I’m not sure if there’s a fund to support George Zimmerman’s defamation suit against NBC News over the intensely dishonest, misleading editing job they did in the aftermath of the controversial shooting (which we talked about as it happened)..:

“NBC saw the death of Trayvon Martin not as a tragedy but as an opportunity to increase ratings, and so to set about the myth that George Zimmerman was a racist and predatory villain,” states the civil complaint in its opening salvo against NBC.

(Also at The Washington Post: Can Zimmerman prevail against NBC?)

NBC’s editing of the 911 audiotape in the Martin case became a public fixation after the media-monitoring Web site NewsBusters.org noted editing oddities on a “Today” show broadcast March 27. Here’s how NBC News portrayed the audiotape:

Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.

The full tape went like this:

Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.

Dispatcher: OK, and this guy — is he black, white or Hispanic?

Zimmerman: He looks black.

Zimmerman thus didn’t volunteer a racial profile of Martin; he was asked to provide it, a point that the lawsuit makes in colorful fashion: “NBC created this false and defamatory misimpression using the oldest form of yellow journalism: manipulating Zimmerman’s own words, splicing together disparate parts of the recording to create illusions of statements that Zimmerman never actually made.”

…but if there is, I’m going to send a buck or two.

In a just world, everyone involved in that story at NBC should rot in jail for the rest of their lives.

Jovan Belcher’s KC Chiefs teammates know where the actual blame for his murder-suicide tragedy actually lies…

…and it’s not the gun:

 “If you have daughters, you should (have a gun),” Chiefs defensive lineman Shaun Smith said Monday. “You have to protect yourself. You work so hard to get to where you at, I’ll be damned if I’ll just let someone take it from me.”

Linebacker Brandon Siler, who had Thanksgiving dinner with Belcher, also had no problems with guns.

“Well, a majority of people own one, especially in the places where they’re legal. Most of the time they’re for self defense or sport,” he said.

They’re refusing to participate in an “anti-gun parade” in Kansas City.

Speaking of parades – the New York Daily News‘ Vera Chinese and Stephen Rex Brown are apparently marching in their own little anti-gun parade (emphasis added):

 The unusual questions about guns and the gridiron came days after Belcher, 25, blew away his girlfriend, Kasandra Perkins, 22, in their Kansas City home Saturday.

Let me guess; just to watch her die?

Nope – no media bias there.

To:  Dog Gone, Chanting Point Congruency Analyst, “Penigma”
From:  M Berg, overly patient guy
Re:  “Crap Legislation”

Ms. Gone,

Last  legislative session, in the wake of Governor Messinger Dayton  vetoing the “Stand Your Ground” Bill – which had just been passed by a bipartisan majority of legislators – you insisted volubly that the bill was “crap legislation”.

When asked repeatedly to please elaborate with details as to exactly how the bill – which, I remind you, was passed with a convincing bipartisan majority, and was largely identical to similar laws that have been roundly successful nationwide – was “crap”, you begged off due to time commitments.

Fair enough.

But you’ve not only found time since then to…

• leave dozens of your, er, long comments in my comment section
• indulge in a bit of unearned name-calling
• trumpet your own dearth of information on the subject (complaining, for example, that Minnesota didn’t share the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension’s information with the federal NICS database – a shortcoming the Cornish bill would have fixed)

So enough equivocating, dodging, and smoke-screening.  Why, exactly, was Cornish’s bill “crap?”  Please be specific; attempt to submit actual facts that logically connect to a thesis, so we can debate the issue. 

I don’t think you can.  I think you were reciting the chanting points the left put out on the subject – which I have spent years patiently, laboriously, factually and completely debunking on this blog, and will no doubt do again after 2014 – and you don’t really understand the issue.  In fact, if I were a gambling man, I’d bet serious bank on it.

But by all means go to it!

That is all!

To:  NBC
From: Mitch Berg, guy counting down the days ’til pitchers and catchers report
Re:  “Sportscasters”

Dear NBC,

Yesterday, Bob Costas used your “sports” air time to babble an uninformed, utterly wrong anti-Second-Amendment screed.

Now, don’t get me started on sportscasters and sportswriters and “sports radio” people; for the most part, they are at the cutting edge of everything that’s wrong with America.  They glorify a sports culture that once at least paid lip service to the best our society had to  offer, but today mostly glorifies all that is base and stupid in our culture.  And let’s not kid ourselves; whatever they glorify, it’s all about making bank for the people that own the teams that give the Sports Media a market, which in turn allows you, NBC Sports, to make bank yourselves.

And when they get into politics?  Forget unions and welfare; sportswriters, sportscasters and the drooling baboons and chattering lemmings that take them seriously were the ones that badgered the Legislature into giving Zygi Wilf a billion-dollar spiff to his investment.  Just as they did in turn for the owners of the Twins, the Wild and the Woofies before them. Sports America is the biggest welfare state there is.

And now we have Bob Costas – a guy who wants to be his generation’s Frank DeFord so badly you can smell it on the wind – using your “sports” airtime to prate and gabble about the Second Amendment.   As if taking an troubled boy with a talent for running or blocking or tackling or catching a ball, glorifying his talent from the age of eight on, allowing him to grow into a rich, spoiled, entitled adult with no education or sense of perspective to feed the system that has made him, his team owners, Costas and all of you obscenely wealthy along the way, didn’t have a role in creating someone so unstable he thought he was justified in killing another human being.

Let’s put this another way; after a career spent making America’s sports industry (and, incidentally, himself) rich, what caliber of handgun did OJ Simpson use?

Or is there a Bob Costas riff against butcher knives out there that I’m not aware of?

Oh, yeah – I don’t watch NBC Sports, and haven’t for decades, so any threat to boycott will be an empty one.  But you get the picture.

That is all.

For starters – the Thanksgiving shooting in Little Falls seems, according to what we know, to be a textbook case of how not to shoot in self defense.

