Just under four weeks from today – January 28 – will be the first annual MInnesota Gun Owners Lobby Day (MNGOLD).

It’ll start with a rally in front of the Capitol.

After that, we – you, me, all of us – will do something that normally only highly-paid union stooges get to do; lobby the legislature.    We’ll go inside, and politely, fairly and civilly meet with every single legislator, and let them know face to face that we’re watching, and that we vote.

Arrange your time off now!  I am!

Just under four weeks from today – January 28 – will be the first annual MInnesota Gun Owners Lobby Day (MNGOLD).

It’ll start with a rally in front of the Capitol.

After that, we – you, me, all of us – will do something that normally only highly-paid union stooges get to do; lobby the legislature. We’ll go inside, and politely, fairly and civilly meet with every single legislator, and let them know face to face that we’re watching, and that we vote.

Arrange your time off now! I am!

More details from the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance (Web, Facebook, Twitter) and the MN Gun Owners Political Action Committee (Web, Facebook, Twitter).

Don’t forget – tomorrow is the Minnesota Gun Rights Seminar and Member Meeting.

It’ll be at the Chaska Community Center starting at 9AM. Come out, hear some great speakers, and find out what the good guys are going to be doing in the coming year.

And most important: become one of the good guys.

For more info, check out the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance (Web, Facebook, Twitter)

Don’t forget – this Saturday, December 13 is the Minnesota Gun Rights Seminar and Member Meeting. 

It’ll be at the Chaska Community Center starting at 9AM. Come out, hear some great speakers, and find out what the good guys are going to be doing in the coming year.

And most important:  become one of the good guys.

For more info, check out the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance (Web, Facebook, Twitter)

During the Los Angeles “Rodney King” riots over twenty years ago, one of the most redeemingly hope-inspiring images was that of the city’s Korean shopkeepers took to their streets and rooftops to defend their stores from looters.

At a very difficult time in American history, Americans used their constitutional liberties to keep barbarism at bay.

I’m not an especially emotional person – far from it – but I feel a little swell in my heart when I see the images.  Like the “You can’t take our freedom” speech from Braveheart, the images of the plucky Koreans make me proud to be American – and human.  (Here’s the story, complete with political subtext).

And it was with that in mind that I found this story to be so inspirational:

A group of four black Ferguson residents reportedly armed themselves and descended upon a white-owned business following a grand jury’s decision not to indict police officer Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown. But unlike many of the Ferguson demonstrators, the armed men were there to protect the business, not destroy it in protest.

The well-regulated militia.

The men told the Las Vegas Review Journal that they feel indebted to the white store owner, Doug Merello, who has given them employment over the years.

The black residents reportedly chased off groups of teenagers who allegedly wanted to loot the store. They also reportedly had a close-call after they were mistaken for looters by soldiers with the Missouri National Guard. One of the men was reportedly handcuffed temporarily until Morello could explain to the soldiers what they were doing at his business.

This is a great and noble thing.

Oh, please.  Like I even need to finish the punch line.

But some of you have been under rocks for a while (vide Governor Messinger’s Flint Smith’s Dayton’s re-election).  So for your benefit:

“Their lips are moving, and/or their fingers are typing something”. 

To wit:  Moms Want Action sent out a post-election thank-you to their supporters (and quite a few Real Americans who get their updates as well):

Many thanks to those of you who made hundreds of phone calls in support of Sen Al Franken. His re-election means that both of our US senators are lawmakers who support gun-sense legislation. Gun violence prevention was not a major campaign theme for any federal candidate, [And why do you suppose that is? – Ed.] although a few did mention it. Notably, US. Rep. Betty McCollum’s campaign materials called it out, and state attorney general candidate Andy Dawkins of the Green Party did, too (McCollum won re-election; Dawkins failed to unseat Lori Swanson)

Side note:  Betty McCollum runs in a district that would elect a wheelbarrow full of manure to Congress, if the DFL endorsed it. 

And what Moms Want Action failed to tell you is that while Lori Swanson may be an interventionist, activist who’s continued her predecessor and mentor Mike Hatch’s policies on nattering away at private business, she is one of the better state AGs in the country on gun rights.  So the Moms would be more honest to say that the pro-gun candidate utterly destroyed the only AG candidate who explicitly mentioned support for gun control and the Bloomberg Oompa-Loompas. 

But here’s the big one.  I’m bolding it for emphasis:

All of Everytown’s endorsed candidates in Minnesota won re-election. Yay!

Oh, did they? 

Follow the link to Everytown’s extraordinarily badly-designed site.  Look for “Filter by State”, and select “Minnesota”. 

Scroll down. 

Do you see Will Morgan?   “Moms Want Action”/”Everytown” offered him endorsement; the then-incumbent was arrogant enough to figure he didn’t need the votes of pro-2nd-Amendment Real Americans to win in District 56B. 

And Roz Peterson absolutely brutalized him with an eight point upset win.

So what is it we say, again?

“If a gun-grabber group says it, it’s probably a lie”. 

Pass the word.

 Yesterday, Gabby Giffords came to town. 

You’d only know it from the media, naturally.  When “Everytown” scheduled Rep. Giffords’ appearance, they made a point to keep the location secret, and to only invite media that could be trusted to report the event exactly the way Michael Bloomberg was paying for it to be reported. 

GOCRA sent out a press release:

Gun control advocate Gabrielle Giffords will [met] secretly [yesterday] with politicians, inviting only the press, while excluding the public, especially any dissenting voices.

The press event was announced to news outlets only [yesterday] morning. This is a common tactic from gun control groups, which enjoy lavish funding but little popular support.

Now, I get it; Bloomberg and “Everytown” want to control the media environment around Rep. Giffords.  They want absolute control over how Giffords is presented, so that her message isn’t diluted by any inconvenient dissent.  It’s standard PR optics. 

