Category Archives: Big Gun Control

Rick Nolan, Banana Republican

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To:  Everyone in Northern Minnesota
From: Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  Your Congressional Representative

All,

Here’s Rick Nolan, your representative from CD8.

Banana Republicans (from L): Keith Ellison, Betty McCollum, and Rick Nolan.

Banana Republicans (from L): Keith Ellison, Betty McCollum, and Rick Nolan.

It was taken this past Wednesday, as he participated in a “sit-in” on the floor of the House, in favor of a bill that would have gutted due process by allowing the government to bar firearms from anyone on a “terrorism watch list” that government can put people on with no due process, no accountability, and no recourse.

All government has to do is put your entire group – pro-lifers, hunting rights groups, even union activists – on the “watch list”, and boom; no guns for you.   And there’s nothing you can do about it.

Just like in the Soviet Union, Saudi Arabia, or any banana republic.

This is what Rick Nolan is spending his taxpayer-funded time and money on in DC; pretending that you, the people of CD8, want this country to turn into a banana republic.

Remember this in November.

That is all.

Quote Of The Day

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Glenn Reynolds, in a piece about Big Left’s lies about “gun culture”:

Remember, none of this is about saving lives. It’s about the cultural domination of the people in flyover country, by their coastal “betters” who get a near-erotic thrill out of such domination, and who are reduced to blind rage whenever their efforts at domination fail.

I’ve been saying for years – usually as a jibe at my DFL friends – that while the Big Left has been jabbering about “the upcoming class war” for decades, most lately with its “Occupy…” “movement” with its rhetoric of the “1%” vs the “99%”, most of them don’t reallize they finally got their class war.   It is the gun issue.  And they’re the Patricians, the 1%, the lotus-eaters.

And Michael Bloomberg isn’t ponying up millions for gun control because he’s concerned about all those poor black and brown people in Chicago and El Paso being murdered.

An ISIS Victory On American Soil

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David French at National Review notes that ISIS has won both a tactical and strategic victory in Orlando – and done it on the cheap:

On Sunday, June 12, ISIS won a dramatic victory. Without risking any of its terror assets and without having to spend one dime of its financial assets, an ISIS volunteer vindicated its strategy of inspiring terrorist acts and launched the deadliest attack on U.S. soil since 9/11. The act not only shattered the lives of the victims and their families. It no doubt inspired still more jihadists to plot their own attacks both at home and abroad. Facing battlefield reverses in Iraq and Syria, ISIS struck back at its chief enemy. But the wins didn’t stop there. Incredibly, ISIS won not just in Orlando. It’s winning the aftermath. The American response to the attack has been beyond ineffective, veering decisively toward the counterproductive. We’re doing nothing more to deter or prevent terror attacks and everything to deceive our own people about the true nature of the threat. Rather than unite to fight a common enemy, we’re dissolving into partisan, polarizing stupidity.

Going after the NRA over Orlando – which many politically and socially prominent gays and media figures are doing – is a little like attacking the Eastern Orthodox Church over Hitler’s invasion of Russia; they weren’t there, and they had nothing to do with it.

French notes the deepening vacuity of our political class in dealing with this:

  • The western and moderate Muslim world’s campaign against ISIS remains dilatory and indecisive.
  • It’s not only validated ISIS’s latest tactic of farming out its terrorism in the West to “do it yourselfers” who get their information from ISIS’s very polished print and web presence, it gave them a poster boy with a big victory.
  • The entire US response so far?  Jabbering about gun control (which doesn’t affect terrorists in the least – even if you went door to door and grabbed every gun in the United States tomorrow, they could switch to gasoline, dynamite or knives), scabrous pronouncements against Christians and gun owners.

Everything but the two things that would work:  getting serious about ISIS, which is not only not the “JV team”, but is running rings around Barack Obama, and decreasing the number of places where citizens are rendered statutorily helpless targets.

Lie First, Lie Always: The Strib Marinades In The Bloomberg Kool-Aid

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The Star/Tribune’s editorial board is a group of people, apparently in their sixties and seventies, who seem to spend their days pining away for a time when the media could say anything they want without fear of being caught out in public by people who know better.

DFLMinistryofTruthLARGE

Those days are long gone.  Only the editorial board doesn’t seem to know it, or recognize it, as shown in last week’s editorial calling for, at the least, hearings on a “universal background check” bill.

And like everyone on the institutional left, they participate – with all the grace of a German jazz band – in the left’s only real tactic on the issue of gun control; Lie First, Lie Always.

Why, it’s almost as if Heather Martens, in addition to being a State Representative, is a Strib editor…

Continue reading →

Ninny Up!

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“Protect Minnesota” is taking it to the streets!

Heather Martens – who, let the record show, has never, not once, said or written a single true, substantive and original thing about guns or gun law – is undertaking one of her last actions as “executive director”

With the Minnesota legislature convening on March 8, now is the time to plug into our plan to stop the gun lobby and build safer communities! Every session, the gun lobby tries to ram through bills like “Shoot First/Stand Your Ground” or carrying pistols without a permit. We’ve been able to stop them year after year — but only because you have shown up.  

She’s making things up again.  Nobody “showed up”.

“Stand Your Ground” passed the legislature with bipartisan support; it was vetoed by Governor Dayton when Alita Messinger yanked his leash.  And that was the only reason Minnesota didn’t join 23 other states that opted to protect the rights of people who resist victimization by criminals and greedy prosecutors.

“Protect” MN’s clubfooted version of activism may have contributed to the good guys almost winning on that issue.

Anyway, they’re going to try to get people to turn up again:

Can you commit to showing up again? [Ha ha ha!  – Ed] You’re invited to a meeting near you next week:
In Mahtomedi – Wednesday, February 24, at 6:30 pm — Click here to RSVP
In Saint Paul – Thursday, February 25, at 6:30 pm – Click here to RSVP
In Duluth – Sunday, February 28, a faith summit from 1:30-4:30. Click here to RSVP.

