Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

Based on initial reporting, which we know is always wrong, but this timetable is for illustrative purposes, not precision:

Shooting occurs at 7:45.

A teacher saw the shooting and chased the gun-wielder, who escaped.

Students started texting their parents about the shooting before 8:00.

Ambulances start to arrive shortly after 8:00

School is locked down and parents are told it’s not safe to enter at 8:21

School evacuated at 8:30

SWAT arrives at 8:45.

Analysis: the school responded promptly and ambulances were there incredibly quickly. The teacher undoubtedly saved lives by chasing the gunman out of the building.

The cops were useless.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

I don’t as a rule bag on cops – but the profusion of SWAT teams will, some day, be seen as one of the worst derivatives of the War on Terror.  While there are definitely times when some extra tactical oomph is needed, often SWAT teams have become budget lines looking to justify themselves; they’ve kept themselves busy serving warrants that regular cops used to serve just fine, without all the shooting of dogs and tearing up of property (occasionally wrong property)…

…and then, as at Columbine, being so hide-bound by procedure that they can’t actually do any “protecting” and “serving”, or much of anything but running around in all their cool battle rattle, frisking and cuffing victims.

The number of SWAT teams has zoomed in recent years.  The question:  at what point are they less a matter of protecting cops, and more one of showing the citizens who’s boss?

Alleged robber in custody after trying to rob men, dropping gun…

Police said [Cedrick Mitchell, age 39] entered a motel room and asked for pills from the two men inside. When they responded that they didn’t have any, Mitchell took out his gun and told the men “everything you got,” according to the Bradenton Herald.

Mitchell dropped his gun when the men began to fight with him, police say. One of the victims sprayed him with pepper spray and Mitchell ran away, authorities said.

…and then…:

He returned to the motel room minutes later and offered the men $40 in exchange for the gun he dropped, the Herald reported . He was pepper-sprayed in the face again.

Reports that Dakota County Attorney Jim Backstrom has said that this is an example of what will happen if the “Stand Your Ground” law passes are at this time unconfirmed.

It’s also unknown whether Champlin police chief David Kolb has recounted any stories of breaking into hotel rooms when he was a 10 year old boy, and wondering if a kid might get shot for that today.

Young mother erases drug-cadging stalking scumbag with a 12-gauge.

The more law-abiding Americans are armed, the better this country gets.

Rich Lowry at NRO on the shooting:

Instances of self-defense are the anecdotes that gun controllers never want to hear. The NRA keeps a running list of them on its website: attempted armed robberies, home invasions, and other attacks rebuffed every month by the would-be victims. Surely, Sarah McKinley’s assailants thought the young, slender, widowed mother was an easy mark. Her shotgun meant they were wrong. Who would have it any other way? Otherwise, the intruder has the knife and she has nothing except a cellphone and the wan hope that someone armed with a gun makes it to her in time.

It should be considered the moral duty of every law-abiding American to be able to do the same.

I’m waiting for the first lefty/media (ptir) pundit to claim the “incongruity” between this story – violent crime is plummeting…:

Murders, rapes and other violent crimes dropped sharply in the United States in the first six months of 2011, continuing a downward trend that has lasted 4 1/2 years, the FBI reported on Monday.

The federal law enforcement agency said preliminary January-through-June figures showed the number of violent crimes declined 6.4 percent from the previous year, led by a 5.7 percent drop in murders and a 5.1 percent decrease in rapes.

In other violent crime categories, robberies declined 7.7 percent while aggravated assaults fell 5.9 percent.

The FBI’s regular statistical report did not give any reasons for the lower crimes nationwide. But the latest numbers provided further evidence of no crime spike coinciding with the tough economic conditions and high unemployment.

…and this bit here; gun sales are shattering all records this holiday season:

It’s the rise in female buyers that is perhaps most surprising – with more women buying guns than ever before, reported CBS Sacramento.

‘People are just coming in to protect themselves,’ an employee at TDS Guns in Rocklin told CBS Sacramento.