It’s the point where optics meets reality that is always a problem for the Orcs:

“When an event is announced in advance, gun rights supporters outnumber gun controllers, 20 to one,” according to Professor Joseph E. Olson, who founded GOCRA 25 years ago. He pointed to gun control hearings in 2013 and 2014, where Second Amendment supporters in maroon shirts flooded the state capitol. “Our legislature is not for sale. Why is Gabby trying to buy it?”

Well, clearly part of  our legislature is for sale. 

GOCRA President Andrew Rothman agreed. “Gun control in Minnesota has always been driven by out-of-state interests,” he said. “For years, it was the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation that funded gun control efforts in Minnesota. More recently, New York City’s billionaire former mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has bankrolled gun control lobbyists. Follow the money.”

I’m just into my third decade of observing the irony of the fact that the Democrat party is, and has always been, about waving the bloody shirt of class warfare – and yet on the gun issue, it is they who have always been on the side of the patricians, against the unruly plebeians. 

And those plebeians must be kept out of the public eye at all costs.

To: Kroger Foods
From:  Mitch Berg, Hypothetical Gun Owner
Re:  Standing Up To Stupid

Dear Kroger Foods,

Please open some stores in the Twin Cities metro area, so I can shop at them. 

Because any chain that tells Michael Bloomberg and his pet group “Upper Middle-Class Moms Want Action” to go pound arugula is a store I wanna shop at.

That is all.

I am currently scheduled to guest on Sunday night on Armed American Radio with Mark Walters.

It’ll be on from 7-10PM Central, on AM1280, or a station or website near you.

Hope you can tune in!

Hot on the heels of yesterdays’ legislative report card from the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance comes today’s list of endorsements from the Minnesota Gun Owners’ Political Action Committee. 

The 78 additional endorsements join four endorsements for state representative previously announced by the MN Gun Owners PAC. A full list of endorsed candidates is below.

“This year, there are many races where there is a clearly defined choice between a candidate that does not respect the civil rights of gun owners, and those who do, ” said Bryan Strawser, Executive Director. “We will be mobilizing our grassroots supporters to get gun owners to the plls in August and November on behalf of our endorsed candidates.”

The full list of MNGOPAC House endorsements is below the jump:

(more…)

Since we’re talking endorsements, the Minnesota Gun Owners Political Action Committee has issued its endorsements for this round of elections:

• Tony Cornish – House District 23B, Republican Party of Minnesota
• David Dill – House District 3A, Democrat-Farmer-Labor Party
• Steve Drazkowski – House District 21B, Republican Party of Minnesota
“Each of these three representatives has a long track record of strong and vocal leadership in support of the constitutional rights of Minnesota’s gun owners,“ said Mark Okern, Chairman, Minnesota Gun Owners PAC. “Tony, David, and Steve are power brokers, “ Okern said. “When they talk gun rights, their caucuses listen.”
“We are confident that Representatives Cornish, Dill, and Drazkowski will easily win re- election and continue to be steadfast supporters of the civil rights of gun owners in Saint Paul during the next legislative session, “ said Bryan Strawser, Executive Director.

More, I’m told, to come.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

If you want to see where American Liberals will be in a few years, look at British Liberals.

Guns already are banned but violence continues so now mandatory six months jail for second conviction for carrying a knife. All the usual arguments about whether it’s harsh enough, prison overcrowding, effect on gang violence, etc.

No concept that giving ordinary citizens the power to fight back in self-defense might be a long-term better strategy for social order.

Joe Doakes

Not only that, but self-defense itself is becoming illegal.

But let’s be fair; the US was headed the same direction 30-40 years ago.  The good guys – that’d be you and me – fought back and pushed the needle back toward freedom.

We need to do it again, and in many, many more areas.

This past twenty years have been good ones, all in all, for the Second Amendment Human Rights Movement.

Even as the ratio of civilian firearms to citizens reaches 1:1 (double the per-capita ownership rate in 1968), the violent crime and firearm murder rates have dropped by half.  The Supreme Court rejected decades of addled legal opinion with prejudice in the Heller and McDonald cases.  And states with “Shall Issue” laws zoomed from eight 30 years ago to over 40 today (and “constitutional carry” states moving from 1 to 3 in the same time).

The orcs are desperate for a victory – even a symbolic one.

And some shooters are giving it to them.

———-

In the 1970s, the anti-gun movement set about an effort to stigmatize gun ownership.  Civilian firearms ownership had long been a natural part of being a free citizen in this country.  Great example – Minnesota didn’t even require a permit to carry a concealed handgun until 1974.

But in the wake of 1968 – with its high-profile assassinations (none of which would have been prevented by any level of gun control) and, more signally, cities full of black people rioting, the left embarked on an effort not only to ban guns legally, but stigmatize them socially.  TV programming and movies started uniformly portraying gun ownership as unnecessary and dangerous at best, a sign of impairment or derangement at worst.  And it sank in; by the mid-eighties, polls showed a majority of people favoring gun control, and a strong-plurality-to-majority having a low opinion of civilian firearms ownership.

And the news and entertainment media still keep that tack alive and well – although the rise of alternative media have effectively outflanked Big Left and Big Media; public attitudes about guns and gun owners have largely flipped.

But it took some convincing.  One of the most important things to convince people of?  That gun owners were real people, just like everyone else.

———-

When I first started hanging out with the Human Rights crowd twenty years ago – GOCRA and Concealed Carry Reform Now (CCRN), one of the first rules given to activists was “no camo”.  Don’t wear camouflage to CCRN/GOCRA events, gun shows and protests and hearings at the Capitol.  Not just hunting camouflage, mind you – the paramilitary stuff was also a no-go.  The movement needed to combat the impression thatbeinga shooter made someone inherently an outsider, self-consciously casting themselves out from society.  We were fathers and mothers, students and lawyers, white and blue collar, Democrats and Republicans -peoplejust like everyone else.

Behind this was a simple bit of human psychology; the first step to taking someone’s rights away from them is to dehumanize them.  To appear to be human makes that hard, if not quite impossible; at the very least, the other side has to expend much more effort, an unseemly amount, to keep dehumanizing you.

If they can’t turn you into a cliche that they can make people dismiss, then your playing field is more even.