Wanna know something funny?  If you try to RSVP, they don’t divulge the locations.  They are apparently worried that Real Americans will infiltrate the meetings and…tell the truth?  I dunno.

And what can the gentle reader expect?

At these meetings, you will:

  • Learn how to pass our background check resolution at your precinct caucus Tuesday, March 1;
  • Sign up for face-to-face meetings with key legislators during the session;
  • Meet our new executive director!

So wait – “Protect MN” is going to pass a “background check resolution”, to become part of a DFL platform that already calls for gun control?

Sounds like a brilliant use of time and effort!

Oh, yeah – as re the last bullet:

That’s right, I’m stepping out of the executive director role to support Protect MN in other capacities. Watch your email for the full announcement. Meanwhile, see you next week!

If you learn the secret handshake, anyway.

As for me?  Heather Martens, I’ll attend your meeting for $1,500.

Thank you for all you do,

Heather Martens

The reader most likely “does” nothing – which likely has more effect on politics in MN than “Protect” MN does.

Today’s News, A Month Ago

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January:  the Real Americans of the Second Amendment movement watched President Obama’s tearful, angry, and utterly theatrical broadside about guns, gun owners and gun manufacturers, noted that nearly everything he was “proposing” was existing law already, and said that the President’s big “effort” was nothing but a shallow bit of political grandstanding calculated to make it look like he planned to, as his supporters wailed, “dooooooooooo something”, without actually signing the political death warrants of every Democrat between the Hudson and the Sierra Madre.

February:  The New York Times notices the same thing.

Lesson:  the Real Americans of the Second Amendment movement are smarter and better-informed than the media.

Details

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Once a week, the Minnesota Court of Appeals releases decisions in criminal cases that have been appealed.  This week, four of them involve pistols possessed by people who aren’t eligible to have them.

One was handed his pistol by a friend just before the murder.  One had a pistol in the trunk of a stolen car.  One was carrying a pistol wrapped in plastic, secured with earbuds (not the way gun stores package the products they sell).  One was found under the seat of a van – nobody knows how it got there.

The court doesn’t discuss how these ineligible people got their pistols, only the fact they had them.  And these four cases are not everybody arrested with a gun, only those who had a strong enough case to appeal; but it’s an indication that the problem is widespread.

How would these crimes would have been prevented by universal background checks?

Joe Doakes

They’d give urban liberals that sense that they’ve dooooooone something.

Which is all that they really care about.

Fiction And Fact

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Fiction: Liberal “comedians”, trying to show how easy it is to “legally” buy a gun without a background check, show that the law and system works (not that they’re apparently smart enough to see it that way, judging by their responses in the comment section) – and flirt with committing a felony in the process:

Note for those who don’t know their gun laws: “Comic” Steve Hofstetter took his friend in with his ID to do the buy, which – “joking” notwithstanding – went through without a hitch.  Because “Brent”, the “buyer”, was perfectly legal.   He has a criminal record and is, as such, a relatively low risk, himself.

But if he’d given the gun to someone who was otherwise disqualified from owning a gun,  that, too, would be a felony.  And while Steve Hofstetter’s “comedy” would be a disqualifying felony in a just world, it’s not in this one.  But if Steve had a couple DWIs, a domestic abuse rap, or some other mischief on his record?  They’re both committing a felony.

So you might ask – what if a criminal with a long felony rap sheet had gotten a friend with a clean record to go to a gun show and buy a gun, and give it to him out in the parking lot?  Well, it’s already illegal, and both parties would be committing a felony.  And if we instituted mandatory background checks to close the so-called “gun show loophole” – more about that below – then what?  They’d be committing another felony – which, like the two they committed without the mandatory background check, will go utterly undetected until some other crime is committed.

Same as today!

Fact:  Crowder goes to actual gun shows, tries to actually find the “gun show loophole”.

And fails:

Not that I need to reinforce this to people who are smart enough to deserve the right to vote – I get this.

I mostly write these things so smart people can pass it on to their friends who need convincing and educating.  Because God knows there are still a lot of them out there.

Shots Fired

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Rep. Kim Norton is going to come for your guns this session.

It may not work, but it’s the next measure in what Big Left hopes to make into a steady drumbeat that eventually wears the great, underinformed middle down on the issue.

But the facts are out there.

Location, Location, Location:   If you live in Minnesota, you know that North Minneapolis is the state’s little Oakland.  While Minnesota as a whole has a murder rate of 1.6 per 100,000 people, the North Side’s violent crime (about 30 murders last year, in a population of under 40,000 people) teases out to a murder rate of 75/100,000 – higher than Venezela, double that of Columbia.

Of course, Minneapolis (and Hennepin County in general) has among the lowest legal firearms ownership rates in the state:

So if the left’s conceit  – less guns (in the hands of the law-abiding) equals less crime – would seem to predict a nice, low crime rate in Minneapolis.

But the MinnPost ran a piece earlier this week – and for starters, it confirmed what everyone already knew; the North Side is a shooting gallery, at least judging by the MPD’s “Shot Spotter” system.

Here’s a “heat map” of the city:

screenshot-www.minnpost.com 2016-01-19 12-16-08

 

 

There’s a faint dribble of shooting in the “Phillips” neighborhood (between Franklin and Lake, east of 35W and west of Hiawatha), and some in the central core of the south side between 35W and probably Chicago (and just so we’re accurate, here, the shot-spotter microphones are only installed in high-crime areas; we don’t see shots fired in Linden Hills or along Minnehaha Creek because there are no microphones in Linden Hills or along Minnehaha Creek.  But there are no microphones there because, objectively, there really isn’t a big “gun violence” problem there.  Or Nordeast.  Or by Nokomis. Or even on Lake Street east of Hiawatha or much west of Nicollet.

More telling?  Shooting has been trending down on the south side for the past six years:

screenshot-www.minnpost.com 2016-01-19 12-16-33
Even the NYTimes knows that North Minneapolis is a free-fire zone:

But as Willesha Moorehead, who came here from Chicago a dozen years ago, can attest, struggle is baked into its streets.