64 year old Byron Smith allegedly shot Nicholas Brady, 17, as he came down the cellar stairs – and then allegedly shot Brady’s cousin Haile Kifer, 18.   He’s been charged with two counts of second degree murder.

And if the news accounts are accurate – and as we’ve learned, on all gun-related stories, we must distrust but verify the media, but this case seems fairly clear-cut so far – he’ll deserve the conviction.  While you don’t have a “duty to retreat” in your home in Minnesota, you still have to have reasonable fear of death or great bodily harm (or, nebulously, to “prevent a felony”, which in practice had better mean “the felony of killing, kidnapping or raping you or your family”), and the force you use has to be reasonable – in other words, no finishing people off.

According to the complaint, Smith told investigators:

He heard glass breaking around noon Thursday while he was in the basement. It was the latest of several break-ins that he’s experienced. Brady started coming down the stairs, and Smith shot him with a rifle by the time he saw the intruder’s hips.

Unless Brady had a chainsaw running around hip level, there wasn’t a whole lot of fear of death, there…

Brady fell down the stairs and was looking up at Smith when the homeowner shot him in the face.

“I want him dead,” Smith explained to the investigator for the additional shot.

And there’s your “unreasonable force”, right there.

And let’s be honest; you hear the same kind of talk from all kinds of people; “it’s best to finish them off”, one yahoo told me in a bar, “because then they can’t sue you”.

I’ve never heard it from anyone that’s been through carry permit training, of course.

And just in case there was some corner of his legal case that wasn’t already utterly self-sodomized…:

Smith put Brady’s body on a tarp and dragged him to an office workshop.

A few minutes later, Smith heard footsteps above him. As in Brady’s case, Kifer too started down the stairs and was shot by Smith by the time he saw her hips, sending her tumbling down the stairs.

Smith attempted to shoot her again, but his rifle jammed, prompting Kifer to laugh.

Upset, Smith, pulled out a revolver he had on him and shot her “more times than I needed to” in the chest, he said.

Smith dragged Kifer next to Brady as she gasped for her life. He pressed the revolver’s barrel under her chin and pulled the trigger in what he described as a “good, clean finishing shot” that was meant to end her suffering.

Hint:  virtually no deer-hunting etiquette is appropriate in self-defense shooting.

This is a case that should be used in self-defense classes as a punch-list of everything not to do in a self-defense case.

• You just don’t get to shoot on sight.  Many juries will have a hard time accepting that you had a reasonable fear of death or great bodily harm if you shoot before you can fully see your perp in what amounts to an ambush zone.
• You do not finish them off when they’re down.

And above and beyond that?  You call the cops immediately.  And – it should surprise nobody – Smith did not:

 Sheriff Michel Wetzel told reporters Monday afternoon that Smith explained to authorities that he didn’t call immediately after killing the two because “it was Thanksgiving. He didn’t want to trouble us on a holiday.”…Smith acknowledged leaving the bodies in his home overnight before calling a neighbor to ask about a lawyer and to request that authorities be notified.

Naturally, you should be on the phone with the police before the smoke clears.

And while I send my condolences to the victims’ families, of course, the kids had no business in his house.  Note, unruly teenagers; you’re not immortal, and you’re only as safe as your least-informed, least-stable victim lets you be.

But here’s the fearless prediction; this case will be used as a chanting point against “Stand Your Ground” at the very least, and most likely against any sort of self-defense reform.

Not because this case has any merit as an example – no factor in this case has any bearing on “Stand your Ground”, and indeed has to have been one of the least-justified self-defense shootings I’ve heard about since Sgt. Jerry Vick’s shooter tried to claim it.

Not because Smith is a carry permit holder – while the records aren’t public, let’s just say his behavior is not that of someone who knew what he was doing.

No – because it involves two things that are catnip for anti-human-rights activists:

• Dead “children”
• Someone who is not, on the surface, a criminal doing something that is exceptionally rare among non-criminals; screwing up with a gun.

It’ll be wrong.  It’ll be legally as well as factually void.  It’ll be pure disinformation.

And as we’ve seen in the past two elections in Minnesota, legally/logically/factually void disinformation sells.

Just saying; if Heather Martens doesn’t put out a press release trying to tie this case to “Stand Your Ground” and/or concealed carry, I’ll be amazed.

I’ve finally followed through on my dream of writing an episode for a major TV drama.

In this case, it’s “Criminal Minds”, the long-running CBS police procedural about a group  of FBI criminal profilers who track mass-murderers.

I hope to hear back from CBS soon.

———-

SCENE:  A Gulfstream G4, silhouetted against a gorgeous sunset, winging its way southwest.  The voice of Special Agent Aaron HOTCHNER narrates in voiceover:

HOTCHNER: “Kurt Cobain wrote “Load up on guns, bring your friends. It’s fun to lose and to pretend“.

(Dissolve to interior of aircraft.  Agends HOTCHNER, REID, JAREAU, PRENTISS, MORGAN and ROSSI are sitting around a well-appointed table. ROSSI sips at a snifter of brandy.

MORGAN (The handsome and über-buff Afro-American agent who, notwithstanding the FBI’s dress code, is never not seen wearing form-fitting sports attire): Lincoln, Nebraska police report two waitresses sexually assaulted, stabbed and strangled.

REID (the nerdy brainiac prodigy):  Sounds like a classic sexual sadist spree killer…

PRENTISS (the flinty raven-haired brunette with the enigmatic past): …with serious mommy issues.

HOTCHNER (The strung-too-tight leader who looks like “Greg” from “Dharma and Greg”):  Police say he turned up in their apartments with no sign of forced entry.

JAREAU (the blond eye-candy): So the vics let the unsub in.