‘I think there’s just a lot of things going on in the world that are getting people thinking,’ the employee added.

The Firearms Dealers Association says the recent boom in gun purchases makes this the best holiday sales season in three years.

It’s not incongruous.  In this case, correlation equals causation.  Violent crime is dropping precisely because more law-abiding Real Americans are armed.  Criminals are stupid and often addled, but they’re not usually overtly suicidal; as the wave of shall-issue laws spreads across the nation and as sales of guns to the law-abiding citizens obliterate all previous records, more and more of them are figuring out that their chances of ending up like this are growing faster than their odds of going to jail.

More and more it’s apparent; it should be considered the duty of every law-abiding American to own and be proficient with a firearm.

:

UPDATE:  Welcome Power Line readers!  Feel free to check out the other parts of my coverage of the Evanovich shooting case.

———-.

I’ve been a “Gunnie” for close to 30 years. Not a hunter, mind you – just a shooter.  Someone who enjoys target shooting, and believes, practically and morally, in self-defense shooting.

In that time, I’ve had it insinuated that the reason for this is that I, like all shooters, am “compensating” for “something”, that I have unresolved anger issues and some kind of incipient blood-lusting psychosis, that I’m motivated primarily by fear of the unknown, and that I, a mild-mannered guy who’s never stolen so much as a candy bar in his life and who has never gotten into a fight that didn’t come to him first, am liable to turning into a “Death Wish”-ing Dirty Harry blasting away at shadows by dint of having a gun in my otherwise law-abiding hand.

Against that, I’ve got a few things; the memory of seeing two burglars running out of the house at the sound of my firearm racking a round; decades of swatting aside anti-Second-Amendment “arguments” with the force of unstoppable fact.

And memories of seeing how very, very much in the bag the local media has been for the gun-control movement, even as that movement’s support in the real world has all but evaporated.

And, to be fair, I encountered a few reporters, eventually – most notably Conrad DeFiebre, formerly at the Star/Tribune and, of all people, Steve Perry at the City Pages back in the nineties – who actually covered firearms issues, and especially the “concealed carry” issue, relatively fairly and dispassionately, including soliciting information from sources other than Sarah Brady, Heather Martens, Wes Skoglund and the various Police Chiefs’ associations.

But it’s been a rare pleasure.

———-

Last week, I wrote – I think it’s fair to say “scathingly” – about an article by Matt McKinney at the Strib.  The piece garnered some approval, and quite a bit of traffic, from the conservative and gun blogospheres; Ed Morrissey and Scott Johnson, as well as a fair chunk of the pro-Second-Amendment alt-media, linked to the piece.

Which has garnered one of the few direct reactions I’ve ever gotten from a mainstream media reporter; Matt McKinney sent me (and Scott Johnson) a response via email.

He tees it up with a bit from yours truly:

What the blogger characterizes as “loathsome bits of agenda journalism” was in fact a faithful representation of the best information we had at the time. It is only through gross misrepresentations of my story published online on Oct. 27 and in print on the morning of Oct. 28 that he made it appear as though I was withholding information.

I’ll meet McKinney halfway on this one; I am sure it’s true that the information he related about the shooting itself was the best he currently had from reliable – read “official” – sources. McKinney includes the text of the police report from which he worked; I’ll include it below the jump.   

As you will see, nowhere does it say the victim was Hispanic, nowhere does it say she was an office cleaner, nowhere does it say she was beaten in the face, sustained two black eyes and received a bad cut, things that I’m accused of withholding.

And in that, I erred.  The information I received was from a source in the Second Amendment community that mixed information from the police statement – which was fairly well-known to everyone with an interest in the case by this point – and other, more current, information from the off-the-books community of gun-rights advocates, one of whom – “Zack” – I quoted in my original piece.

And it’s entirely likely that McKinney didn’t have that information – I’ve never known a Strib reporter to cultivate sources in the Second Amendment community – or, if he did, opted not to run it, since it was unofficial and uncorroborated and the kind of thing an editor would have had his ass on a plate for reporting without corroboration.   My bad.

