The media is acting like this is a big story:
A Sri Lankan prisoner who tried to hide his mobile phone during a search of his cell was caught out when guards heard ring tones from his rear-end, a hospital official said on Friday.
The 58-year-old convict had to be admitted to the national hospital in Colombo where doctors later retrieved the handset from his rectum.
Heck, that’s nothing. Mark Dayton has most of the Twin Cities media in about the same place.
Not sure if the President is going to have this sheriff standing behind him glowering at the audience the next time he announces a gun control bill…
…but we need a lot more like him.
Over the weekend, the left’s chanting-points bots erupted on Twitter with the story of Christian Oberender’s arsenal. As reported in the Strib by Paul McEnroe and Glenn Howatt (under the rather tabloid-y title “Murderous ‘monster’ acquires an arsenal”), it’s one of those stories that’s intended to put Second Amendment activists on the defensive.
It’s an ugly story, on its surface:
They knew the Delano house far too well. It was where Christian Philip Oberender, then 14 years old, had murdered his mother in a shotgun ambush in the family rec room in 1995.
Now, 18 years later, Carver County Sheriff Jim Olson was sending his deputies back to the home where Oberender still lives. Just two days earlier, Olson had scanned the day’s shift reports and froze when he tripped over Oberender’s name. A scan of a Facebook page then showed firearms spread out like a child’s trophies on a bed inside the home, along with notes about the Newtown, Conn., gunman who shot 20 children to death.
Long article short: Oberender is nuts. After “serving his time” for murdering his mother 18 years ago in a psych hospital, Oberender figured out how to skirt the system to get around federal and state gun laws to acquire a pretty significant arsenal (although the practiced eye notes that while the photographer staged the shot to highlight the AK47 and the “Tommy Gun”, most of the weapons on the table were run-of-the-mill hunting a and plinking weapons, and the “Tommy Gun” is a low-powered .22 caliber replica that can’t fire full-automatic – which isn’t to say that we want him having any guns at all).
But look at the methods McEnroe and Howatt describe, used by the nutcase to outflank the system:
A Star Tribune review of state court records found case after case in which individuals deemed mentally ill in judicial proceedings later wound up in possession of guns and accused of violent crimes.
(Didja ever wonder what’d happen if the Star-Tribune turned all that “investigative” mojo toward looking into vote fraud claims? I digress)
At least 84 people have been charged since 2000 with illegal gun possession or assault with a dangerous weapon even though they had previously been committed by a judge as mentally ill. Of that group, 29 were charged with multiple counts of weapons possession and nine were considered by a judge to be mentally ill and dangerous.
Additionally, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) has more than 168,000 “suspense files” — records on Minnesotans who have been arrested since 1990 but whose files are so incomplete that the state can’t determine if they should have the right to buy guns.
“The system failed in this case,” Olson said in an interview. “We are having discussions with the BCA to make sure there aren’t similar things like this hanging out there.”
Now remember – this is the system the DFL fought to have remain in charge of issueing carry permits to the law-abiding citizen.
How did Christian Oberender succeed in obtaining a gun permit?
The answer lies in a combination of deceit on his part, failures in the state court system, and haphazard data collection by state agencies, according to interviews with law enforcement officials.
The article describes the process; to buy a handgun or “assault weapon” (or, at many retailers, any firearm at all) the purchaser needs to go to their police station and get a “permit to purchase”; it indicates the bearer has passed a background check involving a call to the NICS database and a look through state records.
No state permit is required to purchase a long rifle or a shotgun in Minnesota. Buyers going to a licensed retailer must pass a federal background check at the counter — but those records can also be incomplete because they are supplied to the FBI by state agencies.
Unmentioned in the report: this particular gap in the data was supposed to have been fixed by the state ten years ago. Language that would have required complete reporting of BCA data to the feds was in the “Stand Your Ground” bill that passed with a solid bipartisan majority last session, and that Governor Messinger Dayton vetoed in her his fit of bitchy partisan pique last spring.
While McEnroe and Howatt seem to try to stick to the facts, they’re hobbled by the fact that they have exactly one non-legislative anti-gun spokesperson in Minnesota in their rolodex.
You know who we’re talking about:
Minnesota’s gun laws don’t require an applicant to provide a fingerprint or a Social Security number to verify identity.
“This was one of our concerns during the ‘Conceal and Carry’ debate in Legislature 10 years ago and it was beaten down like everything else,” said Heather Martens, executive director of Protect Minnesota, a gun violence prevention organization.
As with all things Heather Martens says, it’s a lie. “Citizens for a “Safer” Supine Minnesota” fought to keep the old, discretionary system of issuing carry permits – which required no standardized background check whatsoever, resulting in few permits going to qualified black males and plenty going to unstable white male felons with mental issues. The anti-gunners wanted no carry permits; when that became inevitable, they wanted to load the bill down with poison pills (like making permit-holders public records, so the Strib could list their names for targeting).