ROSSI (the erudite sixty-something pioneer of the trade and oenophile): The unsub is almost certainly a white male, twenties through forties, victim of sexual abuse as a child…

PRENTISS:  Probably abandonment, too…

ROSSI: …right, and probably socially-accomplished, in great physical condition – most likely very vain, a bodybuilder type…

REID: …a real “lady-killer” if you pardon the term.

(MORGAN, JAREAU, ROSSI and PRENTISS grimace)
HOTCHNER:  Probably a complete stranger to the vics,but charming enough that they didn’t care…

REID:  The same basic MO that Ted Bundy used.

PRENTISS:  Every woman in Lincoln is a target.

JAREAU:  I’ll get a statement out to the media as soon as we land.

HOTCHNER:  Do we have anything else?  What are the Lincoln PD doing?

MORGAN: Tasing people who refuse to comply.

HOTCHNER: Well, it’s all we got.

PRENTISS:  And today’s Friday.

REID:  That means he could be striking again even as we speak.

(Agends furrow brows)

(Cell phone goes off in MORGAN’s pocket).

MORGAN (looks at phone).  It’s Garcia.  I’ll put you on speaker, Princess.

(MORGAN sets phone on table.  Notwithstanding that the G4 is cruising at 40,000 at 500 knots, the phone has and maintains four bars of signal reception, enough to get clear, skitter-free video of FBI macguffin technician technical analyst Chloe O’Brien Penelope GARCIA)

HOTCHNER: Go ahead, Garcia.

GARCIA:  Yo, yo yo, ma izzagents.  Here’s what we have so far.  Victims are 22 year old Danielle Larson, worked at a Perkins in Lincoln, and 21 year old Cathy Profett (Photos pop up on screen, superimposed alongside Garcia), who worked at a truckstop off the interstate.

PRENTISS: Both blond, high school grads, working their way through community college – Larson for nursing, Profett for tool and die fabrication.  You got the causes of death – both identical.

MORGAN:  What are their financials?

GARCIA: Already on it!  (Spreadsheets swirl across screen to superimpose over photos on phone screen).  Both low-income, but solvent.  Larson’s father is an insurance agent and alcoholic who had a fling in 1985 with a receptionist at their insurance office.  Proffett’s mother played fiddle in a country-western band in her twenties and owns a secret copy of Fifty Shades of Gray.

JAREAU (whispering to REID): I always wondered – how does she get all that info instantly, without a search warrant?

REID (whispering back):  My IQ is in four digits, and after seven years, I still haven’t figured it out.

ROSSI:  So other than age, gender, blonde and working-class, no real link.

GARCIA:  Wait, wait – this just coming in now.  We have a third vic.  22 year old Amy Rademacher.  Waitress at a Dennys on the west side.  She’s alive…

MORGAN: So something interrupted the unsub.

GARCIA: Correctamundo.  She also has a detailed physical description.  White, Male, late thirties, dark brown hair…

PRENTISS:  Yep…

GARCIA:  …and gushing blood from his chest…

REID:  Wait – that doesn’t fit the profile at all.  Unsubs of this type are almost always uninjured, in peak physical condition…

GARCIA: …where the victim shot the unsub six times at point blank range with the .357 snubnose revolver she carried.  And (checks scrolling panel on computer) yep, she has a valid Nebraska carry permit and… (pops up online data from a local Gander Mountain) shot better on her last day at the range than you did, oh tall, dark and handsome! (MORGAN blushes).

ROSSI (puzzled):  The victimology is all wrong!  Our vics are never able to fight back…

HOTCHNER:  This is big.  Very big.

GARCIA:  Lincoln police is bagging what’s left of him up right now (photo of blood-smeared floor and full body bag pulsates on the screen.  GARCIA waves at the screen). Toodles, unsub.

MORGAN:  Well done, Princess.

GARCIA:  Oh, you just made kitty purr!  OK – adios, muchachos!   (GARCIA bleems out).

PRENTISS:  Well, that settled that, I guess.

MORGAN:  Vics killing unsubs.  What’ll they think of next?

ROSSI:  Time to rewrite the book.

HOTCHNER (presses intercom button).  Pilot – take us back to Quantico.

(JAREAU brings up “Shot In The Dark” on her Macbook.  For next 56 minutes, camera focuses on her reading, cutting between her face and the rapidly-scrolling blog, as Jareau becomes  more fascinated the longer she goes).

(Shot dissolves to exterior of Gulfstream flying against the dusk,  Agent PRENTISS’ voice appears in narrative voice-over)

PRENTISS: P. J. O’Rourke once wrote “And so I said “let me tell you who those bad guys are. They’re us, Americans. WE BE BAD. We’re the baddest-assed sons of bitches that ever jogged in Reeboks. We’re three-quarters grizzly bear and two-thirds car wreck and descended from a stock market crash on our mother’s side. You take your Germany, France, and Spain, roll them all together and it wouldn’t give us room to park our cars. We’re the big boys, Jack, the original, giant, economy-sized, new and improved butt kickers of all time. When we snort coke in Houston, people lose their hats in Cap d’Antibes. And we’ve got an American Express card credit limit higher than your piss-ant metric numbers go. You say our country’s never been invaded? You’re right, little buddy. Because I’d like to see the needle-dicked foreigners who’d have the guts to try. We drink napalm to get our hearts started in the morning. A rape and a mugging is our way of saying ‘Cheerio.’  Hell can’t hold our sock-hops. We walk taller, talk louder, spit further, f**k longer and buy more things than you know the names of. I’d rather be a junkie in a New York City jail than king, queen, and jack of all Europeans. We eat little countries like this for breakfast and sh*t them out before lunch.”

(And fade to black as credits roll).

———-

Waiting for a call from my agent even as we speak.

Tim Dolan is retiring as Minneapolis’ police chief.

He plans to become an advocate for making honest, law-abiding citizens easier victims for criminals.

No, really:

Minneapolis Police Chief Tim Dolan, who retired Friday after six years as chief, said he’ll spend some of his newfound spare time doing volunteer work for “reasonable” gun control groups.

