The worst kind of political errors are ones where conservatives give liberals an unearned moral victory in a grab for the high ground. 

Carly Melin – who was a 25 year old HamLaw graduate who was airlifted to northern Minnesota precisely in time to meet residency requirements to run for the seat for which the DFL had hand-picked her, when she was elected in 2010 – is taking on Big Law Enforcment on their opposition to the proposed Medical Marijuana bill, in this case in an interview in a Northern Minnesota newspaper (emphasis added):

[INTERVIEWER]: Gov. Dayton has said he will not sign the medical marijuana bill this legislative session if it does not have support of law enforcement. In fact, he made a campaign promise to that effect. The Minnesota Law Enforcement Coalition has made it clear they will not endorse the bill. Where does that leave you?

[MELIN]: We never expected the bill to be passed as written. We expected to use it as a starting point to discuss legislation going forward. Unfortunately, the Law Enforcement Coalition will not discuss specific provisions of the bill with us, and have instead stated that they are opposed to the legalization of medical marijuana for any purpose. In other words, they have a blanket opposition. This makes it very difficult to have a conversation on how to shape the bill.

 Q: Why do you believe MN’s law enforcement agencies are so adamantly opposed to medicinal marijuana?

A: There are many individual members of law enforcement who are supportive of medical marijuana. In fact, one of them is a co-author of the bill, Rep. Dan Schoen, state representative and police office from Cottage Grove, MN. Law enforcement in northeast Minnesota have discussed some flexibility, which is a lot further than we got with the statewide leaders. It is the head honchos and lobbyists down in St. Paul who are the problem. Marijuana being illegal is big business for law enforcement. The forfeiture of property relating to marijuana crimes brings in big revenue to law enforcement agencies. They are worried that legalizing medical marijuana is a step toward the decriminalization of marijuana, which in turn would impact their budgets. I hope that isn’t the basis of their opposition to medical marijuana because there are sick Minnesotans in need of this medicine, but in my experience carrying this legislation they primarily express concerns that this will lead to the recreational use of marijuana.

Leave aside the potential benefits of legalizing recreational marijuana use (I’m not a weed kinda guy, but it’s cut out one of the foundations of the Drug War that’s made parts of Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Richfield and the Brooklyns such lovely places); this is pot for sick people.  Nothing more. 

Melin’s right – and it’s galling for a libertarian-conservative.  Allowing cops, district attorneys and the like set medical policy is just as stupid as letting letting health insurance companies write a national healthcare law.  The entire reason for the opposition is the protection of their own little fiscal fiefdom. 

As Craig Westover points out on Facebook (I won’t link to it, since not all of you are Facebook members), this is a fundamentally conservative stance, getting government out of the relationship between doctors and patients. 

This is an issue where conservatives – especially those who care about liberty in its many forms – should be out front.  Not cowering before a law-enforcement group that is largely beholden to “progressivism”.

Am I the only one struck by the bitter, almost depraved, irony of the Vatican being attacked over a child sex abuse scandal and cover-up…

…by the United Nations?

What “gun safety” law would have prevented this?

Donquarius Davon Copeland, 19, acknowledged that he fired the .357 semiautomatic pistol that killed Rayjon Gomez and said he knew he’d hit somebody.

“I shot two times,” Copeland said under questioning by his defense attorney, Eric Hawkins.

Copeland’s admission Thursday came in a plea bargain in the Aug. 24, 2011, death of Gomez, whose death shocked Minneapolis. The victim was riding piggyback on a friend’s bicycle when he was shot.

Remember that?  A completely random killing of a kid, for no reason whatsoever.   It was a “revenge” shooting, done by people too stupid to know that “revenge” is supposed to mean “against the people who supposedly wronged you in the first place”.

They were cruising around in a van registered to a church pastored by the Taylors’ father.

“We were going to go down there and shoot at people,” Copeland responded to Hawkins when asked why they were driving around.

Just “shoot at people”.

Now, here’s the part I’d like to bring to the attention of all of you ‘gun safety” advocates.  I’ll add some emphasis:

Prosecutors said that as Taylor drove, Copeland and Catchings passed a .357 SIG semi-automatic handgun back and forth.