If the anti-gunners had any useful ideas – and I don’t recall that they did – they got lost in the blizzard of legislative BS they inflicted on us.
Martens said Oberender’s case highlights the reluctance of lawmakers to tighten gun laws because they fear being accused of infringing on individual rights. “Public schoolteachers have to go through a complete background check, even including a fingerprint,” Martens said. “For buyers of assault weapons and pistols, law enforcement currently has only seven days to verify the person’s identity and criminal history — otherwise, a permit is automatically granted. We should at least allow police enough time to verify the person’sidentity.”
And in a perfect world, that’d be just fine – but we know that law-enforcement in DFL-dominated cities would abuse that prerogative, just as they always abuse every prerogative they have.
The orcs of the anti-gun movement have spent forty years abusing loopholes in gun laws to harass the law-abiding citizen; it should be no surprise that when Real Americans do get to set the agenda, we’re careful to pre-empt that abuse.
At the BCA, a spokesperson said the agency’s database will catch closely matched names and aliases, but it would not snag a name like the one on Oberender’s application.
In Oberender’s case, the first glitch was that he simply transposed his first name and middle name on the gun permit application, apparently in an attempt to avoid recognition by the BCA’s database.
Additionally, when Oberender applied for his permit, records show, he lied about his mental health history, a move that triggered no red flag in the computers — the BCA’s system doesn’t contain any state commitment records of the mentally ill and dangerous.
So the bureaucracy isn’t set up to catch scofflaws and those who are determined to outflank the system.
So fix the system. But here’s the glorious rub; Real Americans have taken control of most of the system. We’ve set up laws to make it harder for you to abuse us via the system, and we’ve got the energy and the power to make it stick.
And notwithstanding all of that, it’s a matter of historical fact that all of the good ideas to keep guns out of the hands of the insane and the criminal – the background checks we currently have, including the NICS with its occasional imperfections – came from the right, and from the gun movement. We’re the ones who’ve focused on making the system work for the law-abiding, and against the criminal and the insane.
So here are the rules for the “new conversation on guns”; if you have an idea, bring it up; the burden is on you, the anti-gun orc, to come up with ideas that attack the problem and not the law-abiding citizen – to be better and smarter than your gun-grabber forebears.
The “new conversation on guns” will be a dialog. We know you gun-grabbers hate that.
Tough.
To: Governor Messinger Dayton
From: Mitch Berg, Peasant
Re: A Time For Choosing
Governor Messinger Dayton,
I have a couple of questions for you.
You ran as a “pro-2nd-Amendment” candidate in the 2010 election. I’ve always suspected that you did it more out of memory of what happened to Ann Wynia (and the rest of the Democrat majorities) in 1994, or to the DFL’s majority in the House in 2002, than out of any sincere care for civil and human and rights…
…but I’m willing, if not expecting, to be surprised.
I mean, one way or another, it’s time for a big profile in courage, isn’t it?
That is all.
To: Senator Amy Klobuchar
From: Mitch Berg, Peasant
Re: Powers
Sen. Klobuchar,
I have a couple of questions for you.
You’ve spent the past six years in a calculated effort to create a public image of studied innocuity. But given your massive victory last November, surely you feel secure enough politically to be honest about your stance and motivations.
I mean, you just know you’re bulletproof come election time, don’t you?
That is all.
To: Senator Al Franken
From: Mitch Berg, Peasant
Re: Powers
Sen. Franken,
I have a couple of questions for you.
I mean, you just know you’re bulletproof come election time, don’t you?
That is all.
To: Rep. Colin Peterson (DFL MN-07)
From: Mitch Berg, Peasant
Re: Power, Power, Power!
Rep. Peterson,
If you’d be so kind, I’d love it if you answered the following:
Your attention to this matter will be appreciated.
That is all.
To: Rep. Tim Walz (DFL-MNCD1)
From: Mitch Berg, Peasant
Re: Powers
Rep. Walz,
I have a couple of questions for you.
Please make your stance on this issue as public as you possibly can. Tell the Strib, if you’d be so kind. Failing that, at least inform Sally Jo Sorenson; she’s always been a reliable steno.
That is all.
John Edwards was right; there are two Americas; one that has to follow the regular laws, and one for the big people.
NBC’s David Gregory skates on his “30 round magazine’ pratfall.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
It seems to me that if there was a clear violation of the law, then the Prosecutor should prosecute it. The arguments in mitigation (clean record) go toward the sentence.
