It was one of those “Mission Accomplished” moments. But not in a good way.
A week or so I was talking with someone who was considering running for a fairly important political office.
This person would be anidealcandidate for this office – by which I mean both “as a candidate” and “as a conservative policymaker”. I’m not going to go into specifics – I don’t want to give anyone the faintest whiff of a thread by which to identify them.
So what’s holding them back?
Nope – not the fundraising.
It’s the trashing they’d expect to get from the Alliance for a Better Minnesota (with the willing connivance of a media that carries ABM’s water).
And I have to think; that has got to be one of Alida Messinger’s goals – to make running for office as a conservative such an intimately-brutal, self-abnegating torture test that good people can’t justify putting themselves and their families through it.
The MInnPost is an organization I’d very much like to respect. It includes a raft of people I’ve considered good reporters.
But over the course of Minnesota’s gun debate over this past session – brought on by Minnesota DFL legislators launching a raft of authoritarian gun bills, including at least one that called for confiscation of certain firearms – the MInnPost has shown a very crafty bias toward the anti-Second-Amendment crowd. From Erik Black’s series suggesting that the Second Amendment was just too complicated for modern people, to the fawning coverage the entire publication gives Heather Martens (“Executive Director” and one of very, very few actual members of “Protect Minnesota”), down to Doug Grow’s apparently pre-written slime job on Representative Hilstrom’s compromise “good gun bill” during the past session, the MinnPost has supported the orthodox anti-gun line to a fault.
No, correlation doesn’t equal causation. The fact that the MinnPost threw all sense of objectivity and journalistic detachment to the wind this past session on the gun issue and getting a nice-sized grant from a group that has bankrolled anti-gun groups around the country for over a decade could be purely a coincidence. And it’s not like opposing the Second Amendment doesn’t come along with the left-of-center beliefs most of the staff hold.
Given the outcome of the legislative session, the tone of Tuesday night’s meeting sponsored by Protect Minnesota was surprising.
Heather Martens, who leads the organization that long has been a force for advocating for stricter gun-control laws, urged the 23 people who attended the North Minneapolis meeting to think about the “successes” that came out of the session.
On first blush, that may seem like a hard thing to do, given that gun-rights organizations got all they wanted: No universal background checks, no limits on magazine capacities, no assault rifle bans.
But “Protect Minnesota” doesn’t exist to convince people. It exists to manipulate the media – and, via them, the people.
Confederates! With Guns! Defending Slavery!
Which may be what led to this next statement by Grow (with emphasis added):
And by the end of session, cowed legislators refused to even have a floor vote on anything resembling major gun-law change.
That’s just wrong.
The legislators weren’t so much “cowed” as organizing behind Deb Hilstrom’s Good Gun Bill (Ortmann’s in the Senate). Half of the House, comprising reps on both sides of the aisle, co-authored her compromise bill. And when the backroom “negotiations” between the metro DFLers (who were carrying Heather Martens’ water to the point that one, Rep. Alice Hausman, let Heather Martens do her job for her) broke down, the bills were scuppered from the floor by a bipartisan coalition of Republicans and responsible outstate DFLers.
But that doesn’t fit the “big bad NRA!” narrative, does it?
History Is Written By Those With The Printing Presses
Grow carries on his stenography for Martens (emphasis added):
Martens told the group there was victory in the bipartisan support for $1 million to fund a law that requires the state to file data with the feds on those who should be prohibited from owning firearms.
The law requiring the state to file the data was passed in 2009 but was never funded, essentially making it useless.
Will Grow mention that it was a DFL legislature that scuppered that funding? The metrocrat Democrats didn’t want a bipartisan-backed background check to give the impression that it worked better than actual harassment of the law-abiding citizen.
“But Other Than That, Mrs. Lincoln…”
Grow feels obliged to list the outcome of the tiny group’s self-therapy session:
The successes:
Phone-banking (more than 1,000 calls to legislators sitting on the fence).
Legislators reported that constituent calls ran at least 50:1 against the DFL’s bills.
Media coverage was complete.
Yeah, the suspense was killing us on that one.
That’s what Heather Martens does – get friendly media coverage. She’s the Larry Jacobs of the gun issue – the one, single, sole person that every Twin Cities “journalist” calls for the left’s take on guns in Minnesota.
We’ll come back to that.
“Wait – That Was Your “Intellectual” Argument?”
One of the other “Successes”, according to Grow:
Finding a “visceral” message, one that appeals to the emotions as well as the intellect.
I got a laugh there.
Emotion is the only message Heather Martens’ group has! Talk with any of her group’s “members”, I dare you. You’ll get a broadside of anger and grief over Sandy Hook (but never, ever Chicago, or any other crime scene where the kids don’t look like the children of NPR executives) – and not even the faintest whiff of an “intellectual” message.
Although, as always, I do invite Heather Martens on the NARN to make that “intellectual” case. I’ve been asking for nine years, now.
You Don’t Do Business Against The Family
As Martens via Grow noted above, one of their “successes” was “complete” media coverage.
Now, there’s no surprise there. Most of the media editors and producers in the Twin Cities support gun control. Other reporters, I suspect, haven’t the depth of knowledge on the issue to know that pretty much everything Heather Martens has ever said on the issue is a lie.
But Doug Grow’s piece – really, his entire history covering Martens for the MinnPost – has been at a level of obsequious fawning that outstrips the rest of the media.
Why?
Well, I’ve got a theory. And remember – it’s just a theory. I’ve got nothing but circumstantial evidence to back it up.
But do you remember way up above, where we pointed out that the MInnPost gets big bucks from the anti-gun Joyce Foundation?
This might not be “conflict of interest” for Grow, in any actionable sense of the term. But I’d think that identifying the fact that both Doug Grow’s and Rep. Martens’ jobs are paid for, in whole or part, by a non-profit supported by liberal plutocrats that is the single major funder of anti-gun organizations might have been worth a mention.
Again, correlation doesn’t equal causation.
But given the complete abandonment of any sense of balance or concern for fact on the part of the MinnPost in covering the Second Amendment issue – not to mention Grow’s obsequious. fawning, toenail-painting coverage of Martens and her “group” this session – “causation” doesn’t seem like a big stretch.
MPR’s Daily Current – whose Keri Miller is as reliable a PR flak as the DFL has – talked about the upcoming Governor’s race – with a panel of media libs:
After the Friday Roundtable taping wrapped up, Kerri threw one more question to our guests off the air: “Who is emerging as a GOP candidate to challenge Dayton?”
Patricia Lopez: “I don’t even know if that name is out there yet.”
Steve Perry: “The name I keep hearing in sort of an ‘if only’ vein from Republicans is Julie Rosen.”
Lopez: “She has not said ‘no’ and [I heard her give] what sure sounded like a stump speech. She just dropped by the office and I thought, ‘That sure sounded like a stump speech.’”
Brian Bakst: “She would be headed for a primary no matter what, though, because that stadium legislation that she co-sponsored would be a non-sale within the convention.”
Rosen’s generally good, with a few unfortunate traits, most notably her penchant for being among the first to work “across the aisle” – an inevitable last resort when you’re in the minority…
…which she was not, back in 2012, she led a small group of Republicans to ingratiate themselves with Helga Braid Nation without bothering to get any spending concessions from the Governor.
Of course, working with the DFL sans quid pro quo is one of the key criteria on getting the media to accept you…
…temporarily.
I direct you to Berg’s Eleventh Law (“The conservative liberals “respect” for their “conservative principles” will the the one that has the least chance of ever getting elected.”) and its various corollaries, especially the McCain Corollary (“If that respected conservative ever develops a chance of getting elected, that “respect” will turn to blind unreasoning hatred overnight”). You may be certain that if Keri Miller and Patricia Lopez are talking up Julie Rosen, that the Alliance for a Better Minnesota has a campaign in the pocket against her, all ready to go.
Perhaps “Julie Rosen: Stadiums for the 1%”.
Lopez – the editor of that notable bellwether for conservatives, the Strib – notes:
Lopez: “Think about how hard it would be for Dayton to run against a moderate, Republican woman. Yikes.”
I’m not saying Rosen might not be an excellent candidate. I’m willing to be persuaded. Seriously.
But the fact that a round table of de facto DFL apparatchiks – Steve Perry, for Stu’s sake – are mutedly humming her praises can’t be a good thing, right off the bat.
The editorial is stupid, hypocritical, and awash in institutional self-interest disguised – like all of Sturdevant’s work – as populist dooo-goodism:
No sales tax on clothing or haircuts. No alcohol tax hike. No income tax increase for 98 percent of filers. On Sunday, after four months of launching a flotilla of tax ideas, the Legislature’s DFL majorities and Gov. Mark Dayton unveiled a final 2014-15 state budget outline that, on the revenue side of the ledger, is more notable for its omissions than its contents.
Well, no. It’s notable for about two billion of its contents. Nowhere in the Strib’s editorial does the number “$38,000,000,000” occur.
The Strib doesn’t want to give its few readers who actually follow numbers a nasty sticker shock.
There’s plenty to like on the spending side of their balance sheet. The DFL plan pumps an additional $725 million into public education from preschool through graduate school. That’s enough to reverse the deep higher-education cuts of the past two years; ease the squeeze that has some of the state’s public schools operating only four days a week; pay for all-day kindergarten, and offer preschool scholarships to low-income families.
Read: It’s a big kickback to Education Minnesota; they paid good money for that Governor and Legislature, it’s time for them to get their piece of the action.
The plan also includes measures to close a nagging $627 million budget gap, the residue not only of the Great Recession but also of a dozen years of legislative failure to balance the budget in a lasting way.
Further proof that Lori Sturdevant wrote this. Remember 2010?
A Six Billion Dollar Deficit?
The Strib editorial board is rewriting history for the benefit of the smug and the stupid.
But remember – they have their own self-interest at heart:
But the plan’s tax features are a disappointment. They raise revenue in a way that puts Minnesota’s economic competitiveness at risk.