It turned out, of course, to be accurate – which was why the shooter was neither arrested on October 20, nor indicted a week later.   My good.

Now, look at the bolded passage in the previous paragraph.  There’s a huge question that needs to be put to McKinney in gauging his response, hidden in plain sight in that passage.

We’ll come back to it in a moment.  McKinney continued (with emphasis added by yours truly):

The blogger’s larger distortion occurs when he erroneously attributes to the Oct. 21 police statement the following: that Evanovich turned and pointed his gun at the armed witness. That piece of information was not released until the afternoon of Oct. 28, when the Hennepin County Attorney’s office issued an email press release that said they had determined the witness acted in self defense. We immediately put that information on line, and it was printed in the following day’s newspaper on the top of the B section, a place second in prominence only to the front page.

McKinney referred to my statement emphasized above as a “larger distortion”.  It wasn’t.  It was a mistake.  I didn’t distinguish in my own report the difference between the police report and the account I got from my own sources.  I regret the error; being a blogger who works a private sector day job on top of trying to report the slivers of knows about which I know anything, it’s pretty much inevitable.

But the fact that I erred in reporting the source of my statement should, I’d think, be counterbalanced by the fact that my sources and account were correct, and were confirmed in every particular in the Hennco DA’s final statement.

So at this point, let me take a moment, on the one hand, to apologize to Matt McKinney for characterizing his account of the confrontation as “loathsome agenda journalism”.  Clearly, McKinney was doing the blocking and tackling of the trade.

But I’ll also point out that McKinney’s report was still a blast from the past in terms of structure and tone.

———-

But here’s my question for McKinney – one that really sets off my problem with his response.

Read this excerpt from the police report.  I’ll add emphasis:

This “Good Samaritan” stated that he had a valid Minnesota Permit to Carry a Handgun and that he had shot the male armed robbery suspect during a confrontation outside of the Super Grand Buffet. He told officers where to find his handgun and he was detained for questioning.

The “Good Samaritan” was “detained for questioning” – which is normal in any kind of shooting, whether self-defense or not.

But he was not arrested – which is also common enough in self-defense cases.  Perhaps not in the few cases we’ve seen in Minnesota – the Treptow case, the Grumpy’s Bouncer case, and now the Evanovich case, which only go to show that Minnesota carry permittees are exceptionally trustworthy – but it’s far from uncommon.  In carry permit training, you are instructed if, heaven forfend, you need to shoot in self-defense, to expect to be arrested, and to lawyer up immediately.  And yet the “Good Samaritan”, according to the same police report to which McKinney said he limited his reporting, was not.

Why?

That was the bit that prompted me to start asking questions; why didn’t the Good Samaritan get arrested?  Which led me to the story that Hennco attorney Freeman confirmed last Friday.

Now, I’m just a blogger – a schlump who works a day job and raises kids and writes sizzling polemics and, when time permits (and it rarely does) some reporting. If it occurred to me to ask “why wasn’t the Samaritan arrested?”, why didn’t it occur to anyone in the professional media?

Because it didn’t.  The local and regional media…

• …called the shooter a “vigilante”.  Not just the Twin Cities’ idiot lefty alt media, but even mainstream media.  (To say nothing of the Democrat fever swamp, which called it a “vigilante execution“)
• …openly pondered whether the incident would end up being a black mark on the Minnesota Personal Protection Act, absent any evidence at all, pro or con, notwithstanding than the fact that you are vastly – as in “orders of magnitude” – more likely to be hit by lightning than shot unjustly by a legal carry permit holder)
• …ran to Evanovich’s family for Darren’s backstory and their views of the shooting – which certainly made for a compelling, if dog-bites-man, read.
• And, to be fair – especially since I’ve banged on so much of his writing since he took over being Nick Coleman – John Tevlin wrote a generally good piece on the subject which is only slightly marred by a legal misstep that I’ll leave to the experts to remind him about.