“It’s always been a passion of mine,” he said of gun control. “I worked at it quite a bit as chief, and there’s a lot of work still to be done.”

It’s tempting to say “there’s no such thing” as a “reasonable gun-control group”.  Of course, that’s untrue.  This is one group that advocates for gun laws that stress keeping guns out of the hands of criminals.

It’s the National Rifle Association.

Is that the “reasonable gun control group” that Chief Dolan is talking about?

Dolan said he plans to help the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence in Washington, D.C., the Joyce Foundation in Chicago and a local group, Protect Minnesota: Working to End Gun Violence.

The Brady Campaign and the Joyce Foundation are famous for trying to drum up junk “science” against civilian firearm ownership.  As to “Protect Minnesota” – a group that has to change its name every five years when even the media start realizing what they are.  Their leader, Heather Martens, has never, not even once, said a substantial true thing about the subject of guns.  Not a single one.

Heather Martens, executive director of Protect Minnesota, said she met with Dolan on Wednesday at his office to discuss what he will do for her group.

“I think, basically, he will be a resource on gun policy … and give feedback on legislation,” Martens said. “He has always been a voice for preventing gun violence.”

Given Martens record, one might conclude Dolan has personally committed dozens of murders.  But we won’t go quite that far.

Sorry, Chief.  Your post-retirement activities will enable, not prevent, crime.

New Yorkers, disarmed by generations of nannystate government, are more or less helpless as those who disregarded the city’s gun control laws flow into the vacuum left when the city’s veneer of civilization – cops and “the system” – got blown away last week.

Residents in parts of Queens – where law enforcement is as scarce as power – are trying to “arm” themselves as looters and armed robbers prowl the neigbhorhood:

Thugs have been masquerading as Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) workers, knocking on doors in the dead of night. But locals say the real workers have been nowhere in sight, causing at least one elected official — who fears a descent into anarchy if help doesn’t arrive soon — to call for the city to investigate the utility…

…“We booby-trapped our door and keep a baseball bat beside our bed,” said Danielle Harris, 34, rummaging through donated supplies as children rode scooters along half-block chunk of the boardwalk that had marooned into the middle of Beach 91st St.

“We heard gunshots for three nights in a row,” said Harris, who believed they came from the nearby housing projects.

Carly Ruggieri, 27, who lives in water-damaged house on the block, said she barricades her door with a bed frame. “There have been people in power department uniforms knocking on doors and asking if they’re okay, but at midnight.”

And another local surfer said he has knives, a machete and a bow and arrow on the ready. Gunshots and slow-rolling cars have become a common fixture of the night since Hurricane Sandy.

When owning guns is a crime, only criminals will have guns (and the Department of Homeland Security isn’t wild about people stockpiling food, either).

So demented is Mayor Bloomberg – an Obama-endorsing Quisling pseudo-Republican – that he doesn’t even want the National Guard going into Brooiklyn.  Too many guns.

Mayor Bloomberg has snubbed Borough President Markowitz’s impassioned plea to bring the National Guard to Hurricane Sandy-scarred Brooklyn — arguing that approving the Beep’s request would be a waste of federal manpower and turn the borough into a police state.

“We don’t need it,” Mayor Bloomberg said on Wednesday during a press update on the city’s ongoing Hurricane Sandy cleanup. “The NYPD is the only people we want on the street with guns.”

Markowitz demanded the National Guard’s help just an hour before Bloomberg’s press conference, claiming that the NYPD and FDNY are “brave — but overwhelmed” by all the challenges Sandy brought when it visited the borough on Monday night: flooding, power outages, and looting.

“All of our resources have been stretched to the limit,” Markowitz said. “In the name of public safety we need to send more National Guard personnel into Coney Island, Manhattan Beach, Gerritsen Beach, Red Hook, and any other locations.”

Markowitz hopes that the sight of an armed soldier would deter criminal activity in the still-unaccessible evacuation zones — such as the rash of break-ins that took place in Coney Island hours after Sandy kissed the borough goodbye — but the Mayor said the NYPD was more than capable of handling the job.

“There are plenty of locations upstate and in surrounding states where they don’t have a police department the size of New York and they can use help [from the National Guard],” said Bloomberg.

Markowitz said he was surprised by the Mayor’s response, but was sticking to his guns.

“We stand by our statement 100 percent,” said Markowitz spokesman John Hill. “We hope the governor will listen to our request.”

It might scare the thugs.

Obama did to one great thing for America during the Tuesday debate.

He finally cut the crap and let slip his true colors on the Second Amendment

In his 2008 campaign and while president, Obama has distanced himself from gun issues, aware that it could hurt him politically in key battleground states. But when pressed about gun violence during the Tuesday town hall-style presidential debate, he fully embraced a Clinton-style assault weapons ban. Clinton’s ban expired in 2004.

Well, kudos, Mr. President, for telling the truth for perhaps the only time in the Tuesday debate; you want to return American to the collectivist nadir of the seventies.

Suggesting a ban not just on semi-automatic weapons like the AR-15 but maybe even handguns, the most popular rifle in America, the president said, “What I’m trying to do is to get a broader conversation about how do we reduce the violence generally. Part of it is seeing if we can get an assault weapons ban reintroduced. But part of it is also looking at other sources of the violence. Because frankly, in my hometown of Chicago, there’s an awful lot of violence and they’re not using AK-47s. They’re using cheap handguns.”

Whenever socialists start talking about “broader conversations” about civil rights, what they really mean is “taking more of them”.

The NRA is jumping on this – and if they didn’t, they’d be completely worthless as a political action organization:

Keene said that Obama’s statement was a “strategic error on his part” because it blew up the president’s pro-Second Amendment rhetoric. “He knows it’s politically dangerous to take on the Second Amendment,” said Keene.