Seven of her friends or members of her family, including the father of her first child, have died from gun violence in North Minneapolis. She has struggled to get work, in part because she could not find child care for her two daughters, she said. And for the past three years she has bounced between the homes of friends and family because she could not find affordable housing.

The problem, the NYTimes seems to imply, is that not enough money gets spent on the North Side:

Public transportation is poor, residents say, and though local officials are planning to spend more than $1 billion on a light-rail line, North Minneapolis residents have been critical because it will run through downtown and the suburbs but skirt their community.

So clearly, the answer is to crack down on guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens in Northeast and Saint Paul and Anoka and Thief River Falls.

That should solve it.

The real problem?  The government has been using the North Side as a warehouse for the poor for a couple of generations now.  The city has been fine with that – they’re a nice pool of captive DFL voters – but now, the social consequences of keeping a bull pen full of dependents is catching up with the city.

Again.

America’s Oldest Civil Rights Organization

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In recent years, I’ve had two fascinating interviews on my show, on a subjects that gets short-to-nonexistent shrift in the mainstream media and academia; the role of our Second Amendment in the Civil Rights movement.  Charles Cobb’s This Non-Violent Stuff’ll Get You Killed chronicles the role of armed blacks in protecting the nascent civil rights movement of the sixties, while Nicholas Johnson’s Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms documents the history of armed black resistance to racism.

Another story that needs to be told – especially in the wake of President Obama’s “town hall meeting” about guns two weeks ago, and the wave of the President’s minions trying to paint gun control as a racial issue, is the inextricable involvement of the nation’s oldest civil rights organization in protecting the nascent civil rights movement.

That’d be the National Rifle Association.

A group called the “Deacons of Defense” – largely black military veterans – sprang up to defend civil rights workers and leaders, including Martin Luther King, as well as helping defend blacks in general from the Klan’s depredations.

It wasn’t an academic exercise:

On a hot July night, a cavalcade of 25 Klan automobiles drove through a black neighborhood in Bogalusa, shouting vile comments at women and spewing racial insults. Some Klansmen then randomly fired into some houses. To the Klansmen’s shock, the response was a fusillade of return fire. The Klan members sped away in fear.

“They finally found out that we really are men,” one Deacons leader remembered, “and that we would do what we said, and we meant what we said.”

The escalating crisis forced the hand of the U.S. Department of Justice. Previously timid about expending political capital against the Klan’s alliance with local police, the DOJ unleashed Civil Rights Division head John Doar. For the first time ever, the DOJ took action against pro-Klan local law enforcement. By the end of the year, the Louisiana Klan had been devastated.

The Deacons were rigidly politically neutral – the snubbed Stokely Carmichael’s “black power” agitation, sticking to self-defense – but their impact was immense:

Black dignity—the responsible protection of family and community—was a CORE value of the Deacons. For centuries, adult black men had been called “boy,” and—because of fear of white violence—often acted in servile manner to those whites who treated them with disdain. No longer.

And that thought alone terrifies the Big Left.

And let nobody forget that the NRA was right there with them (I’ve added various bits of emphasis):

As America’s youngest civil rights organization, the Deacons received support from America’s oldest civil rights organization—the NRA, which, like the Deacons, was dedicated to training Americans in the responsible exercise of constitutional rights. At the time, the NRA was the authorized public representative of the U.S. Army’s Civilian Marksmanship Program, and could sell army surplus ammunition at discounts to NRA members.

So the Deacons for Defense—as NRA members—bought ammunition in bulk, and distributed it for free to individual members. It’s little wonder, though, that the NRA was the Deacons’ arsenal. For most of the 20th century, the NRA shooting range in Washington, D.C., had been one of the few public accommodations in the city that was not racially segregated. Virtually alone among the sporting organizations of the late 19th and early 20th century, the NRA had always remained open to members of all races.

As for firearms, the Deacons already had plenty of their own—especially in the “Sportsman’s Paradise” of Louisiana. As it had back in 1775, a strong tradition of hunting provided a solid foundation for armed defense of liberty.

Initially, the Deacons’ main arms were shotguns, plus some handguns. Over time, there were efforts to standardize the Deacons with .30-cal. M-1 carbines [obtained from the Civilian Marksmanship Program, administered by the NRA] and .38 Special revolvers.

Read the whole thing.

And spread it around.

It’s The Rights, Stupid!

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One of the mixed blessings of being involved with an issue – the human right to self-defense – as long as I have is that every couple of years, I’m treated to the spectacle of a whole new generation of gun-grabbers excitedly making arguments that they just know are going to send the Real Americans scurrying for mama…

…not realizing that they are probably the fourth or fifth generation of gun grabbers I’ve heard use the argument since I started.

“Put a 1000% tax on bullets?  You mean like Patrick Moynihan proposed in the seventies the National Coalition to Ban Handguns talked about in the eighties, and Chris Rock in the nineties?  No, ma’am, that one’s new to me.   Does that also mean that the First Amendment protects speech, but that the government can regulate newsprint, or that it protects freedom to worship, but the government can censor the Bible, the Torah and the Quran?  That the Fourth Amendment says we can be secure in our papers and possessions, but that we need to give the cops a master key to our front door because it’s not made of paper?”

That one’s been pretty beaten down again; it’ll be another generation – 3-5 years, in gun-grabber terms (Heather Martens notwithstanding, although she makes the same “arguments” every generation anyway) before we hear that one.

The other one that pops up every time a new wave of naive proto-statists takes the stage is “the founders never envisioned assault rifles”.  Which might be true – but while everyone from Leonardo DaVinci to James Puckle had designed firearms that were conceptually similar to “assault weapons” by 1789, the founders hadn’t the faintest inkling of lithography, radio, television, the Internet, chat rooms, Craig’s List, megachurches, the supercomputer, the NSA, electronic surveillance, photo-cops, photography itself, the electric chair, standing municipal police forces, cradle-to-grave social welfare, the Internal Revenue Service and do you still really want to go there, Ms. “Progressive?”

