According to a new count, the group’s membership has gone from a high of 1,046 following the shootings at Newtown, Conn.’s Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012 to a low today of 885.
That’s a fast drop of 161 members.
Watching what happened in Colorado and, yes, Minnesota has given a lot of mayors a reality check; support for Victim Disarmament is a half a mile wide and two inches deep. The Second Amendment movement is half a mile wide and 200 feet deep and has a current that’ll pull stumps.
Although some of the mayors are attributing it to Bloomberg’s greedy scope creep:
As they’ve left MAIG, many of the mayors have publicly assailed Bloomberg’s group, suggesting that it has gone from a group targeting “illegal” guns to one simply against guns.
The “original mission swayed,” said Rockford, Ill., Mayor Larry Morrissey as he exited. He even explained that he planned to get a concealed carry permit because his family has been threatened.
Just this week, Poughkeepsie Mayor John Tkazyik bailed. He wrote a letter about in the Poughkeepsie Journal. “I’m no longer a member of MAIG. Why? Just as Ronald Reagan said of the Democratic Party, it left me. And I’m not alone: Nearly 50 pro-Second Amendment mayors have left the organization. They left for the same reason I did. MAIG became a vehicle for Bloomberg to promote his personal gun-control agenda — violating the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens and taking resources away from initiatives that could actually work to protect our neighborhoods and save precious lives. Gun control will actually make a bad situation worse.”
Bloomberg’s offensive this year is going to be like the final banzai charge at Iwo Jima; furious, and deadly, but a dying gasp.
At least for this cycle.
(By the way, all you Victim Disarmament activists? We’re all against illegal guns. Unlike Bloomberg, we Real Americans actually have done something about keeping them out of the hands of illegal people).
There must be a legislative session coming up; the MinnPost – a local group-blog funded by liberals with deep pockets employing a rogue’s gallery of recycled local big-media people – is back on the gun beat.
Last week, Susan Perry – their “consumer health reporter”, whose sloppy reporting on this subject we’ve repeatedly, even routinely, beaten up in this space – wrote a fluff piece about a metastudy (a repackaging of the data in other studies) appearing in the Annals of Internal Medicine that shows that having a gun in the home doubles chance of a murder, and triples the chance of suicide.
And it reminded me of an episode from twenty years ago.
Let’s flash back, shall we?
The Gullible, Biased Hack Beat: Back in the early nineties, the anti-gun media (which was most of them, back then) breathlessly recited a factoid; a study in the New England Journal of Medicine had showed, we were told, that a gun in the home was 43 times as likely to kill the owner, or someone the owner knew, than it was to kill a criminal.
The media reported this uncritically, without question, much less the faintest pretense of analysis of the data that led to that very specific number.
Of course, some Real Americans in the Second Amendment movement did dig into the study, back when “the internet” was still “Usenet” for most people.
They found that the data came from King County, Washington, during a period of several years in the late eighties. And the “43:1” ratio actually broke out, over the period of time, to nine justifiable deaths of criminals that the shooter didn’t know, against something like 380-odd other firearms deaths.
And of those 380-odd firearm deaths, the vast majority were suicides – enough to account for 36-37 of the “43”. Of the remaining 6 from the “43” – 50-odd firearms deaths – there were a few accidents; the rest were murders or manslaughters of one kind or another. And note that it only counted the presence of a gun in the home, not whether it was used; if someone broke into your home and shot you as you were peeling potatoes at your kitchen counter, but there was a gun in the house, it went into the “43”.
Suicide is obviously a problem – but it doesn’t depend on firearms. Japan, where guns are unobtainable, has double the US’ suicide rate. But leaving out suicides, the rate dropped to more like six to one.
But there were other clinkers in the way the “43:1”, or even the 6:1, figures were generated, and related to the public by a media that, at best, didn’t know what it was talking about and, at worst, didn’t care.
Walt White Knew Jack Welker!: The phrase “gun owner or someone they know” was the first problem.
Someone who shoots himself, obviously, is “killing themselves or someone they know”. But then so is a drug dealer shooting a rival, or a customer that owes them money, is “killing someone they know”, as is a gang-banger shooting a long-time rival So is a woman shooting an ex-husband that’s been stalking and threatening her. So is someone killing a robber that they had met, even once, ever.
The NEJM study didn’t distinguish between those types of killings. The “1” in the “43:1” ratio only included justifiable homicides where the shooter had never met the victim.
Why So Bloodthirsty?: Did you notice that the only “good” results in the New England Journal study – the “1” in “43:1” – were the nine justifiable killings of complete strangers?
Leaving aside the likelihood (indeed, fact) that some of the homicides of acquaintances were justifiable – why is a justifiable killing of a complete, malevolent stranger the only legitimate use of a firearm?
The study didn’t account for deterrences of other crimes. A gun used to scare away a burglar or a stalker doesn’t have to kill anyone to have a beneficial effect – deterring a felony without a shot being fired.
The Real Results?: So when you take the numbers from the “43:1” ratio, and then…:
factor out suicides (which are a problem, and were the vast majority of the deaths in the study, but are entirely different than crimes committed with malice against others)
move the justifiable homicides of “acquaintances” – ex-spouses and the like – into the “good” column”
Account for the “bad” shootings that involved someone who was drunk or high, or had a criminal record
Add in estimates of the number of crimes that would have been deterred by law-abiding citizens with guns in the same area during the same period
…then the original New England Journal of Medicine study’s numbers came out more like this:
A gun in a home in which one or more residents had a criminal record, drinking or drug problem was equally likely to be involved in a murder or unjustified killing as it was to deter a crime.