And in the world of politics – which is where our laws get written – that’s important.

———

But a group of shooters is doing their best to give the Orcs a new set of cliches on which to focus their rage.

The Open Carry activists at Starbucks, Chipotle, and most recently at a Target in Fort Worth have given the Orcs not so much a “cheap win” as a cheap, unearned boogeyman – the bearded, t-shirt-clad white guy sauntering around coffee shops, fast-food joints and stores, doing their business while carrying not just handguns but “assault weapons”.

There is method to the madness, for open-carry activists; if you don’t use a right, you can lose it.

With all due respect, it’s a lousy method.  It gains the good guys nothing – least of all in Texas, where the right to carry is as solid as any place in the United States – and hands the orcs something they haven’t had in years; cheap public relations victories.

The open carriers’ response is “why should we let fear of their public relations victory interfere with our exercise of our legal rights?”

Because politics is as much emotional and rhetorical as factual, that’s why.  Law-abiding shooters have won the war of facts over the past thirty years – but we also won the war of emotions and rhetoric.  We – the good guys, the law-abiding Real Americans who own guns – are 2-3 orders of magnitude less likely to commit any crime than non-gun owners.

But then, we were before 1968, too.  It wasn’t the factual war that led to the nadir of the late seventies and early eighties; it was the war for rhetoric and emotion; the false, propagandized fear of guns that the media implanted in the middle-American psyche.

The good guys un-planted that irrational fear, at least in most Real Americans between the Hudson and the Sierra Madre.  We did  it even though we had the media and the political class fighting against us.

And it could all reverse – even if the War of Facts continues in our favor, as it will.

Giving unearned victories to the Orcs is no way to eliminate them from the political battlefield.

So I’ll just say this; if I did have a gun and a carry permit, I’d carry concealed.  And I urge everyone else to do it too.

This session, Senate File 2639 (and its house companion, HF3238) have been the subject of a lot of misunderstanding (including on this very blog).   The bills would define how local authorities enforce federal law regarding dealing with firearms in the hands of those accused of domestic abuse.

The bills have also been the subject of an amazing amount of grandstanding rhetoric.

We’ll talk rhetoric first.  Then we’ll talk about the bill.

Aiming Low:  Representative Tony Cornish has, for a long, long time now, been the prime mover for Minnesota’s Second Amendment movement in the Legislature (after the retirement of Pat Pariseau).  Nobody has ever, ever called him “soft” on Second Amendment issues and escaped without being laughed out of the conversation.

But Cornish isn’t stupid.

After the debacle of the 2013 session – where the DFL marched into the legislature with reams of gun-regulation and confiscation bills copied and pasted from California, New York and Pennsylvania, and got publicly humiliated by the “Army of Davids” that the Minnesota gun rights movement mobilized, and a bipartisan assortment of pro-Human-Rights legislators – the anti-rights crowd, led by a more capable batch of professional politicial consultants and armed with shopping carts full of Michael Bloomberg’s cash, came to the Capitol with a brand new plan.  Their goal; find an emotional, red-meat issue that crossed party lines and would involve ratcheting up some sort of gun regulation, to eke out a win and help take the stench of death off of gun-control political efforts.

And there has been no better year since the seventies for the DFL to try to jam something down.  Remember – the DFL controls both chambers of the Legislature, and the Governor’s office.

All they’d have to do to pass any law – magazine restrictions and backdoor registration, to say nothing of taking guns from those accused of domestic abuse – is close ranks.

The fact that any such move would be political suicide is the result of two decades of organizing by the Minnesota 2nd Amendment movement – GOCRA, the MN-GOPAC, the NRA, the Twin Cities Gun Owners, and more. 

But politics is a two way street.  Both sides can play it – and Michael Bloomberg and the Joyce Foundation bought themselves some consultants who know how to play.

Remember – Tony Cornish, and all the other pro-human-rights legislators, are facing a DFL majority.   To avoid getting steamrolled, one of two things is needed:

• Being OK with being steamrollered, or
• canny negotiation.

Cornish and the rest of the pro-human-rights lobby chose negotiation. 

We’ll come back to that.

We Interrupt This Story For Some Law  – Domestic abuse is no laughing matter.  The law provides victims of domestic abuse some remedies under the law.  It also provides those accused of domestic abuse with the the right to due process.

Here, more or less, is now the process works (and every situation is different, so curb your inner lawyer.  Or outer lawyer, if you went to law school):

1. Joe alleges his spouse, Jane, is beating him.  He goes to get a restraining order
2. A judge signs off on an ex parte order (which means “one party”) “order for protection” (OFP).  The OFP prohibits contact (to say nothing of abuse) between Jane and Joe.  Firearms are, however, not an issue – yet.  It’s a temporary order, until the hearing (aka “due process”)
3. Joe has Jane served a copy of the OFP.
4. Jane has the option to request a hearing to review and contest the order.   She can (and probably should) bring a lawyer – it’s serious business (this, by the way, is the part many accused of domestic abuse skip, which screws things up for them badly).
5. If  the judge believes, after the hearing that Jane is a significant threat to Joe’s safety, the judge may make the order “permanent” (which really means generally three years or so).
6. If the order finds that the threat is really serious, the federal “Wellstone Amendment” may prohibit Jane from possessing firearms.

NOTE:  As noted in a subsequent post, Mr. Doakes is in rare error about the effect of the bills he refers to.  Please see the linked post for the response from GOCRA – which includes comments from Joe Doakes indicating that he misread the law.

Unlike some bloggers, I never remove posts – but I will make sure the context is clear. 

———-

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Amending the statute relating to loss of firearms rights.

Allegation of child abuse – must have actual notice of the hearing so you can attend to contest issuance of the order.

Conviction for domestic abuse, stalking – you lost your case at trial, so you had notice and could contest the verdict.

Standard ex parte 518B.01 domestic abuse restraining order – no such requirement. Your domestic partner complains and you instantly lose your right to possess any firearms, for self-defense or hunting or anything. You don’t even have to turn in the firearms – the court must order the cops to go to your house and seize them, without a warrant.

