I got this from the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance this morning; Tony Cornish’s “Stand Your Ground” bill comes up for debate in the Senate tomorrow.

I’m going to start with the call to action, and let you read the rest of it later.

Here’s What We Need To Do:  If you are a Minnesotan who supports the human right of self-defense, here’s where it starts:

• Call Your Senator – Or send them a snail mail.  Or at the very least, an email. Here’s a full list.  Tell them, politely and concisely, that you support the human right of self-defense, and that you want them to support SF1357.  For the Republicans, remember – we shooters supported the GOP in 2010; they need to earn that support.  For Democrats outside the Metro, remind them how many shooters are in their district (lots!).   For Metrocrats?  Call anyway.  And then call a real Senator.
• Join the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance – GOCRA is the single best source of information on Minnesota gun issues there is.  They were fighting for Minnesotans’ gun rights long before most Minnesotans knew it was cool.  And they have been among the most effective grass-roots (as in real grass-roots) political groups anywhere.  And it’s because of people like us.  So join the group.

What’s So Important About The Bill? – This is from Andrew Rothman at GOCRA:

HF1467/SF1357 Summary

HF1467/SF1357, the Defense of Dwelling and Person Act of 2011, brings “Stand Your Ground” protections to Minnesota, restores the presumption that a person using self defense is innocent until proven guilty, enhances Castle Doctrine, prevents the state from seizing guns during an emergency (remember Hurricane Katrina?), improves carry reciprocity with other states and requires the government to do its job to serve law-abiding citizens.

The full text of the bill can be found here: https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bin/bldbill.php?bill=H1467.2.html&session=ls87

Here’s some more detail about the bill:

Adds Stand Your Ground

HF1467 brings “Stand Your Ground” protections to Minnesota, removing the requirement that an intended victim of violent crime must retreat from a place where he has a right to be before using deadly force in self defense.

Enhances Castle Doctrine

The bill also strengthens Minnesota’s “Castle Doctrine,” clarifying when and under what circumstances individuals can legally use deadly force to protect themselves in their homes and vehicles. In addition, it creates a presumption that, when faced with an apparent home invasion, carjacking or kidnapping attempt, a person may use deadly force in self defense.

Adds Universal Carry Permit Acceptance

Of particular interest to carry permit holders, the final article of the bill updates our carry permit reciprocity standards, allowing people holding carry permits from any other state to carry in Minnesota (under Minnesota law, of course). This should result in a large increase in the number of states where Minnesota permit holders can carry, since many states allow other states’ permit holders to carry on a reciprocal basis.

Prevents Gun Seizures During a State of Emergency

Taking a lesson from the problems in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the bill also bans government agencies from seizing guns or ammo, revoking permits to purchase or carry, closing gun shops, or otherwise suspending our constitutional rights during a civil emergency — or at any other time. It also prohibits law enforcement officers from seizing a person’s gun, unless the person is arrested, or the gun is evidence of a crime.

Enhances Purchase Permit Rights

The bill also borrows a page from the Permit to Carry law, providing a more robust appeal process for denied purchase permits, and requiring that police chiefs and sheriffs whose purchase permit denials are overturned must pay the applicants’ legal costs.

This important stuff.

Oh, yeah – one more thing:  We shooters used to be really, really good at focusing our votes.  When Concealed Carry Reform was wending its way through the legislature for those nine long sessions (1995 through 2003), we voted a lot of soft-on-guns outstate legislators out of office; literally, we shooters (organized by GOCRA), swung Minnesota politics.

We need to do it again.  Minnesota’s anti-gun crowd is getting restless. We need to slap them down at the ballot box.  Anti-gun legislators – and other elected officials – need to find out how serious we are by being sent into political retirement.  Which is another reason to please, please join GOCRA.

…it’s almost reassuring to see that gun violence in Washington DC, which along with Chicago is the model city for gun control, is skyrocketing…:

Violent crime so far this year in the District has spiked sharply — a 40 percent increase that includes twice as many robberies at gunpoint than at this time last year.

Across the city, all police districts are reporting increases in violent crime, and all but one have had double-digit percentage increases, according to internal Metropolitan Police Department documents. The documents contained preliminary crime data for the city as of Thursday.

The crime rate is increasing this year after a downward trend — the number of reported homicides last year dropped to the lowest level in a half-century.

Homicides were the only category of violent crime to decline in the first six weeks this year. As of Thursday, the city had recorded 10 homicides compared with 11 at a similar point last year.

Overall, though, incidents of violent crime — homicides, sexual assaults, robberies and assaults with deadly weapons — are rising at an alarming pace.

…even as the Democrat orcs that govern our federal cesspool continue to stonewall the law-abiding gun owner and the defy post-Heller law of the land.

Democrats! The blood of all those innocent victims is on your hands!

Yesterday, I tackled a Strib op-ed by Jim Backstrom.  Backstrom, the Dakota County Attorney, wrote the latest in a long string of fact-challenged diatribes against the rights of the rigorously-law-abiding gun owner.

Now, Backstrom – who is not just an elected public official, but one in charge of enforcing the law by prosecuting accused criminals in Dakota County – has been misrepresenting facts  when it comes to the law-abiding gun owner for years.

Of course, we do have a First Amendment.  Freedom of Speech means freedom to lie like a sack of crap.  And as a general rule, I support the idea that the best way to respond to bad, stupid, misleading, lying speech is by responding with the truth, and more of it.  And I’m not changing that.

But I do have two questions:

Professionalism:  If a doctor were to go in the Star/Tribune and not just declare that, research notwithstanding, smoking cigarettes is in fact good for you, what would happen?  Would she be castigated?  Shunned by her fellow physicians?  Accused of professional malfeasance?  Have her records gone over by dogs trained to sniff out whackdoodelry?

Have her professionalism questioned for giving advice to the public that is directly counter to fact?

So why is it that Jim Backstrom – the chief prosecutor of one of Minnesota’s larger counties – is allowed, as a matter of professional integrity, to misrepresent Minnesota criminal law?  Because as I pointed out yesterday, that’s exactly what he did in yesterday’s op-ed, and in many before it.

Is there no requirement, legal or professional, that lawyers, especially lawyers who are public officials and officers of the court, refrain from actively and blatantly misrepresenting the laws they are charged with enforcing?

(Of course there is no legal requirement; I’d suspect that the same court decisions that allow cops to lie to suspects to trick them into giving information applies to county attorneys lying in the newspaper to the sheeple they’re responsible for herding).

Shouldn’t there be?

I mean, other than the next Dakota County attorney’s election?  Although as a point of principle, DakCo residents should take umbrage at a county attorney who lies about the law.  Even you liberals; if he misrepresents laws about self-defense, who’s to say the next one won’t be, I dunno, Voter ID?

The Same Old Song To The Same Old Beat: And yet again, the Strib prints without question or serious comment the opinion of someone who is simply empirically wrong about the subject.  On subject after subject, it’s been the Strib’s op-ed stock in trade for decades – and on none more than on the law-abiding citizens’ right to defend themselves.

The Strib continues to print the fact-less ravings of Heather Martens, Wes Skoglund, David Lillehaug, and of course Backstrom, without fact-check, without “gatekeeping”, without question, apparently for no other reason than (save Martens) they are big important (liberal) public officials.

Now, does anyone think the Strib would continue to publish, without question, op-eds from the doctor that claimed smoking was good for you?  Or would the circular-file his submissions after a while?

If that doctor were a powerful DFLer, apparently not.

Dakota County attorney Jim Backstrom has built a long career as a “tough on crime” prosecutor.

Unfortunately, among Second Amendment supporters, he’s built an even bigger rep as a useful tool to the gun grabber lobby.

Of course, the orcs in the gun-grabber lobby love him; he’s one few orcs in politics who can dare speak out without much fear of losing his elected seat (unlike nearly ever anti-gun DFL legislator outside the ultraliberal metro area).  He can say pretty much anything he, and they, want him to.

And as we’ve noted in the past, much of what he says is completely wrong; one must conclude that if he, an attorney, doesn’t know he’s wrong, then he’s an not fit for the job, and if he does he’s using his office to serve as a political tool and to mislead the public (as we first showed almost four years ago).