A gun in a home without any of those problems was dozens or hundreds of times as likely to deter a crime (depending on the estimate of deterrences you accepted – from the conservative FBI estimate to the much more expansive estimate by Gary Kleck, which by the way tracks pretty well with the Centers for Disease Control’s recent work on the subject) as to be involved in an unjustifiable homicide. That’s dozens at least, hundreds at most.
So How About Sue Perry’s Article?: A quick scan of the metastudy in Annalsshows that it (or, more proximately, the studies it mines for data) does not, in fact, control for…:
drug abuse
Alcohol abuse
criminal records
…among the subjects in the “study”.
Like the reporting on the NEJM study twenty-odd years ago, it considers firearms in a vacuum, without accounting for any of the human factors – criminal activity of the owner, sustance abuse issues, or mental illness.
Neither does it distinguish between justifiable homicide – which accounts for 2-3% of all firearms deaths in America in a given year – and murder, manslaughter or accidental deaths.
It’s junk science…
…well, no. It’s junk social science, which is the worst kind.
Susan Perry is doing junk reporting of junk non-science, to report a meaningless, junk conclusion.
Why?
Remember: The MinnPost operates with the assistance of a large annual grant from the Joyce Foundation.
Follow the money. Journos do it – when it’s not Alida Messinger or Michael Bloomberg’s money, anyway.
The Joyce Foundation also funds…
“ProtectMN”, the closest Minnesota gets to an actual gun control “organization”,
“TakeActionMN”, which essentially serves as an unregulated “progressive” political party whose mission is to drive the DFL to the left. It may be the most successful political party in Minnesota today – precisely because the laws that apply to the GOP and (to some extent) DFL don’t apply to it.
All “journalism” about guns – and politics and general – from the MinnPost must be considered with that in mind.
Because, I suggest, it’s what they’re being paid to do.
There was a time when “journalists” would have recoiled at any suggestion that their coverage was bought and paid for to secure some special interest’s narrative.
Those days are long past us – to everyone who pays attention.
Of course we’ve seen this in Minnesota; in addition to the phony “sportsmens'” groups (not to mention buying instant media), the entire Tom Horner campaign was floated (or, more accurately, funded) by the left to try to sap votes from Tom Emmer.
Lesson: Check every “group’s” pedigree. Odds are they’ll turn out no more substantial than, say, “Protect” MN
Scott Gillespie of the Strib editorialized about the one-year anniversary of Sandy Hook.
At least he ended the piece constructively:
Those 26 faces will stay frozen, though. The children and their teachers, lost forever except in photos and home video. At least — if you believe it will help — say another prayer for them and their families. If we offer nothing else, at least say a prayer.
Other than that? Gillespie foreshadows what will, I suspect, be the anti-rights movement’s two big hooks in Minnesota this year; guilt, and the vague need to “do something”, even if the “something” is completely useless at preventing actual crime, with both of them always, always, wrapped in the memory of people who would not have been saved by anything that they’re proposing.
But practical responses aren’t the issue, here. This is about emotions:
You see those faces frozen in time on your TV screen now. They are angels, every one of them. You would like to look away, turn the channel and move on. Our Congress did, and most of our state legislatures. One year later, little has changed.
It’s not the Sandy Hook kids’ faults the were all white and upper-middle-class, and that the media focused on them and not the many, many more children slaughtered in ones and twos in Barack Obama’s Chicago – who are almost entirely black. But it is Scott Gillespie’s fault that he ignores, or doesn’t know, that not a single law proposed in any state legislature, or in Congress, would have prevented Sandy Hook – but that the City of Chicago has “done something”, a near complete civilian gun ban, that is closely correlated with a skyrocketing murder rate in Chicago.
But those kids are black, and in a Democrat stronghold. As always, they go unmentioned.
The emotions that Gillespie – and the anti-rights movement whose water he’s carrying – aren’t just about sympathy. No, there’s gotta be ninety seconds of hate:
Wayne LaPierre is on the screen now. You can hear the anger in his voice. If he feels any pain, any regret, he hides it. The perfect man for the job. Raise more money and spread more lies. Intimidate. Bully. Threaten. Win at all costs, from coast to coast. Not undefeated, but close.
Scott Gillespie, I hereby challenge you; where was LaPierre wrong? What are the “lies?” Let’s talk about that. Preferably face to face, but I’ll do email. Let’s hash this out.
No, it’s not that LaPierre lied; he didn’t, and doesn’t have to. He was right. His opponents were wrong. And they – in this case Gillespie, but it could be any lefty columnist – are attacking LaPierre with the dim ad-homina and the scurrilous accusation – the “lies” – because it’s all they have, and a boogeyman, a Goldstein, is what they need.
And then there’s the murderer. We should ignore him and his story, right? Make him as abstract as possible because it’s too hard to answer the why question without that research. There are more like him, but how could we possibly know how to find or stop them? So we move on, trying not to say his name.
Now Gillespie is just making things up. This is where LaPierre – and all of us on the human rights side of this battle – have been focusing; Adam Lanza. The current system worked, in that it denied him a gun. He killed his mother – already illegal in fifty states – to steal her legally-purchased firearms to use in the rampage.