It already passed the House so it should become law this session. Ripe for abuse and unlikely to save lives. But who will stand up against it?

Joe Doakes

“Standing against” it is the easy part.  Derailing a DFL political train, not so much.

The state is full of gun groups (some of them actually based in Iowa) that “stand against” this bill, loudly and with impeccable principle.

The problem, of course, is getting the votes to force changes to the bill.  Some of the most noxious provisions did get stripped out early (back in March), but the DFL is waiting with the “What you support wife-beaters?” line at a moment’s notice.  Count on it.

And remember – they have the votes, and leadership that owes Michael Bloomberg a victory, even a small one, after all the money they poured into this state in the past couple of years.

So some version of this bill is going to pass.

And if you’re a gun owner, the only solution is taking back the legislature with actual pro-Second-Amendment legislators.

Not posturing.  Not bellowing about principle, or demanding a “constitutional carry” bill in a DFL-controlled legislature where we barely avoided a seven round magazine restriction last year.

UPDATE: More on this story tomorrow.

The weekend saw not just one, but two bits of epic anti-2nd-Amendment bias in the Strib.  And not in the columns, mind you – it was in the “news”.

Contestant Number One:  Matt McKinney:  McKinney, whose coverage of the Darin Evanovich shooting in 2011 we spent so much time assailing back in the day.  Last week, he wrote about the Byron Smith trial in Little Falls.  Smith is accused of ambushing two youngsters who were breaking into his home.  Again.  The two -Haile Kifer, 18 and Nick Brady, 17 – were apparently not visiting Mr. Smith’s home for the first time.

How many times?

McKinney (with emphasis added):

The Little Falls homeowner had suffered a few break-ins in his home and his adjacent property in the fall of 2012, but didn’t go to the sheriff’s office until after an Oct. 27 break-in, when a shotgun and rifle, as well as other items were stolen from his home.

“A few break-ins” may have been a half-dozen or more.

How many break-ins is a person supposed to cheerfully endure?

To be fair to McKinney, it appears to this non-lawyer that Byron Smith broke one of the absolute rules of self-defense.  While he was not a willing participant, he had no “duty to retreat” in the home, and he may well have had a reasonable fear of being killed or maimed, the idea that he may have shot one or more of the burglars after they were down and no longer a threat may have been the one mistake he made.

On the other hand?  The Strib ran the story on a Saturday.  When the jurors weren’t sequestered, and could read McKinney’s heart-rending elegies to the victims.  Er, burglars.  Why would they do that?

And the County is charging him with first-degree murder – as if he’d been specifically planning to kill the two.

Why, it almost seems like the Strib has a desired verdict.

No – that’d be crazy talk.

The Second Contestant:  Baird Helgeson:   The Strib’s Helgeson wrote last week about the Schoen-Latz bill to take guns away from domestic abusers.

It’s not so much that the issue doesn’t warrant attention – domestic abuse is ugly and prone to violence.  Most people – even shooters – support some provisions to disarm people who are legitimately suspected of domestic abuse, with due process.

It’s the words “legitimate” and “due process” that are the clinkers.  Many – maybe most – domestic abuse charges brought during divorce proceedings are inflated or false, intended by angry spouses and sleazy divorce lawyers to try to skew the proceedings.   The accused – usually men – are often treated as guilty until proven innocent.  And even a misdemeanor domestic violence conviction is sufficient to disarm someone for decades, maybe life.

So most shooters agree – disarm the violent, but give people due process.

The responsible anti-gunners and the Minnesota 2nd Amendment community have been negotiating over a current bill for a while now, trying to make sure everyone’s concerns get addressed.

So look at the tone of Mr. Helgeson’s piece.  I’ll add emphasis for things like cheerleading and repeating Heather Martens’ chanting points under the guise of “news reporting”:

Minnesota could be on the verge of breakthrough changes in some of its gun laws.

“Breaking through…” against what?

Until now, no restriction on gun ownership has been too small to draw the fierce opposition of gun rights groups and their supporters.

“Small” to whom?  This blog spent a lot of time last year showing how big the “small” restrictions actually were.  That is, apparently, of no interest to Helgeson.

Just a year ago, a proposal for broader background checks for firearms purchases was crushed at the Capitol despite attempts to weaken the bill enough to get it approved.

“Crushed” sounds so…bad.  How about “defeated”?

This time, a rank-and-file police officer — who also happens to be a DFL House member from St. Paul Park — is leading the effort to take all firearms, including rifles, away from those who stalk or abuse their partners. His careful ­legislative campaign is winning surprising support.

Notice how Helgeson is framing the issue?  Gun rights supporters are tyrants, “crushing” and “weakening” legislation from the plucky, reasonable underdogs of the DFL!

The narrative is served!

He has a powerful partner — Republican Rep. Tony Cornish, a retired police officer and the Legislature’s most outspoken advocate of gun rights. He ­regularly carries a handgun into the ­Capitol.

Presumably as “the Darth Vader March” plays in the background.   That plucky Dan Schoen!

The bill, which has run a gantlet of House committees, faces its most serious test Monday, when the full House is scheduled to vote on final passage.

Now, if I were a reporter exercising my personal biases, I’d say the bill “slithered through a series of House committees where members, weary of defending bad gun bills from well-informed citizens, gave it a solid working-over”.

But good bills “run gauntlets”.

Here’s the interesting part – and perhaps the part the Minnesota anti-civil-rights lobby would prefer Helgeson not have written:

The proposal would put Minnesota at the leading edge of a larger national movement that, after meeting with defeat on more ambitious proposals, is aiming at narrow niche victories in areas with broad public ­support, such as preventing domestic homicides.

Leading the way to “Victory” against the big bad shooters!

That is, of course, Michael Bloomberg’s current strategery – to kill the Second Amendment with a million cuts. 

I wonder if Helgeson would be so excited about laws that tossed biased “journalists” out of the trade?  Probably not – he (and I) would likely turn into civil libertarian absolutists.

Narrative alert!