Perhaps – I’d suspect it’s likely, in fact – that McKinney either didn’t have the time to dig for, say, any of the stuff I stumbled into, about the victim or the way the incident happened.

Or maybe he didn’t have the sources to do it.

Or maybe the editorial directive to put any meat on the bones of the sparse, Joe-Friday-“Just-The-Facts”-y police report – or to ask that very simple and, in the end, dispositive question.

———-

McKinney continues:

The police statement includes the phrase “during a confrontation,” which we would later learn meant that Evanovich pointed a gun at the armed witness and told him to mind his own business. At the time the police issued their statement, we didn’t know what the phrase meant.

Who was confronting who? Was it a verbal confrontation? Physical? Was it merely two people facing off in a hostile situation? It was too nebulous to be of much service in understanding what had happened, so we didn’t include it.

As my carry permit teacher, the late Joel Rosenberg, used to joke, “if only we had a class of people, with printing presses and transmitters, whose job it was to find those details out”.

Of course, reporters aren’t omniscient, and they have rules to follow.

And it seems McKinney did.

It’s my opinion that the story deserved a little more than that.

———-

So let me sum it up:

Was I too critical of McKinney’s story?  To the extent that it was based on details of the police report, yes.

In the sense that the main theme of McKinney’s piece was to humanize the “victim” Evanovich, and used language that – to this reader, who admittedly has a hair-trigger when it comes to reacting to bigotry against law-abiding gun owner – seemed to put a gauzy soft-focus on a thug with a record of violent crime while disparaging a law-abiding citizen?  Maybe, but if so I’m far from alone in criticizing McKinney’s story on that count.  Evanovich’s video, his family’s reactions and so on were certainly part of the story.

But not as important as the  question that was, I suggest, the most important part of this story – why was the shooter questioned and released?  On that, I’d say I raised a very valid question about McKinney’s coverage – and that of pretty much the entire Twin Cities media.

(more…)

Earlier this week, when three media outlets (WCCO-TV, KSTP-TV and Rick Kupchella’s Bring Me The News) released near-simultaneous hagiographies of Darren Evanovich – the Minneapolis man who was shot by a “good samaritan” with a carry permit after Evanovich allegedly robbed and pistol-whipped a woman in a grocery store parking lot – I said (in the comment section of an MPR piece on the subject), somewhat hyperbolically, that this looked like a concerted campaign by the media to whitewash Evanovich and demonize the shooter.  The Twin Cities media, of course, have always hated “shall-issue”, and have spared no perversions to “journalism” to try to kill it.

I thought I’d seen the worst the Twin Cities media had to offer.

I was wrong.  So very very wrong.

Mark McKinney at the Strib has delivered what may be the worst piece of journalism I’ve ever seen on a Second Amendment issue in  my depressingly-long career of finding awful journalism on the subject:

Nine days before his death, Darren Evanovich stopped by the south Minneapolis office of MAD DADS to say hi to V.J. Smith, who heads the local chapter of the street anti-violence program.

Evanovich made a video aimed at kids contemplating the thug life:

“Jail is not fun,” Evanovich confides at one point, “Not being able to see your brothers and sisters grow up isn’t fun. … You don’t see nobody. You have no friends once you step in there.”

We know how this ends, of course; last Friday, Evanovich (and, allegedly, his sister and one other accomplice) went down to the Cub on 26th and Lake.

McKinney relates the story – sort of:

On the evening of Oct. 20, a little more than a week later, a 53-year-old woman was accosted in a supermarket parking lot off E. Lake Street. The stranger was armed with a handgun, and after taking her money, he struck her in the head with his weapon, police said.

That sounds so cold and matter-of-fact.  Let’s put this in some context.

Evanovich – as we related this morning – robbed a woman twice his age, a Hispanic woman who cleans offices for a living.  He beat her in the face, with a pistol, giving her two black eyes and a bad cut and, let’s not forget, a very legitimate fear of being shot dead in a parking lot.