“Taylor suggested that Catchings and Copeland stop ‘talking’ about shooting someone and ‘just do it,’ ” Mabley wrote in an order last year.

Now, all you “gun safety” advocates; “.357 SIG” is a type of ammo, not a gun.  But it is, generally, found in higher-end firearms.   Not your cheapo guns.  Not the kind of firearm a typical 19 year old can buy – at a gun show, anyway.   The article is silent on where the gun came from – but I’m going to go out on a limb and say a couple of 19 year olds playing with a gun that probably didn’t go for less than $600 probably had a stolen firearm.

Pick any one of Michael Paymar, Ron Latz or Alice Hausman’s proposals from the last session; which one would have prevented this?

I’ll give you a hint.  None.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Four teens are charged with crimes for unsuccessfully attempting to rob a gun store:

. . . including robbery, possessing an instrument of crime, reckless endangerment and possession of a controlled substance . . . .

Once you read the list of charges, the incident becomes self-explanatory.  That’s almost as good as the guy who pulled a gun to demand a McDonald’s job application, then sat around in the booth filling it out until the cops showed up.

Kids these days, I tell ya.

Joe Doakes

Criminals usually aren’t in the top quintile, to put it tactfully.

Who were the people who allegedly robbed and beat former Minneapolis mayoral candidate Mark Andrew for his iPhone?

“Johnny Northside” runs down the yoots’ family tree.  The piece includes a couple of “I assumes” and at least one anonymous but “well-connected” source, but if you connect the dots the way Mr. Northside does, it looks like Mr. Andrew’s assailants are part of quite a family syndicate.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I knew unemployment among Black youth was bad, but this bad?

Joe Doakes

I can totally see this as a Minnesota state program.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Mathematics – particularly statistics – are racissss

A buddy of mine worries about the implications.  He says “Rahm Emmanual knows that to lower crime, he needs to alter the racial makeup of his community.  So Chicago – the hotbed of anti-gun libs and ground zero of violent crime in the US – will step up the efforts to ship Blacks to welfare-happy Minnesota, with Governor Deer-in-the-Headlights only too happy to meet them at the border with the key to the treasury.”

Nah, couldn’t be.

Joe Doakes

What the Czarist Russians did with Siberia…

The media, especially NPR, ran wall-to-wall coverage of the first anniversary of the Newtown massacre over the weekend.

The media paraded bereaved parents before the media, as scholars and journalists and talking heads furrowed their brows and clucked in the way that they’ve become accustomed to clucking about the whole thing.

As a parent, I can relate.  Seeing peoples’ children being murdered is the mother of all gut-checks.  It’s impossible not to feel that overwhelming flood of parental dread, a wave of human compassion, and a twinge “there but for the grace of God…” at stories like that.

But I noticed something absent in any of the mainstream media’s coverage of “gun violence” over the past year-and-almost-a-week; while the media has spent countless hours memorializing the children of Newtown, we’ve seen scarcely a word about the children murdered in Chicago – the crown jewel of American gun control, and the community controlled by the pals of the current administration.

In 2013 – which roughly corresponds to the year since Newtown – there’ve been 395 murders in Chicago.  The toll is remarkable in that it is marginally a little lower than some previous years, but still a mind-numbing carnage.

And of those 395 murders, nine were of children under 12 years old.  And 40 more were of people from 13-17 years old.

Counting everyone?  That’s 16 Sandy Hook classrooms worth of carnage among children over the past year.

But the victims rated not a single day of national garment-rending.  Scarcely an askance mention on National Public Radio.

Why?

Because they had the misfortune to be murdered in a city that is completely strangleheld by Democrats?

Or because none of them look like the children of NPR executives or “Protect” Minnesota leaders?

…of Cindy Yuille and Steven Forsythe, who were murdered a year ago at this minute (3:25PM Pacific Time) in the Clackamas Town Center Mall in Portland, Oregon by Jacob Tyler Roberts, an insane, delusional narcissist…

…and the many, perhaps dozens, of people whom Roberts couldn’t murder in the ensuing minutes and hours, because Nick Meli – a citizen with a carry permit and a .40 cal Glock 22 – made Roberts stop short, and then end his shooting spree by killing himself.  (We talked about  it yesterday). 