Take it in another context – suppose I went to a school and threatened to shoot a bunch of schoolchildren with a .22 revolver, then claimed I did it to make a point about the silliness of the assault weapons bill. I have a clean record. I was making a political point. I only threatened them for a short time. I passed up other options to make my point. Should I get a pass as David Gregory did?
Or is the “break-the-law free” card only for Democrat VIPs?
Joe Doakes
Como Park
On guns?
It’s the VIP thing.
Three weeks ago: “Democrats think putting armed guards in schools is “cray-cray”, stupid”.
Today? Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
No armed police in schools! That would be bad. For example…
Well, bad for the madman anyway.
Hat tip: instapundit
In related news, the White House is considering funding armed school guards.
I’m guessing that comes after a call from one union or another. Can’t have non-union guards watching our kids, can we?
Three weeks from now: “Democrats have always supported guards in schools, Winston!”
You’re at a community council meeting in the gymnasium of your kids’ school.
As one of your neighbors drones on about easements for new curb construction, a gawky-looking 20-something man in a black trench coat with an unsettling look of demented purposefulness on his face walks into the meeting. He walks to the front of the room and draws an AK47 from under his trench coat, and shoots the leader of the group, who slumps against the cinder-block wall, leaving a slick of blood streaked down to the floor.
“Hey!” says the guy in the seat next to you, a fortyish man with an impeccable gray beard and John Lennon glasses who works for a social-service non-profit, “he can’t do that! This is a gun-free zone!”
The killer turns his gun on the crowd, and fires a shot into the mass of panicking people in their folding seats. Pandemonium erupts as a geyser of blood and tissue sprays over the crowd from what used to be an obese fiftysomething woman’s head.
The man sitting next to you dials 911 on his cell phone as the crowd frantically gets up and tries to get out one of the three available doors. As the man patiently answers the dispatcher’s questions, the young fellow fires again, blasting a hole in the chest of an elderly man who had been there to ask about putting a “Yield” sign on his corner. He slumps to the ground.
Your brain activates your body’s “fight or flight” reflex pumping adrenaline into your system. As the hormone takes over your brain, you focus with tunnel vision on the shooter; the cacaphony of the screaming crowd dies away – you are unaware of any noise at all, in fact.
You have, however, drilled a bit in the basics of how to respond to a lethal-force threat; you’re dimly but practically aware that you are not a willing participant in this episode, that you have a very real chance of sharing the fate of the speaker, the old man and the obese woman (death or maiming), and – since you live in a “stand your ground” state – you don’t need to futz with trying to retreat under fire.
You stand up and move to the side, stand clear of a small group of panicky women who are trying to extricate themselves from the mass of folding chairs and scrambling people, and draw your legally-permitted SIG-Sauer P250 9mm Compact (with a 13 round magazine) from the inside-the-belt holster at your back. And you shoot.
You fire several times – because of the adrenaline, you lose count at 1. But your training guides you; of the five rounds you do fire, two dig into the cinder-block wall behind the shooter. The next catches him in the right shoulder. Your fourth shot drills through the top center of his chest, severing his trachea. The fifth hits him in the lower-right abdomen, drilling through a mass of soft tissue and ricocheting out into the tile floor.
The second hit interrupts the shooter’s air flow and dazes him. The shooter drops the rifle (and its 27 remaining rounds), and slumps to the floor, lying in a rapidy-expanding pool of blood. He bleeds out, and is non-responsive when the paramedics arrive. He’s pronounced dead at the emergency room. In his trench coat was a bag with nine more magazines – 270 rounds – and a pistol.
Question: The original speaker, the obese woman, the old man and the shooter are dead. Are there three homicides, or are there four?
Well, that’s easy enough. There are four people dead. Four homicides.
Question 2: Are those four homicides the same? Or was one – that of the shooter – in balance, a net moral good, if not an unalloyed, morally unambiguous one?
How you answer that tells us a lot about how you perceive this next story.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Expert says mass shootings not increasing, it just seems like it. Hat tip: Instapundit
On the other hand, haven’t we had more mass shootings under President Obama than any other President? Wonder why he makes people crazy . . .
Joe Doakes
Como Park
The worst mass murders in US history – Oklahoma City, the Bath Michigan school bombing – involved no shooting at all, and Bath took place in the twenties.
Read the article Joe linked, by the way.
Chicago – where gun ownership by the law-abiding civilian is, in defiance of two SCOTUS rulings, still effectively banned – just saw its’ 500th homicide for the year.
That’s two Sandy Hook classrooms a month. Every month.
And of those deaths, about seven or eight classrooms-full were children below age 15. That’s on top of similar numbers the year before, and the several years before that. And next year.