And it’s on the crazies, like him, James Holmes, Harris and Klebold, Seung-Hui Cho and the like, that Wayne LaPierre – and, incidentally, all of the rest of us on the human rights side of the argument – are focused.
And not a one of them would have been affected by any of the laws that were passed in places like Colorado, New York, Pennsylvania or California.
So when Gillespie plaintively asks…:
The anniversary show is over now. Will there be another one next year, or the year after that? Why wallow, right? We are Americans. We press on. We buck up and never look back. Like LaPierre.
…the answer is “maybe, but nothing you’re proposing would change a thing”.
But Gillespie is part of a wave of mainstream media that are working to pave the way for the anti-gun movement’s next big campaign in Minnesota.
In 2013, the grassroots of the Minnesota human rights movement – pro-Second-Amendment groups like GOCRA, the Twin Cities Gun Owners and other genuine grass-roots organizations – dealt the gun-grabbers a humiliating defeat. Even though the anti-rights groups were lavishly funded, were supported by a purchased media narrative, and controlled the entire apparatus of Minnesota government, they were unable to jam down any of their useless legislation.
Zero.
It was an epic victory of an army of Davids over a phalanx of obese, arrogant Goliaths.
But 2014 is a whole new year.
Since the last session, the anti-gun movement has made some roster changes. In place of last year’s leadership – “Protect” MN’s credibility-free Rep. Heather Martens, Moms Want Action’s shrill, self-caricaturing Jane Kay, and the hysterical, deranged Joan Peterson, a flood of Joyce Foundation and Bloomberg money has enabled the anti-rights movement (in this case, “Mayors Against Illegal Guns”) to hire Richard Carlbom, the architect of the campaign to torpedo the Marriage Amendment, and then to pass Gay Marriage in Minnesota.
And this is going to change the game here in Minnesota.
Unlike the Minnesota gun grab movement’s previous leadership, Carlbom is a smooth, polished PR fixer with great talent at running a nuanced, effective campaign – and he’s already got one improbable win against (at face value) longish odds under his belt.
As a result, this is going to be a different campaign, unlike any that Minnesota’s Second Amendment movement has ever faced.
My hunch? Carlbom will replace Kay/Martens/Peterson’s club-footed yapping, and Michael Paymar’s wide-front legislative bludgeoning, with a more subtle attack:
Emotional cruise missiles replace carpet-bombing: the anti-rights movement has long bludgeoned their audiences with a ham-fisted appeal to emotion. To be fair, it’s their only argument; to be honest, they haven’t done it well. Carlbom won the gay marriage debate in part by personalizing the gay marriage issue – showing that gay couples were Just Like The Rest Of Us. I think you can expect the emotional assault to be much more focused and personalized than in the past; fewer “schoolrooms full of children”; more “let’s talk with this mom, whose son was…[fill in tragic shooting]. Expect those attacks to be far harder to undercut – Carlbom is less likely to focus on the story of a “child” who turned out to be a gang thug than were the hapless Martens or Kay.
The friendly face of “reasonable” authority: The anti-gun movement lost a lot of credibility points by using as its public face the scolding, unctuous, unfluent Martens, the hectoring and red-faced Kay, and irrational Peterson. Expect those faces to be replaced by Minnesota’s very definition of “reasonable”; lots of Lutheran ministers (ELCA, natch), with their Saint Olaf-bred diction and their carefully-trimmed beards, and liberal-but-not-too-liberal, Jewish-but-not-too-jewish rabbis, carefully and calmly asking for “common sense” measures to “prevent violence” and “promote safety”, and lots of other carefully-focused terms calibrated not to alarm tens of thousands of phone calls and thousands of protesters.
Trying to build the “reasonable” brand: Expect less (overt) talk about attacking puffy-faced white suburban caricatures, and more about how “gun safety” and “violence prevention” appeals to our better natures; the things that make us human, and Minnesotan. This campaign has, in fact, already begun, with Strib columns by Lori Sturdevant and Scott Gillespie (see this space tomorrow morning) that stake out this emotional, intellectual space (in a campaign that just can’t be coordinated, and I’m sure is just a fluke that won’t, no, won’t get re-iterated in turn by every other Minnesota mainstream media outlet, nosireebob).
It’ll be a campaign calculated not to alarm, and to appeal on at least a shallow level to the conceit most Minnesotans have that we’re a thoughtful, deliberate people, not given to unseemly rash emotionality and open to “reason”.
Underneath and obscured by it all, of course, will be the facts; that none of the measures they’re proposing will affect actual violence in any way. Nor are they intended to.
But it’ll be done in a way intended to gently gull the gullible, and lull at least a part of the crowd that rose up to repudiate Representatives Paymar, Hausman and Martens in the last session.
So it’s almost time for a new session – one that may be the most dangerous yet for Minnesota’s Real Americans.
Smoke ’em if you got ’em.
CORRECTION: This past session was 2013, wasn’t it?
One of the tiny network of astroturf gun-grabber groups that’ve been trying to gut the Second Amendment in Minnesota is “Moms Demand Action”. They are run by the rather overwrought-sounding Jane Kay.
So far, their main contribution to the anti-human-rights effort has been to make Heather Martens and “Protect” MN sound almost reasonable. Oh, yeah – and generate Twitter spam for legislators.