The point, of course, is one that I also sometimes get so far down in the weeds of the minutiae of the subject that I miss it; the Founders, in their much-greater-wisdom-than-today’s-brand-of-bobbleheads, wrote the Constitution not to guarantee things, but to guarantee broad, unalienable rights.

Charles C. W. Cooke had the reminder I needed:

Because, our contemporary rhetorical habits notwithstanding, the right to keep and bear arms is not so much a right in and of itself as an auxiliary mechanism that protects the real unalienable right underneath: that of self-defense. By placing a prohibition on strict gun control into the Constitution, the Founders did not accidentally insert a matter of quotidian rulemaking into a statement of foundational law; rather, they sought to secure a fundamental liberty whose explicit recognition was the price of the state’s construction. To understand this, I’d venture, is to understand immediately why the people of these United States remain so doggedly attached to their weapons. At bottom, the salient question during any gun-control debate is less “Do you think people should be allowed to have rifles?” and more “Do you think you should be permitted to take care of your own security?”

And to a large – and, at its logical conclusion, disgusting – part of our population, the answer is “isn’t the state’s security more important?”

Which is what we’re fighting, here.

Read Cooke’s entire article.  It’s a good primer for the battles we’ll face in the coming year.

Our Nation’s Intractable Anti-Gun Culture

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Listen to, or read, the left talking about gun control for a while.  (It’s OK if you don’t want to; I do it so you don’t have to).

You eventually run into three basic tracks of thought:

  1. The Stupid Track:  Best summed up by lefty commenter and triteness merchant John Fugelsang’s line “I don’t have a gun because I’m satisfied with my penis size”.  Which is typical of this crowd; we’re trying to save lives, lower crime and secure liberty, and they’re focused on genitals.  Conversation is difficult, and pointless, and of dubious utility with people this smugly (and unjustifiably), er, self-satisfied.
  2. The Thundering Herd:  The vast swarm of (often) well-meaning people whose only frame of reference is what they hear in the media; “we’ve got to dooooooo something”, “gun show loopholes”, “355 mass murders so far this year” and other chanting points.  Many are otherwise intelligent people who’ve been swayed by the “Lie First, Lie Always” campaign of emotional manipulation that gun controllers have been running for decades.
  3. The Root Causers:  The are the ones that swerve into Deep Thoughts.  Their latest?  Rumination about this nation’s “Gun Culture”.

Let’s talk about #III for a bit.

Culcha:  The notion that America has a “Gun Culture” – a part of society that embraces guns on a social, intellectual and philosophical level – isn’t an earth-shaking one.  A significant part of this country…:

  • Believes the Second Amendment recognizes a right granted us by our creator, whatever that is
  • Owns guns, and treats them like utilitarian tools
  • Makes shooting sports – hunting, target shooting, self-defense training – a part of their lives, shooting for relaxation, fun, exercise,  mental stimulation, food, and personal and family security
  • Passes these beliefs down through the generations, making shooting sports and self-defense a part of family life
  • Believes that guns in the hands of the law-abiding are an awesome responsibility, with horrendous consequences for misuse, but immense benefits for legal, proper use
  • Passionately defends the right to keep and bear arms, supporting gun rights groups with their time, money and political interest in numbers that many other grassroots movements would love to be able to harness.

The “gun culture” is stereotypically a rural trait – but it extends throughout America; there are advocates and activists, as well as passive members, in the largest, most blue-choked cities.

Politically, the “gun culture” is associated with conservatives – and that’s largely true.  But there are plenty who don’t care in the least about politics – and more importantly, enough on the left, especially in politically schizoid states like Minnesota who vote DFL but who support not only the shooting sports, but the armed lifestyle, to make the Minnesota Legislature, split down the middle on partisan lines, a fairly to strongly pro-2nd-Amendment body, especially outside the hapless Twin Cities DFL contingent.

And while decades ago the “gun culture” was associated with the America’s blue collar class, today it crosses most social and class lines, except the academic class and the exceptionally wealthy (who can afford all the security they want).  At its best, it’s best described by this quote from Tolkein:

“I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

So the “gun culture” is relatively easy to identify.  It’s big, it’s passionate about its politics, and it’s been emboldened – some might say “rendered complacent” – by twenty years of relative political success.   It’s support for the Second Amendment is a mile wide and a mile deep.  It is an electoral buzz saw that has cut many a gun-grabbing politician (outside of America’s crime-choked urban cores) off at the knees.   Naturally, it’s also a common boogeyman for the left.

But what about its counterpart?

Objectors Without Object:   There is most definitely an “anti-gun culture” in the US.  It’s no more socially homogenous than the “gun culture”; it includes Hollywood titans, suburban grandées, inner-city political activists, and a whole lot of people in between.

But like the “gun culture”, they share some traits.

They are more or less illiterate about the Second Amendment:  some believe the Amendment is irrelevant; others, that it’s archaic (the whole “the founding fathers never envisioned AK47s” bit), some just don’t care.

Guns and their use are more or less foreign to them.  Don’t get me wrong; shooters can get pretty pedantic about gun terms and parts.  On the other hand, it’s hard to have a literate, much less productive, conversation with people who mix up “semi-automatic” with “machine gun”, or who think a thirty-round magazine makes a firearm uniquely deadly.

But Jonah Goldberg, in an excellent piece in National Review, notes that while part of America regards guns as just another tool, to another part they are utterly foreign and associated only with crime.

And too many of them take that fear out in the form of smug condescension:

The Second Amendment, Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten wrote, is “the refuge of bumpkins and yeehaws who like to think they are protecting their homes against imagined swarthy marauders desperate to steal their flea-bitten sofas from their rotting front porches.”

Almost but not quite too stupid for Minnesota Progressive Project.

Many are just afraid of guns.  Being afraid of guns isn’t especially irrational; they are intimidating machines.  The irrationality comes from wanting to take them away from everyone else.

For the most part, they believe that guns are too dangerous for regular people – until those same people strap on a badge or a uniform, and become infallible.