“We have credibility when we say that Barack Obama is a threat to your rights. But that credibility is obviously enhanced 10-fold when Barack Obama, in a moment of weakness, says, ‘Yeah, as a matter of fact I am.’ And that’s what he did,” said Keene. “This is going to help us.”

For the sake of this country’s future, it had better.

The answers are obvious:

1. Don’t believe the Obama Administration’s and the left’s hype.  Obama has always been anti-gun.  In his world, only the government’s existence is worth defending – not yours.
2. It is the duty of every law-abiding American to own and be proficient with a firearm.  Get with it.  If we can get a few million more “bitter gun-clingers” out there, educaged and voting – and studies have shown that the law-abding shooter is both smarter and more politically-engaged than the general public – then we can not just beat Obama, but crush him.  We – the Real Americans of the Second Amendment movement – have done it before.

This has got to cost The One.

…but as a Second Amendment activist I found myself very, very jazzed that we finally have a Prez candidate who not only can articulate the difference between Automatic and Semi-Automatic weapons…

…but actually did it, on national TV.

Retired SCOTUS Justice Stevens is many things.

• He’s a liberal dinosaur.
• If you are either a pro-Second-Amendment Democrat or a Gary Johnson voter, he is a big reason to suck it up and vote for Mitt; the thought that another Obama term means three more “justices” like him should keep you up at night.
• He’d seem to be one of those lawyers that you just want to punch when they’re in their twenties and thirties and strutting around showing everyone how much smarter than everyone else they like to think they are.
• He’s either hopelessly ignorant, or he’s senile

This piece in the WashEx is evidence for all of the above:

Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens called for Congress to tighten gun laws in the wake of shootings such as the one that took place in Aurora, Colorado.

So Aurora can be as safe as Chicago!

Stevens noted that the legal precedent for restricting gun rights — United States vs. Miller — still stands, despite the ruling in the 2005 Heller case that overturned the Washington, D.C., ban on owning handguns, even in one’s own home.

Which proves the “dinosaur” case.

The “senile” case?  That comes next (with emphasis added by me):

“[Miller] was generally understood to limiting the scope of the Second Amendment to the uses of arms that were related to military activities,” Stevens said today during a question-and-answer session after a speech today with the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence’s Legal Action Project. “The Court did not overrule Miller [in Heller].

That’s technically true.  Heller overruled a specious, logically-vacuous train of opinion in lower courts that Miller meant that the Second Amendment was not a right “Of the People”, but that it might refer to assemblies of people like the National Guard.

Remember the bolded bit.  We’ll be coming back to it very shortly.

Back to Justice and Dolt Stevens:

Instead it ‘read Miller to say only that the Second Amendment does not protect those weapons not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes, such as short-barreled shotguns . . . Thus, the Second Amendment provides no obstacle to regulations permitting the ownership or the use of the sorts of the automatic weapons used in the tragic multiple killings in Virginia, Colorado, or Arizona in recent years.”

For starters, Stevens – like the entire generation of bobbleheaded activists that spawned him – contradicts himself; he said Miller was limited in scope to the use of military weapons – which are, largely, “automatic”.  Meaning…

…well, not what “Justice” and senile fool Stevens thinks.  Here’s some remedial firearms education:  this is “automatic”:

This is “Semi-Automatic” – a mode found on many hunting firearms and possibly the majority of personal defensive handguns:

It was semi-automatic weapons that were used in virtually every major shooting – not full automatic.  The death tolls were not a function of gun’s firing mechanism, but of the fact that the victims were packed into small spaces and rendered defenseless…

…by the laws the likes of Justice Stevens foisted on us.

Stevens also had a recommendation for people who keep a weapon in their homes for self-defense purposes. “Maybe you have some kind of constitutional right to have a cell phone with a pre-dialed 911 in the number at your bedside and that might provide you with a little better protection than a gun which you’re not used to using,” he said to laughter.

My next 200 rounds at the range is dedicated to you, “Justice” Idiot Stevens.

As will be my next semi-automatic rifle purchase.

You’re welcome.

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

New sign posted this week at the front entrance to Ramsey County Property Records and Revenue (the place where you file your deed and pay your taxes), located at 90 West Plato Blvd. It’s across the river from downtown.

The building sits on land owned by Ramsey County government and used for official government business.

The “guns banned” sign comes from Minn. Stat. 624.714, Subd. 17. That law allows posting by a private establishment controlled by a nongovernment entity and used for a nongovernment purpose. On its face, that law does not apply to the government office where the public comes to pay taxes.

Quiz of the day question: are guns banned in that building because of that sign?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

I’m going to guess that the building has some connection to the Ramco Court system, and can be legally posted.  It’s the same technicality that the City of Minneapolis used to arrest Joel Rosenberg a few years back; even though he wasn’t in a “court” facility per se, the court system was involved with the building.

That’s just a hunch, and I can’t say as I’m going to line up to be the text case.

That being said, I’m going to shine the GOCRA signal on a passing cloud and hope a real gun-rights expert turns up…

The Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance has released its candidate grades.

When reading this, remember – “F*”, with the asterisk, means “didn’t return the questionnaire”.  While most Republicans (and a huge proportion of DFLers outside the metro) scored well, plenty of Republicans in tough DFL districts who would be solid on the Second Amendment very likely let the questionnaire slide; you gotta pick your battles.  Don’t be put off by all the F* grades, anyway.

But most importantly, remember – the Second Amendment is a guarantee of a human and civil right.  I’d vote for an anti-gun candidate no more than I would a pro-censorship one.

Either should you.

Close to twenty years ago, in his seminal essay “A Nation of Cowards” – which was in its day the manifesto of the “Shall Issue” movement – Jeffrey Snyder took on, among many other themes, the job of proving that the law-abiding citizen was eminently trustworthy with firearms.  This, he did with a nation that had been intellectually marinaded in the idea that citizens with guns were inherently dangerous for a couple of decades.