Now, the Joyce Foundation has been spending big liberal-plutocrat bucks trying to get Minnesotans (outside of white, upper-middle-class Carlton grads in Crocus Hill and Kenwood) to take them seriously.
And so apparently they have a new PR angle – something to put a jaunty face on what had to be as humiliating a year for Moms Want Action as for all the rest of Minnesota’s anti-rights crowd.
Anyway – new branding! They rolled it out last week! Here it is!
From Rob D of GOCRA on Facebook:
When your group name already sounds like an x:rated website, circulating an image of a woman disrobing could be considered a marketing fail.
Right? Like, do you need a credit card to use their website?
I worry sometimes that the anti-rights movement is floating people like Jane Kay and Heather Martens and groups like Moms Want Action! to lull pro-civil-rights Real Americans into a false sense of intellectual, rhetorical and political superiority.
Whether by design or not, I gotta admit – it’s working.
I almost missed this one in the scrum of this past few weeks.
A couple of weeks ago, when Representatives Paymar and Martens tried to jam down a ban on law-abiding citizens carrying their legally-permitted firearms in the Capitol complex, the Strib’s Abby Simons wrote the paper’s follow-up piece.
It ended with a quote from Representative Martens; like most of Martens’ statements, it reeks of crap from rhetorical stem to stern. But I’ll emphasize the part I want to focus on today:
Heather Martens, executive director [Ha ha ha! – Ed.] of Protect Minnesota, an organization geared toward ending gun violence [Ha ha ha! – Ed.] and an advocate for the ban, said the intimidation happens when a loaded firearm is worn openly, as it was earlier this year during a hearing.
“There is no history of someone like that being a meaningful deterrent or being able to stop an attack,” she said.
If you read this blog, you are smarter than that.
John Lott showed how “someone like that” – multiplied by millions – have deterred hundreds of thousands of crimes in shall-issue states, as compared with discretionary or non-issue states (back when there were more of both).
As to stopping those attacks? Well, we’ve been through this before. Here’s a partial list of attacks stopped by law-abiding, non-police, private citizens with legal firearms:
An episode in Richmond, VA in the nineties where a shooter who intended to copycat the Luby’s Cafeteria massacre (in Killeen, TX) was stopped after killing one person, by another citizen with a legal handgun.
House extended ban on all-plastic guns for another 10 years. Meaningless gesture. Nobody gets shot with them, banning them won’t stop people from making them any more than banning cocaine stops people from using it. Posturing to divert attention from real government failures in every other area.
My grandson has a plastic gun. He carries it in a holster on his cowboy belt when he rides his hobby horse. I wonder if Rep. Paymar is intimidated by that, too?
Joe Doakes
Heather Martens will no doubt make them a priority in the next session.
To prevent them from “intimidating” other kids.
You think I’m joking. But if I’ve learned anything living in a city full of liberals with no fear of being held accountable, today’s sardonic jokes are tomorrow’s laws.
Minnesota is one of only a few states that allows private firearms to be carried at the state Capitol without screening. In addition, committee chairs don’t have the authority to keep people from carrying guns into hearings — no matter how volatile the topic of discussion.
At the Nov. 5 committee meeting, a public safety official described and example of a concealed carry permit holder expressing anti-government sentiment and a plan to bring a gun to the Capitol. Members of the committee who support gun carrying expressed their disapproval of such behavior. But sitting right in the hearing room was a group aligned with the gun lobby wearing Guy Fawkes masks. Nobody on the committee appeared to realize that Guy Fawkes was known for his attempt to blow up the English Parliament, and a recent movie glorified Fawkes’ effort.
The safety risk of loaded firearms is known – but the use of guns for political intimidation is becoming more brazen every year. This is unacceptable in a democracy. Our public safety officials and legislators should be allowed to know when individuals are coming in with guns and keep guns out of all or part of the Capitol complex.
It would be irresponsible to wait for a tragedy to happen in Minnesota before making our Capitol safer. Please give law enforcement and legislators who run hearings the ability to protect our free speech and our safety at the Capitol.
I have to wonder – has Representative Martens actually been to an “Occupy” rally (back when the were still happening)? The places were crawling with those creepy masks.
But let’s take Heather Martens at her stated word. The legislature has to guard against “Anti-Government Sentiment?”
So now Rep. Martens is trying to gut the First Amendment, too!
Here’s the letter I sent back through their little email spam-bot widget:
Representatives,
This, like everything “Protect Minnesota” has ever written or said, is a lie.
Capitol Security staff are pretty clear about it; carry permittees are the most polite, least bothersome groups of protesters that ever show up at the Capitol.
By the way – the “anti-government sentiments” Ms. Martens is referring to was a guy in a Guy Fawkes mask. Ms. Martens is filling in the details about “blowing up the Capitol” – because, as usual, she’s lying. And, apparently, she’s no more comfortable with the First Amendment than the Second.
Please stop wasting taxpayer time participating in Heather Martens’ Joyce-Foundation-funded charades.
Mitch Berg
Saint Paul
Not sure it’ll get through, but it was fun to write.
This email came out from Rep Heather Martens (DFLiar, HD66A) earlier this week:
Dear Friend,
Tomorrow at 10:30 am, the legislature’s committee on Capitol security will decide whether to continue to let people carry loaded guns in the Capitol.
At a meeting earlier this month, it became clear that some concealed carry permit holders have used their loaded guns for political intimidation.
And there’s your lie.
There was no “intimidation”.