And he’s at it again, sounding off in the Strib about Tony Cornish’s “Stand Your Ground” bill in a piece which is long on noise and short on fact:

The Minnesota Legislature is considering changes to existing laws concerning the authorized use of deadly force. Supporters see these changes as affording law-abiding citizens the right to stand their ground and protect themselves when confronted by dangerous criminals. In truth, this proposal (HF1467/SF1357) greatly expands the legal boundaries for the use of deadly force and will have significant unintended consequences.

Remember that for later in the piece – his affirmative statement that the law “WILL” have nasty consequences.

We’ll come back to it.

Currently, Minnesota law authorizes the use of deadly force, without an obligation to retreat, when done to prevent the commission of a felony in a person’s home. When not in his or her home, a person can rightfully use deadly force to avert a threat of death or great bodily harm to themselves or another, provided the person first attempts to avoid the danger if reasonably possible. In all situations, Minnesota law properly requires that the response be reasonable and necessary given the gravity of the danger faced.

The proposed changes would eliminate the duty to retreat before exercising the right of self-defense in all locations and permit a person to meet force with superior force, including deadly force, if the individual reasonably believes such force is needed to resist or prevent the imminent infliction of substantial bodily harm, great bodily harm or death.

Which is true – and, the way Backstrom phrases it, sounds almost reasonable.

And from Jim Backstrom’s perspective – a County Attorney, who renders his judgments sitting snug in a warm, well-lit office with metal detectors and Dakota County deputies at all the entrances, drawing on his background in criminal law from the perspective of the prosecutor, with its leisurely fitting of circumstances into laws to try to generate indictments and sentences, like a law-school analytical exercise, no doubt it is.

But for a woman taking groceries out of her car in her garage on a dark evening, when an intruder comes slipping under the door in the dark?  Does she have time to parse the situation – “this is on my property, but not in my house, and that looks like a knife but what if it’s just a wrench?  Does he intend to rape and kill me, or just rape and beat me?  Because a beating might not meet the legal definition of “great bodily harm”…”

Or if you’re a good Samaritan who just saw a thug thump a woman in a parking lot, and you give chase, and the thug confronts you with a gun in a dark alley; do you have time to think “does my “duty to retreat” mean I should stomp on the gas and hope I get away before he shoots me in the head?  Does my car accelerate faster than a 9mm bullet?”

It’s in situations like these that law-abiding citizens make life-or-death decisions in split seconds under mind-warping pressure – and, nationwide, in state after state, do as close to a unanimously good job of it as any sector of society ever does.

But under current law, county attorneys like Jim Backstrom, in their offices surrounded by metal detectors and armed deputies and their walls of law books, get to decide “no, lady in the garage, you should have locked yourself in your car and called 911”, or “yes, good samaritan, it’s your duty to try to outrun the bullet.”

And in both cases, it’d be Jim Backstrom’s option to haul you into court, and face his limitless budget with your life’s savings in a battle where lawyers will parse your intent against the letter of the law as Jim Backstrom or his minions decide to try to present it to a jury, with the prize being your freedom.

All for doing the right thing, but in the wrong county.

Backstrom and the other county attorneys oppose the “Stand Your Ground” bill not because there’s been any statistical evidence it makes life more dangerous – there is none, and it does not – but because it would take away some of the County Attorney’s discretion in otherwise-legal self-defense shooting.

And by “discretion”, we mean “power”.

Not all of it, of course; Backstrom is reciting the same lie that the left’s other useful idiots babble on this case; while it’d modify the “duty to retreat” in Minnesota law under certain reasonable circumstances, it would not touch the other three elements of justifying the use of lethal force; one must still…:

• not be a willing participant in the incident – no getting into bar fights, and pulling a gun when someone pulls a knife.
• Have a reasonable fear of nasty consequences – Whatever level of death or harm the law says, it’s still gotta convince a jury.
• Lethal force must be reasonable – You can’t shoot someone who’s running away, or already been shot and is no longer a threat to you, or cowering on the ground in terror at your display of resolution.  No matter what some leftybloggers say.

This proposal creates a presumption that deadly force can be used against someone who enters a dwelling by force or stealth, and it expands the definition of dwelling to include decks, porches, fenced-in areas, tents, other structures, and occupied watercraft and motor vehicles.

Backstrom says that like it’s a bad thing.

This proposal inappropriately creates a subjective standard of reasonableness of the actions rather than the objective standard in current law. In other words, the issue becomes what was in the mind of the person using deadly force, rather than how a reasonable person would have reacted under the same circumstances.

And there, Backstrom is truly full of it.  The law doesn’t “create” a “subjective standard”; it merely takes some of the power for defining that “subjective standard” out of his hands – a place where he apparently believes it’s perfectly legitimate.

Such a law would, in essence, allow people to shoot first and ask questions later whenever they believe they are exposed to substantial harm, regardless of how a reasonable person would have responded under the circumstances.

Let’s be perfectly clear here:

County Attorney Backstrom is lying.

The law would not protect people who “shot first and asked questions later”, if they were a) willing participants, or b) they didn’t reasonably fear death or great bodily harm, or c) the force they used was not reasonable under the circumstances.

If this proposal were to be enacted, there would be numerous examples of situations where the law would allow an individual to shoot and kill in self-defense, even though a reasonable person would never have done so.

County Attorney Backstrom is still lying.  These laws exist all over the country.  The scenario County Attorney Backstrom describes has never occurred in any of them. 

Do we really want to allow a driver who believes he is being threatened with substantial harm in a road-rage incident to shoot and kill the other driver, rather than calling 911 or simply driving away?

County Attorney Backstrom is lying.   Let’s look at the law to see why; if the mythical shooter in this situation couldn’t prove that he wasn’t a willing participant and that he reasonably feared death or great bodily harm and that shooting was legitimate, any competent county attorney could prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.

And if they couldn’t?  Then perhaps Mr. Backstrom might entertain the notion that the shooting was legitimate.

Do we really want the law to presume that a homeowner has the right to shoot and kill an unarmed person who has entered a garage to steal a bicycle or other personal property, without first calling the police?

County Attorney Backstrom is misleading the audience.   Was the fear of death or significant bodily harm reasonable under the circumstances?  Was lethal force reasonable?  Again – any competent county attorney could prove this.

And if I were one of Mr. Backstrom’s attorneys, I’d wonder how confident he felt about my abilities…

Do we really want to authorize the use of deadly force in response to a push, punch or verbal threat without any inquiry as to whether a reasonable person would have done so under the circumstances?

County Attorney Backstrom is using misleading rhetoric.   Determining what a “reasonable person” would have done is, in part, the job of the justice system.  And if Backstrom’s attorneys can’t prove that a “push, punch or verbal threat” isn’t a “reasonable” grounds for using lethal force, do you think that they’re competent enough to get the perp on “duty to retreat” grounds?

Another problem with this stand-your-ground-and-shoot-first expansion of the right to use deadly force is that it would apply equally to dangerous criminals. With no duty to retreat, anyone can claim they are responding to a threat of serious harm and are therefore justified in escalating the confrontation and killing the other person. And keep in mind that under this proposal it is their judgment, not that of a reasonable person, that is the controlling factor.

County Attorney Backstrom is using misleading, alarmist rhetoric that also presumes the reader is a moron.   “Dangerous criminals” already claim self-defense; the clown who shot Sergeant Vick in Saint Paul a few years ago tried to claim it.  The county attorney made short work of the claim; the perp could satisfy no element of the claim. neitherparticipation nor fear nor reasonableness of force; “duty to retreat” and “on my own property” weren’t even relevant.

Any competent county attorney can separate a reasonable claim of self-defense using the criteria that area already, and will continue to be, part of the law, without touching the areas covered by Cornish’s bill.

No one is more concerned about the safety and protection of Minnesota’s citizens than I am as one of our state’s prosecutors. But current Minnesota law establishing the right of self-defense and the justified use of deadly force adequately protects law-abiding citizens. These proposed changes would unnecessarily expand the law of self-defense and encourage the use of deadly force as a first thought in response to danger.

County Attorney Backstrom is oozing contempt for the law-abiding Minnesotan.  In no case, nationwide, in any of the states that have adopted “Stand Your Ground”, has this happened.  In state after state, the law-abiding American has shown him and herself to be a pretty capable judge of the situations facing them; a law-abiding citizen is about 1/5 as likely to shoot the wrong person in an altercation as a cop is (which isn’t a ding on cops; they arrive on the scene of a crime when things can be exceptionally confusing; a law-abiding citizen usually faces a binary choice; shoot, or die).