Particularly worrisome is a new marginal tax bracket that will apply to the state’s top 2 percent of incomes. The rate attached to that bracket remains to be set by a House-Senate conference committee, but it is almost certain to be among the nation’s highest, especially after an anticipated temporary surcharge for top earners “blinks on” to get state aid payments to schools back to their normal schedule…While that decision is true to Dayton’s 2010 campaign promises, it comes at an economic price. Making Minnesota an income tax outlier among the states won’t be helpful in attracting and sustaining private-sector investment.
Especially the next round of investors the Strib will need to stave off bankruptcy.
Right?
It gets worse:
In addition, like a bad penny, a bad tax policy idea that disappeared two months ago turned up again Sunday. Applying the state sales tax to some currently untaxed business-to-business purchases will be part of the plan, Senate Majority Leader Tom Bakk announced. He was not specific about which items or services would become taxable, nor about how the revenue thus raised would be used, other than for “significant economic development.”
Oh, well, then. Good enough for me!
The Strib is worried that taxing business to business purchases – which could include advertising, as well as pretty much anything in the supply chain – is going to hit their bottom line. It’s a legitimate worry; businesses of all size, from the Strib all the way down to lil’ ol’ me, are going to see some arbitrary percentage come out of our revenues; we can pass it along and hope that our goods and services continue to get purchased, or we can eat a percentage – 5.5%? 6%? – lopped out of our revenues and try to ride it out.
Regardless of how the money would be used, taxing business inputs is not sound policy. It layers hidden taxes into the cost of goods and services and takes a toll on wages and job creation in the affected industries. Those costs will affect low- and middle-class Minnesotans as surely as a clothing sales tax would. But the spurned clothing tax would have had the virtue of transparency, and could have been offset for low-income earners by a refundable tax credit, as the Senate tax bill provided.
Waaaah.
In for a bad penny, in for a poo-streaked pound, Strib. This is the government that you wanted. You did whatever it took to get this government; you served as an adjunct PR firm for the DFL, you covered up their transgressions, you whinged about “ALEC” while laughing over cocktails with “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”, you did whatever it took to get them into power, and you do your best to cover up the train wreck that is Mark Dayton.
To be sure, businesses will benefit from some of the property tax relief measures that total a hefty $400 million over two years in the DFL plan. But low- and middle-income homeowners and renters ought to be favored as the tax conference committee allocates that sizable sum.
This is Minnesota’s source of information. Good lord.
Where does the Strib think that “relief” comes from?
It’s money that’s redistributed from the parts of the state whose votes the DFL doesn’t need, to the parts whose votes they need to protect.
Who do you suppose that is, Strib?
Republicans have offered no alternative budget plan this session, evidently preferring to stand aside and criticize DFL decisions.
Further proof it’s Sturdevant.
The DFL offered no alternative budget in 2011. The Strib editorial board had not a word to say about it.
They should know that if they scuttle a bonding bill, they will deserve to be seen by this session’s critics as part of the problem.
And the Strib will do its’ level best to make sure they do.
I can not wait for the Strib to go bankrupt again.
In Eric Black’s three part series about the Second Amendment a few weeks back (part 1, 2 and 3), Black – writing in the MInnPost, which operates in part through the generosity of a big grant from the anti-gun zealot Joyce Foundation – notes the not-exactly-earthshaking conclusion that the Second Amendment can confuse people.
Ooh! Confederates! That must mean the MinnPost is writing about bitter gun-clinging Jeebus freaks again! Seriously, MinnPost – I’m never letting you live this down.
And the underlying themes of his series were – as I read ’em – that the Second Amendment is:
Linguistically and legally inscrutable
Confusing
Obsolete.
We’ll address the first two of these today.
Black notes the definitions that vex a surface-level reading of the Second Amendment:
What’s a militia? If you aren’t in a militia, does this have anything to do with you? Or perhaps (and this is roughly the current Supreme Court interpretation) what if “militia” is just an 18th century word for all the able-bodied males in a state who had better have access to arms in case their state needs them to secure its freedom…But if “militia” doesn’t refer to an organized group, what’s “well-regulated” doing in there?
It’s a good question. But it’s hardly a new one.
For much of US history, it didn’t need an answer – since hardly anyone questioned the notion that Militia meant…
…both. The Militia Act of 1903 codified what had been followed in practice since the Militia Act of 1792; the the Militia was composed of…:
The Organized Militia – the National Guard and the Naval Militia, and…
the Unorganized Militia – every able-bodied male between 17 and 45 years of age who wasn’t a member of the Organized Militia. In other words, everyone. Including Eric Black.
But even answering “it’s in the law!” misses the most important point.
The answer to the question “What does the Second Amendment really mean?” started taking its currently definitive shape with the publication, about 20 years ago, of “The Embarassing Second Amendment“, by Dr. Sanford Levinson. At the time, Levinson was a professor at the U of Texas School of Law; the article appeared in the Yale Law Review.
Levinson was and is an arch-liberal with portfolio, who described himself then and now as a card-carrying ACLU member who was very uncomfortable around the notion of civilians owning guns. He’s no mossy originalist; he’s called for a Second Constitutional Convention.
The article – about 80 pages, half of them footnotes – is a highly detailed analyis of the textual, historical, structural, doctrinal, prudential and ethical history of the Second Amendment, its related case law, and analysis of all the above.
And the conclusion was all wrapped up in the title; Levinson, unabashed anti-gun liberal that he is, is embarassed to conclude that the “NRA” was right, and the gun-grabbers were wrong.
It came out a solid decade and a half before the Heller decision, but it was one of the key waypoints on the path between the silly, collectivist post-Miller-decision miasma and the Court’s curent stance on the issue. It was the argument that started even arch-liberal Laurence Tribe on his path from dismissing the originalist interpretation (as Levinson notes in the article) to acceptance that the Amendment is in fact a right “of the people”.
The road to Heller and McDonald started with Levinson’s article.
And he started from the same question Eric Black did: what does “well-regulated militia” mean?
In textual terms – the strict reading of the words? Not much help there: “The text at best provides only a starting point for a conversation. In this specific instance, it does not come close to resolving the questions posed by federal regulation of arms. Even if we accept the preamble as significant, we must still try to figure out what might be suggested by guaranteeing to “the people the right to keep and bear arms;” moreover, as we shall see presently, even the preamble presents unexpected difficulties in interpretation.”
But in historical terms? Things are clearer:
Consider once more the preamble and its reference to the importance of a well-regulated militia. Is the meaning of the term obvious? Perhaps we should make some effort to find out what the term “militia” meant to 18th century readers and writers, rather than assume that it refers only to Dan Quayle’s Indiana National Guard and the like. By no means am I arguing that the discovery of that meaning is dispositive as to the general meaning of the Constitution for us today. But it seems foolhardy to be entirely uninterested in the historical philology behind the Second Amendment.
I, for one, have been persuaded that the term “militia” did not have the limited reference that Professor Cress and many modern legal analysts assign to it. There is strong evidence that “militia” refers to all of the people, or least all of those treated as full citizens of the community. Consider, for example, the question asked by George Mason, one of the Virginians who refused to sign the Constitution because of its lack of a Bill of Rights: “Who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people.” 48 Similarly, the Federal Farmer, one of the most important Anti-Federalist opponents of the Constitution, referred to a “militia, when properly formed, [as] in fact the people themselves.” 49 We have, of course, moved now from text to history. And this history is most interesting, especially when we look at the development of notions of popular sovereignty. It has become almost a cliche of contemporary American historiography to link the development of American political thought, including its constitutional aspects, to republican thought in England, the “country” critique of the powerful “court” centered in London.
One of the school’s most important writers, of course, was James Harrington, who not only was in influential at the time but also has recently been given a certain pride of place by one of the most prominent of contemporary “neo-republicans,” Professor Frank Michelman. 50 One historian describes Harrington as having made “the most significant contribution to English libertarian attitudes toward arms, the individual, and society.” 51 He was a central figure in the development of the ideas of popular sovereignty and republicanism. 52 For Harrington, preservation of republican liberty requires independence, which rests primarily on possession of adequate property to make men free from coercion by employers or landlords. But widespread ownership of land is not sufficient. These independent yeoman would also bear arms. As Professor Morgan puts it, “[T]hese independent yeoman, armed and embodied in a militia, are also a popular government’s best protection against its enemies, whether they be aggressive foreign monarchs or scheming demagogues within the nation itself.” 53
Which gets us into the third of Black’s conclusions, which we’ll come back to later in the series.
As to the notion that the “Right of the people to keep and bear arms” refers to a National Guard that the founding fathers didn’t envision:
Consider that the Fourth Amendment protects “[t]he right of he people to be secure in their persons,” or that the First Amendment refers to the “right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” It is difficult to know how one might plausibly read the Fourth Amendment as other than a protection of individual rights, and it would approach the frivolous to read the assembly and petition clause as referring only to the right of state legislators to meet and pass a remonstrance directed to Congress or the President against some government act. The Tenth Amendment is trickier, though it does explicitly differentiate between “state” and “the people” in terms of retained rights. 42 Concededly, it would be possible to read the Tenth Amendment as suggesting only an ultimate right revolution by the collective people should the “states” stray too far from their designated role of protecting the rights of the people. This reading follows directly from the social contract theory of the state.( But, of course, many of these rights are held by individuals.)
(If you haven’t read Levinson’s entire piece – you need to. It’s one of the most politically influential law-review articles in recent history – and it’s not a bad read, either).
As to “well-regulated?” Levinson doesn’t address it directly – in the parlance of the 1790s, it meant “can do the job”, or “can hit their targets”, a definition that’s changed in the past two-odd centuries -because it’s irrelevant. It’s a right of the people, necessary to the preservation of a free state. It’s a secondary question at most, in the lee of the real question “what is a right of the people?”.
As noted in Heller, it’s not an absolute right; states can ensure that people who aren’t good citizens, felons and the like, don’t get guns. They can legislate the types of guns, within reason; the whole “can you get a flamethrower or a cannon” argument is a strawman, although it’s worth arguing on its own merits (if I’m a law-abiding schnook with a .380 or a shotgun, why wouldn’t I be with a howitzer or a bomb?).