Go check for yourself. Call the folks at Capitol Security. They’ll tell you the Second Amendment Rights crowd, guns or no, is the very best-behaved group of protesters that ever comes to the capitol. Friendly, polite to a fault, never even the faintest shred of a problem. Which is an amazing feat with group that always numbers in the hundreds every time they show up.
Not a single problem. Ever.
Martens – as always – is lying.
It’s The Bigotry, Stupid: Martens points out that there’s some fear, classism and bigotry at work here:
A legislator on the committee expressed disapproval of such behavior.
I don’t doubt that “a legislator” might have said something like this. Some DFL Metrocrat no doubt does have an aversion to guns, and people carrying them.
But why do we pay them any more attention than we would a legislator who was afraid of black people?
It’s entirely possible some ninny is afraid of people exercising their law-abiding rights. People get intimidated by free speech, too. Do we dignify it with a response? Or do we call it what it is?
(Fact: the only “intimidation” carried out by an unelected official during the gun hearings was the loathsome gun-grabber who walked up to the daughter of a GOCRA organizer and told her “you’ll be a better person than your father when you grow up”).
But he then said nothing should be done because nobody has been killed yet at the Capitol.
Nor will they ever be – by a carry permittee, anyway. Statistically, you are at greater danger of being shot by a Democrat legislator than by a legal carry permit holder.
I Gotcher Call To Action Right Here: Martens puts out a call to her anemic, arthritic, utterly white little legion:
Please contact committee members to urge them to take decisive action. They should allow security officials and legislators to limit where guns can be carried at the Capitol.
We can’t wait for something to happen in the Minnesota Capitol building in order to make the Capitol safe. And political intimidation should be unacceptable at our state Capitol.
Once more unto the breach, Real Americans. It’s time to light up the switchboards.
Which ones? For some reason, the members of the select committee on Capitol Security aren’t published (or at least five minutes of googling didn’t turn up a list). Start with the Public Safety Committee. You know the drill.
This past Friday, I talked with Susie Jones, a reporter from WCCO Radio, about the Gun Grab Summit in North Minneapolis.
Now, I’m stuck in a bit of a conundrum, myself. On the one hand, I do seek a civil, grown-up dialog. As a gun owner, I have a vested interest in making sure my “tribe” – the law-abiding gun owner – acts in a way that credits the responsibility that God gave us and that our Founding Fathers recognized in the Constitution (a responsibility that the record shows we’re really, really good at meeting).
I also have kids. And a granddaughter. Violence is an awful thing. Protecting against violence is one of the reasons I would be a gun owner, hypothetically.
So curbing violence – with guns, knives, axes, fists, cars, sex organs and every other kind – is Job 1 for me, and for every law-abding gun owner I know.
On the other hand? It’s hard to stay adult and civil when dealing with “ProtectMN”, the Joyce-Foundation supported astroturf group that has been campaigning against guns – as opposed to violence – under several names for a couple decades now.
Part of it is that the group – its’ leader, Representative Heather Martens (DFL HD 67A), speaking as a leader and as an individual – has never, ever uttered a solitary substantive word of truth on the gun issue. Ever. Seriously – you can tell Ms. Martens is lying when you see her lips move. She is the most disingenuous person anywhere in Minnesota public life.
Yes, worse than Carrie Lucking.
We are constantly reminded that we need to have a “Dialog” about gun violence.
And “Dialog” requires honesty. So I’m going to be honest.
Monologue And Backstory: The key to “Dialog” is, of course, discussion between two divergent-to-dissenting points of view. Otherwise, all you have is a monologue.
Now, this is what ProtectMN put up on their Facebook page the other day. Read it and tell me…:
“It’s time to stop letting our critical national debates be handled by lunatics, and by corporate lobbyists. It’s time for us to take up the mantle of civics and citizenship again, beyond our narrow self-interest.
We need to have a real discussion about the civic duty of gun ownership sooner, rather than later. It’s time for the grownups to start talking, and more importantly, to take action.”
The MN Gun Violence Summit will consist of “grown-ups” talking about how to make our communities safer and reframe the debate about gun policy.
…if all of that Alinskyite framing (“lunatics”, “grown-ups”) sounds like someone looking for a dialog?
Class Warfare: Jones noted in her conversation with me that some of the people at the “summit” had complained that the issue was a matter of the plucky, put-upon inner city versus the smug, complacent suburbs – and that shooters just don’t understand life in the inner city.
I refuted them thusly; me. I live in the Midway. I’ve had a drive-by shooting in front of my house. I had a break-in when I was in my house, once upon a time; the sound of my own firearm ended the incident. Senseless violence? A four-year-old girl was murdered half a mile from my house, right about the time I had two kids in her age bracket.
Gun violence affects my city. My quality of life. My property value. Just as much as it does yours, and more than it does those of any of the leadership of “ProtectMN” and “Moms Want Action”.
And – this is the important part -not a single proposal they’re making, or have ever made, would affect gun violence in the least.
So, Mr. Duncan, please spare us the BS and never, ever play that crap with me.
And the fact is, many shooters live in the suburbs because decades of DFL mismanagement have left the cities much more dangerous than the subs, the exurbs or Greater Minnesota.
Indeed, given that Minneapolis and Saint Paul have the lowest incidence of civilian gun ownership in the State and the highest crime rates, perhaps it’s time we considered whether owning guns is a better deterrent to violence than banning them.