Does Mr. Backstrom believe Minnesotans are more depraved than the average American?

The taking of a life should be a last resort. It should not be encouraged as a first response unless the danger is reasonably apparent to us all.

Yeah, it’s a good thing I had a f**king county attorney to tell me that.

Dakota County – why do you keep returning this hamster to office?

Since they’ve solved all the nation’s other problems, President Obama and his minions and the media (pardon the redundancy) are going back to liberal basics; they are beating the drums for gun control (there’s a much bigger piece on the subject coming soon).

Part of this is some renewed activity on the part of the myriad astroturf gun control “groups” – almost invariably tiny groups of addled activists – to try to push the anti-human-liberty agenda.   These groups and their tiny but clout-enhanced coteries of followers – whom I affectionately call “orcs”, because they represent everything Tolkien intended with his fictional soldiers of darkness – are trying, with the full connivance of the mainstream media, to agitate for gun control, or at the very least enhanced harassment of the law-abiding gun owner.

Starbucks is in the crosshairs.

When the orcs approached some national coffee chains, they found a willing audience that was in tune with the shallow, showy, shrill politics of their most stereotypical customers – shallow, showy, shrill liberal coffee drinkers. Some national chains banned guns (in the hands of the law-abiding citizen – carry permit holders and the like) on their premises.

Starbucks held the line for liberty, enacting a policy that deferred to local laws – as any sensible business should.

For supporting the human right to self-defense, I'll say "thanks" in part by giving them a free ad on my site.

The orcs are organizing to try to boycott Starbucks.

An anti-gun group is attempting to organize a nationwide Valentine’s Day boycott of Starbucks over the coffee chain’s gun policy.

Starbucks does not ban guns in its stores; rather, it defers to local laws. The National Gun Victim’s Action Council (NGAC) says that amounts to a pro-gun policy that endangers customers.

Gun owners, and other civil rights activists, are rallying to support The Buck tomorrow.  If you support civil rights, do the following:

1. Go to Starbucks on Tuesday.  I don’t care if the thought of spending $2 for a cup of coffee galls you – it does me too.  But swallow your pride and buy a damn cup.  And then…
2. Tell the manager why.  I never go to Starbucks.  But I will – because of their principled stance.  I will tell the manager to his/her face exactly why I’m supporting them.  Leave a tip for the barrista, while you’re at it.
3. Go to Starbucks.com, or their Facebook and Twitter pages, and tell them what you told the manager.  Be polite, professional and civil; don’t get in their way; maybe just leave them a note.

Too often we gun owners – like conservatives as a whole, when social issues come up – are as quiet and unassuming as our concealed firearms.  Orc groups – the NGAC, “Citizens for a “Safer” Supine Minnesota and the VIolence Policy Center make up for their dearth in numbers by making lots of noise (having a sympathetic media doesn’t hurt ’em, of course).

It’s time to speak up.  And caff up.

After getting Ed Morrissey absorbed into the shooting arts about a year and a half ago, I’m gratified to say that not only has John Hinderaker been assimilated – so’s the family!

I think we might just have to concoct some excuse for another MOB day at the range, somewhere, somehow.

Tony Cornish’s “Stand Your Ground” bill – which would make legal self-defense a more tenable option for law-abiding Minnesotans – is coming up for another hearing in the Senate tomorrow.

For the second straight day, I’m going to urge all Second-Amendment supporting Minnesotans to get on the phone.  These Senators are all pretty much in line to support HF1467/SF1357:

• Michelle L. Fischbach, (651) 296-2084
• David W. Hann, 651) 296-1749
• Ingebrigtsen, Bill, 651) 297-8063
• Magnus, Doug, (651) 296-5650
• Scott J. Newman, 651) 296-4131
• Gen Olson, (651) 296-1282
• Mike Parry, (651) 296-9457

They could use a call to encourage them, but mainly thank them for their continued support for Civil Liberties in Minnesota.

Three more Senators on the committee – Terri E. Bonoff, Barb Goodwin and Linda Higgins – are worthless Metrocrats.  Rust-encrusted enemies of civil liberty, none of them is worth the time it’d take to contact them.

The last two…

• Keith Langseth (651) 296-3205
• LeRoy A. Stumpf. (651) 296-8660

So please – take a moment to email or (especially) call today; the hearing is tomorrow.

Remember – have them support HF1467/SF1357.

[1] Yeah, I went there.  Whatchagonnadoabout it?

Tony Cornish’s “Stand Your Ground” bill – which would make legal self-defense a more tenable option for law-abiding Minnesotans – is coming up for another hearing in the Senate Thursday.

The bill – which got side-tracked in the last session, amid a mass of inaccurate and dishonest reporting on the issue – is a must-pass for this session.  And I think it’s fair to say if the GOP allows it to die this time, a lot of gun-owning Minnesotans are going to wonder when they’ll get some payback for all their commitment.

I’m going to urge all you Second-Amendment supporting Minnesotans to get on the phone.  These Senators are all pretty much in line to support HF1467/SF1357:

• Michelle L. Fischbach, (651) 296-2084
• David W. Hann, 651) 296-1749
• Ingebrigtsen, Bill, 651) 297-8063
• Magnus, Doug, (651) 296-5650
• Scott J. Newman, 651) 296-4131
• Gen Olson, (651) 296-1282
• Mike Parry, (651) 296-9457

They could use a call to encourage them, but mainly thank them for their continued support for Civil Liberties in Minnesota.

Three more Senators on the committee – Terri E. Bonoff, Barb Goodwin and Linda Higgins – are worthless Metrocrats.  Rust-encrusted enemies of civil liberty, none of them is worth the time it’d take to contact them.

The last two…

• Keith Langseth (651) 296-3205
• LeRoy A. Stumpf. (651) 296-8660

So please – take a moment to email or (especially) call today and tomorrow.

Remember – have them support HF1467/SF1357.

[1] Hyperbolic?  Maybe. Probably not.

I can remember a time when Soldier Of Fortune might have run a piece on a latte-drinking liberal woman, scared by some close calls with crime opted to buy a gun:

More than once [while living in Los Angeles] I called 911. What’s bizarre is that during those nights I never remembered the gun. I didn’t even know where R. stored it. It never occurred to me that a gun might quiet my blaring inner alarms.

Until last year, that is, when I moved to Montana to live with my new boyfriend, now fiancé. Montana is one of only 12 states that allow residents to carry a loaded gun in public—“open carry”—either on foot or in a vehicle, without a permit. (To carry a concealed weapon, you do need a permit, obtainable after completing a training or safety course.)

Firearms, in other words, are a seamless part of the culture here. I don’t see people examining fruit in the produce aisle at Albertsons with a gun in plain sight, but I have glimpsed quite a few guns idly resting, like a map or some other quotidian object, on the dashboard of a car. People also talk about guns casually and often, the way people in New York talk about long workdays and people in L.A. talk about yoga classes. My boyfriend’s father’s girlfriend, a sixtysomething former stewardess who lives in Jackson Hole, tells me she keeps a pistol in her car because she often drives long stretches, crisscrossing her way between Wyoming and Arizona. Another woman I befriended, a quirky, devoutly Christian two-time divorcée in her fifties, takes her teenage son to the shooting range on weekends instead of to the movies. Leaving a sporting-goods store one evening, I pass a young couple with a yellow Labrador. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” squeals the woman, who has frosted pink lipstick and a blond ponytail snaking down her back. “This is for my birthday, right?” She’s carrying a large box containing a shotgun. As Lindsay McCrum, a photographer who published the bluntly titled book Chicks With Guns, has said: “When you get outside of the blue-state cities, everybody has a gun.”

But that’s not Soldier Of Fortune  It’s Elle. And I can not remember a time when Elle would have done anything but sniff with horror at the thought.

Modern American liberalism is predicated on the notion that you, the people, aren’t to be trusted.

On much of anything,really; there’s experts for pretty much everything; they all know more than you, and you, peasant, should defer to them.  Because that’s what peasants do.