If you see Representative Heather Martens, Jane Kay, their PR flak Doug Grow, Michael Paymar, Alice Hausman or any of the Twin Cities’ other gun grabbers, please do me a favor and remind them – Nick Meli saved more lives in that moment than they and their groups of smug, sanctimonious, sputtering hamsters ever will.

Two of the gun-grabbers’ favorite conceits:

• It’s guns – not criminals – that make the “inner city” dangerous (this pronounced always by unctuous white liberals like Jane Kay and Representative Heather Martens, who live in places like Linden Hills and Crocus Hill after doing their stint at Carlton or Saint Thomas)
• Nobody ever foils a crime with a gun

Both lefty memes were, um, shot full of holes earlier this week:

The victim of an attempted robbery in St. Paul took action when one of the robbers pointed a gun at him, firing his own gun and wounding one of the robbers.

No, it’s not Mario Van Peebles gone terribly to seed. It’s Michael Galloway, alleged accomplice to robbery. Photo courtesy of the Saint Paul Pioneer Press.

One of the robbers [Marcel Lee Galloway] simultaneously fired in the direction of the victim, who was not hurt, according to a criminal complaint filed Tuesday.

Galloway was hit in the leg.

Yep – it was justified.  And in John Choi’s Saint Paul, you gotta figure the County Attorney’s office did its darnedest to prove it wasn’t.

The article relates that two men – listed as “VT” and “TG” – got off work in downtown Minneapolis, where they work as bar bouncers.  They drove to a check-casheria on University at Lexington, by the White Castle, around 3AM to cash their checks:

VT, who is 31, saw two males approaching them as he walked to the passenger side of the car and heard the sound of a gun racking a round. A man in a baseball cap, later identified as Galloway, pointed a gun at VT and told him not to move. VT told TG, who is 26, not to move because he feared they would be shot if they did.

The two scumbags lifted TG’s money.  VT hid his wallet before they could get to him.  The robbers frisked him, and found nothing – which has been known to make robbers upset.  I add a bit of emphasis:

“VT was afraid that he and TG were going to be shot” and reached under the passenger seat to grab his SIG Sauer P250 .45-caliber handgun, which he has a permit to carry, the complaint said. “VT feared the two men didn’t believe him when he said he didn’t have any money, and he was afraid they might come back.”

A SIG/Sauer P250 in .45.   Relatively inexpensive, reliable as the rising sun (like all SIG products), and – most importantly of all – at the scene.

The robbers crossed into a Dairy Queen parking lot and the man in the stocking cap raised his handgun and pointed it toward TG and VT.

VT then fired at the robbers, the complaint said, and the man in the stocking cap simultaneously fired once in VT’s direction. VT fired five times and his second shot struck Galloway.

The gunman ran off.  The police caught Galloway.

A couple of bets to place, here:

• The ninnies at “Protect”MN will list this as an example of “inner city gun violence” – even though it was self-defense.  Just watch.
• “VT” will turn out to be African-American, Latino or Asian.  And yes, there are Asian bouncers.

Any action on that bet?

By the way – while it wasn’t a “homicide” (Calloway will live) this is yet another defensive gun use carried out by Minnesota’s 160,000-odd carry permit holders.

…then we need to see a lot more stories like this.

The only truly free society is the one where the government fears the people.

And government today – with police and prosecutors walking all over the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, with our government spying on us and siccing the Tax Police on dissenters, and putting virtually all civil political dissent on government watchlists – is trying to achieve just the opposite.

…guns serve no useful purpose in civil society.

None.

Nosirreebob.

There’s been very little talk about Paul Ciancia in the mainstream media, compared to most of the major spree shootings.

Perhaps it’s because “only” one person died.  Maybe it’s because the shooting spree was ended before it really got started by good guys with guns.

Or maybe it’s because Paul Ciancia’s story ties in nicely with the NRA’s line on mass shootings; it’s not the gun, it’s the mental illness:

The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee said on Sunday the suspect’s “mental illness” was a chief reason behind the shooting at Los Angeles International Airport.