McKinney – with emphasis added to loathsome bits of agenda journalism:

A man nearby saw the attack. He had a state permit to carry a pistol, and he had one with him. He chased the robber behind a restaurant and shot him dead.

How does that read to you?  Like “the man” stalked, tracked and hunted Evanovich like he was a wild animal, perhaps?   Like Evanovich was just a leaf in the autumn wind, blown into the wrong place at the wrong time, the wrong parking lot with the wrong remorseless Dirty Harry wannabee?

No mention of the facts from the police’s statement on the incident: that Evanovich allegedly turned and pointed his own gun at the “good samaritan” (according to some accounts, fired a shot at him); indeed, only the most oblique possible reference to the fact that Evanovich was carrying a gun that could still be considered “honest”.

No mention of the fact that had the shooting been even in the least bit ambiguous, the shooter would have been detained, arrested, booked and charged pretty much immediately.

Apparently nobody involved in the case had any choice!

No, really:

The investigation ensnared Evanovich’s sister, Octavia Marberry, this week when she was jailed on allegations of fraud and aggravated robbery. She had been with Evanovich the night he died, and according to their mother, held him in her arms as he took his last breath.

Back that up a minute, here; Marberry was allegedly part of the robbery.  She allegedly participated with her brother in giving an older woman the choice “give us your grocery money or we will kill you” – the act that directly led to the chase, her brother’s alleged move to end the life of the man chasing him, that would justify the “good samaritan’s” alleged shooting and, finally, the heart-rending scene McKinney favored us with.

Evanovich grew up in Minneapolis and Gary, Ind., one of five children.

“He has a good, loving family, and he has lots of friends. He wasn’t 100 percent bad,” his mother, Mary Evanovich of Minneapolis, said in an interview Thursday.

Two members of that loving family were apparently involved in pistol-whipping a Latina working-stiff-ette, of course.

Look – I’m a parent.  I’m not going to do the end-zone happy dance over someone getting killed, even if it’s justifiable homicide.  As much “fun” as I had raising my own kids, I can’t imagine what it must be like watching yours go off the rails as badly as Mary Evanovich’s seem to have.

But let’s eschew the bullshit, here.  Darren Evanovich’s death is a personal tragedy; the path that led him to that godforsaken parking lot was a social tragedy.

But the shooting?  That was (so it seems right now) self-defense; as the late Joel Rosenberg taught us all, the second-worst of all the possible outcomes – if you were the “good samaritan” seeing a gun pointing at you in that wretched alley.

UPDATE: A source – let’s call him “Zack” – with extensive knowledge of the issue and some knowledge of the case – wrote an email to McKinney.  He sent me a copy.  He reached about the same conclusions, but more economically. I’ll include it below the jump.

(more…)

From the Minnesota Carry Forum, unverified but utterly plausible information about the pistol-whipping victim in the Evanovich case:

A little inside firsthand facts directly from the pistol whipped lady (my wife knows who she is from work) and overheard her talking today about it. There was 3 perps. (dead guy, his sister, one still unknown one) I don’t know why the news or police have not released that info unless they are looking for the third scumbag still. The mugged lady was told “give me your purse” to which she replied “fuck you” to the now dead mugger when he told her to give it up. Probably the reason she got hit. You wont get the most the facts by watching the news or police releases. She is in her lower 50,s, hispanic and now has 2 black eyes from the pistol whipping along with a small cut on the head.

So while it’s not odd that Evanovich’s sisters have mentioned this, one wonders if the media – who breathlessly carried their attacks on the shooter – know that Evanovich (and, allegedly, his sister) were engaged in brutally attacking a hispanic office cleaner for a few bucks?

A source with considerable knowledge in the area, asked his opinion of this case, writes about the speculation about the shooter’s case.  Asked what he thought about the good samaritan’s chances of getting indicted, he responded:

[Henco Attorney Mike] Freeman can always do what he wants, but he’s not completely tone-deaf, and…

• There are LOTS of believable ways that this was a good shoot, and very few (and all pretty far-fetched) ways that it was not.
• Who ya gonna believe? The heroic guy with all the clean background checks, or the felon in illegal possession of a gun while committing a violent crime?
• The cops have essentially called it a good shoot. They might even be pissed if he gets charged.
• There has been no real bloody-shirt-waving by the “community.” This little thug brought it on himself, and no one but his sisters are saying otherwise.