Snyder pointed to a bunch of studies and statistics that were a breath of fresh air for Second Amendment supporters for whom the media’s drumbeat of paranoia flunked the sniff test.  Being published as it was, at the very beginning of the dawn of the conservative alternative media (Usenet news groups were among the essay’s first conduits), the essay was a revelation to many. We are rapidly approaching the 20th anniversary of this seminal essay – and when we get there, I’ll be commemorating it in style.

Here was one of the stats that was a real eye-opener when this piece came out:

A nationwide study by Kates, the constitutional lawyer and criminologist, found that only 2 percent of civilian shootings involved an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal. The “error rate” for the police, however, was 11 percent, over five times as high.

It is simply not possible to square the numbers above and the experience of Florida with the notions that honest, law-abiding gun owners are borderline psychopaths itching for an excuse to shoot someone, vigilantes eager to seek out and summarily execute the lawless, or incompetent fools incapable of determining when it is proper to use lethal force in defense of their lives. Nor upon reflection should these results seem surprising. Rape, robbery, and attempted murder are not typically actions rife with ambiguity or subtlety, requiring special powers of observation and great book-learning to discern. When a man pulls a knife on a woman and says, “You’re coming with me,” her judgment that a crime is being committed is not likely to be in error. There is little chance that she is going to shoot the wrong person. It is the police, because they are rarely at the scene of the crime when it occurs, who are more likely to find themselves in circumstances where guilt and innocence are not so clear-cut, and in which the probability for mistakes is higher.

This was driven home to us last week in New York, at the Empire State Building shooting.  The shooter killed one person – his target. The cops were responsible for killing the shooter – and wounding nine bystanders, shooting three and injuring six others with ricocheting debris.

Bob Owens at PJM notes that the NYPD doesn’t issue tasers to beat cops; anyone they can’t take down with clubs, it’s off to the holsters:

Not making Tasers standard issue to officers in a city as densely populated as New York would be almost criminally negligent, and I’d like Mayor Bloomberg to explain why someone so strongly against the civilian ownership of guns hasn’t taken steps to minimize the threat that handgun-armed police pose to the nine million civilians in his city.

If anything, the number of bystanders hit by police gunfire in this incident and others suggests that NYPD officers should be armed with Tasers instead of handguns. It simply isn’t possible to use a handgun in many parts of the city without significant risk of hitting and killing innocent citizens downrange of the target.

It’s not a knock of cops to say that gun controllers who demand we “trust the cops to do the right thing” are ignorant of human nature and the physiology and psychology of stress.

On the one hand, Fareed Zakaria – the perpetually hapless hack for the left – has been suspended for plagiarism.

On the other hand?  At least when he plagiarizes, he has a chance of sounding smart.

On his dim little CNN show a few weeks back, in the immediate aftermath of the Aurora shooting, Zakaria noted perfunctorily that (and i’m paraphrasing closely here) “while some people note that there might be a link between psychology and gun violence, you are entitled to your opinion, but not to your own facts; it’s all about the availability of guns”.

In so doing, he ignored, well, the facts:

• Crime is broadly down nationwide – a drop that has closely paralleled the skyrocketing sales in guns.
• Notwithstanding the nationwide trend, violence is steady to up in places with the tightest gun control – Chicago and DC.
• On the other hand, it’s been generally down in New York, which has gun laws that Benito Mussolini would love.
• On the other hand, crime is lower still in many places with gun-friendly shall-issue laws…
• …and plenty high in other places with shall-issue laws, like the Deep South, with a culture of violence that started long before the age of civilian firearms (where crime is well above the national average, but has also fallen faster than the national average).
• Even in areas that are ostensibly identical, violent crime rates vary wildly.  Minneapolis and Saint Paul are part of the same metro area; by state statute, they have identical gun laws.  And yet Minneapolis’ murder and violent crime rates are a dramatically – as in, 50% – higher than in Saint Paul.

So when Zakaria – one of the most noxious anti-Second Amendment orcs there is – says “you’re not entitled to your own facts”, what he really means is “ignore the facts that gut the chanting point I’m repeating”.

Good riddance.

The Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance has released its candidate scorecard.

Be advised that anyone that didn’t return their scorecard gets an “F*”, based on the assumption that people who don’t return questionnaires are trying to hide their sentiments until after election time.  I think that may have been a fair assumption ten years ago; In the case of many Republican candidates – for instances, District 65’s Senate and both House candidates – I think it’s more a matter of pro-gun libertarians not wanting to hand the DFL another cheap chanting point in a tough area.

And let’s give credit where it’s due; while I’ve railed against Steve Smith’s record in many areas, he’s been a solid Second Amendment vote, although I don’t see Cindy Pugh being any less a supporter.

At any rate, there you go.  Vote accordingly.

Democrats will find any way they can to attack your civil rights.

Being practical, they know they’re not going to ban guns outright anytime real soon – at least not via the political process.

But they can regulate every peripheral part of the firearms industry out of existence by executive fiat.

Regulators, operating beyond legislative oversight, have essentially banned gun stores from the Twin Cities or the inner ring of suburbs.  And regulations in DFL-clotted cities and ‘burbs have made gun ranges nearly a thing of the past anywhere within 30 miles of either downtown.

Burnsville Pistol Range – “BPR” – has been an exception.  The Burnsville institution is probably the closest range to the Twin Cities available to the general civilian public.  They had a fire last week; their ventilation system caught fire, and damaged part of the rifle range.

They’re working hard to re-open – but regular reader Kevin writes to note that the Feds may have other plans:

as they repair and plan for reopening after the fire the BPR people should prepare themselves for an OSHA inspection along the lines of the one described in the [linked] file detailing the “violations” OSHA found at the Illinois Gun Works Ltd

Obama’s OSHA working with the EPA could systematically reduce the number of gun ranges nationwide to a tiny very expensive few within the next 4 years using the methods exhibited in this set of citations.