The bipartisan nature of the measure has drawn the attention of DFL Gov. Mark Dayton, a devoted gun owner who has been leery of tightening Minnesotans’ right to own firearms.

The left trots that out whenever Dayton needs to appear “moderate”.  He’s a “devoted gun owner” – but not one of the icky bad ones!

“It’s not perfect, but it’s getting there,” said Rob Doar, a lobbyist for the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance, which has dropped its objection to Schoen’s bill. “We agree with making sure the guns get out of the house,” so long as there is ample due process.

There is some question as to how accurately Helgeson related Doar’s quotes.  I’ll be talking with Rob about this soon enough.

Studies show that half of all domestic abuse homicides in Minnesota over the past three years involved a firearm.

“I absolutely believe without a doubt that lives will be saved by this,” said St. Paul City Attorney Sara Grewing, whose office handles about 1,000 domestic violence cases a year.

All likely true.  But they’re significant for what they set up:

“The gun culture of this country is so disturbing,” said Marree Seitz, whose daughter Carolyn was shot and killed by her husband several days after filing for divorce in 1996. “So much of the domestic abuse is so flammable, where the littlest thing can set the person off,” she said. “The accessibility of the weapons makes it such a natural thing.”

It’s as if Helgeson thinks he’s writing a buddy movie – the unlikely good/liberal cop bad/conservative cop taking unlikely sides against “the gun culture”, personified by all those unwashed gun maniacs that swarm the Capitol “crushing” and “weakening” their precious gun laws.

And yet they try soooo hard!

Legislators were still working on the proposal late in the week, ensuring that gun advocates could approve the changes.

The measure puts opponents in the difficult and politically dicey position of defending gun ownership rights for domestic abusers and stalkers.

Right!  And in case any of you missed it, Baird Helgeson was there to say it’s so!

The measure has strong support from Mayors Against Illegal Guns, the country’s largest gun violence prevention advocacy organization.

Not to be confused with “gun control group”.  Good heavens, no.

The group was founded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has poured millions of dollars of his personal fortune into the cause.Just this month, Bloomberg pledged an additional $50 million to try to match the NRA’s formidable membership base, lobbying force and campaign organization.

That’s good ol’ Bloomie; just another plucky billionaire underdog, fighting against those millions of regular middle-American nuts!

“Clearly, we ran into a buzz saw last year,” said Paymar, who runs a nonprofit organization aimed at reducing domestic abuse. “The environment was toxic at the time.”

Regular citizens turning out and making their opinions crystal clear = “toxic”.

Good to know.

Now It’s Time To Vote!:  Who wins the first ever “Strib Bias Pageant?”

Results will be announced tomorrow. Vote early and often!

In the late sixties, a justifiably obscure SCOTUS’ “decision”,  “US v. Miller” (a depression-era case involving a robber who was murdered before his case made it to the court, and for whom no attorney argued before the high court) was dragged out of the legal ether by a series of liberal, activist judges, and installed into a misbegotten place as binding precedent that led, by a tortuous “logical” route, to the Second Amendment being interpreted for four decades as a “collective right”.   Just the way the Ku Klux Klan interpreted it until the 14th Amendment came along.

The Heller case began the process of flushing this noxious bit of authoritarian posturing down the latrine of history.

But it fell to Otis McDonald – a seventy-something black man who just wanted to defend his life and property against the crime that had overrun the neighborhood where he’d lived since 1971, in which he’d raised three of his children – to deliver the coup de grace against Chicago’s racist, classist gun ban.

Otis McDonald

It was merely the latest of several fights for McDonald, who was 76 when the SCOTUS upheld his demand to be allowed to defend himself, his family and his property, and not be treated like the government’s livestock.

It was one of many battles he fought in his long, full, unsung-but-productive life.

McDonald started life as one of 12 children of a Louisiana sharecropper who’d left the land at 17, deep in the Jim Crow era.  He worked for decades as a janitor at the University of Chicago, joined the union, earned a living, raised a family…

…and watched his neighborhood decay from a comfortable blue-collor area to a crime-ridden gang shooting gallery.

He sought “permission” to own a handgun – because as an older man, he couldn’t stand up in fight against one predatory teen, much less the whole pack.  The city of Chicago, adhering to the gun control movement’s orthodoxy that black people must only be seen and heard at the polls, and shouldn’t be getting all uppity in between elections, shut him down with, as it were, prejudice.

And so he, along with three other co-plaintiffs, filed suit – which duly led to the Supreme Court and, in 2009, victory in the case that bore his name, and incorporated the Second Amendment as law binding all lesser jurisdictions; the right to keep and bear arms was, as it has always been, a Right of The People, not the National Guard, not to be frittered away by self-appointed racist elitists out of the fear of armed brown men that motivates all gun control.

McDonald, on the day of his case’s epic victory.

McDonald, a humble man without even a high school education, accomplished more to secure freedom than many buildings full of Ivy-League-spawned pundits and lawyers ever will.

Otis McDonald passed away last week at age 79, after a long battle with cancer.

Massood Ayoub:

As a black man in America, he fought his way up from economic disadvantage to earning a good living for his family. He fought against violent crime in his adopted city of Chicago, and in so doing came to his most famous battle as the lead named plaintiff in McDonald, et. al. v. City of Chicago. In the plaintiffs’ landmark victory in that case in 2010, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that neither the Windy City nor any other city could ban law-abiding citizens from owning handguns for defense of self and family. The McDonald decision helped pave the way for the concealed carry permits now being issued throughout Illinois

.And the wages of McDonald’s victory are being felt – despite the media’s attempt to suppress them – today.  More at noon.  Oh, yes – oh, so much more at noon.

And so rest in peace, Otis McDonald.  Your legacy – leaving your world a freer place than the one you came into  – is one that shames those of a whole lot of people who came into this world with advantages you never dreamed of.

At noon today:  McDonald’s legacy is already saving lives.

Remember the bloodbath that Minnesota was in 1973 and before? 