The “What does the Second Amendment Really Mean?” argument – like the “The Second Amendment existed to protect slavery!” argument we dispensed with a few months back – is a manufactured controversy, a re-hashing of questions that were answered literally decades ago among those who pay attention to the issue.
But the gun control movement rarely makes its appeals to people who pay attention to the issue.
Up next – probably Tuesday – the notion that the Second Amendment is just plain obsolete.
As I noted about a week back, being a Second Amendment activist for any length of time – I started in the late eighties – is a little like being Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day; every time the argument cycles, you wind up answering exactly the same questions. Over and over and over.
Some of the questions -“aren’t you compensating for something?” – are stupid conceits. Some – “isn’t a gun in the home many times more dangerous to the owner or people he knows than to criminals?”, or “wasn’t the Second Amendment put in place to protect slave holders?” – are well-worn, long-debunked tropes that keep coming back, just like the villain in the last two minutes of a monster movie.
And others? Well, despite both sides’ oversimplifications, they keep coming back because the Second Amendment is a complex issue, full of historical, linguistic and legal nuance.
Notice I said “complex”. Not “inscrutable”. Because it’s Groundhog Day, and everything, including answering nearly all the questions, has happened before. Maybe several times.
Eric Black – one of the phalanx of deans of Minnesota political journalism – wrote a series a few weeks back at the MinnPost (which is the recent recipient of a big grant from the Joyce Foundation, an anti-gun group that lavishly funds anti-gun astroturf groups around the country). The first of the three parts, “The Second Amendment is a Mess“, came out probably three weeks ago.
Confederate soldiers. With guns. Be afraid; your betters have declared that the Constitution is all about slavery. Except the First Amendment, and of course the emanations of penumbras that give us abortion. But I digress. Prejudicial? Do you think? The MinnPost ran this in a piece about the Second Amendment, and I’m never going to let them live it down.
In stating the case that the Amendment is “a mess”, Black writes:
…the interpretation of any law must start with the actual language of the law as enacted. So, for today, let’s just put the text of the Second Amendment under the microscope. Here is its full text:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
It’s a marvelously unclear statement, to modern sensibilities – and yet for some reason it defined a policy, more or less, through nearly 200 years. Until the 1960s, nobody really questioned that the “…right of the people” in the Amendment meant anything different than “of the people” meant in the First, Third or Tenth Amendments.
We’ll come back to that. I’ll return to Eric Black…
…while noting that I’m getting that feeling Bill Murray had during the last three-quarters of Groundhog Day; it’s deja vu:
It’s a disaster. Seriously. Here’s just a sample of problems it presents.
What’s a militia? If you aren’t in a militia, does this have anything to do with you? Or perhaps (and this is roughly the current Supreme Court interpretation) what if “militia” is just an 18th century word for all the able-bodied males in a state who had better have access to arms in case their state needs them to secure its freedom even though they might not actually “belong” to what we 21st century-types would recognize as a militia, like a National Guard unit that you actually joined and were trained by and that actually has a command structure.
A fair point…
But if “militia” doesn’t refer to an organized group, what’s “well-regulated” doing in there? Who gets to decide whether the (actual or theoretical) militia you are in is well-enough-regulated to trigger (no pun intended) whatever impact the militia clause has? Who is doing the regulating? The state? The United States? The (non-existent but theoretical) organization of all the gun-owners in the state acting as self-regulators?
…and a vexing one.
Indeed, Black’s series seems to focus on three allegations about the Second Amendment:
It’s linguistically and legally inscrutable
It’s confusing
In an era where the US has a standing military, it’s obsolete.
But the first two were rendered null and void nearly a generation ago. And the third exhibits a myopia about history, to say nothing of the Constitution, that needs to be actively fought.
But none of them are new. Indeed, it’s been nearly 20 years since the first two points were put out to pasture among people who are serious about the issue of the Second Amendment.
It was ten years ago yesterday that the Minnesota State Senate passed the Minnesota Personal Protection Act, making Minnesota a “Shall Issue” state.
I was there, back during this blog’s infancy. I sat in the gallery in the Senate and watched as the Metro DFL did what they always do on Second Amendment issues; lie as fast as they can. I cringed a little as the Senate Metrocrat DFLers came back from recess theatrically donning flak jackets to express the fear that was really their only message.
The Metrocrat orcs predicted blood in the streets; Wes “The Original Lying Sack of Garbage” Skoglund claimed he feared being stalked by “gang-bangers with carry permits”, apparently having access to a list of gang-bangers who had clean criminal records who felt the need to pay $100 and get training to use the guns they already have illegally.
They also predicted maybe 90,000 Minnesotans would get permits eventually.
Today the total is somewhere over 140,000. And in ten years, there’s been one unjustifiable homicide by a post-2003 carry permit holder, a rate of .036/100,00, as opposed to the state’s rate of around 1.4/100,000; Minnesota carry permittees are roughly 40 times safer than the average Minnesotan.
As in the 39 other shall issue states, the streets didn’t run red with blood. Indeed, not much happened; nearly no murders, exactly two justifiable self-defense shootings (which are not “good” things, but certainly beat the alternative), this one and this one.
After ten years, the Minnesota Citizens Personal Protection Act’s legacy is this:
Reduced violence: Minnesota’s murder rate is down nearly half since 2003; violent crime in general, nearly 15%. That’s not entirely the responsibility of the MPPA – but it’s the exact opposite of what the DFL-Media noise machine warned us about.
Grassroots Matter: The battle to pass the MPPA mobilized a huge army that represents a silent majority; people on both sides of the aisle, or no side, who care about human rights and civil liberties enough to get involved in an abstruse issue, and donate to it heavily with time, treasure and energy. The victory of the MPPA – from no traction at all to victory between 1995 and 2003 – was among the great bits of genuine grassroots politics in Minnesota history.
The Road Goes On Forever: And remember – always, remember – the way The People, regular workadaddy, hugamommy schlumps with day jobs and mid-size late-model used cars, dwelling far behind the fashion curve and well outside NPR’s target market demos, humiliated the elite of the DFL, Representatives Paymar and Martens and Hausman and Senator Ron “I Went To Harvard” Latz, providing conservatives one of precious few whiffs of victory in a dismal session, splitting the DFL into two, providing one of the most priceless images of the year; a helpless hapless extremist faux-elite metrocrat orc declaring majority to support to a crowd where the good guys outnumbered them 40:1. Every time.
The troops at GOCRA – helped, this year, by the NRA – won the victory ten years ago, and continue to defend your human right to protect your self, your family, your property and your democracy today. If you’re not a GOCRA member and you care about protecting your human right of self-defense, please sign up now.
To the orcs? Keep fearmongering, Representatives Paymar and Hausman. Keep lying, Representative Martens and County Attorney Backstrom; keep sucking the filthy toes of the heirs of Stalin and Pol Pot, Doug Grow. We may be mere peasants, but we beat you ten years ago, we humiliated you this year, and we will always beat you.
When Second Amendment human rights activists saw the movie Groundhog Day, we had two reactions:
How the hell was it that Andie McDowell was the big break-out actress from the movie Sex, Lies and Videotape, and Laura San Giacomo languished in obscurity on LIfetime movies and the series “Just Shoot Me”? [*]
This isn’t a comedy. This is a documentary.
Repeating the same day over and over and over and over and over and over again – it’s sort of what we Second Amendment activists do. Only the cycle, at least in terms of the media’s approach to the issue, runs about every five years or so.
Because there are no new questions on this issue. Since the 1960s, it’s been the same tiny set of points, accusations, strawmen, red herrings and the odd honest question, over and over and over again.
I’ve been active in the Second Amendment human rights movement since the eighties. I’ve been through a series of cycles in media and astroturf interest in the subject; the wave of post-office mass murders in the eighties (whose main vestige today is the phrase “going postal”), the Florida “shall issue” bill, the Stockton schoolyard massacre, the Luby’s massacre and a few copycat episodes, the Shall Issue debate in Minnesota, Columbine and the small wave of copycat school shootings (including the Red Lake massacre in Minnesota), Virginia Tech, and finally the three big shootings of this past year and a half, the Giffords, Aurora and Newtown shootings (but never, it seems over Washington DC or Chicago).
Each of the episodes had a different story. But each of them brought out basically the same set of questions, largely from media people who thought they were the first to ask the questions. They start with the simple, situational questions – “why does anyone need a thirty round magazine?” – and graduate to The Big Questions, “what does the Second Amendment really mean, and do we need it at all?”.
Every. Single. Time.
Anyway – Eric Black at the MinnPost spun the wheel this past week, writing a three part iteration of a whole long slew of the same questions about the Second Amendment that, depending on how long you’ve been a Second Amendment human rights activist, you might have lost count of the times you’ve answered.
But the goal, always, for the Second Amendment human rights supporter, isn’t to do the end-zone happy dance over past triumphs. It’s about convincing and persuading successive generations of people about the rightness of the cause.
And so as this week progresses I’ll be addressing the points in Black’s series.
Dana Milbank reflects the exposed id of the spoiled, cossetted, inside-the-beltway journalist in exactly the same way as Nick Coleman, Doug Grow and Lori Sturdevant do for the self-absorbed, smug Twin Cities journalistic “elite”; all of them wrap a lot of high-minded-sounding wrapping around “being a hack for a party narrative” .
But a hack is a hack – and Milbank may never have been hackier than in today’s piece about an NRA press conference which revolved less around reporting and analyzing the news than in comparing it with Milbank’s narrative and, worse, the prejudices he’s accreted on the subject over decades of being an “elite journalist” and damn glad to tell you so.
But give Milbank this; he doesn’t bury his lede. He really, really doesn’t like gunnies (emphasis added):
The gun-lobby goons were at it again.
The National Rifle Association’s security guards gained notoriety earlier this year when, escorting NRA officials to a hearing, they were upbraided by Capitol authorities for pushing cameramen. The thugs were back Tuesday when the NRA rolled out its “National School Shield” — the gun lobbyists’ plan to get armed guards in public schools — and this time they were packing heat.