Make no mistake – Obama has used every means at his disposal, including the systematic defrauding of the American people using the Justice Department (to say nothing of the vapid demigogueing of the Trayvon Martin case) to make whatever dent possible in the law-abiding Ameircan”s  civil right to keep and bear arms.

If you are a shooter – whether hunter or defensive – it is absolutely imperative to get Obama out of office.

News came in last night; there was a nasty fire at Burnsville Pistol Range.

BPR is one of the primary public ranges left in the Twin Cities.  DFL-dominated local governments have seen to the closing, either via ordinance or uninsurability, of many of the local ranges that used to dot the Twin Cities map.  BPR is one of very few ranges anywhere near the actual cities themselves.

BPR is were I’ve taken both of my carry qualifications.  And Roger and his crew gave us a great deal last year when we wanted to hold a shoot-out to benefit the family of the late Joel Rosenberg.

Hopefully insurance and local government cooperate to help keep this great small local business in business where they belong.

(Thanks to Fresch Fisch for the report)

Joe Doakes emails:

Well that’s going to put a damper on Heather Marten’s post-Aurora party plans.

Joe’s pointing to an article in Slate which points out the fact that “automatic” weapons (the media’s constant, consistent error; they’re “Semi-Automatic”), and indeed firearms, are not only not the most common weapons used in mass murders – they aren’t even the most deadly:

 

Guns aren’t even the most lethal mass murder weapon. According to data compiled by Grant Duwe of the Minnesota Department of Corrections, guns killed an average of 4.92 victims per mass murder in the United States during the 20th century, just edging out knives, blunt objects, and bare hands, which killed 4.52 people per incident. Fire killed 6.82 people per mass murder, while explosives far outpaced the other options at 20.82. Of the 25 deadliest mass murders in the 20th century, only 52 percent involved guns.

And aircraft.

The worst school mass murder in US history was…Columbine?

Not even close, as we discussed a few years ago; a deranged politician killed 45, including himself, blowing up a schoolhouse in Bath Michigan in the twenties.

Slate notes what is to lefties the unthinkable; the mass murder rate really has nothing to do with the availability of semi-automatic firearms:

The U.S. mass murder rate does not seem to rise or fall with the availability of automatic weapons. It reached its highest level in 1929, when fully automatic firearms were expensive and mostly limited to soldiers and organized criminals. The rate dipped in the mid-1930s, staying relatively low before surging again in the 1970s through 1990s. Some criminologists attribute the late-century spike to the potential for instant notoriety: Beginning with Charles Whitman’s 1966 shooting spree from atop a University of Texas tower, mass murderers became household names. Others point out that the mass murder rate fairly closely tracks the overall homicide rate. In the 2000s, for example, both the mass murder and the homicide rates dropped to their lowest levels since the 1960s.

There is  psychology involved:

A mass murderer’s weapon of choice depends somewhat on his victims. Attacks with guns, fire, knives, and bare hands are far more likely to be directed against family and acquaintances than total strangers, while mass murderers prefer to use explosives against people they don’t know. Also of note: Those who use firearms in a killing spree turn the gun on themselves 34 percent of the time, while only 9 percent of mass-murdering arsonists take their own lives.

At any rate – the “gun control’ “crisis”, like the “war on women” and Trayvon Martin, are all just attempts to change the conversation from the economy.  There is no other there there.

Professor Lott, from NRO, from a larger piece, on “Military Style Firearms“:

…murder rates fell immediately after September 2004 [when the Clinton-era “Assault Weapon” ban was lifted], and they fell more in the states without assault-weapons bans than in the states with them.

More on Monday.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails in re Aurora, and provides a quote that the NRA or the GOA should put on a T-shirt:

Orc: The Aurora theatre was a gun-free zone but it didn’t matter because the shooter wore body armor, he was Invincible!

Joe: Not so much. The initial media reports thought “tactical vest” meant “bulletproof vest.” No, he wore the cop version of a pheasant hunting vest, with the pockets modified to hold pistol magazines instead of shotgun shells. It affords no protection to the wearer whatsoever.

Orc: Well that doesn’t matter. The theater was dark and noisy and full of smoke. Even if theatre patrons had been allowed to carry pistols, nobody could have made a shot to stop the threat under those conditions, it’s like a battlefield.

Joe: Four military veterans died in that theatre..

Orc: Yeah, but not every veteran can shoot. They’re just Air Force computer clerks, unlikely they had experience in war or handling weapons.

Joe: Jon Blunk died in that theatre. He threw himself on top of his girlfriend to save her life.

Orc: Yeah, but he was only a sailor. Could he shoot? Would he have had the guts to shoot in a dark, noisy smoky theatre? With someone shooting back at him?

Joe: Blunk already had three tours in the Middle East under his belt and had plans to re-enlist with a goal of becoming a Navy SEAL. That’s what SEALS do – they go into dark, noisy smoky places where people are shooting at them, and they kill bad guys. Would he have had the guts? Listen to someone who knows him:

“Gill, who lived with Blunk several years in the Navy and later in Aurora, described his friend as an avid outdoorsman and gun rights advocate.

“Pretty much every weapon the guy in the theater used [Blunk] owned,” Gill said. “If you asked if he was still alive, he would have said his only regret is he didn’t have his sidearm with him and he couldn’t do anything to stop him.”

This part should be on the T-shirts and bumper stickers:

Gun-free zones don’t stop bad guys from killing good people; they stop good people from killing bad guys. That’s why they matter.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Their lips are moving.  (Or their fingers are moving over a keyboard.  Either way).

This blog has spent the better part of a decade exposing and illuminating the lies of Minnesota gun control advocates like Heather Martens, Dakota County Attorney Jim Backstrom, and former Senators Jane Ranum, Wes “Lying Sack of Filth” Skoglund, Ellen Anderson, and the like.

But I had a blast from the past over the weekend.

Senator Diane Feinstein of California appeared on the Chris Wallace show on Sunday.