The Potemkin Mission: But “ProtectMN” isn’t about curbing violence. Not even a little bit.
Proof: In the legislative session just passed, most of the Legislature got behind a bill, HF1325, sponsored by Rep. Hilstrom (DFL, some godforsaken Western suburb). The bill would have added mandatory penalties for using a gun to commit a crime, and improved the state’s reporting to the national background check database (a ball the DFL has been dropping for over a decade now)…
…y’know – things that have a record in curbing violence.
That’s the mission – right?
Not for “ProtectMN”. They – Martens and the Metrocrat DFLers who controlled the Legislature – fought like hell against the bill that would address violence with measures that have actually worked around the country, claiming it was “The NRA’s Bill” (which was written by a rep with an “F” rating from the NRA, but whatever). Instead, they fought for useless fripperies like magazine size restrictions, and yapping about cosmetic features of different guns – things that don’t and have never had the faintest impact on violence at the very most.
Zero.
Nada.
Zilch.
So I ask you – who is actually “dealing with violence”? And who is acting out a fetish over metal objects?
The Takeaways From The “Summit”: I’d like to address this to my brothers and sisters, my fellow human beings in places like North Minneapolis and the lower East Side.
There is a “dialog” to be had about gun violence. And we, your fellow Americans and Minnesotans of the Second Amendment community, are more than ready to have exactly that. We, like you, want to make your streets, neighborhoods and homes safer – because they’re our streets, neighborhoods and homes, too.
“ProtectMN” doesn’t care about “violence”. They froth and fume about guys in Lakeville with AR15s – and you know as well as I do (and Heather Martens does not) that they and their guns aren’t the problem.
It’s the criminals. The people who couldn’t pass a background check when they were 18, and sure as hell can’t pass one now.
And let the record show that Protect MN fought against the legislation that would attack them, in favor of attacking the law-abiding, in the past session.
And starting in January, they’re going to ramp up that attack.
Today at 10AM, “Protect Minnesota” and a coalition of mostly white, mostly upper-middle-class, entirely left-of-center groups will meet, as we discussed yesterday, to try to figure out how to suppress the Second Amendment for the law-abiding Minnesotan.
Yesterday, we discussed the invitation – and how they’re really not interested in any solution that doesn’t involve infringing on the law-abiding, having rejected the RSVPs of Second Amendment activists.
But what about the agenda itself?
The invite – from “Protect Minnesota” The Brady Factory – says:
Find out what’s next in this important work and what your role can be. Sessions include:
— Changing the narrative around gun violence prevention
— Developing effective media strategy
— A deep dive on gun policy in Minnesota
— Grassroots lobbying
— Creating change with personal stories
What are they talking about?
Let’s turn this into real English:
Changing the narrative around gun violence prevention: Whose narrative are we talking about, here? The one in the media? That one is certainly gun-grabber friendly. Or are you talking about the one out there in the larger society – the one that keeps answering “guns in the hands of the law-abiding are a good thing” at the ballot box?
A deep dive on gun policy in Minnesota: “Deep Dive?” You don’t need no stinkin’ deep dive. I’ll tell you what you need to know; for the past 40 years, our self-appointed “elites” have been trying to set gun policy. From 1974 through 1994, it worked. Then Minnesota’s gun owners got organized. Since then, the “elites” have been shut down, and haven’t won a battle that wasn’t handed to them by a judge.
Take that time you were going to spend in your “deep dive” and do something useful. Maybe take a walk.
Grassroots lobbying: This should be a fun session. The gun-grabbers have no “grass roots”
White, upper-middle-class, NPR-listening, Volvo-driving, free-range-alpaca-wearing, white-liberal-guilt-stricken perma-scowling Saint Olaf alums from Linden Hills, Crocus Hill and Saint Louis Park. These are the closest the gun-grabber movement gets to “grass roots”.
They have astroturf. They have a few activists (see photo above) and a lot of money from liberals with deep pockets.
And that’s it.
Creating change with personal stories: Go ahead. Bring your personal stories. We’ll bring ours.
The meeting should be fun. And by “fun”, I mean “clogged with self-righteous but badly-informed bobbleheads”.
If any of you Real Americans attend as ringers, please send me your report.
In the previous piece about tomorrow’s “Gun Violence Prevention and Safe Communities summit “, I said “You’re invited”, sort of.
It’s not actually true. A number of members of the Twin Cities’ human rights community responded to the invitation on Facebook – because the meeting invitation noted that “We all have to step up”, and nobody, but nobody, wants to curb gun violence more than the law-abiding, responsible gun owner [1], and so a number of Second Amendment human rights activists did step up, and RSVPed to the invite.
And some of them have been getting responses:
“Dear [Redacted]
I am writing to inform y ou that the meeting on Friday, for which we received your RSVP, is not open to you. If you come, you will be asked to leave.
Regards,
Heather
Presumably that’s Heather Martens, “Executive Director” and sole member of “Protect Minnesota’.
So apparently when they say everyone needs to “step up” to prevent “gun violence”, they only mean “people who want to ban guns in the hands of the law-abiding citizen”.
I wonder if theMinnPost,or Minnesota Public Radio, both of whom are sponsored by Joyce Foundation, the group of liberals with deep pockets who are “ProtectMN’s” only real source of money, will note that in what will no doubt be their embarassingly effusive coverage of the “event?”