Educating your kids?  There’s experts. They know more than you.  Just shut up and do what they say.

Your health?  Oh, for the love of pete – experts!  They’ll tell you how to live – and for how long.

And protecting your life and property, and your family’s safety?  Well, that’s the big kahuna.  That’s the one that liberals see as the real finger in the eye.  It’s the ultimate rejection of the idea,that the state – with its cops and social workers and theorists – is the ultimate arbiter of life, death and freedom.

The left has been quiet on gun control for years now.  But that doesn’t mean there’s not a strong undercurrent of gun-grabbing sentiment.

Moe Lane at Redstate reports:

In the course of reading this subtly bitter (and thus subtly entertaining) story (via Instapundit) about the effective collapse of the anti-gun movement on the grassroots level, I came across this passage: “In November the Republican House approved a measure that would require states to respect concealed carry permits issued by other, less restrictive states; it now awaits action in the Democratic-controlled Senate, where its fate is uncertain.”

For all the Dems’ talk of moderating on the issue, you see their true colors here; where they have any power, they will eat your freedom.

And it is peoples’ freedoms we’re talking about here:

As people reading this probably know, reciprocal respect of other states’ right-to-carry laws is a hot topic: it recently came to the forefront when a Tennessee woman got arrested for trying to check in her firearm at the 9/11 Ground Zero site. I should also note in passing that Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s (INDEPENDENT) attempt to smear said woman by claiming she was also in possession of cocaine backfired: the woman didn’t have any. But she’s still facing several years of jail time – no, really – for a ‘crime’ that more enlightened portions of the United States of America decriminalized some time ago*.

So who are the Senators who voted to make civil rights contingent on geography?

Lane notes the Senators from (mostly) shall-issue states who voted against civil rights:

• Senator Amy Klobuchar (D) is from Minnesota, which is a Shall-Issue state. Is Senator Klobuchar really comfortable with putting nursing students in jail for owning guns and taking them to NYC? Does that mean that she will continue to let gun-grabbers keep this bill in the Judiciary Committee?
• Senator Herb Kohl (D) is from Wisconsin, which has just become a Shall-Issue state; and, judging from the number of applications for CCW, it was a popular decision. Is Senator Kohl really comfortable with repressing civil liberties by not voting to move the Senate bill out of committee? And does he really want to make this an election year issue for the Democratic candidate that will be running for his seat?
• Senator Jim Webb (D) …
• Senator Bill Nelson (D)…
• Senator Debbie Stabenow (D) …
• Senator Claire McCaskill (D) …
• Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D) may be from New York, which is obviously not a Shall-Issue state – but she’s from the upstate portion of it, which has a somewhat different take on the subject than does NYC. Is she putting pressure on fellow New Yorker Chuck Schumer to get this bill out of Judiciary and on the floor? If not, can we safely assume that New York City has two Senators and New York State has none?
• Senator Sherrod Brown (D) …
• Senator Bob Casey (D) …
• Senator Maria Cantwell (D) …
• Senator Joe Manchin (D) ..

Now, remember – on the issue of gay marriage, liberals are fond of saying “we don’t put civil rights up to a vote”.  And the right to defend one’s life with a firearm is, unlike gay marriage, specifically enshrined in the Constitution.  There is no rational debate on the subject, certainly not since the McDonald decision.

I bring this up because if Minnesotans across the political divide showed us one thing in the past ten years, it’s that outside the thin film of Metrocrat DFL nannystaters, Minnesotans across the political spectrum – Republican, Democrat, Independent, Apathetic – support the right to keep and bear arms.  In the 2000 and 2002 elections, even before the Legislature passed the Minnesota Personal Protection Act, legislators who opposed the right of the people to defend their lives and property – especially outstate DFLers – were roundly shredded at the polls.  And Republican and DFL voters supported candidates who supported that civil right.

The right to keep and bear arms, and be able to use them when needed, may be the single most bipartisan issue in Minnesota.

But for all her moderate rhetoric at home, once Amy Klobuchar goes to DC and sits down in her inside-the-beltway office, she dons a leash; that leash gets yanked by the ultra-liberal anti-gun lobby.

Does this represent Minnesota?

Young mother erases drug-cadging stalking scumbag with a 12-gauge.

The more law-abiding Americans are armed, the better this country gets.

Rich Lowry at NRO on the shooting:

Instances of self-defense are the anecdotes that gun controllers never want to hear. The NRA keeps a running list of them on its website: attempted armed robberies, home invasions, and other attacks rebuffed every month by the would-be victims. Surely, Sarah McKinley’s assailants thought the young, slender, widowed mother was an easy mark. Her shotgun meant they were wrong. Who would have it any other way? Otherwise, the intruder has the knife and she has nothing except a cellphone and the wan hope that someone armed with a gun makes it to her in time.

It should be considered the moral duty of every law-abiding American to be able to do the same.

Dear Twin Cities (and National) Media:  please use this handy guide for identifying firearms.

It’s vetted by the NYTimes, so you just know it’s right:

Via regular commenter Seflores and Ace.

NOTE:  OK, on a more serious note:  this is a subject where the media’s vaunted “fact-checking” is more often than not humiliatingly bad.  And it’s on a subject where the vast majority of Americans are better-than you are or could reasonably make them.

Why not admit ignorance, shut up and learn something?

Government’s assault on human rights finally hits it where it lives; in its budget.  

The District of Columbia owes the plaintiff in Heller Vs. DC for legal fees and expenses:.

Dick Heller sued the city in 2003 over its ban on handgun ownership and the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the ban in June 2008, saying it violated the Second Amendment.

A federal judge on Thursday issued an opinion awarding Heller’s attorneys $1,137,072.27 in fees and expenses. The attorneys had argued they should be awarded $3.1 million. Attorneys for the city said the figure should be closer to $840,000.

Governments can try to ignore speedbumps like “the Constitution” and “the law” and “morality”. But once you start talking money?

This could get fun.

Going back almost four years, this blog has been covering (OK, linking to other conservative bloggers who’ve been covering) the malfeasance, misdirection and/or sloth of former Ramsey County sheriff Bob Fletcher in re his policy on issuing handgun carry permits.  At his nadir, he was rejecting one out of eight permit applications. That’s a lot of human rights being trampled on.

It was one of the reasons such an unholy alliance – “progressives” angry about equally-egregious accusations about the sheriff’s first amendment record, and conservative gunnies – united to topple Fletcher in favor of Bostrom.

It’s been a year. How’s it going?

For the answer, I turn to – of all people – Grace Kelly at MN “Progressive” Project:, who to be fair hated Fletcher long before most people did.  .

It has now been almost a year in office for the new Sheriff Bostrom. How is the gun permit processing going? Basically, using our best evidence, it looks like it is going well. Although there are some unexplained numbers.

Which are, in turn, unexplained. I did mention it was Grace Kelly, right?

The first error is to give permits to people who should not have received permits. We rarely find out about those errors. We usually discover those permit errors only when a crime is committed.

And nine years after the first passing of the Minnesota Personal Protection Act, we’re still waiting for the first such case.   I’ll call that a win, for Bostrom and everyone else.  (For those who aren’t up on the issue – there were quite a number of permits issued to people under the old, “discretionary” system to people who should not have gotten them; people with crime records and the like).

The other error is to deny permits from people who should have received permits. The best hard evidence is a court allowing a permit on appeal. When appeal is upheld, our tax payer dollars pays [sic] the lawyer’s fees, otherwise the person wanting the permit pays. Usually the cost is about $3000.

From what I’ve been told, $3,000 would be pretty cheap.  Fletcher rang up – according to the late Joel Rosenberg – over half a million dollars in attorney fees awarded to plaintiffs   under the appeal provisions of the MN Personal Protection Act.

Lawyers loved Fletcher…:

Marc Berris used to make jokes that Ramsey county was sending his kids through college just based on the gun permit appeals…[he noted] that no client paid him quite like the Ramsey County sheriff’s office. For years, Berris made a killing by taking on former Sheriff Bob Fletcher. …However this year there are no pending cases in the court appeal process. Neither the Sheriff’s office nor Andrew Rothman, executive director of the Minnesota Association of Defensive Firearm Instructors has heard of any pending court cases… So by the measure of court appeals, it appears that the gun permit process is being applied correctly.