Feinstein has been a kicktoy of the pro-Human-Rights movement for over twenty years – since I first got involved, really.

She’s an epic hypocrite on the issue, like so many gun control advocates.  When she was mayor of San Francisco, she revoked all civilian carry permits…

…but only after she had the police issue her a special “police” permit that was exempt from her own decree.  Even as she worked to disarm San Franciscans, she carried a revolver with her.

Because while the average villein’s citizen’s life was of no value and unworthy of defense, and incompetent to do it himself, Diane Feinstein was, in Diane Feinstein’s judgment, both worthy and competent.  (Chuck “Chuckles” Schumer and Barbara “Stupidest Person In The Senate” Boxer are similarly hypocrites; gun banners with carry permits).

Anyway – she appeared with Wallace yesterday.  She claimed that one out of five cops who are killed in the US are killed “by the same type of weapon” used in the Aurora massacre.

She’s lying, naturally.

The weapon getting all the attention in this shooting is the AR-15 – a semi-automatic civilian version of the Army’s M-16 and M-4 rifles.

An AR15, which is available in a bewildering number of configurations

(And Holmes’ AR-15 apparently jammed before an indeterminate number of shots fired, which is also similar to the military versions, which have been derided as famously jam-prone for almost as long as they’ve been in service).    Holmes then apparently switched to a shotgun and one of a number of Glock pistols he had – like an amazing number of utterly law-abiding Americans).

Feinstein – called “Feinswine” by human-rights advocates who’ve been trying to draw the “media fact-checkers'” attention to her for two decades, now – is using a rhetorical dodge built into American gun laws by the 1994 Crime Bill that, theoretically, classified almost any weapon larger than a revolver as an “Assault Weapon”.   The term “assault weapon” is almost entirely devoid of technical meaning; it “means” essentially any weapon that looks menacing and has a magazine (“clip” for rookies and videogamers) capacity over 10 rounds.

So during the nadir of the “Assault Weapon” ban, it’s meant large-capacity semi-authomatic pistols…:

With a capacity of 15 rounds, the Beretta Model 92 is the standard sidearm of the US military, and of many private citizens.

…or my own SIG P250, with its 12 round magazine:

Yep - an "assault weapon", according to Diane Feinstein!

So this is Feinstein’s rhetorical sleight of hand; she’s using a definition of ‘Assault Weapon” that is intentionally as broad as it can be made, to rope in as many otherwise-fairly-normal firearms as possible.

Because that’s what the left wants to control and eventually ban – as many as possible now, and everything else later.

For starters – my thoughts and prayers go out to the families and friends of the victims of last night’s outbreak of senseless, cowardly violence.

Not that I have a lot to offer in re this story, but here are some observations:

• As many people died in that theatre as died in the previous week and half in “gun-free” Chicago. And the week and half before that.  And the week and half before that.  So far this year, they’ve been almost 300 firearms homicides in Chicago, and many many hundreds maimed.  And there is no end in sight.
• I say that for the benefit of the liberal orcs who are already coming out of the woodwork demanding big changes to American gun laws.
• Notwithstanding the occasional headline-grabbing spree killing, violent crime has been dropping steadily in the US, even as (or, I believe, because) the number of Americans owning guns has skyrocketed in the past decade.  43 states have either shall-issue permitting laws – which have been shown, all other things being equal, to reduce violent crime – and about half the states have some variety of “Stand your Ground” laws, all of them successful outside the media’s rarified sampling of high-profile politicized cases (like the Zimmerman case).  No state has even considered repeating a shall-issue law in the nearly thirty years that the laws have been on the ascendant.
• One of the arguments is “what if someone with a carry permit brought their piece to the theatre?”  On the one hand, liberals – expressing the deep intellectual rigor for which the liberal anti-gun argument is so famous – respond “Oh, yeah, just what they needed – a bunch of wannabe Dirty Harries”. To which the conservatives respond “Yeah, good thing nobody in the theatre fought back. It might have gotten dangerous!“

So pray first for the victims, their families and friends, the doctors who are treating them, and the people of Aurora.

And then, when all that’s done, pray for the liberal hamsters who come out calling for more moronic gun control laws.

Pray they get God’s mercy, because rhetorically speaking, I will show them none.

UPDATES:  I am at the moment thankful that both b the President  and even the folks at iMedia Matters seem to be taking the high road so far.

Two young thugs storm into an internet cafe in Florida with a bat and a gun, and start herding everyone together to rob them – at the very least.

Sam Williams – a 71 year old guy with a carry permit – legitimately fearing death or great bodily harm (lest we forget, there are A GUN AND A BASEBALL BAT pointed at him and the rest of the customers), draws and fires, wounding both of the attackers and sending them scampering for their lives.

It’s a beautiful thing – criminals wetting themselves with fear:

That’s two criminals (and, most likely, Democrat voters) off the street.

No word yet on whether President Obama thinks the lads “look just like him” or not.

Here’s the point:  in Florida, if the shooting is ruled legitimate self-defense, the shooter – Sam Williams – will be immunized from being sued by the victims thugs.

If this were in Minnesota?  The two probable DFL voters thugs, from jail, would have every right to run out and find themselves a couple of personal injury lawyers (most of whom are DFL voters and contributors) and try to sue Mr. Williams back to the stone age.  At best, Mr. Williams will spend whatever is in his retirement to defend himself against the people who’d threatened to kill him for his money; at worst, he’ll be cleaned out. Ruined.

Thanks, Governor Bored Dilettante!

(Via Erika from Hot Air)

“So why do you spend so much time on the Second Amendment? Are you (titter, titter) compensating for something?”

Yes. I’m compensating for the fact that much of humanity is evil, and much of the rest of them are as dumb as you. No, I’m not saying you’re party to totalitarian dictatorship; merely that dictators need people like you to be in the majority for them to take power.

Shut up, watch and learn.