But they were largely black, and brown, and urban; not white and from fashionable zip codes and a lot like the children, nieces and nephews and grandchildren of the people who run our opinion-driving industry. And they lived in a city that spawned our current President, who endorsed every single policy currently in force in a city that is nothing if not a laboratory for modern “progressivism”. So they don’t count.
There are Two Americas. One with real, uncompromising laws for commoners, and one with special laws for the media:
Alternate caption: “If I were James O’Keefe, lefties would already be calling for jail time”.
I had a conversation with AVERY LIBRELLE. Avery is an associate professor of Victimization Studies at Saint Thomas, and still votes for Paul Wellstone every election.
LIBRELLE: So are you gun nuts really demanding that we arm all teachers?
ME: Well, no. Some conservatives merely want to allow teachers that qualify for carry permits – pass the background checks, take the training and so on – that wish to, to bring their legally-purchased firearms to school. Concealed, anonymous, no publicity.
LIBRELLE: That’s just madness. That just adds more guns to the situation.
ME: Well, yeah. Guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens. Which, the past 25 years of experience have shown, is at worst neutral and very likely a good thing, and which current police doctrine shows is the best way to deal with mass shooting situations.
LIBRELLE: What? That’s insane! Teachers are trained to teach! It’ll take years to train them to be soldiers!
ME: Soldiers? Huh? You don’t have to be a “soldier” to defend yourself. When a regular citizen is faced with a life-or-death situation, it’s usually pretty cut and dried; there is someone right in front of you providing an immediate threat of death or great bodily harm to you or the people around you. You pull a gun, you point, you shoot.
LIBRELLE: That’s so not how it works.
ME: Well, yeah. It is. The record is full of 14 year old kids and septuagenarians and elderly women and pregnant women, teenage single moms and just plain folks successfully defending themselves against violent – indeed, by definition, lethal – crime.
LIBRELLE: Well, mass shooters are different. They are white, young, male, and very, very smart. They plan their shootings out to a “T”. There is no way the regular citizen can stand up to them! Only the police can deal with freaks like this.
ME: Again, Avery, no. For starters, cops have their own problems; the policeman at Columbine wasn’t able to stop Klebold and Harris, although someone should tell David Gregory that the cop likely saved quite a few lives – and the SWAT team didn’t go into the building at all until hours after everyone including Klebold and Harris were dead. After that, cops changed their tactics, and we’ll come back to that.
In the meantime, we have several instances of armed citizens stopping mass-shooters in mid-shooting, including the guy in Portland Oregon two weeks ago, and Jeanne Assam in Colorado Springs a few years back.
LIBRELLE: Hah! Now I know you’re parroting NRA talking points! Both of those shooters killed themselves! The armed civilian Rambo-wannabees didn’t kill them!
ME: Now, hang on, Avery. No need to be so bloodthirsty. The goal isn’t necessarily to get a notch on one’s handgrip. It’s to end the shooting.
And that brings us to police tactics. Guess what they train police to do about mass shooters these days? Not wait for the SWAT team. but go in and get after the shooter as fast as they can – because since mass shooters do tend to be intelligent, but narcissistic and disturbed and and to live in fantasy worlds, once you disrupt the fantasy and derail the plan, they do tend to stop, re-assess, panic and kill themselves. The goal is to cause that derailing when the massacre has just started, rather than when they’re standing up to their waists in dead bodies and hearing the sirens coming, like Harris and Klebold and Seung-Hui Cho and Jeffrey Weise. And depending on the killer, that disruption can be pretty minor; in Portland last December 11, Nick Meli didn’t have to fire so much as a shot to get the Clackamas Mall shooter to slink away into a store and polish himself off. These people are narcissists and cowards; once their master plan gets off the rails, they almost always either kill themselves or, like the Aurora shooter, give up.
LIBRELLE: But the Brady Organization says arming teachers would only make things worse.
ME: Oh, you mean that if a teacher had shot back at Lanza, things might have gotten bad?
LIBRELLE: Well, yeah…that’s what Brady says! Anyway – Teachers are not soldiers. They spend their careers mastering pedagogy and nurturing, not soldiers!
ME: Wait – do you think the guy in Portland trained his whole life to get ready for that moment in that mall? Don’t be absurd! You’ll labor in vain to find a single civilian who shoots, successfully, in self-defense, that spent an entire working career preparing for the moment. But go ahead and try!
But let’s just say for argument’s sake that you’re right; that by the nature of a teacher’s job, they should never, ever be armed, even if their states of residence have duly issued them carry permits for which they’re qualified. That’s what we’re saying, right?
LIBRELLE: Yes.
ME: Even if they have a carry permit, which according to nationwide statistics means they’re a couple of orders of magnitude more trustworthy with firearms than the general public?
LIBRELLE: Of course. No armed teachers. It’s just not right!