About 20 of them — roughly one for every three reporters — fanned out through the National Press Club, some in uniforms with gun holsters exposed, others with earpieces and bulges under their suit jackets.
In a spectacle that officials at the National Press Club said they had never seen before, the NRA gunmen directed some photographers not to take pictures, ordered reporters out of the lobby when NRA officials passed and inspected reporters’ briefcases before granting them access to the news conference.
The NRA has been the target of an awful lot of what would be called “hate speech” if directed at any regular schemiel. Death threats have been the least of it, the background noise.
If a media outlet were the target of this much hatred – whipped up by the likes of Milbank – do you think they might tend to their security?
Hint: Try to walk in to the Washington Post office without an armed security guard giving you a brusque once-over, if you don’t have an employee pass. Get back to us.
It’s The Beltway Way – Provinicalism? Milbank’s got it!
By journalistic custom and D.C. law, of course, reporters don’t carry guns to news conferences — and certainly not when the person at the lectern is the NRA’s Asa Hutchinson, an unremarkable former congressman and Bush administration official whom most reporters couldn’t pick out of a lineup.
Well, then.
Let that be a lesson, peasants; your worth is proportional to how much you’ve hobnobbed inside the beltway lately.
Everything They Need To Know About Policy Analysis, They Learned From Aaron Sorkin – Milbank rattles off the left’s shopping list of shame:
Thus has it gone so far in the gun debate in Washington. The legislation is about to be taken up in Congress, but by most accounts the NRA has already won. Plans for limiting assault weapons and ammunition clips are history, and the prospects for meaningful background checks are bleak.
Watch any of Aaron Sorkin’s poli-tainment; “The West Wing” and “The American President”. Liberal orthodoxy is always presented, without question, not just as the only rational approach, but the only approach. Which is one thing when you’re watching an overhyped TV show. It’s another when you’re reading the blithe assumptions of the “elite” media…
…in this case Milbank, who’s assuming that:
“Limiting assault weapons” is of any use in fighting crime. It’s not; violent crime has dropped like a rock since the end of the 1994 Ban, even as the number of “assault weapons” in general circulation has ballooned).
Limits on “ammunition clips” (grrr) are equally useless; even if criminals obeyed the law, mass murder is not a function of magazine size; having extra magazines is of much more use to defenders than attackers.
The background checks being proposed, above and beyond the NICS system, are of any use in fighting crime. They’re not. Criminals don’t take background checks.
And yet all three are presented critically, as if questioning any of them is too absurd to think about.
If You Can’t Dazzle ‘Em With Fact, Baffle ‘Em With Strawmen – Milbank presents the facts that fit the narrative and ignores the pesky stuff next:
Now, The Post’s Philip Rucker and Ed O’Keefe report, the NRA is proposing language to gut the last meaningful gun-control proposal, making gun trafficking a federal crime. Apparently, the gun lobby thinks even criminals deserve Second Amendment protection.
“Gun trafficking”, depending on your definition of the term (and Milbank doesn’t define it, and I doubt that someone who refers to “Magazine Clips” would know how to define it if he had to) is already illegal, at various state and federal levels (unless you’re the Department of Justice, ironically). The “gun trafficking” bill that Milbank refers to, the Elijah Cummings bill, is a sloppy thing that would ensnare a lot of innocent gun transfers with felonies worth 20 years in prison, and the NRA is right to oppose it.
Not because “the NRA thinks criminals deserve” protection, but because it believes the innocent do.
Milbank is either too lazy to know the difference, or lacks the integrity to say so.
Boogeymen! – Next, Milbank – trapped in a world that he never made – whines about the state of the world:
If the NRA has its way, as it usually does, states will soon be weakening their gun laws to allow more guns in schools.
And why does Milbank think the NRA “usually” gets its way?
Because it’s a voracious all-powerful monster that consumes all in its path?
If that’s what it is, why does Milbank propose it got that way?
Because a solid, growing majority of the American people support it and its agenda. The NRA is rapidly heading toward five million members, and any legislative staffer will tell you that if a phone call representes the opinions of ten other people, then someone who’ll come out and shell out money to join an organization represents at least as many. There are more NRA members in the Twin Cities metro than there are actual activist members of every gun-control group in the country rolled up together.
That’s why the NRA is powerful; unlike their opponents, they represent actual people in vast numbers.
And all those uppity proles have just gotta piss Milbank off.
Dana Milbank, Low-information producer – Get a load of this next statement:
The top two recommendations Hutchinson announced Tuesday involved firearms in the schoolhouse. The first: “training programs” for “designated armed school personnel.” The second: “adoption of model legislation by individual states to allow for armed school personnel.”
Hutchinson claimed that his task force, which came up with these ideas, had “full independence” from the NRA. By coincidence, the proposals closely matched those announced by the NRA before it formed and funded the task force.
Oh, cry us a river, Dana. Everyone claims to be independent of their side’s 900 pound gorilla. Major media claim they’re not at the beck and call of the Democrats. Governor Dayton claims Alida Messinger doesn’t make him dance like an organ-grinder monkey. Let it go.
The task force did scale back plans to protect schools with armed volunteer vigilantes, opting instead for arming paid guards and school staff — at least one in every school. States and school districts “are prepared” to pay for it, Hutchinson declared.
The task force garnished the more-guns recommendations with some good ideas, such as better fencing, doors and security monitoring for schools, and more mental-health intervention. But much of that is in the overall Senate legislation that the NRA is trying to kill.
And why does Milbank suppose the NRA is trying to kill those passive “good ideas?”
Because they’re part of a bill with many noxious, stupid provisions.
Save It For “Lifetime Movie Scriptwriting” Class, Mr. Milbank – Milbank’s big finish is apparently also an audition for a Mad Max reboot:
If so, American schoolchildren may grow accustomed to the sort of scene Hutchinson caused Tuesday, protected by more armed guards than a Third World dictator.
Where does Milbank live?
A quarter of schools have armed guards already. In urban schools with over 1,000 students, the figure is already over 90%. Many schools feature metal detectors, pat-downs and permanently-assigned uniformed officers.
Our kids, bombarded by our onanistic, self-absorbed media with images of carnage that bely the fact that schools are safer now than they’ve been in decades, and that violent crime is down 40-odd percent in the past 20 years and is falling faster as the number of civilian guns explodes, are forced to endure “huddle on the floor and hope you don’t get killed” drills – called “lock downs” by more clinical-sounding school administrators.
Seriously – on what planet is “huddling in the corner and hoping you don’t get murdered” better than “there’s someone here whose job it is to protect us?”
Note to Dana Milbank: I’m sure your journalistic credentials, including your “independence” from the nation’s major gun control groups, are in order.
But if you were working as a PR flak for the Brady Factory, how would your writing be any different?
When you’re a conservative, distrust of the media – like most large institutions – is part and parcel of the job.
You probably accept that, for whatever reason – from systemic bias to cultural confirmation bias to being paid off by George Soros – that the media has a comprehensive bias toward the left.
And you notice it on some issues more than others. For example, you notice that anti-gun groups – for example, “Protect Minnesota”, led by Representative Heather Martens (DFL – 66A), a woman who has never, not once, uttered a substantively accurate or true original statement about guns or the Second Amendment – gets breathless, slavish coverage from the Twin Cities media, whose mania for “balance” obscures, in their coverage, the fact that the pro-Second-Amendment movement includes thousands of actual activists, while Martens’ group and the other antis muster…
…well, Martens and about a dozen of her pals.
And it doesn’t take a political rocket scientist (?) to notice that while their groups have virtually no electoral clout, Martens is apparently a big enough cheese among DFLers on Capitol Hill that she gets treated like, well, a Representative herself.
So after the hearings broke up last night, I watched who went where for a bit.
After he got done with the media, Rep. Paymar lit his afterburners and ran for the bleachers to meet Representative Martens and Jane Kay from Action Moms:
Kay, Martens and Paymar, talking about how much clout they have when those Million Moms finally show up. Someday. Honest.
DFL stenographer and former Strib columnist Doug Grow – now with DFL PR shop MinnPost – painted Jane Kay’s toenails:
Grow, Kay
Hey, maybe his story about last night won’t be pre-written!
And at the end of the night, you had pretty much every anti-gun activist in town gathered with the DFL PR coalition:
Grow, Kay, Nick “I’m Not The DFL’s Monkey” Coleman (from “The Uptake”), a staff guy and Martens talking, presumably, about what a bunch of wingnuts their opposition are.
Us gunnies? We had the fun down front:
Second Amendment attorney David Gross mixing it up with an anti who claimed we should “learn our history”, that firearms confiscation had nothing to do with the Holocaust. The anti, by the way, reportedly had walked up to the child of one of the GOCRA members in attendance and said “You’ll grow up to be a better person than your father” at a hearing last week. These people ooze class, don’t they?
Jane Kay is the leader of “Moms Demand Action”, which is what they renamed the “Million Mom March” after they realized they actually had about two members in Minnesota. While more objectively accurate – it might be better still to call it “Mom Demands Action” – I’m not sure if they considered that the name sounds a little like a made-for-Cinemax movie.
I’m sure she’s a perfectly lovely human being and all. But the contempt she feels for those who disagree with her is emblematic of the intellectual entitlement the anti-gun crowd brings to the table.
She tweeted this (from a protected account, naturally) last night:
She seems to be of the opinion that you can either care about the Constitution or children, but not both.
Of course, Ms. Kay, I own guns precisely because I care about my children – enough to defend them in some meaningful way. And because protecting them – and eventually, teaching them to defend themselves and, God willing and yet heaven forfend, my grandchildren, is one of the paramount duties a parent has.
I’d love to discuss this with Ms. Kay. But it’s hard to get past the air of invincible condescension.
Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talkradio show – brings you the best in Minnesota conservatism, as the Twin Cities media’s sole source of honesty!
I’ll be on from 1-3 today. I’ll be talking about my trips to the Capitol this past week, Doug Grow’s really really dumb column, why Republicans should support the Hilstrom bill, a little about Rand Paul, and a big announcment. We’ll also be talking with Twila Brase about the Health Insurance Exchange (HIX) bill, and with Dr. John Kern about the DFL’s bid to abolish teacher basic skills tests.