I remember the episode in November of 1971, in rural Hitterdahl, Minnesota, about 20 miles west of Detroit Lakes.  Oscar Gundersson, a plumber and handyman, was playing bridge with his wife Trina and their farmer neighbors, Rolf and Edna Berndsen.  Oscar though Edna had cheated on a hand.  Being a second-generation Norwegian-American, he skipped straight past accusation, anger and argument, and pulled a pistol from his overalls, shooting the woman.  Then, anxious to kill all witnesses, he shot Rolf and, finally, his wife, before jumping in his car and driving toward the Canadian border in a killing spree that left six additional dead and ended with Gundersson living in Indonesia, scoffing at the law.

Or the sad episode of Ruth Slorbie, who was shopping with her husband, Olaf, at the downtown Minneapolis Daytons in October 1970.  Weary of waiting in lines, she pulled a revolver from her purse and, according to a Minneapolis Star article, calmly executed six people who got in her way, calmly “changing clips” as she wandered from department to department, her husband indolently shuffling behind her holding bags of purchased merchandise, until the police responded. 

Er…wait.  None of those happened.

Before 1974, Minnesota did not require the law-abiding citizen to have a permit of any type to carry a firearm, concealed or otherwise. 

You may recall – Minnesota was a pretty low-crime state, back then.    Of course, being a Democrat-dominated state, when the winds of Political Correctness bade the left to restrict guns back in the seventies, at the Second Amendment’s legal and social nadir, Minnesota followed suit – for no real empirical reason, of course.  Which is, of course, a common thread among most gun-control legislation, and all such rules that affect only the law-abiding; none are ever supported by evidence.

Minnesota became a “may issue” state in 1974 – carry permits were issued entirely on the whim of local police chiefs, meaning that the law-abiding citizen’s Second Amendment rights were subjected entirely to the whim of their local police chief.  Police chiefs in Greater Minnesota issued permits pretty liberally; in the Metro, it was entirely based on political connections; law-abiding citizens were routinely turned down, while pals of cops and local pols could get permits even with lengthy criminal records.  The chief of Bloomington’s police department famously said that nobody in Bloomington really needed a permit, but made sure his wife – alone among the city’s women – was issued one. 

MInnesota rolled part-way back, ten years ago, with the passage of our “shall-issue” law; there are currently nearly 160,000 permits active in Minnesota, nearly double the number estimated in 2003. 

But what if we rolled the laws back even further?  To 1973? 

Last week Senator Branden Peterson and Representative Steve Drazkowski introduced a bill that would do just that; institute “constitutional carry” in Minnesota.  A law-abiding citizen would require no state permit to exercise their constitutional right to carry a firearm in a safe, responsible manner.  It’d give us the same law as Vermont, Arizona, Alaska and Wyoming. 

It’s an utterly symbolic proposal at this point, of course; the bill was introduced after the committee deadline, and even if it hadn’t been, it would have had no chance of passage with a DFL-controlled legislature and governor.  At a time when Michael Bloomberg is buying astro-turf groups to push genuine, bad restrictions in a legislature currently controlled by the DFL, it’d be misplaced to spend a whole lot of energy on it.

Yet. 

But kudos to Senator Peterson and Representative Drazkowski for firing a shot, as it were, across the DFL’s bow.  Here’s to more in a friendlier future. 

The worst enemy that fabian statism has is generalized prosperity.

It’s always been a theory – ’til now.

The North Dakota Democrat Party can muster not a single Democrat to run for office anywhere in Bakken country, according to Rob Port:

Democrats have managed to recruit exactly zero candidates in legislative districts representing the state’s oil patch with all local district conventions completed and less than two weeks to go before their statewide convention…If we count the urban districts in Minot and Bismarck as being “oil patch” districts, we add five more: Districts 3, 5, 7, 47 and 35. Of those, all have a full slate of Republican candidates, and just one has Democrat candidates.

And the North Dakota Democrat Party is fielding candidates for only about 1/3 of the state’s legislative races overall, almost exclusively in the eastern part of the state:

That speaks volumes, doesn’t it? Democrats will talk a lot about oil and energy policy this year, but the lack of Democrat candidates in the oil patch tells us their arguments aren’t getting much traction where that policy has the most impact.

What a glorious time to be alive.

I went down to the Capitol last night for a 6PM hearing on SF2639 – Senator Ron Latz’s bill to punish people accused but not convicted of domestic abuse by confiscating their guns and keeping them confiscated, innocence notwithstanding. 

We started out on a high note; Michael Paymar’s attempt to create a felony trap for law-abiding gun owners in Capitol-complex buildings got turned into a fairly innocuous tweak to the existing notification law.  The law, by the way, dates to 1994, and is utterly obsolete, a relic of a time when law enforcement still kept records on paper files.  The notification law is obsolete and needs to be gutted and tossed entirely – but for now, it’s no big deal.

So I showed up at the Capitol.   As usual, I was among plenty of friends:

The nose count, last I checked, was 70-75 civil rights supporters to about a dozen civil rights opponents.

I did a nose-count; Real Americans outnumbered people there for “Protect MN”, as usual, by a lopsided margin.  

So we waited.  

Strategizing got done…:

GOCRA leaders churning on strategy.

…but for the most part, everyone waited.  And waited some more.

There were several updates from security; they were busy with other bills; they were going to get through a few more and then take a half hour break before getting to 2639.

So we waited some more. 

A few cases of water bottles, courtest of GOCRA, made the rounds. It was warm in there.

GOCRA brought water and granola bars, which theypassed out up and down the line (including to the anti-rights people; I had the singular pleasure of giving water and a granola bar to Rep. Martens).

They took the half-hour break – which ran more like an hour.  And then they re-convened – and addressed the Fetal DNA bill.  For an hour.

I had to leave; I was fighting a cold, and had to work this morning.

Latz didn’t bring up his gun-grab bill until nearly 11 – after he’d let Heather Martens and her friends in through the back door, essentially packing the hearing room with his supporters.  Latz has set himself apart, along with Reps. Paymar, Hausman and Martens, as one of the most virulently anti-civil-rights people in the Legislature; he quite clearly passive-aggressively used his power as committee chair to make the hearing as difficult as possible for the unruly peasants who had the affrontery to oppose him. 