And in terms of numbers?

By another measure, the rate of denial has gone down from a Sheriff Fletcher high of 13.5 percent in 2007 to  4.7 percent of applications, this year through November. This is still higher than 1.7 percent state average. So if the appeals process shows that permits are properly denied, then why are Ramsey county numbers higher?

I’d be tempted to say that it’s all those DFL voters…

…but Hennepin county’s denial rate is, if anything, below the state average.

Thugs  case a pregnant woman’s house…::

It all happened in broad daylight on Monday afternoon. That’s when the first man walked up to her kitchen door and began pounding and ringing the doorbell. He was clearly checking to see if anyone was home.

The woman recalls, “He started ringing the doorbell, probably 50 times, fast — ding, ding, ding, ding!”

The woman, who is nine weeks pregnant, was feeling sick and was in her bed. Not expecting anyone to visit, she called her boyfriend and then phoned police.

Beat in mind – the men had ignored two dogs, including a pit bull.  Getting a dog is the first thing most lefty hamsters suggest, rather than gunning up.

Anyway – dogs, locks and calling the cops didn’t work:

“About three minutes later, my dogs started barking again and I looked out the window and now there are two guys standing outside my home,” the woman recalled.

Within mere seconds, she heard the loud “bang” of the kitchen door being kicked open. With footsteps coming her way, she quietly stepped upstairs.

And what do you do when passive defense fails?

“So then I hustled up the stairs to grab our gun, and I came down and I loaded it and cocked it,” said the homeowner.

With a single pump of her 12-gauge shotgun, the would-be burglars bolted out the door and through the backyard.

“Yes, a shotgun racking is something you don’t forget if you’ve ever heard one. So, it frightened these two suspects off right away, they took off running,” said Coon Rapids Police Captain John Hattstrom.

Congratulations, law-abiding, armed and pregnant home-owner!

If you’re old enough to remember the seventies and early eighties, you remember the isolated stories of the Japanese soldiers who lived in the jungles of New Guinea and other parts of the South Pacific that our troops had bypassed, who’d gone into the wilderness awaiting word from their leadership that never came.  They never heard of HIroshima, the surrender, the complete collapse of their military, and finally the rebirth of Japan as a fairly pacific society and then industrial giant.

And they staggered out of the jungle, three and sometimes almost four decades later, wearing improvised and native clothes, their rifles long-rusted into uselessness, amazed that Japan had surrendered, their Emperor had renounced the war that “he” had (by proxy) sent them to fight, and that life – and fact – had gone merrily on without them.

Anti-gun zealots are the new Japanese-Soldiers-who-never-got-the-word.  Exhibit 47839203943823983290 – this fellow, “Capper”, from the perhaps-incongruously-named blog Cognitive Dissonance, about a dissonant decision at a gun show in Wisconsin:

It has been recently reported that Waukesha County, deep in Republican red, has expanded its ban on concealed carry to other county buildings besides the courthouse and the administration building.

What was not reported is that it is also possible that when a person or group rent one of their facilities, like the expo center or a park, they can ask that the facility be marked as do not carry and that the county will honor that request.

The only reason that I even bring this up is that I’ve heard that at least one group, renting the Waukesha County Expo Center, has availed themselves of this new rule.

It’s not so much a “new rule” as it is “part of Wisconsin’s carry permit law“: from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s fairly capable summary of the law, “You can’t carry concealed at law enforcement buildings, prisons, jails, secured units or secured mental health institutions, courthouses, courtrooms, beyond security checkpoints in airports, on school grounds and premises, in taverns if you’re drinking alcohol, at special events such as concerts or games where organizers don’t allow it, at colleges or universities where prohibited, in businesses or on private property where the owner prohibits or limits concealed weapons”.  In other words, a lot like Minnesota’s law (but apparently without the idiotic posting requirement).

I’m going to issue an O’Rourke alert here; “LIfe is full of ironies, for the stupid”.  Not to say that Mr. Capper is stupid – far from it – but generally if someone finds “irony” in the mundane, it means they haven’t looked far enough for the not-so-“ironic” explanation.

Ironically, if my information is correct, that group is none other than the Bob and Rocco Gun Show. My source indicated that it wasn’t Bob Pucci that wanted this, but the national franchise. They said that there’s been too many accidental shootings by people bringing in their concealed weapons and, either through clumsiness or ineptness, have had the gone accidentally go off shooting the vendors.

Sorta.  Like most such restrictions and such events, it was actually a matter of a lawyer at an insurance company waving a big financial surcharge at the franchiser, because of the elevated risk that it might happen.  It has much less to do with people “bringing in their concealed weapons” than it does to people bringing in weapons at all, because – remember this? – Wisconsin didn’t have a concealed carry law until November 1.

Doesn’t that make you feel better knowing that Scott Walker and the Republican Legislature has now made it possible for any fool to walk around armed without even taking an inadequate four hour training course?

And here we are with the Japanese Soldier bit again.  Perhaps “Capper” never heard – legal carry permittees nationwide, over the past thirty years, have proven themselves not only two orders of magnitude more law-abiding than the average citizen, but vastly more competent than them as well.

And one thing Mr. Capper definitely has in common with the Japanese soldier; the soldier never had any need to read Wisconsin law.  Mr. Capper needs to, but apparently hasn’t; the law requires a training course.  It’s not the specialized training course you have to take in Minnesota – but it’s training.  Although there has been no link shown between training classes and safety; carry permittees are equally safe and reliable in states that don’t require training as in those that do.

And they wonder why we are recalling them….

Back into the jungle, Capper.  Walker is going to be in office for another three years.  And even if he does get recalled, it won’t be over this; even hard-core Democrat states – see Oregon, Washington and Connecticut – have shall-issue laws that are in no danger of repeat.  Because they work.

Sayonara.

This blog’s first post (other than “hey, look, I have a blog!”) back in 2002 was about a firearms-related issue – the battle for concealed carry, as it happens.

And since then, it’s fair to say I’ve written a post or two about the second amendment and the civil and human right of self-defense.

But I’ve never been a “gun blogger”, like the late Joel Rosenberg or the great Clayton Cramer.  It’s one of many issues I consider vital.

But since the Evanovich shooting two weeks ago, I might forgive newcomers to my blog for thinking I am a gun-blogger.  It’s been a hot topic around here.

Not strictly on the subject of the Evanovich case – but squarely in the gun wheelhouse, and a subject on which the Evanovich case only barely avoided being germane – was this bit form the MinnPost last week, from that noted civil rights firebrand Brian Lambert.

Now, I’ve known Brian for years – indeed, on my first day at KSTP in 1985, he was filling in for Geoff Charles; Lambo is literally one of the first people I ever met in the Twin Cities media.  And he’s not a bad guy.

But I don’t think it’s unfair to say he was a leader of the “never let facts or information get in the way of giggly uninformed snark” school of reporting long before blogs and Jon Stewart made it cool.

His subject?  Tony Cornish’s “Stand Your Ground” bill, which was going to get a renewed push in the Legislature in the upcoming session even without the impetus of the Evanovich case; it’s a powerful swing issue among Minnesota’s mass of shooters, who have been a quietly but disproportionally powerful constituency in Minnesota for over a decade.

Remember last winter and spring’s scuffle over an expansion of the so-called “castle doctrine,” giving homeowners more legal protection in the event they needed to gun down someone on their property?

Let me guess – “gun them down” just to “watch them die?”

In the liberal subconscious, there seem to be a powerful, maybe chemical, urge to keep repeating “law-abiding gun owners are all depraved maniacs” endlessly, in the hope that it’ll ever actually be true.

Lambert cites some questions from that wellspring of care for the less-fashionalbe civil liberties – the mainstream media:

He has (second-hand) questions.  I have answers.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel throws up an editorial on precisely that legislation floating around over there in Badger Land: “Today’s quiz:

1) Just exactly what problem are lawmakers trying to solve with a proposal to extend new legal protections to people who shoot intruders in their homes, vehicles or businesses?

The problem is that in Minnesota (and Wisconsin), self-defense law is vague on what’s called the “Duty to Retreat”.  In Minnesota, the law says you have to make a “reasonable” effort to disengage from a situation in which you are being attacked and “reasonably” fear being killed or maimed.  What does “reasonable” effort mean?