Of course, there’s been no dispositive diagnosis yet – but if I were a gambler, I’d go long on “crazy” in this case.  As I have in every recent mass-shooting incident.  And won.

Of course, there’s a problem:  mental illness data isn’t getting to the NICS system, the national database that provides the “go/no-go” answers on disqualifications for buying guns.

The data Minnesota reports, in particular, has gaps in it – gaps that were supposed to be fixed over a decade ago. The DFL – which has controlled the process one way or another that entire time – has dragged its feet on improving the system.

Most recently, the Metrocrat Extremists – Representatives Martens, Hausman and Paymar and Senator Latz – blocked the “Good Gun Bill”, which would have fixed the gaps in Minnesota’s data reporting.

Before that?  Governor Dayton – who, let’s remind you, ran as a “Second Amendment Friendly” governor (with a pair of .357 Magnums in a gun safe, doncha know) vetoed Tony Cornish’s “Stand Your Ground” bill, which would have likewise fixed the gaps in the data we report.

So why do Democrats support mass murderers?

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Two 70-year-old ladies sitting on the porch at 800 Carroll had to dive to the floor to avoid 40 shots fired at their house, which is on the south side of I-94, by Marshall and Dayton, so it’s not Frogtown proper. But the behavior is the same. The plague of violence is spreading.

A Saint Paul City Councilmember says this incident reminds him of Night Riders but those were White KKK members terrorizing Blacks. Is there even the tiniest shred of evidence any White people were behind this shooting? Because if not – if this was another Black-on-Black gang retaliation incident like the Nizzel George shooting – then Councilmember Khaliq just slandered me and I resent it.

There’s a problem in the Black community all right, but I think Councilmember Khaliq needs to take a good hard look at who’s causing it. Right now, he’s looking for blame in all the wrong places. The Truth Shall Set Him Free.

Joe Doakes

Which is why so little truth actually filters out anymore.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Media is identifying this as the LAX shooter’s rifle.

What is it? The long bare snout looks like an M1 Carbine that my Dad carried in Korea:

. But it has a pistol grip the M1 didn’t have.

The body looks like wood, which nobody uses for modern assault rifles, they’re all black plastic, and the receiver is the same size as the fore-grip.

It doesn’t have the huge carrying handle of an AR-15 or a rail to attach scopes, etc.

Weird. What is it?

Joe Doakes

I’m gonna place it as a “Tacti-Cool” modified Ruger Mini-14. In its original form, it’s one of the most popular working guns in rural America…

…an excellent varmint gun, built on the legendary M-1 Garand operating system (which was adopted by the M-14 service rifle – hence the name “Mini-14” – it’s basically an M-14 chambered for 5.56x45mm (like the AR-15/M-16/M-4 series) instead of the much more powerful 7.62x51mm round.

With some “tacti-cool” accessories added – as not a few police departments have done – it does a passable “assault rifle” impression:

That’d be my guess.

Any other takers?

Speaking of the LAX shooting – how about the absolute dearth of details about the alleged shooter?

Ted Nugent, famous gonzo guitarist and gun nut, says that armed, law-abiding citizens are likely the only coherent way that open societies have to protect against “soft target” terror attacks like the massacre Westgate Mall in Nairobi:

“Societies have to think about how they’re going to approach the problem,” Noble said. “One is to say we want an armed citizenry; you can see the reason for that. Another is to say the enclaves are so secure that in order to get into the soft target you’re going to have to pass through extraordinary security.”

Noble’s comments came only moments after the official opening of the 82nd annual gathering of the Interpol’s governing body, the General Assembly. The session is being held in Cartagena, Colombia, and is being used to highlight strides over the last decade in Colombia’s battle against the notorious drug cartels that used to be the real power in the country.

The secretary general, an American who previously headed up all law enforcement for the U.S. Treasury Department, told reporters during a brief news conference that the Westgate mall attack marks what has long been seen as “an evolution in terrorism.” Instead of targets like the Pentagon and World Trade Center that now have far more security since 9/11, attackers are focusing on sites with little security that attract large numbers of people.

Wait – “Noble?”  I thought it was Ted Nugent…

…oh, I can’t keep a straight face.  It’s not Ted Nugent.  It’s Ronald Noble, who is in charge of Interpol. 