Brad Carlson is back on “The Closer” from 1-3 tomorrow. Tune on in!
(All times Central)
So tune in to all four hours of the Northern Alliance Radio Network, the Twin Cities’ media’s sole guardians of honest news. You have so many options:
I was down at the State Capitol yesterday for a press conference, as Representative Deb Hilstrom (DFL Brooklyn Park) introduced the gun bill/s we talked about yesterday.
The bills, as we noted yesterday, would exert the state to solve actual problems – close gaps in the background check system, add mandatory penalties for using guns in crimes or possessing them illegally…
…y’know. Controversial stuff.
At the presser, I saw a big group of legislators from both chambers and both parties lining up to support Hilstrom’s proposal. Reps, Senators, Democrats, Republicans – it was probably the most bipartisan assembly I’ve seen that wasn’t in the lounge at the Kelly Inn after hours.
Not just legislators; guys in uniform. They weren’t just there for the fun of it – guys in uniform never are. No, they were from the Minnesota Sheriff’s Association.
And I saw media. Oh, lord, did I see media.
And Heather Martens was there, naturally; where there is truth about the Second Amendment, Martens will be there. To lie. And lie and lie and lie (note to the media who bothered to speak to her; she has uttered not one substantial word of truth in her years at the capitol. Ask me).
And the “groups” she represents put out a call for their “membership” to turn out in force to oppose this bill – probably remembering the hundreds of Second Amendment supporters who turned out daily to oppose the DFL’s gun grab bills a few weeks ago.
We’ll come back to them.
One person who was not there was Doug Grow, from the MInnPost.
To be fair, I haven’t seen Grow in person in over 20 years; I might not recognize him.
But judging by the story he wrote about the conference, and the bill itself, even if Grow was there, his story was pre-written, and would have appeared in exactly the same form had Mothra emerged from the Supreme Court chamber shooting flame from wherever Mothra did whatever he did, since I never watched the movie.
Rep. Debra Hilstrom, DFL-Brooklyn Center, has discovered again that there is no comfortable middle ground when the subject is guns.
At noon at the Capitol, Hilstrom, standing with Hennepin County Sheriff Richard Stanek and Rep. Tony Cornish, the gun-toting legislator from Good Thunder, introduced a gun bill that she said “can bring people together’’ on the volatile subject of guns.
“Gun-toting”.
Scare quotes.
No, no bias here.
The Astroturf Consensus
Grow, like most of the Twin Cities mainstream media, labors under the delusion that there’s a large, organized mass of people supporting gun control, and that they were out in force yesterday.
Her words were still echoing in the Capitol when critics, who had hoped for much stronger actions from the Minnesota Legislature, lambasted the effort of Hilstrom and a bipartisan group of 69 other legislators to “close gaps’’ in current state gun law.
“This is just a band-aid over a huge problem,’’ said Jane Kay of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense, an organization formed in the days following the mass shooting of school children in Newtown, Conn.
Only in America can a two-month old pressure group with fewer members than there were legislators standing behind Hilstrom get the breathless adoration of the media. Which is what “Moms Demand Action” and “Protect Minnesota” both are; astroturf checkbook advocacy groups funded by liberal plutocrats with deep pockets – with “membership” numbers in the single digits.
Provided they share the goal of fluffing the left’s withering narrative on gun control.
Of course, Grow wasn’t the only offender; Pat Kessler of Channel 4 asked Hilstrom why the bill included no universal background check which, he asserted, “70% of Minnesotans oppose”.
The correct answer – the polls ask people about background checks without explaining the consequences of those checks as the DFL and Governor Messinger Dayton currently propose them; they will result in a de facto gun registry, which is a necessary first step to universal confiscation.
More on gun-related media polls in another piece soon.
The Pre-Written Story
But Grow himself is the real problem here. His piece, while short on the sort of insight that actually engaging people on both sides of the issue might have given it, is long on evidence that Grow wrote the story long before yesterday’s press conference.
There’s the inflammatory reference to every leftymedia member’s favorite boogyman:
The bill has the support of the National Rifle Association, presumably because it does nothing to require background checks on all gun sales and because it does nothing to restrict sales of military-style weapons or even the quantity of rounds in ammunition magazines.
Well, no.
The bill has the support of gun-rights organizations because instead of wasting time and effort putting niggling restrictions on the rights of the law-abiding that didn’t affect crime in any way the first ten years they were tried, they actually address the real problem; criminals, the insane, the addled, and the holes in the data the state sends to the Feds for the background check system.
(And while the NRA makes a nice, recognizable, stereotyped boogeyman for the lazy propagandist, the NRA actually has very little to do with the day to day heavy lifting of the gun rights movement in Minnesota. It’s the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance that turned out 500 or more people a day to attend the gun grab hearings a couple of weeks back. Grow either doesn’t know that, or doesn’t want people to know that. You know where my money is).
More evidence that Grow wrote the story entirely off of DFL and “Protect Minnesota” chanting points?
Despite the fact that it’s a bill that authors hoped would unite people, it seems to be dividing. Yes, there was a mix of Republican and DFL representatives standing with Hilstrom, Cornish and Stanek. But there were no law-enforcement organizations represented at the news conference where the proposal was unveiled.
That’s false.
Here’s the video of the press conference:
See all those guys in uniforms?
Scroll in to 1:12. That’s Sheriff Rich Stanek, Hennepin County Sheriff, speaking on behalf of the Minnesota Sheriff’s Association.
Either Grow is lying, or he wrote the entire story with no knowledge of the facts of the story.
Short On Fact, Long On Jamming Words Into Peoples’ Mouths
Grow follows by saying…:
There also were no DFL senators, though presumably the bill will be as attractive to outstate senators as it appears to be to many outstate DFL representatives.
Grow throws that in there as if it’s a substantive fact related to the bill itself. It’s not. While most outstate legislators no doubt remember the DFL debacle of 2002, it’s also more than plausible Tom Bakk wants to keep his powder dry.
In other words, presence of no DFL senators is a non-factor, unless you’re a low-information reader.
Grow next swerves through fact – and in so doing, undercuts his own premise. I’ll add emphasis:
Rep. Michael Paymar, DFL-St. Paul, and the chairman of the House public safety committee, has indicated he has no desire to have the bill heard by his committee. Paymar is pushing a bill that would require purchasers of guns at flea markets and gun shows to go through background checks.
Yet, given the large number of co-authors with Hilstrom, there likely are ways for the bill to weave its way through the legislative process.
Yes. There are a large number of co-authors; so many they had to submit it not one, not two, but three times to get them all on. Over half of the House is signed on as authors of the bill.
Michael Paymar wants to thwart the will of the representatives of over half of Minnesota’s voters?
Putting Thirty Shots From An AR15 Into A Strawman
Finally, Grow takes his whacks at some of the legislators who’ve violated the DFL’s narrative:
[Representative Tony] Cornish, usually a lightning rod in the gun debate, said he was taking a different role regarding the fate of this bill.
“Several of my statements (in the past) have been controversial,’’ he said. “Today my role is to be a peacemaker.’’
No sooner had he said that than he uttered a statement that raises the hackles of those hoping for stronger gun measures.
“I want to thank the NRA for helping (on the bill),’’ he said. He went on to say that the bill “contains nothing for gun owners to fear.’’
Er, who’s “hackles” got “raised”, here? And why?
Was it the involvement of the NRA? Your dog whistles aren’t our problem.
Or was it the quote about gun owners having nothing to fear? Is that the actual goal, here?
Hilstrom, in her seventh term, refused to talk about her true feelings of the bill. Rather, she kept speaking of the importance of “passing a bill that will solve real problems.’’
She did point out that she never has sought the endorsement of the NRA and that in the past she has received a “C,’’ “D,’’ and “F’’ from the NRA.
OK.
So what?
If she’s doing the right thing – which, for a majority of Minnesotans, is “solving problems”, rather than attacking the law-abiding gun owner – then I don’t care if she’s a life-time “F” rating. And I don’t care about her true feelings; I don’t care if she’s being used as an escape hatch by the DFL to get out of the embarassment of the Paymar/Hausman gun grab bills.
Guess Who!
Finally: I owe the Twin Cities media an apology. I’ve said that Larry Jacobs is the most over-quoted person in the Twin Cities media. And he is. David Schultz is right up there.
But in the “single-issue” category, Heather Martens – “Executive Director” and, near as we can tell, one of less than a half-dozen members of “Protect Minnesota” (and de facto representative of House District 66A) and a woman whose entire body of public assertions is lies, dwarfs them all:
Heather Martens, executive director of Protect Minnesota, derided the bill as “NRA-approved.’’
Boo! Boogeyman! Hiss!
Listen, MinnPost-reading dogs! There’s your whistle!
“Any bill that fails to address the gaping holes in our background check law falls far short of the public’s demand for the right to be safe in our communities,’’ Martens said in a statement.
And there’s another lie. The bill does address the gaping hole that exists in the background check laws.
No, not the misnamed “gun show loophole”, which is another media myth. The real gap is the data that the state isn’t sending to the feds; the Hilstrom bill fixes it.
GOCRA’s Mountain, Grow And Martens’ Molehill
Leaving aside the fact that Grow got pretty much everything in this story wrong – and wrong in a way that suggests not only that he wasn’t at Hilstrom’s press conference but that he wrote the whole thing straight from chanting points long before Hilstrom took to the microphone – the most pernicious thing about Grow’s story is that it tries to create the impression that there’s a genuine battle between two titanically-powerful sides to this debate.
There’s not.
In terms of legislators? A bipartisan sample of over half of the House is on board co-authoring Hilstrom’s bill(s). A thin, runny film of metro-DFL extremists is backing the Paymar/Hausman/Simonson gun grab bills.
In terms of the public? Last month, GOCRA put out a call for people to come to the Capitol. And they did.
No, really:
“Protect Minnesota” and “Moms Demand Action” put out a call yesterday for people to come out and protest against Hilstrom’s bill.
Here they are:
Well, not literally. But no, other than Heather Martens, nobody showed up.