[1] As evidenced by the fact that it’s us law-abiding, responsible gun owners that actually point out that the bulk of the gun carnage is being carried out by criminals, and most of the innocent victims are black children in places like Chicago. The Twin Cities gun-grabber movement, being almost exclusively upper-middle-class white liberals (and, in terms of positions of power, white as the driven snow), seems only to concern itself with the deaths of children who look like their parents are NPR executives. I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.
We’ve written before about “Moms Demand Action”, the gun-grabber astroturf group financed entirely by liberals with deep pockets, and “run” (and, I suspect, almost solely inhabited) by Jane Kay, a woman whose hatred of the law-abiding firearms owner is so toxic as to frankly make me worry about her well-being.
Jane Kay (l) with Rep. Heather Martens (DFL – 67A) and Rep. Michael Paymar, at last spring’s gun grab hearings.
Mama Jane has a website, now. And through the miracle of Web 1.0 technology, it gives the Moms and the group’s “member” their sympathizer or two the ability to put lies, long-debunked research and bobbleheaded long-discredited scare stories out in front of Congresspeople via Twitter in bulk loads. Sort of the “Ugly Black Gun” of Twitter interfaces, designed to spit out untruths as fast as a group of orcs can click.
They’re using the #gunsense, #Savethe9 and of course #momsdemandaction tags.
If #MomsDemandAction had more than a few members, it’d be fun to jack the hashtags.
But of course, the point of groups like Moms Demand Action and “Protect Minnesota” isn’t getting members, or even producing social media. It’s getting the compliant media (like the MinnPost, which is sponsored by the same groups that sponsor both of the gun grab groups) to present them as if they’re real groups, to gull the gullible into believing that there is an organized, organic gun-grab movement.
There isn’t. But you’ll never hear it from Doug Grow.
Earlier this week, the Joyce Foundation collected another installment on its payment for the MinnPost’s PR services in pursuit of disarming the American people – in this case, a “Community Voices” column by by Rebecca Lowen and Doug Rossinow, who are listed as “history professors at Metro State”.
Those who fail to learn from history, it’s fair to say, teach history at Metro State.
And if this reflects the current state of the victim-disarmament movement, it’d seem their strategy has shifted to “ad homina” and “making things up”.
I got this letter from “Protect Minnesota” recently. “Protect Minnesota” was what Rep. Heather Martens (DFLiar – HD66A) had to rename “Citizens for a “Safer” Supine Minnesota” when it turned out her constant lying had damaged whatever credibility the old brand had.
For those who’ve missed earlier installments of my coverage of Ms. Martens, here’s what you need to know; every single substantive thing she had said about gun issues, ever, throughout her career, has been a lie. Every. Last. Word.
Here’s her letter:
Dear Heinrich ,
It’s been several weeks since the Minnesota legislature went home. Despite passing one bill to fund improvements in Federal gun background check data, the legislature left gaping loopholes in the law that still allow people who shouldn’t have guns to get them easily.
Well, no. A bipartisan majority of the legislature realized that Martens’ various bills – copied and pasted as they were from New York and California – wouldn’t change criminals’ ability to find guns; they’d just register the guns of the law-abiding, for further targeting by law-enforcement when and if the political winds swing that way.
We’d never tolerate that sort of treatment of the First Amendment. Why the Second?
Martens:
We can’t afford to wait for another mass shooting, so we are not letting up in the push for change. We need your help to have one-to-one conversations with voters about what is at stake, and how they can push common sense state and Federal laws. Can you join a phone bank tomorrow? Click here to help phone on Wednesday, July 10, at TakeAction in St. Paul. (Pizza and air conditioning provided!)
Not that there was any doubt that “Protect MN” was part of the ultra-left hive, but the fact that TakeAction – which, like “Protect MN” is an astroturf group funded by unions and liberal plutocrats – just happened to lend “Protect” a phone bank should tell you something.
With more than 75 percent of Minnesotans supporting universal background checks for gun sales,
…according to a push poll whose results have been reported with flagrant disregard for the context of the original survey question; tomayto tomahto, I know…
we had great success engaging voters all over the state, generating thousands of phone calls and emails to legislators.
Martens has been showing an interesting pattern since her bills got tubed by solid bipartisan majorities (which included a bipartisan majority of all House members signing on to co-author a bill that was a direct repudiation of Martens’ bills (channeled via the likes of Michael Paymar and Alice “The Phantom” Hausman); she’s been reduced to trying to turn defeats into victories, at least in the minds of her utterly uninformed followers.
“Thousands” of calls? By all accounts, calls ran 50:1 against Martens’ bills. Even the MinnPost’s Doug Grow, who gets at least part of his paycheck from the same place Martens does (the anti-gun Joyce Foundation contributes at least five figures to both “Protect” MN and the MinnPost, which I suspect is in major part behind the MinnPost’s atrociously ignorant and ludicrously slanted coverage of Second Amendment issues this past year), said it was more like a thousand, as if that was a major accomplishment.
In 2013, we didn’t have time to build the power it takes to reverse the long-term effects of gun-rights extremist propaganda. But we have the public on our side, and we can make the change we need, as long as we keep at it!
Click here to join us and our friends at Mayors Against Illegal Guns for the first in a series of summer phone banks!