This could get much more interesting.  Stay tuned.

Not a lot of updates in last week’s case in Minneapolis, where a “good samaritan” with a carry permit chased 23 year old Darren Evanovich after seeing Evanovich “pistol-whipping” a 53 year old woman in the parking lot of a grocery store.  Evanovich, so the story goes, ran and then turned and pointed a gun at the samaritan, who allegedly shot Evanovich dead.

Earlier this week, several Twin Cities media outlets – WCCO-TV, KSTP-TV, Rick Kupchella’s “Bring Me The News”, and Bob Collins’ column at MPR – all ran stories featuring Evanovich’s mother and sisters complaining that it was wrong that a citizen shot their son/brother – that the Samaritan should have called the police (without mentioning the allegations that Evanovich had pointed a lethal weapon at the Samaritan).

One of Evanovich’s other sisters apparently got a little more involved in the case:

Tuesday police arrested the sister of a robber who was shot and killed by a witness last week.

Officers believe Octavia Marberry was with her brother, Darren Evanovich at the time of the robbery at Cub Foods on 26th Avenue South last Thursday.

Marberry is facing charges of aiding and abetting her brother.

One of the sisters has apparently started a facebook page, “Justice For Darren Evanovich“.  Someone whose comments got deleted from that page started another, “Darren Evanovich Got Justice“, in response.  They’re both about as depressing as you might expect.

We don’t really know what happened behind the Cub store near Lake and Hiawatha last week, in an incident in which one Darren Evanovich allegedly robbed a woman in the parking lot, pistol-whipped her, was chased by a Good Samaritan, allegedly drew a pistol on the samaritan, and was in turn shot dead.  I published the details that were available in the media last week; not much else seems to have come up, other than the fact that the Minneapolis Police declined to arrest the man – generally a good sign – and the Hennepin County Attorney’s office is evaluating whether or not to prosecute.

This didn’t stop Channel Five’s Tim Sherno from running a – I’m going to pick my words carefully – bizarre piece interviewing the sisters of the victim in the shooting.

Evanovich’s sisters say they know what their brother was doing was wrong, but they say the police should have handled the response because they’re trained to deal with crimes in progress.

I heard the audio from this piece – which is, sadly, not online at the moment.  And I almost drove off the road.

What do you think police “training” tells a cop to do, Evanovich sisters, when he sees a guy with a gun?

They are trained to order him to drop it and, if he doesn’t, shoot him without a lot of further ado!

Johnita Beal says the witness should have dialed 911, “Police could have been easily contacted, easily, and my brother would have been behind bars, or something like that, but no, he’s gone now.”

That is true.

And he’d have gotten away, since the police simply can’t be everywhere, and he’d have gone on to pistol-whip (allegedly) some other woman sooner than later.

But what about your brother, Madames Beal and Evanovich?  Leaving aside the robbery that started the incident – your brother is dead because he allegedly drew a gun on a guy who was chasing him for robbing and beating an old woman. Your brother could easily have killed the other man.  That – if the story checks out – is why it’s called “self-defense”.

Have you thought about that?

I’m sorry for your loss.  A brother is a terrible thing to lose.  But he might have made some different choices, under the circumstances – we see this, right?

And all the rest of you would-be robbers out there – if this story pans out, and the case is ruled justifiable (I’m crossing my fingers), does it give you any pause about, oh, I dunno, attacking and robbing people, and waving guns in the faces of people who lift a finger to stop you?

UPDATE: Rick Kupchella’s “Bring Me The News” spoke with Evanovich’s mother, who is claiming he was “the victim”.

Two stories doesn’t make a trend – it’s possible that two simultaneous, produced, sympathetic stories just happened to appear at almost the same time.