ME: Because being gentle-bred, lotus-eating teachers, the whole subject of killing in self-defense is beyond them?
LIBRELLE: No need to be so snide – but yes. Basically.
ME: So the schools then opt to follow current law-enforcement procedure, and follow President LaPierre’s idea of hiring guards to try to carry that out in our schools? To try to disrupt the shooters’ plans, just like law enforcement advises. Just as Israel has done for some time now against a real, constant threat.
LIBRELLE: Oh, no. The NEA has said that that’s insane!
ME: So let me get this straight: a union comprised of people that you just said were incompetent to see to their own and their childrens’ defense (notwithstanding potentially having carry permits that show they are competent) is nonetheless expert enough in self-defense tactics to reject current law-enforcement practice out of hand?
LIBRELLE: …
ME: Well?
LIBRELLE: Why do you hate the children? And women?
(And SCENE)
If you haven’t read this yet – and it’s been circulating for the past week or so – then get on it.
Then we’ll have a conversation about why things like school massacres happen, and what we can do about it.
I used to play in a band with a guy, a keyboard player. He was a bit of a prodigy; he’d been sent off from North Dakota to the Berklee College of Music in Boston; he was one of the most amazing keyboard players you’ve ever seen.
Of course, like a lot of prodigious talents, he had some issues. He was bipolar. The illness left him unable to function at Berklee, so it was back to North Dakota. Psychiatrists put him on lithium – which enabled him to function. To thrive, really – when he was on his meds and everything was well-tempered, he would practice, perform, put on recitals that’d stun the locals, play in bands, hold a job, function in society.
Then he’d feel he could function without the meds. He’d go off ’em…
…and, inside of a few weeks, wind up in the papers for having driven to Fargo and remodeled the inside of a Catholic church with a sledgehammer. Followed by another bout of treatment, and then another course of lithium. Lather, rinse, repeat.
He functioned about 95% of the time. About 5%, he was incapacitated. Was he a success story, or a failure?
———-
Psychotropic medication has been a boon to many people. They’ve helped pull back the gray fog on the lives of millions who suffer from depression. They allow many with serious mental illnesses to function, and often thrive.
But as my keyboard-playing friend showed, there’s a downside; when the medication doesn’t work, or when the doses get changed, or abruptly stopped? Bad things can happen.
As at least one Catholic church in Fargo discovered back in the early eighties.
And sometimes, much, much worse.
The site “SSRI Stories” – it stands for “Seratonin-Specific Re-Uptake Inhibitor”, a class of anti-depressants that includes Zoloft, Paxil and Wellbutrin among many others – catalogs crimes and other violent and bizarre incidents that have some link to psychotropic meds. The stories on the site are open to some discussion – and there is discussion – and correlation doesn’t equal causation. But the site chronicles a hell of a lot of correlation.
The list of school shootings alone is below the jump. The incident at the Red Lake Reservation school seven years ago is on the list. There’s much, much more there.
Speaking of correlations that don’t necessarily equal causation – is it any wonder the Psychiatric community is so hell-bent on calling gun crime a “public health issue?” It’d sure be more convenient than addressing their own stake in violent crime, especially spree shootings, wouldn’t it?
It’s hard to believe that this particular angle on this story – about the shooting at the mall near Portland, Oregon, which happened a few days before the New Town, Connecticut shooting – didn’t get national coverage:
PORTLAND — Nick Meli is emotionally drained. The 22-year-old was at Clackamas Town Center with a friend and her baby when a masked man opened fire.
“I heard three shots and turned and looked at Casey and said, ‘are you serious?,'” he said.
The friend and baby hit the floor. Meli, who has a concealed carry permit, positioned himself behind a pillar.
“He was working on his rifle,” said Meli. “He kept pulling the charging handle and hitting the side.”
[Aside to shooters; poor gun maintenance actually saved lives. Who knew?]
The break in gunfire allowed Meli to pull out his own gun, but he never took his eyes off the shooter.
“As I was going down to pull, I saw someone in the back of the Charlotte move, and I knew if I fired and missed, I could hit them,” he said.
Meli took cover inside a nearby store. He never pulled the trigger. He stands by that decision.
“I’m not beating myself up cause I didn’t shoot him,” said Meli. “I know after he saw me, I think the last shot he fired was the one he used on himself.”
The gunman was dead, but not before taking two innocent lives with him and taking the innocence of everyone else.
“I don’t ever want to see anyone that way ever,” said Meli. “It just bothers me.”
As it should anyone with a human soul.
But as the media celebrates the teachers in New Town as heroes for dying to try to protect their students – as it should – it’s high time we took a moment to praise our live heroes; the ones that choke back their fear and respond to unexpected trauma…
…and because they had the tools they needed to confront the trauma, a deranged killer, at closer to even odds, were able to be live heroes.