They largely believe, deep down inside, when push comes to shove, that citizens shouldn’t have guns, and that government legitimately claims a monopoly on the use of force.

There’s one other key difference; beyond a few hyperactivists, it’s just not that big a deal to most anti-gunners.  They may oppose guns of one kind or another, to one degree or another.  They may be scared of…something, and advocate some regulation or another than one of another “leader” has proposed.  But for most of them, their support for restrictions on the law-abiding is a mile wide and an inch deep.

Ill-Informed Hysterics With Short Attention Spans:  So this combination of dilatory, poorly-read passion, slopped on top of intense fear spread by social convention (not a whole lot different than racial bigotry, when you take it apart) has yielded a small, badly-informed, but intensely powerful political force that exerts a disproportionate, universally deleterious effect on American politics.

And as it did when large minorities of American society smoked cigarettes, hated black people or treated women like chattel, it’s going to take a huge education program and changes in Americans’ attitudes to send our intractable anti-gun culture where it belongs – history’s scrap heap, along with the Klan and the glass ceiling.

Unexpected!

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As carry permit applications, pre-purchase background checks, and gun and ammo sales roar to new all-time records, the NRA is being crushed with new and renewing members.

Scarcely a peep in the media (especially about the membership).

But one Democrat politician and “NRA member” “quits” – and the media is lined up out the door.

If I were a betting man (and I’m not), I’d wager good money that:

  1. He was an “NRA member” for the same reason I “joined the teachers union” when I taught a semester at Metro State, and
  2. Come his next campaign, he’s going to have at least one pic in his campaign lit, decked out in hunting camo with a duck gun.

But I won’t blame anyone for not taking any action on that bet.

Heather Martens: “Lie First. Lie Always”

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The good guys have apparently gotten into Heather Martens’ head.

GOCRA and MNGOPAC figured prominently in Martens’ “Give to the Max” day fundraising plea:

By giving today, you make it possible for the voice of reason to be heard at the Capitol despite the intimidation.

Intimidation?

The stories we could tell.

And will, someday.

But let’s move on to the fun part:

We need your support, because this other group says whatever it wants. I quote [from, I believe, a MNGOPAC fundraising email]:

“Let’s remember what Protect Minnesota advocates for: bans on common hunting rifles and shotguns, licensing of gun owners, mandatory inspections by your county sheriff for ‘safe storage,’ court orders to seize your firearms without a hearing, and on and on!”

It seems that Protect Minnesota is scary to those who think assault weapons are “common hunting rifles and shotguns” and will believe whatever accusations this group invents.

Now, let’s recap:  Heather Martens has never, not once in her career, said a single, original, substantive true thing about gun owners, gun crime, or the Second Amendment.

And she doesn’t start with this email.  “Assault Weapons” like the AR15, the Mini-14,  and SKS are exceptionally common hunting weapons.  The de facto licensing and mandatory inspections were parts of the bills that Protect MN supported – indeed, that Martens, a paid lobbyist, read into the record in lieu of Rep. Hausman, in a clubby little violation of House rules. The seizure without hearings was part of the various Domestic Abuse proposals pushed at the state and federal (by Sen. Klobuchar) level, and supported with robotic monotony by Martens and “Protect” MN.

She does swerve toward truth, briefly – but that, inevitably, undercuts her case without her knowing it, bless her simple little heart:

They are a small minority [Which routinely turns out 30 times as much public support as “Protect” MN – Ed] that makes “controversy” to stop any kind of public policy to reduce gun violence — even when the vast majority of Americans support such policies. But something scares me in their email: That they raised $51,000 last year.

Which is, likely, 50 times as much as “Protect” MN raised from the general public last year (they get $300K from the Joyce Foundation and other big institutional donors – read “Liberals with deep pockets”).

The people – real people, Real Minnesotans, Real Americans – support the Second Amendment.

And I’m not sure why that “scares” Heather Martens. It’s the only thing keeping her employed.

Heather Martens: “Round Up The Usual Suspects!”

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Heather Martens – “Director” and likely sole member of “Protect Minnesota”, and sometimes ad-hoc legislative representative from House District 66A – has sent out a fund-raising email.

Because trying to squat on peoples’ civil rights isn’t cheap, even if you do it badly.

And in this email, Martens – who has never, not once, uttered a single, substantive, original true statement about the Second Amendment, gun owners or guns in her career – gives us a little surprise.

Here’s the fundraising letter:

Dear Friend,
In Colorado on Halloween morning, a woman called 911 when she saw a black man walking down the street. During the six-minute call, the dispatcher lectured the caller on the fact that it is legal in Colorado to be a black man walking in public. Then black man started shooting people. He murdered three people before being killed by police, when they finally arrived on the scene.
Can you support Protect Minnesota on Give to the Max Day, to fight the laws that enable such black people to perpetrate such tragedies?
[Several paragraphs of bla bla bla about PMs purported accomplishments]
Thank you for all you do,

Heather Martens
Executive Director
Protect Minnesota: Working to End Gun Violence

“Wait – did Heather Martens actually send out a letter saying that a woman called in to report a black man walking down the street?”

Of course not.  Even a director at a PC non-profit can’t get away with that – unless they’re talking about Ben Carson or Tim Scott.

No – where you see references to “black man” in the letter above, fill in “a man carrying a gun”.  Here’s the actual fundraising email from Martens.  In the episode Martens writes about, a woman called 911 about someone openly carrying a firearm.  The 911 operator told the woman that it’s legal to open-carry in Colorado…

…and something else.    This story has a twist at the end.

Put a pin in that.  We’ll come back to it.

Then, six minutes into the 911 call about a man carrying a gun, something illegal happened – the man started shooting.  People died.  It was a tragedy.

But here’s the rub; Martens wants the police to respond to someone doing something they have every right to do, in a place they have every right to do it.  And they want them to do it when they know full well that the overwhelming majority of people who open-carry firearms are utterly and completely legal, and will never break a single law.