There are literally more DFL legislators co-authoring Hilstrom’s bill than there are members of “Protect Minnesota” and the “Moms Demand Action” put together.
“Minnesotans spoke so loudly during this last election refusing to adopt that proposed constitutional amendment. It was a very clear statement, and I think we’re now ready to take the next step, and it means everything to our families.”
Surrounded by supporters, Clark and Sen. Scott Dibble, who was instrumental in the anti-amendment campaign, said their side is prepared to combat the flood of national money that’s been promised against the proposal.
I’ve been saying since the opening day of the session that the DFL was going to stall on gay marriage – and they have.
And they’ll continue to; even the DFL’s house PR organs (including the MinnPost, from which I quote) note that the DFL leadership is going very slow:
Although DFL leaders have said they personally support same-sex marriage, they haven’t been overly enthusiastic in discussing legislative action with the press.
This is echoed in fundraising letters being sent to gay marriage supporters; outstate DFLers, already alarmed by the DFL’s gun grabs and a DFL tax bill that is going over outstate like a Lindsay Lohan one-woman show in Branson, are queasy about the bill; they remember (even if the media doesn’t) that the Marriage Amendment passed, often convincingly, in most of Minnesota; it was stopped by cataclysmic turnout in the Metro.
Where, unlike greater Minnesota, the issue is a winner for the DFL.
My fearless prediction: the DFL will introduce the bill with much fanfare (ok, that’s not a prediction, that’s what happened). It’ll quietly die in committee. And the Alliance for a Better Minnesota will send its flying monkeys out next year to spin the death as perfidy by a GOP caucus that, in fact, controls nothing.
Final scorecard: those who prosper from low-information voters: 1. Gays who wish to marry: 0.
Minnesota newspapers, largely, supported Governor Messinger Dayton and the DFL. They largely not only bought the “Alliance For A Better Minnesota’s” bill of goods hook line and sinker, but most of them worked tirelessly to propagate it, and to squelch dissent from it.
They studiously avoided, almost completely, any reporting that would have impeded the DFL’s rise to power.
The Minnesota media, at large, were among the DFL’s most valuable players this past two electoral cycles. At the highest levels – the Strib, the PiPress, and at least the programming arm of MPR – they serve as the DFL’s Praetorian Guard.
But now? Now that the governor is tacking 5.5% sales taxes (for starters) onto print services, advertising and retail newspaper sales?
Business groups and retailers complain that the proposal would cost jobs. As he spoke to the Minnesota Newspaper Association, several editors and newspaper owners complained that a sales tax on newspapers would hurt their industry.
Tom West, the managing editor of the Morrison County Record in Little Falls, spoke about his concerns during a question and answer session.
“We are the ones who cover local government and state government, and we are wondering why you would think it would be a good idea to have less information about government and what government is up to,” West said.
(Slightly less cynical answer: “While your contributions to DFL hegemony were vital, you don’t have the same political clout as AFSCME, the SEIU or MPR).
(Cynical and partisan but realistic answer: “How about not just “covering local government”, but turnin a critical eye on the DFL? For once?”)
Others said that expanding the sales tax to newspaper ink, paper and advertising would result in job losses. Dayton said he understood the concern but did not back away from his plan.
Job losses only matter if they’re union.
Small papers aren’t union.
Big papers are – and we’ll see what happens there.
As to the rest of you newspapers? You got the government you mostly worked for, largely shilled for, and for the most part operated as in-the-bag PR agents for. Most of your editorial stances praised Dayton and the DFL’s return to power.
So now you’re saying you’re not Happy To Pay For A Better Minnesota?
Suck it.
BONUS QUESTION FOR DFLers: What do you think happens when you tack 5.5% onto the price of something?
All other things being equal, people buy 5.5% less of it.
Ponder losing 5.5% of your business overnight. Ponder hard.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails to elaborate on the subject of this piece, assailing the MinnPost’s Eric Black’s participation in the resurrection of the long-forgotten “Second Amendment Was Written To Protect Slavery!” meme:
I forgot about this when I wrote to debunk Carl Bogus’ law review article. Bogus relies for some of his historical evidence about firearms use on Michael Bellesiles, saying:
“Most militiamen were not even good shots.[168] We think of men as having grown up with guns in colonial America.[169] We assume they were sharpshooters by necessity. Did not men have to become proficient with muskets to protect themselves from ruffians and Indians or to hunt to put food on the table? Contrary to myth, the answer, in the main, is no. In reality, few Americans owned guns.[170] When Michael A. Bellesiles reviewed more than a thousand probate records from frontier areas of northern New England and western Pennsylvania for the years 1765 to 1790, he found that although the records were so detailed that they listed items as small as broken cups, only fourteen percent of the household inventories included firearms and [Page 342] fifty-three percent of those guns were listed as not working.[171] In addition, few Americans hunted. Bellesiles writes: “From the time of the earliest colonial settlements, frontier families had relied on Indians or professional hunters for wild game, and the colonial assemblies regulated all forms of hunting, as did Britain’s Parliament.”[172]
You remember Michael Bellesiles? He supposedly studied probate records and found practically nobody owned guns in those days, so he wrote a book called “Arming America” saying the scarcity of private firearms ownership proved the Founding Fathers could not have intended the Second Amendment to refer to private firearms ownership, but must have intended it to refer to government militias.
James Lindgren at Northwestern University writes on The Volokh Conspiracy to remember his work taking Bellesiles down. And I know you remember how Bellesiles claimed to have lost his research notes in a flood.
No serious historian believes Bellesiles today. And to the extent Bellesiles is the foundation for Bogus, no serious legal scholar should believe Bogus, either.
Joe Doakes
Como Park
Reading Bogus’ original article, most of the citations are to, well, himself. But listing Bellesisles is about on par with listing Milli Vanilli.
Brian Lambert may now respond with a dismissive, name-calling bit of snark before going back to metaphorically painting Mark Dayton’s toenails.
But the Governor released the budget at an 11AM press conference yesterday.
At 11:13, Carrie Lucking – the “Executive Director” of the “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”, one of the huddle of lefty non-profits via which liberal plutocrats and the unions launder millions of dollars and run the DFL’s entire messaging operation – tweeted:
Thirteen minutes.
Maybe Carrie Lucking is an incredibly fast reader.
A flurry of conservatives on Twitter wondered last night – is that how Lucking got enough detail about the budget, 13 minutes after it was announced, to call a critic a “liar?”
I thought that showed too much faith in Governor Dayton. I think it’s more likely ABM gave the budget to the Administration.
Either way – I need your help here.
Back in the 2000s, the media spun up a tempest in a teapot over Governor Pawlenty’s involvement with an outside group, and the potential impact that had on the Pawlenty Administration’s message and policies. It passed quickly, because there was no there there. But the media gave it its’ 15 minutes.
Does anyone remember the parties involved in that? I only remember the dimmest possible outlines of the episode.
But compared with the collegial clubbiness between the Twin Cities media – especially the Strib and the MinnPost – and the various political non-profits and advocacy groups, I think it’d be useful for comparison’s sake.
UPDATE: I need to point out that the heavy lifting on Twitter was done by Dave Thul and Sheila Kihne. They smelled the rat. I just wrote about it.
Brian Lambert took umbrage to Joe Doakes’ and my dissection of Eric Black’s anti-gun piece last week in the MinnPost, which cited a justifiably obscure theory by Dr. Carl Bogus.
Look out! It’s gun owners! At least, according to the MinnPost. I can just see the “job” interviews at the MinnPost; “do you now, or have you ever, supported an originalist interpretation of the Tenth Amendment, or ever blasphemed against the Commerce Clause?” Behold the liberal alt-media.
At the conservative consortium blog True North, Mitch Berg goes after our Eric Black on the issue of … “gun grabbin’ ”: [lengthy quote from my piece removed] The sweat stains are showing among our gun-fondling friends.
Over the years on this blog, I’ve made certain observations about human behavior as manifested through online media, like blogs and Twitter.
I’ve captured and codifed some of these observations as “Berg’s Law“, a series of common observations that I’m pretty sure are universal.
One of the most commonly-invoked Laws is “Berg’s Seventh Law”, which states “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds”.
To: Eric Black, MinnPost
From: Mitch Berg, Peasant
Re: The New JournoList?
Mr. Black,
You built your reputation as a reporter. And for that, I give you all due respect.
I was a reporter, too. Not much of one; a couple of radio stations, some free-lance print work. Nothing big, and certainly nothing to build a career out of – but I did learn one thing, and practice it; a reporter is supposed to ask questions.
And while I apply only the broadest possible definition of “journalist” to myself, I do ask questions. I’m told I’m not bad at it, at least on the radio; even a reporter on your side of the aisle commented on it (I’ll direct you to paragraph 16). So it’s not a foreign concept to me.
Now, far be it from me to gainsay one of the deans of Minnesota political writing, but I’ve got a question here.
Last week, you wrote about Dr. Carl Bogus’ assertion from fifteen years agothat the Second Amendment was written to protect slavery. Now, my friend and frequent commenter Joe Doakes – who actually is a lawyer – pointed out that Bogus’ theory is given no weight by the legal academy, because it’s been pretty soundly debunked and, more signally, ignored by legal scholars; Bogus’ theory is only kept alive by anti-gunners who like, as Doakes put it, to “borrow his degree to lend them legitimacy”.
So here’s what I’m curious about.
Bogus published his theory fifteen years ago. It was roundly shredded in short order. It was substantially ignored (beyond a few trivial references to incidental research) in the SCOTUS’ debates that led to the Heller and McDonald decisions, which respectively adopted the “individual right” definition of the 2nd Amendment and incorporated that definition onto the states.
And yet somehow last week Bogus’ theory was pulled from legal history’s scrap heap and restored to glorious prominence by the gun-grabber left.
Hey! It’s Confederate soldiers, defending slavery! The MinnPost ran this image in Eric Black’s story last week about Carl Bogus’ theory. I’m never going to let the MinnPost live this one down!