And if Interpol – an agent of international statism – is finally twigging to the idea that the citizens are their own best last line of defense (short of absurd levels of “security”, which we all know means “Security Theater”, and for the most part immense sacrifice of freedom. 

Your choice.

As “bullies” have become public enemy number one, a scourge being tackled by state legislatures, you might think that all of this frenzied activity would be affecting the incidence of bullying.

And you’d be right – but not in the way you’d suspect.  I’ll add some emphasis:

It started as a simple look at bullying. University of Texas at Arlington criminologist Seokjin Jeong analyzed data collected from 7,000 students from all 50 states.

He thought the results would be predictable and would show that anti-bullying programs curb bullying. Instead — he found the opposite.

Jeong said it was, “A very disappointing and a very surprising thing. Our anti-bullying programs, either intervention or prevention does not work.”

The study concluded that students at schools with anti-bullying programs might actually be more likely to become a victim of bullying. It also found that students at schools with no bullying programs were less likely to become victims.

The results were stunning for Jeong. “Usually people expect an anti-bullying program to have some impact — some positive impact.”

Politics is the worst possible way to allocate resources; it may be even worse for regulating behavior.

Joe Doakes of Como Park emails:

The Capitol Shooting story is looking less heroic and more like a blunder. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence she was a threat, only that she panicked when she turned into the wrong driveway.

Might make a good opening sequence for an action/thriller movie.

Black, single mother, divorced from abusive spouse, lives in Maryland but commutes to work in D.C. for some government agency. Walking down the corridor, she hears raised voices. Her boss, a nice Latina woman, is being given orders by a flabby middle-aged White man in a wrinkled suit. He demands she harass the administration’s political opponents, a group of Black, lesbian, abused, single mothers called BLAM, or he’ll have Social Services take her kids away.

The man sees a shadow, realizes he has an eavesdropper, gives chase. She runs out of the building. She wants to blow the whistle to higher authorities but her cell phone rings – her kid at daycare has a fever and they insist she pick up the kid immediately. She gets the kid in the car and heads for the FBI to report the crime but D.C. traffic is a nightmare because of the shut-down, streets closed, veterans in wheelchairs protesting at a monument. She turns into the wrong driveway by mistake, the cops yell and draw their guns. She’s afraid they are after her because of what she overheard, panics, drives off, is chased down and shot dead by half-a-dozen Capitol Security cops. Her child is left crying by the side of the road.

A brave investigative journalist decides to take on the Administration to get justice for the child. This is her story. Coming soon to a theatre near you.

I was thinking Julia Roberts for the lead but since you have such a close, personal relationship with Scarlett Johansson, I thought maybe you two could do lunch and work it out. Have your people call hers, won’t you?

Joe Doakes

I’m on it.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

That wasn’t a mass shooting in Chicago, it was a gang war. Coming soon to a neighborhood near you, as soon as the high-speed rail line is completed.

“Senseless and brazen acts of violence have no place in Chicago and betray all that we stand for,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Friday. “The perpetrators of this crime will be brought to justice and prosecuted to the full extent of the law. I encourage everyone in the community to step forward with any information and everyone in Chicago to continue their individual efforts to build stronger communities where violence has no place.”

Pretty much exactly what President Obama said about Benghazi. That didn’t turn out so well for us either.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Capitol Police told not to help Metro Police during the Navy Yard shooting, but to stay to protect the Capitol.

Same excuse for why we didn’t send troops to Benghazi:

“GEN. DEMPSEY: They weren’t told to stand down. A stand down means don’t do anything. They were told to — that the mission they were asked to perform was not in Benghazi but was at Tripoli Airport.”

Geez, you’d think they were all a bunch of government union employees protecting their turf.

 Suddenly, the reports of a second and third man wielding AR-15’s makes sense. They were there, then suddenly they weren’t there. Now we know why the cops have stopped looking for them. What we don’t know is how many people died when they retreated.

And I doubt we will.  Not from the American media, anyway.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Initially, media assumed he was a right-wing kook NRA member killing innocents with an assault rifle.