Martens thinks the police should respond to her fear, her paranoia, and her bigotry about people doing what they do, utterly legally, because of her paranoid assumption that a guy with a gun is a crime waiting to happen – which is not even a little bit different than assuming a black guy is a crime waiting to happen.

And that alone is reason to mock the hapless Martens.

But there’s more.  Heather Martens also lied.

Details, Details:  Buried further down in the fundraising letter, we see this little bon mot; emphasis is added:

:45  Naomi Bettis calls to report that she sees a man on her street carrying a big black rifle and  several cans of gasoline.  Over six minutes of conversation, she relays to the dispatcher the activities and a description of the man, noting that he had gone into another building and then emerged also carrying a handgun. She tells the dispatcher that she is “scared to death.”

So it turns out that Ms. Bettis not only called in to report the legal and overwhelmingly unremarkable fact that the man had a gun, but also the fact that he was carrying gasoline and acting suspiciously.

As, by the way, she should have.

And then the dispatcher responded…:

The dispatcher relates to her “It is an open carry state, so he can have a weapon with him or walking around with it.   But, of course, having those cans of gasoline it does seem pretty suspicious, so we’re going to keep the call going for that.”

So in other words, the police responded to Ms. Bettis’ call, exactly as if they’d have responded to the killer’s legal behavior.  The dispatcher acted correctly, and the police responded to the part of Ms. Bettis’ call that actually addressed something objectively and legally worthy of a response given the facts at the time, exactly as they’d have done if carrying the gun had been the  act they responded to.

Martens lied about the content of the phone call, and about the police response, to give the misleading impression that Colorado’s open carry law led to the deaths of innocent people.

It’s misleading, and it’s cowardly.  It’s a lie.

And yet the news media uses her as a source, without question.

Question For The Media:  It’s not a new one.  It’s the same one I ask every time Martens pulls a stunt like this.

When I was a reporter, we learned that when a source burns you, especially multiple times, you stop using them as a source.  At the very least, you get lots of corroboration.

Heather Martens has burned you.  She’s burned you  so often that the parts of the Minnesota media that care about accuracy and credibility have quietly started downplaying, or burying, her side of the story below that of credible sources like Joe Olson, Andrew Rothman and Bryan Strawser.

But if you’re one of those who still puts Heather’s stuff out there unquestioned, I have to ask you – why?

Ignorance?  Call me.  Email me.  I’ll show you the problem.

Not ignorance?  Then I really wanna talk with you.

Why We Never Call Gun Grabbers “Gun Safety Advocates”

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Because they don’t give the faintest whiff of a rat’s patoot about gun safety.

When I was a kid, someone came into the school and gave us a quick demo and (IIRC) a film strip on actual gun safety.  It included a couple of simple rules that any kid can remember – and that I still do.  If you’re a kid, and you see a gun – your friends bring out their dad’s hunting rifle or grandpa’s WW2 pistol – and your parents aren’t there:

  • Stop
  • Don’t touch
  • Run away
  • Tell a grownup

That’s it.   That’s gun safety for kids.

There’s no way of knowing how many kids in my elementary school’s lives were saved by that lesson; not a single kid in my school died in a gun accident.  Zero.  There was a drowning, a couple car accidents, an alcohol poisoning, and a suicide right after graduation – but no gun accidents.

And this, in a part of the country where there are likely more guns per-capita than on bases for some branches of the military.

It’s a pretty standard program; many hunting groups, along with the NRA, teach gun safety in schools.

Y’know – because it keeps children from getting killed, accidentally.

You’d think moms (not to mention fathers) would be all over it.  And in the parts of our society ruled by common sense, they are.

But not I Moms Want Action (a wholly owned subsidiary of Michael Bloomberg’s “Everytown For “Gun Safety”, the billionaire’s gun-grabber group),   To them, “gun safety” is, in their own words, “atrocious”:

Moms Demand Action’s Jennifer Hoppe recoiled at the news that Forest Hills was teaching children about gun safety. She said, “It’s atrocious to put the onus of gun safety onto children — this is an adult problem. Every gun that’s gotten into the hands of a child has first been under the control of an adult. A program that tries to dodge that is disingenuous.”

In a further effort to make her point, Hoppe added, “Accidental gun deaths among children are not ‘accidental,’” suggesting that the focus should be on how they are “preventable” if adults store guns properly.

Which is the sort of calm, cool, rational logic we’ve come to expect from Moms Want Action.  No, seriously.

Because in a world where our leftist entertainment industry gives money to gun-grabber groups with one hand, while glorifying consequence-free violence with the other, there are plenty of irresponsible parents out there, leaving guns in easy reach of kids.  And that is certainly a moral, and often literal, crime – which is nice, but what does your kid do when he or she comes face to face with their kids, acting like kids?

Question for you, Jennifer Hoppe, Jane Kay, Michael Bloomberg and Heather Martens:  would you be happier if your kid knew to stop, run away and tell an adult, or would you prefer the county attorney sort it all out after the funeral?

The article points out something I’d missed.  Usually, when a gun-grabber yaps about wanting a “conversation about guns,” what they mean is “you shooters shut up while we shriek at you”.

But Mark Kelly – wife of Gabby Giffords, and certainly no gun-rights advocate – actually indulged in that rarest of treats; he actually conversed about guns, complimenting the NRA’s exceptionally-effective child safety program.

The results were…predictable:

Ironically, it was just months ago that Huffington Post went comparably apoplectic after gun control proponent Mark Kelly praised the NRA’s Eddie Eagle program for its effectiveness with children. On April 14, Kelly tweeted: “I don’t agree w/ the NRA on some big issues, but they deserve a lot of credit for teaching kids about gun safety [via] Eddie Eagle.”

The reaction from the left was predictably emotionally-thud-witted, intellectually barren and morally bereft.

Dear Moms Want Action:  the blood of every child accidentally killed for want of commonsense gun-safety education is on your desiccated talons.