Greetings, City Pages Readers. If you’ve been reading what certain gutless Tweeps have been writing – nope. I don’t advocate arming elementary school kids.
I do point out – correctly – that Israel has been arming teachers for decades, to prevent, as it happens, mass school shootings. And it’s worked.
This is, of course, a mindless, senseless tragedy, the kind of thing that makes you re-examine your faith in your fellow human, if you have any. I urge everyone to send your thoughts, prayers or whatever you believe in, as well as a buck or two to whatever relief effort springs up when the time comes, to the families and community.
But let’s be honest, if we can, for a moment; look at just about every mass shooting in the past twenty years. Schools, universities, malls, the Aurora theater, post offices, the entire City of Chicago. What do they have in common? They’re gun free zones, by federal, state or local law.
More below.
———-
Another deranged gunman has cut loose in another building full of people forbidden from being able to defend themselves and the children in their “care” by federal law.
Initial reports indicate the gunman – who was killed, somehow – was the father of one of the students.
How many more children need to die before we realize “gun free zones” don’t work?
UPDATE: Count up the number of school shootings we’ve seen in the past decade and a half, including two in Minnesota (with 11 dead) – all in “gun free zones”. What was that “definition of insanity” again?
In Israel, in the seventies, there were a number of attacks by terrorist gunmen on Israeli schools and school buses. The Israelis responded…how? By banning guns in schools, just to keep the law-abiding terrorists in line?
No. They allowed (and on field trips, required) teachers to be armed. And it worked. And it’s still working.
People ask me why I oppose the death penalty
I say “because of the inevitability that we’ll convict and execute an innocent person, which is both morally wrong and absolutely avoidable”.
The reply is “give me some reasons to believe that could ever happen”.
And I respond “I’ve got 141 of them since they re-legalized the death penalty. Including one very recently“.
“But they were never executed! The system works!”
“Well, not for this guy. They’re down to arguing over which judge has the legal standing to declare him innocent, which is welfare for lawyers, and is just delaying the inevitable; crap science and incompetent, lazy prosecutors killed an innocent man. So what do we do about that?”
“Cut down on frivolous appeals!”
I’m not sure if there’s a fund to support George Zimmerman’s defamation suit against NBC News over the intensely dishonest, misleading editing job they did in the aftermath of the controversial shooting (which we talked about as it happened)..:
“NBC saw the death of Trayvon Martin not as a tragedy but as an opportunity to increase ratings, and so to set about the myth that George Zimmerman was a racist and predatory villain,” states the civil complaint in its opening salvo against NBC.
(Also at The Washington Post: Can Zimmerman prevail against NBC?)
NBC’s editing of the 911 audiotape in the Martin case became a public fixation after the media-monitoring Web site NewsBusters.org noted editing oddities on a “Today” show broadcast March 27. Here’s how NBC News portrayed the audiotape:
Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.
The full tape went like this:
Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.
Dispatcher: OK, and this guy — is he black, white or Hispanic?
Zimmerman: He looks black.
Zimmerman thus didn’t volunteer a racial profile of Martin; he was asked to provide it, a point that the lawsuit makes in colorful fashion: “NBC created this false and defamatory misimpression using the oldest form of yellow journalism: manipulating Zimmerman’s own words, splicing together disparate parts of the recording to create illusions of statements that Zimmerman never actually made.”
…but if there is, I’m going to send a buck or two.
In a just world, everyone involved in that story at NBC should rot in jail for the rest of their lives.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
20-something Cold Spring cop killed. PiPress article claims he didn’t draw his service revolver. Really? I thought all the kids wore Glocks.
If they got that wrong, what else is wrong?
Or is Cold Spring so backwards they actually issue pistols and require cops to use wheel-guns?
Joe Doakes
Como Park
Well, it could be one of those “retro chic” things that all the kids are doing. Or maybe a cop that watched “Get Shorty” and became a revolver fan.
But I’d suspect a reporter who assumes “service revolver” is a technical term for “any firearm a cop carries, from a Glock to a shotgun to an AR15 to, occasionally, a revolver issued to him by their department”.
Not to make fun of the tragedy; my condolences to Officer Decker’s family.
To: NBC
From: Mitch Berg, guy counting down the days ’til pitchers and catchers report
Re: “Sportscasters”
Dear NBC,
Yesterday, Bob Costas used your “sports” air time to babble an uninformed, utterly wrong anti-Second-Amendment screed.
Now, don’t get me started on sportscasters and sportswriters and “sports radio” people; for the most part, they are at the cutting edge of everything that’s wrong with America. They glorify a sports culture that once at least paid lip service to the best our society had to offer, but today mostly glorifies all that is base and stupid in our culture. And let’s not kid ourselves; whatever they glorify, it’s all about making bank for the people that own the teams that give the Sports Media a market, which in turn allows you, NBC Sports, to make bank yourselves.