Now, it turns out he’s a liberal Obama fan with mental health issues who drives a Prius and used an ordinary shotgun.

So we’ll never hear another word about him.

Joe Doakes

Many mainstream media also transformed the Queens native into a “Texan”.

OK, I’m being hyperbolic.  David Frum is not an idiot.

But he is no more accurate than any other liberal on Second Amendment issues – as we see in his Daily Beast insta-opinion on the Navy Yard shooting, which is chock-full of enough ripe inaccuracy to be a Heather Martens piece.

He tries to diagnose gun violence in America:

Yet the gun enthusiasts do have one point on their side: for all the horror of these massacres, they are only a small part of the story of gun violence in America. Most casualties of gun violence will not die at the hands of a mentally disturbed killer seeking random victims. Most gun casualties occur in the course of quarrels and accidents between people who would be described as “law-abiding, responsible gun owners” up until the moment when they lost their temper or left a weapon where a 4-year-old could find it and kill himself or his sister.

It’s a convenient theory.  It fits nicely with the narrative – that it’s the presence of guns, not the people, that’s the problem.

It’s utterly wrong.

“Most” gun casualties, as in “the vast majority”, are suicides.  All of which are tragic; seeing to peoples’ mental health and preventing suicide is important.  But it is in no way the same as street crime.

Of those?  Most occur as a result of “quarrels”, all right – quarrels between rival gangs, or between drug dealers arguing over turf, or adolescent gang wannabees who feel “disrespected”, or small-time hoods who lose their temper or their control and turn crimes of convenience into crimes of passion. 

While Frum isn’t Heather Martens or David Bloomberg or Doug Grow, he does share some of their congenital illogic about the issue:

As David Hemenway notes in his study Private Guns, Public Health, Americans have experienced similar debates in the recent past. “Cars don’t kill people; bad drivers kill people,” could have been the slogan of the auto industry when it resisted safety regulation in the 1960s. The garment industry could have argued: “Flammable pajamas don’t kill children; careless smokers kill children.” And so on. Every accident has many causes, of course, and public safety progresses by addressing each one. To reduce car fatalities, we both installed seat belts and cracked down on drunken driving. Child deaths by fire have been reduced both because pajamas are safer and because adults smoke less.

 Are we supposed to believe that David Frum, a leading public intellectual of the center-center-center-sorta-right, doesn’t know the difference between “making a product do its main job – carrying people, clothing children – safer against the vagaries and tragedies of normal life” and “misuse of a product that is designed to violently poke holes in things”?

I’d certainly hope so. 

Likewise, better mental-health provision would contribute to the reduction of gun massacres. But America’s uniquely grisly record of gun death cannot be addressed without addressing guns.

“Addressing guns”, like “we have to doooooooooooo something”, is one of those vague, generalized blandishments that shows the writer is out of ideas. 

And after this past year, I suspect the anti-gun movement is exactly that.

There’ve been more mass shootings on Obama’s watch than any other presidency except Clinton’s – and Obama’s on track to pass that dismal record.

And that’s even as violent crime has been plummeting.

It’s a factoid, and I don’t see that it’s necessarily a comment on the Obama administration itself…

…but both the violent crime rates and mass murder rates dropped during Dubya’s terms.

Go figure.

Aaron Alexis, the alleged Navy Yard shooter, originally hailed from Queens.  He spent some time in Seattle. 

But the BBC and NPR referred to him as a “Texan”.   And CNN went one further, calling him a Texan and a military contractor, for the lefty narrative bifecta. 

(He was a “military contractor”, inasmuch as he was working for a firm that was subcontracting with Hewlett-Packard…to work on the Navy’s intranet.  Think Blackwater, only for networking geeks). 

The narrative, above all, must be served.

Just remember:  when there’s a mass-shooting going on, and seconds count, you can depend on the authorities to respond in minutes:

D.C. police quickly deployed an “active shooter team” within seven minutes of reports of shots fired, Ms. Lanier said.

The Navy Yard – a “gun free zone” but for any security on the site – was as defenseless as Fort Hood. 

A carry permit holder would have reduced that time from “seven minutes” to “as long as it took to get his or her firearm out of its holster”.