Rob Doar, the VP of Government of Affairs for the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance, summed it up about the same way: “Senator Ron Latz is wll established as one of the most anti-rigths legislators in Minnesota.  Under his leladership of the Jundiciary Committee, we’ve come to expect he’ll use every tool at his disposal to make hearings as difficult as possible for anyone who opposes his agenda”. 

At the end of the evening, the bill passed from the Judiciary Committee. 

Which is no surprise; the bill was going to pass Senate Judiciary no matter what; Michael Bloomberg invested a LOT of money in this session, and there needed to be something to keep the metrocrat troops rallied, for all that investment; the Metrocrats control the Judiciary Committee.  When Bloomberg says “speak”, Latz will bark on command. 

Now, reality sets in.  There needs to be a companion bill in the House; the House DFL caucus is panic-stricken about their chances this fall, and getting saddled with one of Latz’s gun-grab bills would be poison for a couple of outstate DFLers that are already fighting for their lives.  And Tom Bakk – who is an Iron-Range union guy who loves his big-game hunting – knows what long memories us civil rights advocates have.    If I had to bet, I’d say this bill dies in committee without getting to the floor, or at the very worst, in conference. 

Which is not another way of saying “relax for the rest of the session”.  There will be more hearings, more amendments, more attempts to weasel legislation through the system.

You need to call your legislators.  Thank the good guys.  Politely urge the ones who are wrong to reconsider.  Urge the fence-sitters to throw a vote for freedom. 

We can win this round.  Indeed, we can humiliate the bad guys, just like last year.

Remember – the gun grabber agenda picks up again with a vengeance today at the Capitol – and once again, we’ll need Real Americans to turn out to hold them back.

The first hearings, at noon today, will be for the Capitol Trap Bill:

Based on the flawed recommendations of lame duck Lieutenant Governor Prettner Solon’s capitol safety advisory committee, and steamrolled by lame duck Representative Michael Paymar, SF2690 would impose additional red tape hoops to jump through, and “gotcha” felonies for permit holders visiting the State Capitol Complex. THE BILL WILL BE HEARD THURSDAY, March 20, at noon in Room 15 of the Capitol.

This bill would create a trap for harmless permit holders whose meaningless, duplicative, unused notifications “expired.” A visit to any capitol-area building — even the Minnesota History Center — after this false “expiration” would turn a permit holder into a felon.

Then, this evening, Ron “I’m From Harvard.  Are You From Harvard?  No?  Oh” Latz will present a gun confiscation bill:

Civil rights opponent Ron Latz, chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, introduced SF2639, a bill that would create de facto confiscation of firearms from persons accused of domestic violence.

Senator Ron “I went To Harvard, you know. Did you go to Harvard? No? Because you know, I actually WENT to Harvard” Latz

THE BILL WILL BE HEARD THURSDAY EVENING, March 20, at 6 p.m. in Room 15 of the Capitol.

While GOCRA has no love for wife-beaters, this bill goes far beyond protecting victims, and would impose a back-door theft of personal property through exorbitant fees.

This bill would gang-rape due process for those accused but not convicted of domestic violence.  Remember – a shocking number of domestic violence charges are completely made up; many soon-to-be-ex-spouses know full well that getting the police to confiscate their soon-to-be-ex’s firearms, among all the many ugly consequences of false accusations of domestic abuse is a great way to dig at them – and Latz’ bill would put on onerous burden on the innocent. 

I’ll be there this evening.  Hope you can too.  Bring your maroon GOCRA shirts if you have ’em – but whether you have the shirt or not, show up. 

And remember – we Real Americans have been winning the battles against Bloomberg’s Billions lately, but it’s only because we show up; we make the phone calls, we sacrifice the time and shoe leather, we come to the hearings, we fight the fight on the street.  If we ever stop – at least while the DFL controls the show in Saint Paul – then the orcs win.

If you can’t make it to the hearings?  You know the drill; call your rep and your legislator.  If they’re among the good guys – mostly GOP, but also many out-state Democrats – then thank them for defending your civil rights, and encourage them to keep up the fight.  If they’re with the orcs – most Metro DFLers – express your opposition politely and calmly.  We win this thing by being better than our opponents.  And we pretty much always are.

I hope to see you tonight.

UPDATE:  I’m going to keep this post at the top of the page for the rest of the day; new posts will fill in below at the usual time, around noon.  Just saying.

So…what are you doing Thursday?

The DFL is back at it again.  Two gun control bills have been introduced so far this session – and they’re both bad ones.

As bad as last years’ avalanche of stupid?  Perhaps not.  But noxious in their own way.  And both of them are the camel’s nose under the tent.

The Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance sends:

Civil rights opponent Ron Latz, chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, introduced SF2639, a bill that would create de facto confiscation of firearms from persons accused of domestic violence. THE BILL WILL BE HEARD THURSDAY EVENING, March 20, at 6 p.m. in Room 15 of the Capitol.

While GOCRA has no love for wife-beaters, this bill goes far beyond protecting victims, and would impose a back-door theft of personal property through exorbitant fees.

The DFL is going to spin opposition to this bill as “supporting wife-beaters”, of course; the orcs are fluent liars. It’s the one form of language they’re good at.

And someone who’s legitimately convicted of domestic violence should give up their guns.  But this is on accusation – and as many has half of all accusations of domestic violence, at least during divorces, are false.

Capitol Carry Traps

Based on the flawed recommendations of lame duck Lieutenant Governor Prettner Solon’s capitol safety advisory committee, and steamrolled by lame duck Representative Michael Paymar, SF2690 would impose additional red tape hoops to jump through, and “gotcha” felonies for permit holders visiting the State Capitol Complex. THE BILL WILL BE HEARD THURSDAY, March 20, at noon in Room 15 of the Capitol.

Bad information leads to bad policy, and the information presented by the Department of Public Safety at those committee meetings this summer was terrible: the DPS spokesman had no idea that the DPS managed the permit holder database!