And there you go. Two astroturf groups sponsored by liberal plutocrats and government unions (fluffed by a “news” outlet sponsored by those same plutocrats and their plutocrat-supported foundation) are joining with a group of liberal politicians in another astroturf group funded by another liberal plutocrat to try to keep all us unruly peasants in line.
I’ve said it for twenty years, now; the extreme left has always led with the class-warfare rhetoric – and yet on this, the most populist issue of them all, it’s the left who are the patricians, and the gun rights movement in all its bipartisan and non-partisan millions who are the uppity peasants demanding real freedom.
There is a new astroturf group calling themselves “American Rifle + Pistol Association.” (Here’s the URL — I recommend against giving them PageRank by posting it, though: http://amriflepistol.com/ )
And I won’t post it as a link, for precisely that reason.
They are Obama-cheering, gun-control-supporting, MSNBC-watching, Moms-Demand-Action-loving, MAIG-parroting gun banners.
Don’t be fooled. DO spread the word.
Every few years, the left tries to float one potemkin “gun group” or another. I can remember at least three over the years – and the ARPA is no exception.
Here are the screenshots that show [Peter Vogt] the Connecticut converted to Texan Chairman of American Rifle & Pistol Association who is an Obama supporter who is pushing Bloomberg/MAIG’s gun control campaigns while helping to promote Moms Demand Action, a group trying to pressure companies to ban lawful concealed carry so gun owners can’t carry in public anymore and convince gun retailers to stop selling the most popular guns in the country.
They can’t beat us, so they’re going to try to co-opt us.
And they think this is the first time we’ve seen them try 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.
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.
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.
The “Million Mom March” – which, lately, draws fewer “moms” than pro-gun activists to its “events” – and “Citizens for a “Safer” Supine Minnesota, famous for never having once published a single fact in any of its press releases, and whose leader (and, let’s be honest, only member) Heather Martens has given this blog ten years of too-easy material, have had to “merge” (hahahahaha). They are “Protect Minnesota“, now.
Rumor has it that they had to change the names in large part because their old names have become so utterly synonymous with dishonesty and providing false information.
This blog is happy and proud to have contributed to that. And I dedicate its next ten years to extinguishing the group completely, preferably by humiliating them into an inescapable political shame spiral.
Although a little bird at the capitol tells me Heather Martens may be doing that herself; she reportedly approached a prominent Republican lawmaker with a model bill that was an attempt at a compromise on “Stand Your Ground”; Ms Martens claimed it had been approved by the NRA.
The lawmaker called the NRA. They’d never heard of it, and did not approve. Martens had lied, not that this surprises anyone who’s read this blog over the past ten years; if Heather Martens drops a hammer and claims it will hit the floor, don’t buy it until you hear the thump.
Just saying – it’s hard to humiliate an organization like “”Citizens for a “Safer” Supine Minnesota”…er, “Protect” Minnesota, when they do it so well themselves.
If the Minnesoa left has a boogieman in this cycle, it’s the “American Legislative Exchanage Conference”, better known as ALEC.
Founded and run by that other perennial boogieman of the hysterial left, Grover Norquist, ALEC pushes a conservative agenda by hosting get-togethers and suggesting legislation to – wait for it – legislators. Mostly conservative ones.
Sort of like the AFLCIO, the Ntaional Rifle Association, National Education Association, and practically every other organization that pokes is nose into legislation at the state level.
For the past year, a phalanx of leftybloggers and regional media have been passing on the meme hat ALEC is somehow different. More sinister.
Some have called ALEC a “lobbying” group – which is odd, inasmuch as legislators actually pay to join the group.
Now,the coverage “coverage” of ALEC throughout the lefty alt-media has been utterly uniform in what it mentions (model bills!) and also what it omits (paid memberships), to the point that I’d bet money that the entire campaign is being run by “Media Matters” or some other lefty spin organization.
…but omits a number of the key facts that one might expect a “reporter” to provide in covering a “story” – the who, what, when yadda yadda.
Last week, the Minnesota House of Representatives did not meet on Thursday or Friday. The state Senate held a handful of hearings Thursday, but was in recess Friday.
Which was terribly convenient for those members of the Republican caucuses who are also members of the secretive, controversial American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which recently issued members this invitation to a confab where it was to roll out its 2012 legislative agenda:
You can plug your nose and read Hawkins’ piece for the details,such as they are.
Hawkins channels Sally Sorenson, snarking that the recess “was terribly convenient” for liegislators who are also ALEC members.
So – who went?
Anyone?
Hawkins tacitly admits she hasn’t a clue – and tries to fob her negligence as a reporter off on the legislators:
If you want to know whether your elected official was one, you will have better luck calling and asking as a constituent than reporters have had.
It’s striaght out of Jesse Ventura’s “Conspiracy Theory”; lack of evidence is, itself, evidence of a coverup!
“It’s complete BS”, said a source on Capitol Hill familiar with the issue. The source was not aware of any legislators attending the event – “maybe one”, and that seemed like a long shot.
Read the piece. See if you can find anything in it that doesn’t look like it came from a press release.
And then remember Berg’s Seventh Law of Liberal Projection: “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”
The left is harping on ALEC because the the left’s pressure groups – “Alliance For A Better Minnesota”, “Win Minnesota”,and the various unions’ political arms – are about to launch a wave of smear and noise that dwarfs ALEC by many orders of magnitude.
It’s what the media – “alternative” and otherwise does; create whispering campaigns about conservative conspiracies to draw attention away from the real thing.