And when they get into politics? Forget unions and welfare; sportswriters, sportscasters and the drooling baboons and chattering lemmings that take them seriously were the ones that badgered the Legislature into giving Zygi Wilf a billion-dollar spiff to his investment. Just as they did in turn for the owners of the Twins, the Wild and the Woofies before them. Sports America is the biggest welfare state there is.
And now we have Bob Costas – a guy who wants to be his generation’s Frank DeFord so badly you can smell it on the wind – using your “sports” airtime to prate and gabble about the Second Amendment. As if taking an troubled boy with a talent for running or blocking or tackling or catching a ball, glorifying his talent from the age of eight on, allowing him to grow into a rich, spoiled, entitled adult with no education or sense of perspective to feed the system that has made him, his team owners, Costas and all of you obscenely wealthy along the way, didn’t have a role in creating someone so unstable he thought he was justified in killing another human being.
Let’s put this another way; after a career spent making America’s sports industry (and, incidentally, himself) rich, what caliber of handgun did OJ Simpson use?
Or is there a Bob Costas riff against butcher knives out there that I’m not aware of?
Oh, yeah – I don’t watch NBC Sports, and haven’t for decades, so any threat to boycott will be an empty one. But you get the picture.
That is all.
For starters – the Thanksgiving shooting in Little Falls seems, according to what we know, to be a textbook case of how not to shoot in self defense.
64 year old Byron Smith allegedly shot Nicholas Brady, 17, as he came down the cellar stairs – and then allegedly shot Brady’s cousin Haile Kifer, 18. He’s been charged with two counts of second degree murder.
And if the news accounts are accurate – and as we’ve learned, on all gun-related stories, we must distrust but verify the media, but this case seems fairly clear-cut so far – he’ll deserve the conviction. While you don’t have a “duty to retreat” in your home in Minnesota, you still have to have reasonable fear of death or great bodily harm (or, nebulously, to “prevent a felony”, which in practice had better mean “the felony of killing, kidnapping or raping you or your family”), and the force you use has to be reasonable – in other words, no finishing people off.
According to the complaint, Smith told investigators:
He heard glass breaking around noon Thursday while he was in the basement. It was the latest of several break-ins that he’s experienced. Brady started coming down the stairs, and Smith shot him with a rifle by the time he saw the intruder’s hips.
Unless Brady had a chainsaw running around hip level, there wasn’t a whole lot of fear of death, there…
Brady fell down the stairs and was looking up at Smith when the homeowner shot him in the face.
“I want him dead,” Smith explained to the investigator for the additional shot.
And there’s your “unreasonable force”, right there.
And let’s be honest; you hear the same kind of talk from all kinds of people; “it’s best to finish them off”, one yahoo told me in a bar, “because then they can’t sue you”.
I’ve never heard it from anyone that’s been through carry permit training, of course.
And just in case there was some corner of his legal case that wasn’t already utterly self-sodomized…:
Smith put Brady’s body on a tarp and dragged him to an office workshop.
A few minutes later, Smith heard footsteps above him. As in Brady’s case, Kifer too started down the stairs and was shot by Smith by the time he saw her hips, sending her tumbling down the stairs.
Smith attempted to shoot her again, but his rifle jammed, prompting Kifer to laugh.
Upset, Smith, pulled out a revolver he had on him and shot her “more times than I needed to” in the chest, he said.
Smith dragged Kifer next to Brady as she gasped for her life. He pressed the revolver’s barrel under her chin and pulled the trigger in what he described as a “good, clean finishing shot” that was meant to end her suffering.
Hint: virtually no deer-hunting etiquette is appropriate in self-defense shooting.
This is a case that should be used in self-defense classes as a punch-list of everything not to do in a self-defense case.
And above and beyond that? You call the cops immediately. And – it should surprise nobody – Smith did not:
Sheriff Michel Wetzel told reporters Monday afternoon that Smith explained to authorities that he didn’t call immediately after killing the two because “it was Thanksgiving. He didn’t want to trouble us on a holiday.”…Smith acknowledged leaving the bodies in his home overnight before calling a neighbor to ask about a lawyer and to request that authorities be notified.
Naturally, you should be on the phone with the police before the smoke clears.
And while I send my condolences to the victims’ families, of course, the kids had no business in his house. Note, unruly teenagers; you’re not immortal, and you’re only as safe as your least-informed, least-stable victim lets you be.
But here’s the fearless prediction; this case will be used as a chanting point against “Stand Your Ground” at the very least, and most likely against any sort of self-defense reform.