This bill would create a trap for harmless permit holders whose meaningless, duplicative, unused notifications “expired.” A visit to any capitol-area building — even the Minnesota History Center — after this false “expiration” would turn a permit holder into a felon.

This is one of the approaches gun-grabbers just love; make laws that create confusing restrictions that are bound, indeed designed, to entrap people.  Then, complain to the media about all the “gun felonies at the Capitol!”, and demand more gun control!

Anyway – GOCRA would love to see people at the Capitol this Thursday, as noted in bold above.   Needless to say, calling your representatives about these bills is going to be important.

Last year, the avalanche of real citizens showing up at the capitol shut the lavishly-funded gun-grab effort down.  Shot it down in flames.  Humiliated it.

It’s a new year, and a new session.  Time to beat the orcs back again.

I’ve said it for nigh-on 20 years, now; gun control is the class war the Left’s been barbering about for the past century.  And they are the patricians.

And the plebeians are winning. 

Glenn Reynolds notes something I’ve been talking about for the past half-decade; the legal, social and moral landscape of the gun question and the Second Amendment has inverted completely over the past 25 years:

Overall, the trend of the past couple of decades seems to be toward expanding gun rights, just as the trend in the 1950s and 1960s was toward expanding free speech rights. America has more guns in private hands than ever before, even as crime rates fall, and, after a half-century or so of anti-gun hysteria, the nation seems to be reverting to its generally gun-friendly traditions.

This is a state of affairs that seemed almost inconceivable a mere two decades ago, and therein lies a reminder: It often seems as if the deck is stacked, and change is inconceivable. Twenty years ago, the prospect of this kind of expansion in constitutional freedom seemed very dim. But in America, change, when it comes, can be sudden and dramatic — even when, as here, the general current of punditry and political opinion seems set in stone. Keep that in mind, as you contemplate other political issues.

And there’s an important lesson there; while the Second Amendment is in the ascendant, it’ll only stay there with constant vigilance and effort – and in the meantime, we have many other civil liberties that’ve been serving as bureaucratic playgrounds for decades now; the Fourth, Fifth and Tenth Amendments in particular are in about the same state today as the Second was thirty years ago.

While much of conservative Minnesota is having a hard time with “messaging”, the Real Americans of Minnesota’s Second Amendment human rights movement have a clear, resounding one.

This from the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance (GOCRA), in their session-eve email blast; it’s as crystal-clear a statement of principles and positions to the Legislature as you could ask for:

• Minnesota’s law-abiding gun owners will not take the blame for the actions of criminals
  We refuse to be treated like those criminals
• You don’t work for Michael Bloomberg and his billions: you work for your Minnesota constituents!
• We know what [Bloomberg’s] “universal background check” proposal really is: universal registration. And we will not sit still for it.
• You have a perfectly good criminal control bill, HF1325, co-authored by 99 senators and representatives, waiting for your action

As always, the gun rights movement – GOCRA, MN-GOPAC, the TC Gun Owners and Carry Forum, the NRA and the like – will be working hard to hold back the Metrocrat orcs’ assault on Real Americans’ freedom. 

And they need you. 

Look – whatever group you prefer, there’s one to fit your style, temperament and philosophy. 

• Dying to bite off a bite-sized piece of activism?  Sign up for GOCRA, and be alerted when action – phone calls, emails, hearings at the Capitol – is needed (send ’em a few bucks; they will put ’em to good use). 
•  Wanna put your money to direct political use, endorsing and influencing elections?  Send MNGOPAC a buck or two, or a few hundred.    
• Wanna fight the fight on main street – and University Avenue, for that matter?  Shelley and the crew at TC Gun Owners and Carry Forum have been spreading the gospel in the wilderness. 

Hell, help out all three.  It’s not like the Orcs are going away any time soon.

As much rhetoric as the Democrats have expended in the past eighty years about class warfare, this is the true class war in America; our would-be “elites” want Real America disarmed; the plebeians, the underdogs, the people are the Real Americans. 

Never let the Legislature forget it.

The problem with most – as in the vast majority – of media people when writing about the Second Amendment is that most of them haven’t the foggiest idea about the subject, and all of their sources on the subject are fellow liberals.

That’s the only excuse I can think of for this piece of suppurating journalistic drainpipe-meat from ABC News:

Gun owner and Second Amendment advocate Marlene Hoeber isn’t your typical member of the National Rifle Association. In fact, she isn’t a member of the NRA at all.

The Oakland, Calif., laboratory equipment mechanic regularly visits firing ranges, where, along with other members of her gun club, she shoots a variety of weapons. “Guns are fun to play with,” she says. She even makes her own ammunition.

But wait!  There’s a whammy!

She has no use, however, for the NRA’s conservative political agenda. By her own description, Hoeber is a feisty, liberal, transgender, tattooed, queer, activist feminist.

She belongs instead to another gun advocacy group entirely–The Liberal Gun Club–whose membership ranges, she says, “from socialists, to anarchists who can quote Marx, to Reagan Democrats.”

It’s also tiny – 1,200 members.  And I’m going to guess they’re in the Bay Area – the media only refers to a “Northern California Chapter” – and I’m going to guess they’re long on the “liberal”:

Its mission, she says, is to provide “a place for gun owners to talk to other owners about neat gun stuff, without having to hear how the president is a Muslim-usurper-socialist running a false-flag operation.”

Aaaaaand there you go.  (The NRA has no such institutional belief; to the extent you can find birthers in the NRA, I’m gonna guess you’ll find just as many “Bush took down the Twin Towers!” and “Trigger” types in the LGC.

Still, if they’re solid on the Second Amendment – let a thousand flowers bloom, I say.

Still, they could do with a little less narrative-mongering:

Although liberal gun owners are presumed not to exist, Gardner says they most certainly do.

There are plenty of Democrats in the NRA – and Minnesota’s Real American movement freely acknowledges we’d have never gotten Shall Issue permit reform without Democrat support.

Less paranoia.  More firepower.