It depends on where you live. A county attorney in the Red River Valley will likely see it differently than one of John Choi’s eager young DFL-bot assistants.

So, Brian Lambert – on what other civil, human right do we tolerate that level of vagueness?  Especially vagueness that is based entirely on local political fashion?  More importantly, on what other civil/human rights do you tolerate this sort of “make it up as you go along” approach to the law?

2) What is it about the current system that isn’t working?

In a nutshell:  if you, a law-abiding carry permit holder, are approached in, say, your garage or your car – which are not covered under Minnesota’s current “inside the home” exemption to the so-called “duty to retreat” – the question “did you make a reasonable effort to run away”, made in a fraction of a second in the dark under mind-warping pressure, will be answeredby some pencil-necked U of M-grad assistant County Attorney sitting in a warm office, guarded by sheriff’s deputies with metal detectors, and all the time in the world to work up whatever theory his boss wants him or her to work up.  They – in their due time – could decide you “should have” hit the gas, or run for the house, or just given the attacker what she wanted – and force you go to trial, with your freedom on the line, even if the shooting was utterly justified in every other way.

3) How many homeowners are sitting in jail because they were simply defending themselves against intruders inside their houses?

We’ll come back to that.

The answers are:

1) There is no problem.

2) The current system works just fine.

3) None.

The first two are matters of (blinkered, context-deprived) opnion.

The third is at the very best a misleading answer – and the wrong question, to boot.  Better questions would have been “how many honest, law-abiding citizens had to exhaust their lifes’ savings defending themselves against charges that revolved around prosecutors asking “did the accused try hard enough  to retreat?””.  Or “how many honest, law-abiding citizens, faced with an endless battle with a county attorney’s office that they could not afford, were hammered into taking plea bargains that destroyed their legal futures and infringed their civil liberties, in exchange for staying out of jail after shootings that were otherwise perfectly justified?”   In Minnesota, the answer to that last is “one that I can rattle off to you right now, and if you gave me a few minutes on the phone I could probably come up with half a dozen more”.

There is no need to change state law to allow for a “castle doctrine” defense (“castle doctrine” as in “your home is your castle”). Indeed, doing so could put some innocents in greater danger.

Really?

How?

I mean, the statement was made with some perception of authority; feel free, Brian, to provide an example of “danger” to “innocents” in the 31 states that have some variation of Cornish’s law on the books today.

I’ll wait.

The above answers come by the way, from Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm and the Criminal Law Section of the State Bar of Wisconsin, made up of more than 600 prosecutors, judges, criminal defense lawyers and academics. That’s a reliable set of expert witnesses.”

Well, no. It’s a set of witnesses with an agenda; leaving aside their political affiliation, “stand your ground” laws remove County Attorneys’ discretion.   Prosectors like having discretion.  Government loves having discretion.  See George Wallace.

Your expert is my “appeal to false authority”.  Not to mention…

Yeah, but tell any of ’em to just try and walk across my lawn.

…snark.  Always, always the snark.

With last week’s statement by Hennco Attorney Mike Freeman that the “good samaritan” who shot Darren Evanovich acted in justifiable self-defense, I have a question for the Twin Cities media.

I’ll direct it first and foremost at my, well, good acquaintance, Bob Collins at MPR, who wrote a piece on the NewsCut blog which asked the question “A concealed carry ‘success’ or ‘failure’?” and concluded  – based on the sketchy facts and deeply incomplete and, I suggest, fatally slanted reporting the story got in the Twin Cities mainstream media – “it’s unclear whether [the Evanovich case] is a matter of the law gone right or gone wrong”.

Last week’s release from the Hennco attorney’s office answered that question.

Again.

Since 2005 – when the Minnesota Personal Protection Act was re-passed by an overwhelming bi-partisan vote – there have been exactly four shootings involving Minnesota carry permit holders (that I’m aware of – and someone will no doubt set me straight if I’m not):

• The Evanovich case – which I’ve been writing about this past few weeks pretty extensively. Details of the shoot are here and here.  The denouement is here.
• The Grumpy’s case, in which a bouncer was attacked by drunken, tossed-out patron with a knife; the bouncer was also never arrested,
• The Treptow case – a deeply controversial case involving a citizen who shot (and very mildly wounded) a road-raging thug who was pointing a gun at his pregnant wife…who turned out to be an undercover cop affiliated with the disgraced Gang Strike Force.  While Treptow was never arrested, the Anoka County Attorney basically buried him in charges (the Anoka County Attorney went to a grand jury and got a three-count indictment against Treptow and another against the cop, Robbinsdale Police officer Landon Beard. The Anoka County attorney’s office then pushed the case over to Washington County, where the county attorney dropped the indictment against Beard) forcing a plea bargain leaving Treptow with a felony rap and a 60 day sentence.  The case is broadly regarded as a travesty and a miscarriage of and an example of government protecting its own. Treptow has, by the way, had his civil rights restored.
• The Nye’s case – which involved a drunken patron shooting a bouncer at Nye’s Polonaise in Northeast Minneapolis.  The shooter wasn’t carrying his pistol – after being ejected, he went home and got it – and his permit was one of the pre-2005 variety issued largely to people with connections with the county sheriff, so it’s not really applicable to MPPA-era permit laws.

UPDATE:  Welcome Power Line readers!  Feel free to check out the other parts of my coverage of the Evanovich shooting case.

———-.

I’ve been a “Gunnie” for close to 30 years. Not a hunter, mind you – just a shooter.  Someone who enjoys target shooting, and believes, practically and morally, in self-defense shooting.

In that time, I’ve had it insinuated that the reason for this is that I, like all shooters, am “compensating” for “something”, that I have unresolved anger issues and some kind of incipient blood-lusting psychosis, that I’m motivated primarily by fear of the unknown, and that I, a mild-mannered guy who’s never stolen so much as a candy bar in his life and who has never gotten into a fight that didn’t come to him first, am liable to turning into a “Death Wish”-ing Dirty Harry blasting away at shadows by dint of having a gun in my otherwise law-abiding hand.

Against that, I’ve got a few things; the memory of seeing two burglars running out of the house at the sound of my firearm racking a round; decades of swatting aside anti-Second-Amendment “arguments” with the force of unstoppable fact.

And memories of seeing how very, very much in the bag the local media has been for the gun-control movement, even as that movement’s support in the real world has all but evaporated.

And, to be fair, I encountered a few reporters, eventually – most notably Conrad DeFiebre, formerly at the Star/Tribune and, of all people, Steve Perry at the City Pages back in the nineties – who actually covered firearms issues, and especially the “concealed carry” issue, relatively fairly and dispassionately, including soliciting information from sources other than Sarah Brady, Heather Martens, Wes Skoglund and the various Police Chiefs’ associations.

But it’s been a rare pleasure.

———-

Last week, I wrote – I think it’s fair to say “scathingly” – about an article by Matt McKinney at the Strib.  The piece garnered some approval, and quite a bit of traffic, from the conservative and gun blogospheres; Ed Morrissey and Scott Johnson, as well as a fair chunk of the pro-Second-Amendment alt-media, linked to the piece.

Which has garnered one of the few direct reactions I’ve ever gotten from a mainstream media reporter; Matt McKinney sent me (and Scott Johnson) a response via email.

He tees it up with a bit from yours truly:

What the blogger characterizes as “loathsome bits of agenda journalism” was in fact a faithful representation of the best information we had at the time. It is only through gross misrepresentations of my story published online on Oct. 27 and in print on the morning of Oct. 28 that he made it appear as though I was withholding information.

I’ll meet McKinney halfway on this one; I am sure it’s true that the information he related about the shooting itself was the best he currently had from reliable – read “official” – sources. McKinney includes the text of the police report from which he worked; I’ll include it below the jump.   

As you will see, nowhere does it say the victim was Hispanic, nowhere does it say she was an office cleaner, nowhere does it say she was beaten in the face, sustained two black eyes and received a bad cut, things that I’m accused of withholding.

And in that, I erred.  The information I received was from a source in the Second Amendment community that mixed information from the police statement – which was fairly well-known to everyone with an interest in the case by this point – and other, more current, information from the off-the-books community of gun-rights advocates, one of whom – “Zack” – I quoted in my original piece.