The Top Ten Next KARE11 Debate Matchups

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In the wake of the “debate” between Heather Martens – liar for hire and leader of a gun grabber “group,” sort of – and…

DFLMinistryofTruthLARGE

Andy Parrish?  The former Michele Bachmann staffer and campaign manager of the abortive Marriage Amendment, who is famous for many things, not including having an extensive portfolio as a Second Amendment activist?

Nothing against Andy, with whom I’m a nodding acquaintance – but why in the name of all that is holy would anyone select him to be the face of Second Amendment Human Rights issues?

My hunch:   because he’s the only Republican that anyone at KARE11 has talked to, lately, and, perhaps, someone at KARE11 figured it’d be a fair fight.  Martens going up against Andrew Rothman or Joe Olson or David Gross of GOCRA, or Bryan Strawser or Rob Doar of MNGOPAC, or even lil’ ol’ me would be a massacre.  A turkey shoot.  Like shooting fish in a barrel on a plate.

Anyway, KARE11,  I’m all about the help.  So I’m here to suggest some equally-appropriate matchups of “expert spokesperson” and issue:

For a Debate On…: “Expert”
10. The nature of Dark Matter Minneapolis mayor Betsy Hodges
9. “Why would God let the Holocaust happen?” Retired Twins announcer John Gordon
8. Is Adrian Peterson past his prime? Dr. Larry Jacobs, U of M Political Science prof and author
7. Were Shakespeare’s works written by people other than he? Jesse Ventura, former Governor and professional wrestler
6. When does human life begin, to a moral certainty? Mark Brown, former bassist for Prince’s “Revolution” band.
5. How do we deflate the entitlement bubble without messing up the part of the economy that’s based on entitlements? Comedian Louie Anderson
4. How do we resolve the crisis with Militant Islam? Diana Pierce, KARE11 anchor.  (Or maybe former anchor.  I haven’t watched local TV news in ten years.  Is Diana Pierce still there?)
3. Resolving our immigration and citizenship dilemmas Heather Martens, director and sole member of “Protect Minnesota”
2. What is the nature of liberty, in the modern world? The Fox Sports North girls
1. Does God exist? Any random person at Happy Hour at the Gopher Bar in Saint Paul.

There you go, KARE. Don’t say I’ve never done anything for you.

UPDATE: Bryan Strawser of MNGOPAC is responding to KARE11:

Letter to KARE-11 TV – October 2015 Gun Control Debate by Bryan Strawser

So, I think, will I. More later.

“Conversation” Update

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After my go-around earlier this week with Heather Martens – where she seemed to challenge the Twin Cities media to hold the Gun Rights movement’s factual feet in the fire – and my attempt to send a letter to the Strib accepting that challenge, I figured it’d be fair to try to actually have that “conversation about guns” with Ms. Martens.

Y’know – to let her win that cataclysmic victory of fact over superstition that she seems to think the media will conjure up when questioning the Second Amendment movement.

So I called “Protect MN’s” phone number – and got through to Heather Martens.  For the first time.

And I invited her to appear on the Northern Alliance with me on Saturday.  Or next Saturday. Or any Saturday – live in studio, or via phone.  Or if Saturdays don’t work, we could record an interview in studio or via phone any time, 24/7, at her convenience.  Or, for that matter, I could come out to wherever she wanted to meet and tape an interview.

She said she’d get back to me.

Which, to be fair, she did, in about 15 minutes, via email, saying she’d be happy to do the show…

…for a $1,500 fee.

Of course, we don’t pay for interviews.  Nobody does.  Presumably Martens knows that asking a fee for an interview is a polite-yet-condescending way to say “F**k you” to an interview request – as well, in Martens case, as an admission that she doesn’t pack the gear to a point anywhere but an echo chamber where the media is painting her toenails.

The truth remains:

  • I invite any significant Twin Cities gun control activist to appear on my program, at a time of their choice.
  • I challenge any Minnesota gun control activist, “gun safety” leader or lobbyist, or anti-gun politician to a public debate, on neutral turf, with an audience, with mutuall-agreed rules.  I keep challenging them; their continued avoidance simply means none of them is up to defending the indefensible.
  • Heather Martens has never, not once, said or written a single, substantial, factual thing about the gun issue.

This isn’t over.

Heads? Disaster. Tails? Catastrophe

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As we noted earlier in the week, the left is just dying to get the NRA out of its way.

And they have been since I started following this issue – in probably 1980.

It seems that lately, the left has taken to a three-tiered strategy for fighting the Second Amendment Human Rights movement:

  1. Lie About Everything.  Everyone from the President to the hapless Heather Martens, and the entire media class in between, has spent the past couple of years relentlessly churning out easily-debunked lies; no, Mr. President, we’re not the most violent nation in the world, and states with tight gun laws aren’t safer.  And it seems to be working – while violent crime in general and gun crime in particular has plummeted over the past 20 years, most people don’t know it.
  2. Refuse To Engage the Second Amendment Human Rights Movement Directly:  They always lose in open, head-to-head debates based on facts.  Always.  There has never in history been an exception, and there never will be.
  3. Appeal to Magic:  The NRA is going to go away!   Someday!  You just gotta believe!

This blog has spent nearly a decade and a half engaging points 1 and 2.  Today, it’s all about the 3.

The National Boogeyman Association:  As I pointed out earlier in the week, the NRA is both vital and irrelevant; while it’s a juggernaut at federal lobbying, it’s mostly a bystanding helper at the state level, where most of the actual legislation happens.   But the left – being a fear-based institution – needs a big, centralized boogeyman.  And for this, the NRA serves their purposes.

And let’s be frank; organizations come and go (although the NRA is, and remains at, a peak of numbers and power).

 Adam Winkler – a UCLA law prof who’s popped up on this blog before, and not as an idiot – wrote an op-ed in the WaPo (reprinted earlier this week in the Strib, Read It And Weep:  The NRA Will Fall.

Before I respond, let me establish something.

Baselines:  When I first started covering the battle for Second Amendment human rights, about 30 years ago, the gun grabber movement used to wave around a Gallup poll showing that 85% of the American people favored gun control.  While that number dropped sharply as the poll got into specifics (even then, near the nadir of the Second Amendment’s fortunes), it showed where The People were at regarding our right to self-defense.