Not because this case has any merit as an example – no factor in this case has any bearing on “Stand your Ground”, and indeed has to have been one of the least-justified self-defense shootings I’ve heard about since Sgt. Jerry Vick’s shooter tried to claim it.
Not because Smith is a carry permit holder – while the records aren’t public, let’s just say his behavior is not that of someone who knew what he was doing.
No – because it involves two things that are catnip for anti-human-rights activists:
It’ll be wrong. It’ll be legally as well as factually void. It’ll be pure disinformation.
And as we’ve seen in the past two elections in Minnesota, legally/logically/factually void disinformation sells.
Just saying; if Heather Martens doesn’t put out a press release trying to tie this case to “Stand Your Ground” and/or concealed carry, I’ll be amazed.
The GOP’s new motto on immigration reform? Yo quiero pander…to all sides of the debate:
Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., told Politico that he’s open to giving illegal immigrants a path to citizenship in exchange for a temporary moratorium on all legal immigration while they “assimilate.” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a longtime proponent of reform, said legalization should be paired with the repeal of the 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil. And Republican House Speaker John Boehner told reporters on Friday that he would not commit to including a path to citizenship in his immigration reform efforts…
Juan Hernandez, a Texas-based Republican political consultant who served as Sen. John McCain’s director of Hispanic outreach in 2008, said whatever the potential disagreements, congressmen should start hammering out a deal now.
“Should it be with two, three or four steps? That’s fine. Let’s negotiate. But let’s starting taking the first steps immediately,” Hernandez said. “We may not find a political moment again in which at least I see everyone saying it’s time for immigration reform.”
The cries that demographics equal destiny for an eventual GOP shift to the left on all issues pertaining to immigration reform have been shouted for some time. And in the wake of a narrow popular vote re-election for Barack Obama, carried in part by a 44% margin of victory among Latino voters, the cries have renewed with vigor. Even some in the conservative intelligentsia have backed a 2007-esque immigration reform stance, including Sean Hannity and Charles Krauthammer.
But would backing amnesty, a path to citizenship, however the GOP wishes to define such legislation, really give the GOP any electoral edge? Republicans have gained nothing among African-American voters despite the GOP’s critical role in civil rights legislation. Yet pollsters love to mention Bush’s 44% showing among Latinos in 2004 and equally enjoy pointing out 65% of all voters (including 3 out of 4 Latinos) support some opportunity at citizenship for illegal immigrants. Of course, Bush’s Latino support was greatly inflated and was more likely around 38%. And last, but not least, is the data suggesting that immigration from Latin American countries may be actually reversing.
That last part is critical because Latino attitudes towards immigration reform vary depending on whether they were born here or immigrated. While 42% of all Latino voters called immigration reform their number one issue, only 32% of U.S. born Latinos agreed compared to 54% who were foreign born. Financially stable ($80k+ incomes) Latinos and those who are second generation are less likely to focus on immigration reform or support carte blanche amnesty. Those who called Spanish their first language were far more interested in immigration reform than those who said English was their primary language. The greater integrated recent immigrants had become, the less interested they were in immigration concerns.
Republicans focus on Latinos when speaking about immigration reform ignores a number of other demographic groups who have more at stake in any immigration conversation. Asians are now the largest block of recent immigrants, surpassing Hispanic migration. And as a voting block, Asian-Americans voted by similar margins to Latinos for Obama. Where are the breathless newspaper column inches declaring the GOP must court Asian-Americans?
Republican outreach to minority groups has been a priority mothballed election cycle after election cycle. If an election where nearly 13 million fewer voters showed up prompts the GOP to finally engage demographics they’ve thus far all but ignored, then great. But if Republicans try and out liberal liberals on issues like immigration reform, they will continue to find no real opportunities for political gain.
ADDENDUM: Rachel Campos-Duffy at National Review hits the nail on the head of the broader challengers standing between Republicans and Latino voters:
Hispanics come to America for the American Dream. They are “trabajadores,” and you would be hard pressed to find an American farmer, contractor, or restaurant owner who would not testify to their work ethic. Unfortunately, the communities in which they live and work are teeming with liberal activists: farm and service-industry labor unions, well-intentioned community-based social services providers and more radical and racially motivated Latino groups such as La Raza, LULAC, and Mecha. In addition, the curricula their kids encounter in public schools are either hostile or silent on the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, and ideas that are the foundation of conservative thinking. All of these activist groups and institutions have a common ideology and an affinity for big and centralized government, and of course, entitlements. They go out of their way to sign folks up and to begin the cycle of government dependency. Once hooked to the IV of government handouts, a steady drip of ideology, and a heavy dose of raunchy pop culture, the once vibrant American Dreams and traditional family values of Hispanics drift into a slow, deep coma.
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