And it’s entirely likely that McKinney didn’t have that information – I’ve never known a Strib reporter to cultivate sources in the Second Amendment community – or, if he did, opted not to run it, since it was unofficial and uncorroborated and the kind of thing an editor would have had his ass on a plate for reporting without corroboration.   My bad.

It turned out, of course, to be accurate – which was why the shooter was neither arrested on October 20, nor indicted a week later.   My good.

Now, look at the bolded passage in the previous paragraph.  There’s a huge question that needs to be put to McKinney in gauging his response, hidden in plain sight in that passage.

We’ll come back to it in a moment.  McKinney continued (with emphasis added by yours truly):

The blogger’s larger distortion occurs when he erroneously attributes to the Oct. 21 police statement the following: that Evanovich turned and pointed his gun at the armed witness. That piece of information was not released until the afternoon of Oct. 28, when the Hennepin County Attorney’s office issued an email press release that said they had determined the witness acted in self defense. We immediately put that information on line, and it was printed in the following day’s newspaper on the top of the B section, a place second in prominence only to the front page.

McKinney referred to my statement emphasized above as a “larger distortion”.  It wasn’t.  It was a mistake.  I didn’t distinguish in my own report the difference between the police report and the account I got from my own sources.  I regret the error; being a blogger who works a private sector day job on top of trying to report the slivers of knows about which I know anything, it’s pretty much inevitable.

But the fact that I erred in reporting the source of my statement should, I’d think, be counterbalanced by the fact that my sources and account were correct, and were confirmed in every particular in the Hennco DA’s final statement.

So at this point, let me take a moment, on the one hand, to apologize to Matt McKinney for characterizing his account of the confrontation as “loathsome agenda journalism”.  Clearly, McKinney was doing the blocking and tackling of the trade.

But I’ll also point out that McKinney’s report was still a blast from the past in terms of structure and tone.

———-

But here’s my question for McKinney – one that really sets off my problem with his response.

Read this excerpt from the police report.  I’ll add emphasis:

This “Good Samaritan” stated that he had a valid Minnesota Permit to Carry a Handgun and that he had shot the male armed robbery suspect during a confrontation outside of the Super Grand Buffet. He told officers where to find his handgun and he was detained for questioning.

The “Good Samaritan” was “detained for questioning” – which is normal in any kind of shooting, whether self-defense or not.

But he was not arrested – which is also common enough in self-defense cases.  Perhaps not in the few cases we’ve seen in Minnesota – the Treptow case, the Grumpy’s Bouncer case, and now the Evanovich case, which only go to show that Minnesota carry permittees are exceptionally trustworthy – but it’s far from uncommon.  In carry permit training, you are instructed if, heaven forfend, you need to shoot in self-defense, to expect to be arrested, and to lawyer up immediately.  And yet the “Good Samaritan”, according to the same police report to which McKinney said he limited his reporting, was not.

Why?

That was the bit that prompted me to start asking questions; why didn’t the Good Samaritan get arrested?  Which led me to the story that Hennco attorney Freeman confirmed last Friday.

Now, I’m just a blogger – a schlump who works a day job and raises kids and writes sizzling polemics and, when time permits (and it rarely does) some reporting. If it occurred to me to ask “why wasn’t the Samaritan arrested?”, why didn’t it occur to anyone in the professional media?

Because it didn’t.  The local and regional media…

• …called the shooter a “vigilante”.  Not just the Twin Cities’ idiot lefty alt media, but even mainstream media.  (To say nothing of the Democrat fever swamp, which called it a “vigilante execution“)
• …openly pondered whether the incident would end up being a black mark on the Minnesota Personal Protection Act, absent any evidence at all, pro or con, notwithstanding than the fact that you are vastly – as in “orders of magnitude” – more likely to be hit by lightning than shot unjustly by a legal carry permit holder)
• …ran to Evanovich’s family for Darren’s backstory and their views of the shooting – which certainly made for a compelling, if dog-bites-man, read.
• And, to be fair – especially since I’ve banged on so much of his writing since he took over being Nick Coleman – John Tevlin wrote a generally good piece on the subject which is only slightly marred by a legal misstep that I’ll leave to the experts to remind him about.

Perhaps – I’d suspect it’s likely, in fact – that McKinney either didn’t have the time to dig for, say, any of the stuff I stumbled into, about the victim or the way the incident happened.

Or maybe he didn’t have the sources to do it.

Or maybe the editorial directive to put any meat on the bones of the sparse, Joe-Friday-“Just-The-Facts”-y police report – or to ask that very simple and, in the end, dispositive question.

———-

McKinney continues:

The police statement includes the phrase “during a confrontation,” which we would later learn meant that Evanovich pointed a gun at the armed witness and told him to mind his own business. At the time the police issued their statement, we didn’t know what the phrase meant.

Who was confronting who? Was it a verbal confrontation? Physical? Was it merely two people facing off in a hostile situation? It was too nebulous to be of much service in understanding what had happened, so we didn’t include it.

As my carry permit teacher, the late Joel Rosenberg, used to joke, “if only we had a class of people, with printing presses and transmitters, whose job it was to find those details out”.

Of course, reporters aren’t omniscient, and they have rules to follow.

And it seems McKinney did.

It’s my opinion that the story deserved a little more than that.

———-

So let me sum it up:

Was I too critical of McKinney’s story?  To the extent that it was based on details of the police report, yes.

In the sense that the main theme of McKinney’s piece was to humanize the “victim” Evanovich, and used language that – to this reader, who admittedly has a hair-trigger when it comes to reacting to bigotry against law-abiding gun owner – seemed to put a gauzy soft-focus on a thug with a record of violent crime while disparaging a law-abiding citizen?  Maybe, but if so I’m far from alone in criticizing McKinney’s story on that count.  Evanovich’s video, his family’s reactions and so on were certainly part of the story.

But not as important as the  question that was, I suggest, the most important part of this story – why was the shooter questioned and released?  On that, I’d say I raised a very valid question about McKinney’s coverage – and that of pretty much the entire Twin Cities media.

(more…)

I caught Heather Martens – astroturf mistress from “Citizens For A Safer Minnesota” – on Channel 9’s late debate segment last night, along with my old friend John Caile.

And while there were the inevitable lapses of reality from Martens (as bad as the media was at covering last week’s Evanovich shooting story, I don’t recall anyone reporting that the citizen “chased Evanovich down and shot him in the back”.  City Pages, maybe?  Set me straight if I’m wrong; she also said the Evanovich shooting was “investigated” in such a way as I wondered if she thought that wasn’t the usual procedure…), there was the realization that perhaps we were seeing an epochal sea change.

Martens said the Evanovich shooting was justified,

When even Heather Martens has given up, you know there’s been a sea change on this subject.

By the way – congrats Wisconsin on joining the ranks of states that recognize the human right of self-defense.

Martens called

Channel Five is reporting that the man who shot Darren Evanovich after he pistol-whipped a 53 year old woman last week won’t be charged:

That word today from the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office.

But the sister of the dead robber faces two counts of Aggravated First Degree Robbery.

Authorities say they believe 20-year-old Octavia Marberry of Minneapolis has possibly been involved as an accomplice in this and two other store parking lot robberies.

Frankly, I’m just a tad stunned.

Even though the case was apparenlty a good enough example of self-defense to keep even the Henco Attorney’s office off the “good samaritan”‘s case.

The reporter for The Five did a signal job of actually getting the facts straight:

According to the criminal complaint, on Thursday, October 20th, a 53-year-old woman was robbed just before 10:00 p.m. outside the Cub Foods on 26th Avenue and struck in the head by a gun held by the robber, 23-year-old Darren Evanovich.

Minneapolis Police say their investigation showed that at least two other people were with him and one of them was Marberry.

After Evanovich took the woman’s purse, all three ran off in a northwest direction, police say.

That’s when a man who witnessed the robbery chased Evanovich.

According to witnesses, the man drove up to the spot where he saw Evanovich going through the victim’s purse and asked him if he wanted to give the purse back.

Witnesses say that’s when it started to turn ugly–Evanovich pointed his gun at the “Good Samaritan,” and moved towards him.

The man in the vehicle pulled out his handgun and shot Evanovich.

Authorities say after they reviewed the circumstances, they determined that the man “acted in self-defense.”