So I got to checking. The first I heard about it was a comment on my blog on 1/17, which pointed to your article in MinnPostthe same day; around that time, I started seeing a lot of lefties on Twitter chanting more or less the same thing. Danny Glover and Roger Ebert had spoken or written about it, stating the “slavery” theory as settled fact, around the same time. And the story was churning around the leftyblog fever swamp, as these things do, once the likes of Kos and Crooks and Liars repeated the meme (which meant every bobbleheaded leftyblog carried it like it was the revealed truth).
Disarmed people – Jews, in this case – dealing with the SS, which is short for “Schützstaffel”, which loosely translated means “Department of Homeland Security”. Connect the dots, people. The MinnPost can run its inflammatory, searing, emotionally manipulative images, I’ll run mine. Mine happen to be good analogies based on historical fact, but whatever.
Now, a concerted Googling (and a reading of your piece) seems to show that the “writing” about the subject links back to last Tuesday, when lefty talk show host Thom Hartmann – who is sort of the Dennis Prager of the left, only without the intelligence or credentials – wrote a piece on the lefty überblogs TruthOutand Smirking Chimp , lavishly citing Bogus’ theory.
Oops, I did it again! More disarmed people! The sign above their heads says “Arbeit Macht Frei”, which is German for “Work Creates Freedom”, which was sort of the “Hope and Change” of the era. Again – you publish your inflammatory, emotionally manipulative images? I’ll publish mine.
And I thought the dynamics of the story were interesting; in two days, the “story” of Bogus’ “theory”, which had laid mostly dormant since being shredded in the court of academic and public opinion half a generation ago, suddenly was on the lips and minds and blogs of, it seemed, every lefty, from the fever swamp to Hollywood (pardon the redundancy) to, well, MinnPost and a half a million chuckleheaded leftybots on Twitter.
I’ve been writing online for a long time, Mr. Black. I’ve seen memes come and go. The “come” side usually takes a while; someone writes something, it gains traction, it holds sway, it rolls away like the tide. It usually takes a little while.
The Klan attacking black people! And therein lies the real truth – and the Berg’s Seventh Law reference; Gun Control actually has its roots in American racism. The first serious American gun control laws were aimed at – you guessed it – blacks. In fact, the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment was written in part in response to a Texas law aimed at former slaves who’d been shooting up Klansmen.
But the Bogus theory went, metaphorically, from zero to sixty in four seconds flat.
Didja notice that?
Anyway, those are the facts; Bogus’ theory came, was shredded, went away for fifteen years, and suddenly re-germinated across the broad swathe of lefty opinion over the course of two measly days. Now, leaving aside the fact that the theory is, well, bogus (as noted last week) – wouldn’t it have been a useful fact for the reader to know that Bogus’ theory has been languishing in academic obscurity for 15 years for a reason? I know, that would have been a statement against your interest and, I suspect, the MinnPost’s, but it’s kinda significant, no?
But here’s my question: aren’t you the least bit curious as to the, er, pace at which this meme swept the left? From “forgotten” to “conventional wisdom” in two days?
It almost seems as if there’s some sort of back-channel communication – one might even call it a list of journalists, absurd as that sounds – a, for lack of a better term, “Journo List” that syncs the leftymedia up on the major chanting points.
No, I know – that’s just crazy talk. I know.
Anyway – did that strike you as odd in any way? If not, why?
That is all.
PS: Well, no. It’s not. Because while the theory that the Second Amendment was “about protecting slavery” is pretty much a fringe, fever-swamp conceit, it is a matter of settled historical fact and Constitutional Law that the roots of the gun control movement are intensely racist.
I hinted at this in the past few weeks; one of the hard parts about being a Second Amendment supporter is that it feels a lot like the movie Groundhog Day. Every time the left goes through one of its spasms of gun-grabbing, they bring up the same, exact, precise points every single time. There is nothing new, ever, under the sun when it comes to anti-gun “arguments”. Never!
And yet every single liberal, especially in the media, receives the same threadbare worn-out arguments from their elders during every spasm of this debate, as if they’ve discovered some new logical Killer Anti-Gun App. And they trot them out with all the pride of a toddler that just made a good pants, repeating the moldy meme with a nod and a knowing, condescending wink, as if they think you’re lucky they suffer fools like you.
And you – me, in this case – shake your head, and re-muster facts that you’ve been deploying since before your children were born, and feel a little like the burned-out gunfighter in a Clint Eastwood movie; I’ve lived this day, or at least this argument, more times than I can remember. I know these facts backward and forward. There is not a corner of the left’s argument that I can’t make better than the lefty I’m wasting my time with.
And on you go.
Fortunately, we’re not alone.
———-
The problem with Eric Black isn’t that he’s a lefty who’s been getting steadily more “out” about it for years, in the “pages” of the MinnPost, whose focus has been sliding away from “legitimate journalism” toward “being a DFL Public Relations organ” for this past year or so.
It’s that he believes, and reports, so much that is just not so.
I read it yesterday, and thought “even in monster movies, there’s only so many times you have to kill the critter before the movie ends”. So with the esteemed Carl Bogus.
Fortunately, Joe Doakes from Como Park – an actual lawyer – took over. I’ll add the odd bit of emphasis to Joe’s email:
God, not that old chestnut again. Carl Bogus? Really?
Okay, facts: Bogus was indeed a law professor. He wrote a law review article for UC Davis in 1998. He admitted there was plenty of evidence the Founders intended the Second Amendment so ordinary people could resist tyrants. But he argued Southern slaveholders probably wanted to keep ordinary people armed to prevent slave rebellion. Therefore, the Second Amendment might have served two purposes: resist tyrants and oppress slaves. Bogus’ explicit argument is that ordinary people couldn’t have resisted tyranny and oppressed slaves acting alone so when the Founders said “the people” they must have meant “state militias.” His implicit argument is that since slavery is bad, the Second Amendment is tainted so we can ignore it.
Bogus’ arguments were immediately rebutted by other legal scholars, see for example “The Approaching Death of the Collectivist Theory of the Second Amendment” by Douglas Roots, 39 Duq. L. Rev. 71.; and “The Supreme Court’s Thirty-Five Other Gun Cases” by David Kopel, 18 St. Louis U. L. Rev. 99. The Supreme Court cited several of Bogus’ works in District of Columbia v. Heller, 128 S. Ct. 2783 (2008) but the majority opinion expressly rejected his collectivist legal theory. Bogus was mentioned in Justice Stevens’ dissent in MacDonald v. Chicago, 130 S. Ct 3020 (2010) as the source for a single statistic on handgun violence, but not even Stevens endorsed Bogus’ collectivist legal theory. Nobody endorses his secret slavery theory.
Bogus’ legal theories are not taken seriously by Constitutional scholars, only by gun-control advocates hoping to rent his diploma to give the appearance of credibility. That’s why Bogus was appointed a director of Handgun Control, Inc. and served on the advisory board of the Violence Policy Center. That’s also why Eric Black cites him. It’s as if the Flat Earth Society suddenly learned of this brilliant mathematician named Ptolemy who PROVED the Sun does indeed revolve around the Earth and thus vindicated what they’ve believed all along. Sorry, fellas, serious scholars have moved beyond that hoax.
Joe Doakes
Como Park
I’m thinking; is there an issue besides guns where a journalist can get away with so much guileless incuriosity as the gun issue?
And wrap that incuriosity in so much misguided-yet-inflammatory rhetoric?
Inevitably, the MinnPost ran a photo of Confederate soldiers along with Black’s piece. I suppose we should be thankful it wasn’t a photo of white guys lynching a black guy, huh? That said, I suspect I just gave some clever MinnPost copy editor another bright idea for the next round of anti-gun articles, along with the next, inevitable citation of Carl Bogus as an expert on the Second Amendment. You’re welcome, MinnPost.
Feminist dogma patrol, maybe, and even that doesn’t generally impact the Constitution.
Mark Dayton’s mental health? That’s not so much “incuriosity” as “a gentlemans’ agreement between journalists and the DFLers who own them”.
What is it about Second Amendment issues that makes so many journalists act like journalists think mere partisan bloggers act?
———-
Nothing against Eric Black, of course. He’s doing his job, which these days seems to be “advancing the DFL and Democrat Parties’ narratives”. It’s good to have a gig.
But the mainstream media in the Twin Cities has gotten a free pass on their habit of just slopping whatever crap fits the DFL’s narrative in front of the public for far too long.
Let’s take a run back to 2008 The DFL controlled the legislature and everything else but the govenorship.
ME: “So, DFL – if you’re so hot for gay marriage, why don’t you pass a gay marriage bill?”
DFLers: “Because the Governor will veto it?
ME: “So? Principle is principle! If your voter base is so hot for gay marriage, why not put your stake in the sand, and make the GOP plant theirs?”
DFL: “It’d be a waste of time”.
Fast forward to 2010:
ME: “So, DFLers – see how the GOP pushes bills they believe in – everything from budget reforms to “Stand Your Ground” – so that the electorate knows who’s on what side of what issue, even though Governor Dayton is going to veto it?”
DFLers: “Clearly you are a racist”.
Fast even further forward to Wednesday, when I pointed out to Minnesota Progressive Project ‘s Jeff Rosenberg that there was no chance on earth that the DFL was going to push gay marriage. Partly because it’s worth more to them as a wedge. Partly because they’ll take less electoral flak letting the courts do it.
For those of us who want to see DFLers move decisively to approve equal marriage, there was disappointing news at a press conference held on Wednesday:
“Many Democrats, led by Gov. Mark Dayton, opposed the amendment. But on Wednesday they would not commit to overturning the law.
Senate DFL leader Tom Bakk of Cook said the state’s budget situation is so serious that he thinks any such policy decisions should be delayed. House DFL leader Paul Thissen of Minneapolis would not go that far, but agreed budget work must come first.
In a radio interview, even the most outspoken same-sex marriage opponent, openly gay Sen. Scott Dibble of Minneapolis, said he did not know if it was time to move forward with changing the law.”