But thirty years later, things have changed; a distinct majority support the right to keep and bear arms.

All by way of saying – peoples’ attitudes change over time.

Changes:  I won’t quote extensively from Winkler’s piece – which is based on the idea that the NRA, and the Second Amendment movement, are doomed by demographics; that Latinos, African-Americans, urbanites and women are much less supportive of the Second Amendment and the NRA than rural white males.

On the one hand?  That may be true – today.  Just as it was true of 85% of the people – thirty years ago.  Attitudes change.  Are they changing for or against the NRA and the Second Amendment?  All evidence is anecdotal; the fact that Minnesota has well over twice as many carry permittees today as were ever forecast before the passage of “Shall Issue” reform might be a hint that the swing might actually be in the NRA’s favor.

Are Latinos more favorable to gun control?  Perhaps.  But Latinos aren’t a monolithic bloc; while Latinos in general vote Democrat, those who’ve been in the US longer than 2-3 generations are much more likely to vote GOP.

Asians, Winkler notes, support gun control – but again, they’re hardly monolithic; Koreans and H’mong are actually fairly likely to be shooters (if not “NRA supporters”).

Women tend to be pro-gun-control. They are also the fastest-growing group of shooters in America today.

How will these changes shake out over two decades?  Will policy be dragged to the left, reflecting these minorities’ left-leaning politics?  Or will they, too, evolve?

I know what I’m working toward.

(Let’s also not forget that most of the anti-gun minorities live in states like California, New York and Illinois, that are already relatively hostile to gun ownership).

Omens:  But let’s say Winkler is right; that minorities, new Americans, women and urbanites’ current attitudes will stay static over time.   It is a fact – noted by the estimable Kevin Williamson – that many of our minorities have vastly different perspectives on the concept of risk and freedom than white, middle class Americans do.

So if New Americans and minorities-who-will-one-day-be-the-majority don’t support the Second Amendment, is that going to be a problem for the NRA?

Who the hell cares?  It’s going to be a problem for the whole idea of “America” as a place built on the ideal of freedom.  And by “freedom”, we mean the traditional American founding interpretation – life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, protection of private property, freedom of speech, conscience, religion, press, assembly, keeping and bearing arms, security in your home, trial by jury with representation, equality before the law, the whole shebang – as opposed to the “freedoms” the Democrat party is pushing these days; the “freedom” from consequences, the “freedom” to force other people to make you free of want, the “freedom” to have government force others to give you stuff at gunpoint and enforce an arbitrary, politically-motivated concept of “fairness”; the freedom to abort your fetus and wave your privates around in public.

If the Second Amendment collapses because a majority of “Americans” don’t understand what it is to be “American” or what “America”, indeed, is, then the demise of the NRA will be the least of our problems, because there will be nothing to prevent the rest of the Constitution, and the freedoms it ostensibly guarantees, from being shredded much, much more comprehensively than it already is.

Science!

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SCENE:  Interior shot at local hardware store. Mitch BERG is grabbing a bag of sidewalk salt.  Suddenly, Avery LIBRELLE, holding a bag of various parts, steps around the corner.

LIBRELLE:  Hah, Merg!  Your statistical analysis is shit!

BERG:  Say that again like you’re having a civil conversation in polite company.

LIBRELLE:  Your statistical analysis is bad.

BERG:  That’s a little more like it.  Care to get more specific?

LIBRELLE:  Tuesday on your blog, you said that urban gun violence correlates with Democrat-controlled cities.

BERG:  Yep.  Because when you run through the numbers, both homicide and violent crime rates are statistically much higher in cities controlled by Democrats.

LIBRELLE:  Hah!  Those were crap statistics.

BERG:  They were from the Department of Justice.

LIBRELLE:  Well, look at this!  Stats from the CDC!  And lookie there!  All those red counties with higher gun death rates than all those blue cities!  Hah!  You are an idiot and stupid and your head is full of poop!  Hahahahahaahahahahahaahaha!

BERG:  Yeah, Avery – we’ve dealt with this same exact chart on this blog before.  You don’t see how this is a non-sequitur, don’t you?

LIBRELLE!  It’s science!

BERG:  Yeah – it’s also comparing apples to axles.  My story yesterday covered homicide and violent crime rates.  This chart covers all gun deaths.  You do see the difference, don’t you?

LIBRELLE:  I see that you are a stupid idiot.

BERG:  “All gun deaths” also counts suicides, Avery. Suicides are between 65-70% of the gun deaths in this country. And it’s a form of suicide “preferred” by rural, white men, mostly lonely and socially isolated, very frequently deeply depressed and/or terminally ill. It’s especially prevalent in…the rural west.  And, being prevalent in lots of sparsely populated rural western and southern counties, it means that the gun death rate will look very high – and it comparably will be.  But that’s not the homicide rate.  Which, you will note, is almost nonexistent in most of those rural, western counties with a high “gun death rate”.

Suicide is a tragedy – but no worse than any other form of suicide (the US’s suicide rate is much lower than many countries that control guns strictly).   And it’s morally not the same as murder – which is taking someone else’s life, by definition against their will.  Which was what my story covered.

So, Avery – what does this mean.

LIBRELLE:  It means that you hate women and science and are a racist…

(LIBRELLE, gesturing expansively, knocks an elbow against a shelf.  A gallon can full of paint falls, conking LIBRELLE on the head)

BERG:  (Rushing to LIBRELLE’s assistance)  Are you OK?

LIBRELLE:  (head lolling about in mild delirium) What it really means is that it’s my statistical analysis that is “shit”, and that I should really stop playing at being a “fact checker” until I learn how to do the job, because I make myself look like an ignorant laughingstock.

HARDWARE STORE ATTENDANT:  (Rushing from the counter) Is h…,er sh…is this person OK?

BERG:  Just having a moment of clarity.  It’ll pass.

(And SCENE)