To be honest, I expected Henco Attorney Mike Freeman to try to find some pretext for throwing the book at the shooter.

I’m pleasantly surprised:

Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman said today in a press release, “While this man is to be commended for helping his fellow citizen in need, a note of caution is appropriate.  We prefer that armed citizens do not chase after criminals.  Too much can go wrong with deadly consequences.”

Nobody who took concealed carry class needs to be told twice.

As my carry teacher, the late Joel Rosenberg, told us over and over again, shooting in self-defense is the second-worst possible outcome.  Your kids growing up without a parent, when you yourself did nothing wrong, is worse.

Earlier this week, when three media outlets (WCCO-TV, KSTP-TV and Rick Kupchella’s Bring Me The News) released near-simultaneous hagiographies of Darren Evanovich – the Minneapolis man who was shot by a “good samaritan” with a carry permit after Evanovich allegedly robbed and pistol-whipped a woman in a grocery store parking lot – I said (in the comment section of an MPR piece on the subject), somewhat hyperbolically, that this looked like a concerted campaign by the media to whitewash Evanovich and demonize the shooter.  The Twin Cities media, of course, have always hated “shall-issue”, and have spared no perversions to “journalism” to try to kill it.

I thought I’d seen the worst the Twin Cities media had to offer.

I was wrong.  So very very wrong.

Mark McKinney at the Strib has delivered what may be the worst piece of journalism I’ve ever seen on a Second Amendment issue in  my depressingly-long career of finding awful journalism on the subject:

Nine days before his death, Darren Evanovich stopped by the south Minneapolis office of MAD DADS to say hi to V.J. Smith, who heads the local chapter of the street anti-violence program.

Evanovich made a video aimed at kids contemplating the thug life:

“Jail is not fun,” Evanovich confides at one point, “Not being able to see your brothers and sisters grow up isn’t fun. … You don’t see nobody. You have no friends once you step in there.”

We know how this ends, of course; last Friday, Evanovich (and, allegedly, his sister and one other accomplice) went down to the Cub on 26th and Lake.

McKinney relates the story – sort of:

On the evening of Oct. 20, a little more than a week later, a 53-year-old woman was accosted in a supermarket parking lot off E. Lake Street. The stranger was armed with a handgun, and after taking her money, he struck her in the head with his weapon, police said.

That sounds so cold and matter-of-fact.  Let’s put this in some context.

Evanovich – as we related this morning – robbed a woman twice his age, a Hispanic woman who cleans offices for a living.  He beat her in the face, with a pistol, giving her two black eyes and a bad cut and, let’s not forget, a very legitimate fear of being shot dead in a parking lot.

McKinney – with emphasis added to loathsome bits of agenda journalism:

A man nearby saw the attack. He had a state permit to carry a pistol, and he had one with him. He chased the robber behind a restaurant and shot him dead.

How does that read to you?  Like “the man” stalked, tracked and hunted Evanovich like he was a wild animal, perhaps?   Like Evanovich was just a leaf in the autumn wind, blown into the wrong place at the wrong time, the wrong parking lot with the wrong remorseless Dirty Harry wannabee?

No mention of the facts from the police’s statement on the incident: that Evanovich allegedly turned and pointed his own gun at the “good samaritan” (according to some accounts, fired a shot at him); indeed, only the most oblique possible reference to the fact that Evanovich was carrying a gun that could still be considered “honest”.

No mention of the fact that had the shooting been even in the least bit ambiguous, the shooter would have been detained, arrested, booked and charged pretty much immediately.

Apparently nobody involved in the case had any choice!

No, really:

The investigation ensnared Evanovich’s sister, Octavia Marberry, this week when she was jailed on allegations of fraud and aggravated robbery. She had been with Evanovich the night he died, and according to their mother, held him in her arms as he took his last breath.

Back that up a minute, here; Marberry was allegedly part of the robbery.  She allegedly participated with her brother in giving an older woman the choice “give us your grocery money or we will kill you” – the act that directly led to the chase, her brother’s alleged move to end the life of the man chasing him, that would justify the “good samaritan’s” alleged shooting and, finally, the heart-rending scene McKinney favored us with.

Evanovich grew up in Minneapolis and Gary, Ind., one of five children.

“He has a good, loving family, and he has lots of friends. He wasn’t 100 percent bad,” his mother, Mary Evanovich of Minneapolis, said in an interview Thursday.

Two members of that loving family were apparently involved in pistol-whipping a Latina working-stiff-ette, of course.

Look – I’m a parent.  I’m not going to do the end-zone happy dance over someone getting killed, even if it’s justifiable homicide.  As much “fun” as I had raising my own kids, I can’t imagine what it must be like watching yours go off the rails as badly as Mary Evanovich’s seem to have.

But let’s eschew the bullshit, here.  Darren Evanovich’s death is a personal tragedy; the path that led him to that godforsaken parking lot was a social tragedy.

But the shooting?  That was (so it seems right now) self-defense; as the late Joel Rosenberg taught us all, the second-worst of all the possible outcomes – if you were the “good samaritan” seeing a gun pointing at you in that wretched alley.

UPDATE: A source – let’s call him “Zack” – with extensive knowledge of the issue and some knowledge of the case – wrote an email to McKinney.  He sent me a copy.  He reached about the same conclusions, but more economically. I’ll include it below the jump.

(more…)

From the Minnesota Carry Forum, unverified but utterly plausible information about the pistol-whipping victim in the Evanovich case:

A little inside firsthand facts directly from the pistol whipped lady (my wife knows who she is from work) and overheard her talking today about it. There was 3 perps. (dead guy, his sister, one still unknown one) I don’t know why the news or police have not released that info unless they are looking for the third scumbag still. The mugged lady was told “give me your purse” to which she replied “fuck you” to the now dead mugger when he told her to give it up. Probably the reason she got hit. You wont get the most the facts by watching the news or police releases. She is in her lower 50,s, hispanic and now has 2 black eyes from the pistol whipping along with a small cut on the head.

So while it’s not odd that Evanovich’s sisters have mentioned this, one wonders if the media – who breathlessly carried their attacks on the shooter – know that Evanovich (and, allegedly, his sister) were engaged in brutally attacking a hispanic office cleaner for a few bucks?

A source with considerable knowledge in the area, asked his opinion of this case, writes about the speculation about the shooter’s case.  Asked what he thought about the good samaritan’s chances of getting indicted, he responded:

[Henco Attorney Mike] Freeman can always do what he wants, but he’s not completely tone-deaf, and…

• There are LOTS of believable ways that this was a good shoot, and very few (and all pretty far-fetched) ways that it was not.
• Who ya gonna believe? The heroic guy with all the clean background checks, or the felon in illegal possession of a gun while committing a violent crime?
• The cops have essentially called it a good shoot. They might even be pissed if he gets charged.
• There has been no real bloody-shirt-waving by the “community.” This little thug brought it on himself, and no one but his sisters are saying otherwise.

This could get much more interesting.  Stay tuned.

Not a lot of updates in last week’s case in Minneapolis, where a “good samaritan” with a carry permit chased 23 year old Darren Evanovich after seeing Evanovich “pistol-whipping” a 53 year old woman in the parking lot of a grocery store.  Evanovich, so the story goes, ran and then turned and pointed a gun at the samaritan, who allegedly shot Evanovich dead.

Earlier this week, several Twin Cities media outlets – WCCO-TV, KSTP-TV, Rick Kupchella’s “Bring Me The News”, and Bob Collins’ column at MPR – all ran stories featuring Evanovich’s mother and sisters complaining that it was wrong that a citizen shot their son/brother – that the Samaritan should have called the police (without mentioning the allegations that Evanovich had pointed a lethal weapon at the Samaritan).

One of Evanovich’s other sisters apparently got a little more involved in the case:

Tuesday police arrested the sister of a robber who was shot and killed by a witness last week.

Officers believe Octavia Marberry was with her brother, Darren Evanovich at the time of the robbery at Cub Foods on 26th Avenue South last Thursday.

Marberry is facing charges of aiding and abetting her brother.

One of the sisters has apparently started a facebook page, “Justice For Darren Evanovich“.  Someone whose comments got deleted from that page started another, “Darren Evanovich Got Justice“, in response.  They’re both about as depressing as you might expect.