy, since it’s going to be a brick around the Democrats’ neck in 2014 (and I’ll be doing my best to tie it onto them).

And I don’t long for it because I’m in any way tired.  The fight for liberty, like the fight against the baser sides of human nature that bring us everything from petty theft to the Holocaust, never ends, and never will as long as humans are human.  Fatigue is human, but quitting is the luxury of the dilettante.

But since my first broadcast on the subject of gun control, way back in August of 1986 at KSTP, to this very day, I have to say that the fact gun-grabbers’ arguments never, ever change.  I respond to the same crap today that I did in 1987.  How many times can a guy answer, refute, debunk and stomp flat the same tropes, over and over and over again?  No, violent crime does not drop when you ban guns.  No, concealed carry doesn’t lead to shootings over fender-benders.  No, the UK’s violent crime rate didn’t drop after they banned guns.  No, the only thing I’m compensating for is the fact that our society is so full of the depraved and the stupid.

But every so often, something comes along that banishes the rhetorical lactic acid from my mental muscles.  Something that focuses me on the real goal here – keeps my eyes on the lies, if not the prize.  Something that is the rhetorical and intellectual equivalent of watching a group of brownshirts shuffling down the street smashing windows and painting “Judenrein” on burned-out storefronts, something that focuses the mind not only on the stakes of the battle, but on the depravity of one’s opponents.  And suddenly, all the fatigue melts away, and all I want is to dig into the battle and not come up for air until I’ve got a mouthful of my opponent’s neck veins raw and dripping from my teeth.

Rhetorically speaking.

———-

Here is one such, by a Des Moines Register columnist named Donald Kaul, about whom I can say I’m sorry, Nick Coleman.  I never knew how good we had it, in comparison, when you were writing – because in Des Moines and reading Mr. Kaul, but for the grace of the Father Almighty, might we all have gone.

Mr. Kaul is apparently a superannuated scold, sort of the Sid Hartmann of Des Moines punditry.  And he’s got some curious takes on events:

The thing missing from the debate so far is anger — anger that we live in a society where something like the Sandy Hook Elementary massacre can happen and our main concern is not offending the NRA’s sensibilities.

Right, because our society’s self-proclaimed “elites” tread so carefully around the NRA.

That’s obscene. Here, then, is my “madder-than-hell-and-I’m-not-going-to-take-it-anymore” program for ending gun violence in America:

Let me just take a brief moment for a tangent.  Can we please, please have mainstream media figures refrain from ever, ever invoking “Network” again?  Or at least until such time as they have given up on their affectation as self-referential, self-reverential putative “high priests of knowledge?”  Until they stop comforting the comfortable and afflicting those who attack the narrative?  Because the mainstream media does not, ever, ever upset the establishment.  They are the establishment.  And that anyone who works in the MSM still believes Paddy Chayefsky’s fantasy has applied to a single reporter at a single traditional institutional media outlet since before the Kennedy Administration is evidence not of purpose, but of delusion.

• Repeal the Second Amendment, the part about guns anyway. It’s badly written, confusing and more trouble than it’s worth. It offers an absolute right to gun ownership, but it puts it in the context of the need for a “well-regulated militia.” We don’t make our militia bring their own guns to battles. And surely the Founders couldn’t have envisioned weapons like those used in the Newtown shooting when they guaranteed gun rights. Owning a gun should be a privilege, not a right.

Mr. Kaul has reportedly suffered a heart attack in recent years.  Regrettably, brain damage seems to have been involved.  There are no “absolute rights”; everyone agrees on keeping guns out of the hands of the insane, the criminal, and the addled (no offense, Mr. Kaul).  And it’s signally important that behind most of the legislation that’s actually accomplished that goal has been…

…the NRA.

And when Jefferson and Madison wrote the First Amendment, surely they can’t have imagined that the modern printing press (which they could also not imagine) would be used to inject Mr. Kaul’s twaddle into the public discussion.

Sorry, Mr. Kaul.  We are all the militia.  Even – heaven forefend – you.

Well, until you get convicted of a crime.  And we may have to work on that, after reading what’s coming up:

• Declare the NRA a terrorist organization and make membership illegal. Hey! We did it to the Communist Party, and the NRA has led to the deaths of more of us than American Commies ever did. (I would also raze the organization’s headquarters, clear the rubble and salt the earth, but that’s optional.) Make ownership of unlicensed assault rifles a felony. If some people refused to give up their guns, that “prying the guns from their cold, dead hands” thing works for me.

Mr. Kaul; you are welcome to try.  Start with me.  Bring friends.  You’ll need ’em.  Maybe 14 or 15 of ’em.

• Then I would tie Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, our esteemed Republican leaders, to the back of a Chevy pickup truck and drag them around a parking lot until they saw the light on gun control.

Has anyone contacted the Des Moines police?  Seriously – since Columbine, Red Lake and Sandy Hook, we’ve been told to watch out for people who…:

• froth with anger over their perceived enemies
• sputter about the violent remedies they fantasize about
• believe their ends justify their means
• are white males stuck in dead-end lives.

Because I’m sure the founding fathers never envisioned hate speech that may or may not stop short of being a terroristic threat  when they were writing the First Amendment.

Let everyone who has ever called gun owners “angry white men compensating for their own shortcomings” read Mr. Kaul’s entire piece, and then forever hold your peace.  You are forever trumped.

And if that didn’t work, I’d adopt radical measures. None of that is going to happen, of course. But I’ll bet gun sales will rise.

Knowing that people like Donald Kaul are among our opposition, I’m going to buy a few extra boxes (for the gun/s I will neither confirm nor deny that I own) in his honor.

Chicago – where gun ownership by the law-abiding civilian is, in defiance of two SCOTUS rulings, still effectively banned – just saw its’ 500th homicide for the year.

That’s two Sandy Hook classrooms a month.  Every month.

And of those deaths, about seven or eight classrooms-full were children below age 15.  That’s on top of similar numbers the year before, and the several years before that.  And next year.

But they were largely black, and brown, and urban; not white and from fashionable zip codes and a lot like the children, nieces and nephews and grandchildren of the people who run our opinion-driving industry.  And they lived in a city that spawned our current President, who endorsed every single policy currently in force in a city that is nothing if not a laboratory for modern “progressivism”.  So they don’t count.