Sorry, but saying that the budget must come first is a cop-out. The legislature can — and does — consider dozens of issues at one time. There will be over 110 DFLers in the legislature. Surely two or three of them can take some time to write the bill without taking away from work on the budget. Ater all, a bill to legalize same-sex marriage would probably only need to be a page or two long. It could be written, debated, and signed before the February economic forecast is available.
It could be six words long – “Son, you may kiss the groom” – and the DFL still won’t touch it.
Because gay marriage is worth a lot more to the DFL as a wedge issue than as a bunch of married gays.
The DFL – or, more realistically, the “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”, which does all the DFL’s thinking for it these days – needs to have lots of wedges to wave in front of the low-information, emotionally-manipulable audience that is its main source of voters. And they’re going to need to conserve the ones they have, as the reality – “we just elected a high-tax, high-regulation bunch of government-worker-union stooges in the middle of a crap economy” – sinks in with Minnesotans.
It started almost as a joke. Two years ago, as I watched the Alliance for a Better Minnesota run Governor Dayton’s campaign (let’s be honest) behind a set of memes that a modestly intelligent junior high kid could have shredded, I observed that the Dems seemed to be basing their campaign on winning over “Low-Information Voters” – at its most charitable, people whose entire political worldview is shaped by soundbites, chanting points and slogans.
But the idea that the Democrats realize that the (let’s be charitable here) not-very-well-informed are the present, if not the future, of the Democrat and DFL parties started to gel earlier this election cycle, as the Dems’ array of chanting-point-bots lined up, one after the other, behind the ideas that…:
There’s a Republican “war on women”
That Medicare is fine. Juuuuust fine
There there is no voter fraud problem
The Tea Party is violent
The Koch Brothers and Grover Nordquist are conservatism’s puppetmasters
That the economy is really picking up speed. (“Just look at that Dow Jones!” bellow leftybloggers who haven’t wiped the spit off their monitors from when they were writing about “The 1%” and “The Banksters!”.
Because remember – money in politics is baaaad, unless it’s from a liberal plutocrat…
…like Alita Messinger, billionaire and scion of the Rockefeller fortune and, need we mention, ex-wife and chief bankroller of Mark Dayton. She is the prime financier of a network of little-publicized groups – “Alliance for a Better Minnesota”, “Win Minnesota”, “Common Cause Minnesota” – that funnel vast sums of money into epic, toxic sleaze campaigns against Republican candidates.
And Alita Messinger is back with a vengeance. While her epic sleaze campaign against Tom Emmer was able to eke out a win for her ex in 2010,. the uppity peasants went and elected a Tea Party legislature.
And uppity peasants are one thing up with which she will not put:
Philanthropist [!!!!!!!!] Alida Messinger, the ex-wife of Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton, is putting big money into overturning Republican control of the Minnesota Legislature.
Fundraising reports released Tuesday showed that Messinger gave $500,000 to the WIN Minnesota political fund. That group funneled money to the Alliance for a Better Minnesota, a Democratic-supporting independent expenditure group expected to sink significant amounts into key legislative races.
Among others, they are pouring money into trying to unseat Doug Wardlow in Eagan and Dave Hancock in Bemidji.
Dayton is asking voters to give Democrats control of the Legislature for the second half of his term.
This story is Berg’s Seventh Law in action; months of caterwauling about the Koch Brothers and “ALEC” have been done, entirely and without exception, to either distract attention from Messinger and her fellow plutocrats’ flow of money, or at least to let them say “Yeah, but you do it too!”:
Messinger’s donations dwarfed all others to independent groups so far this year. Three Republican-oriented funds combined had $380,000 on hand.
In 2010, Messinger was a major donor to funds that ran ads attacking Republican Tom Emmer in the governor’s race, which Dayton won by less than 1 percentage point.
On the one hand, this election is the national debate writ small: Dayton, like Obama, depends almost entirely on big donors – Obama on Hollywood and Silicon Valley, Dayton on the Hamptons and the government unions – to cling to relevance.
On the other? The Democrats know they can count on at least 43% of the voters to be ill-informed enough to fall for their propaganda machine’s slop.
The GOP’s freshman class in the legislature brought a lot of good, hard-nosed, idealistic conservatives into office – Wardlow and Hancock and Roger Chamberlain and Mary Franson and King Banaian and many others included, many of whom are on Messinger’s hit list. They’re counting on the disarray in the state party to help them.
The GOP – especially its freshmen, who largely kept their promises – need your support more than ever. If there were ever a time for Minnesota’s conservatives – a true Army of Davids – to pull off an upset against the DFL’s League of Plutocrats, this is the time.
Because the GOP Freshmen are all that stand between us and Minnesota becoming a cold Greece.
Last night, the paid flaks at “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” – the astroturf PR group financed by the Dayton family, Mark Dayton’s ex-wife Alita Messinger, a bunch of their liberal plutocrat friends, and the unions that own Mark Dayton, put out a tweet:
Now, as always – when ABM says, writes or posts anything, one is best to do…
…what?
I don’t wanna keep seeing the same hands, here. What does one do?
Distrust, then verify. Then, almost inevitably, distrust some more.
So let’s look at the study and, as ABM would have the ill-informed voter believe, this wave of fresh murder begat by “Stand Your Ground”. The study was cited in a WSJ Law Blog post:
In April, more than a month after the shooting of Trayvon Martin, we looked the incidence of justifiable homicides in states with “stand your ground” or “castle doctrine” laws like Florida’s.
In general, such laws grant people more leeway to use lethal force on an attacker. More than 20 were passed after Florida’s in 2005. They typically do at least one of the following:
• Remove a person’s duty to retreat in places outside the home
• Add the presumption that the person who killed in self defense had a reasonable fear of death or harm [subject, in ever case I’m aware of, to a hearing establishing that that fear was reasonable]
• Grant people who killed in self-defense immunity from civil lawsuits [provided, of course, they are found to have acted in legal self-defense; currently, a woman killing a stalking rapist is only as safe from being sued back to the stone-age by her rapist’s family as the least bobble headed jury that can be empaneled]
So let’s look at the study’s conclusions (and I’ll add emphasis):
Justifiable homicides nearly doubled from 2000 to 2010, according to the most recent data available, when 326 were reported. The data, provided by federal and state law enforcement agencies, showed a sharp increase in justifiable homicides occurred after 2005, when Florida and 16 other states passed the laws.
While the overall homicide rates in those states stayed relatively flat, the average number of justifiable cases per year increased by more than 50% in the decade’s latter half.
Now, let’s put that number into two bits of context.
First; the “doubling” – 160 or so killings up to 320 and change – amounts to less than 1% of the people killed in unjustifiable homicides every year.
And every single one of them involves someone who was ruled to have had a legitimate fear of being killed or maimed, killing an attacker first.
These “homicides”, every one of them, occurred in lieu of a rape, murder, kidnapping or aggravated assault. In every case, the alternative to those 320-odd justified homicides would have been an innocent person dead; a woman raped; a child kidnapped, a person beaten into a vegetative state.
The study – and ABM – would have you think that’s a bad thing. Or at least have you not think about it very hard.
Speaking of the study – what about it?
The answer, [Texas A&M Professors Mark Hoekstra and Cheng Cheng] conclude, is [that “Stand Your Ground” does not deter crime]. In fact, the evidence suggests the laws have led to an increase in homicides.
From the study:
Results indicate that the prospect of facing additional self-defense does not deter crime. Specifically, we find no evidence of deterrence effects on burglary, robbery, or aggravated assault. Moreover, our estimates are sufficiently precise as to rule out meaningful deterrence effects.
The blog post doesn’t go into details about the study – but this paragraph is nonsense on several levels.
So was the study “sufficiently precise” to account for other factors in changing murder rates?
Did it account for the deterrent effect that John Lott proved that the concealed carry laws that usually accompany “Stand Your Ground” provide? Because if those laws are already deterring violent crime, there’s a smaller pool of violent crimes to deter. Right?
Which leads them to concludes…:
In contrast, we find significant evidence that the laws increase homicides.
But what kind of “homicides?”
Suggestive but inconclusive evidence indicates that castle doctrine laws increase the narrowly defined category of justifiable homicides by private citizens by 17 to 50 percent, which translates into as many as 50 additional justifiable homicides per year nationally due to castle doctrine.
But if they’re justifiable – a response to a lethal threat – then why is this a problem?
Is the death of a rapist the same as the death of his victim?
More significantly, we find the laws increase murder and manslaughter by a statistically significant 7 to 9 percent, which translates into an additional 500 to 700 homicides per year nationally across the states that adopted castle doctrine.
And there, the researchers find causation in a correlation.
Which came first – the rise in violent crime, or the rise in killings in self-defense?
Thus, by lowering the expected costs associated with using lethal force, castle doctrine laws induce more of it.
This is patent nonsense.
The study seems to make several key errors of logic:
Considering “justifiable homicides” a bad thing. And they are, in a very real way; they’re the second-worst possible outcome of a lethal-force situation. But giving the same moral weight to the death of someone who was killed for providing a deliberate and grave threat to another person, who responded by shooting? That’s madness.
Not providing full context for the numbers – the researchers ascribe a hike in all homicides to the “lowered cost” of self-defense. But we don’t know which murders are attributable to which motive. Also, we don’t know how many of the un-justifiable homicides were justifiable, but hung up on one technicality or another in court (see George Zimmerman).
Back to the study:
This increase in homicides could be due either to the increased use of lethal force in self-defense situations, or to the escalation of violence in otherwise non-lethal conflicts. We suspect that self-defense situations are unlikely to explain all of the increase, as we also find that murder alone is increased by a statistically significant 6 to 11 percent.
I find that number intensely suspect, and will be looking into it. My sniff-sensor tells me that number is BS – murder rates in general are dropping, nationwide, and given the number of states with stand your ground laws, it seems unlikely that there’s any link.
As the authors note, the increase in homicides may not be viewed by everyone as “unambiguously bad.” It could be driven by individuals protecting themselves from imminent harm by using lethal force. But it could also be driven by an escalation in violence that, absent the “castle doctrine,” wouldn’t have ended in serious injury for either party, they say.
Or it could – no, it would – be substituting deaths of criminals for deaths of the innocent.