I don’t believe it, but it’s possible.

If you see any other media coverage, let me know.  Two is a coincidence.  Three’s a campaign.

The Pack will go 16-0 (or maybe 15-1, just to make things seem plausible), and sail through the playoffs, only to lose in the Superbowl to a visibly inferior team…

…by just inside the spread.

Because a lot of teenage children of sanitation industry executives in northern New Jersey and Nevada need Lexuses (Lexi?), that’s why.

(more…)

A shooting  by reported carry-permit holder in South Minneapolis may just illustrate the problems facing the law-abiding citizen.

We’ come back to that.  First, the reported details:

A man was fatally shot Thursday night in south Minneapolis in what may have been a case of self-defense by another man who interrupted a robbery, police said.

Just before 10 p.m., police got a 911 report that someone had been shot in a parking area behind the Super Grand Buffet restaurant about a block west of Cub Foods near the intersection of Lake Street and Minnehaha Avenues, according to police spokesman Sgt. William Palmer.

Among all the shootings that have plagued that neighborhood – which is, by the way, my old neighborhood – over the decades, this one is distinguished by one factor:

When police arrived, a man with a gun who said he had a valid concealed-weapon permit told them he had interrupted the robbery of a woman in her 60s. The man said that he chased the robbers, a male and a female, exchanged fire and killed the male robber.

And if you’re a normal person with a living soul (and, of course, all the facts check out), that’s all it takes; guy interrupts two pieces of vermin not just robbing but (according to some media reports) pistol-whipping an older woman; and gives chase. Robber turns to shoot the good samaritan; samaritan shoots first.

But the Hennepin County Attorney’s office aren’t people – they’re prosecutors.  People who not only focus on the letter of the law, but the letters of the law that their bosses want empasized; they work for an office whose tacit purpose, run as it is by a DFL elected official, is to enforce DFL social policy, which is that only urban thugs and the police should have guns, and that we, the law-abiding, should be disarmed and docile.

Police took both the alleged female robber and shooter into custody while they investigate his account of the shooting. Two guns — one from the slain man, one from the shooter — were recovered, Palmer said.

On the one hand – especially if you’re a resident of a long-blighted neighborhood, or have ever had a grandmother – you can sympathize with the guy chasing the scumbags down. You might even root for the guy – I sure would.

But there are two problems here:

Self Defense Law Starts Our Shooter Out With Two Strikes – The problem with self-defense is that it is an “affirmative defense” – you’re saying “Yes, I killed the guy, but I have an excuse”.  In other words, you essentially plead guilty to murder, and spend the trial process fighting that admitted guilt by proving four things:

• You had reasonable fear of death or great bodily harm. No problem in this case (as reported): scumbag, who had just pistol-whipped a defenseless woman, points a gun at the samaritan.  It’s reasonable.
• Lethal force was justified under the circumstances – Hello?  It’s a gun.  Two down.
• You weren’t a willing participant in the incident – This is intended to prevent people from claiming self-defense after, say, bar fights.  This wasn’t (reportedly) a bar fight.  Any rational person gets this.  But some pencil-necked dweeb with big political ambitions who is trying to parlay a U of M Law degree into a political career, sitting in a nice warm office with metal detectors and cops protecting him, can decide “the letter of the law is you can not be involved in the scuffle first”, forcing the samaritan to spend his life’s savings defending himself at trial.
• You made reasonable efforts to avoid using lethal force – And that same pencil-necked lawyer can say “he made NO effort to avoid shooting the alleged robber!  He chased the poor disadvantaged fellow!”.

This – if all the facts are as reported, as I am assuming they are – is why we need more reforms to Minnesota’s self-defense laws like those proposed in the past several sessions by Tony Cornish.  A key reform would be to do what many states do, with great success; give self-defense the presumption of innocence until proven guilty; make the Assistant County Attorney prove the self-defense shooter didn’t meet the criteria of a self-defense shooting.

“But that’ll make it easy for people to shoot each other over fender-benders!  Or because someone thinks they got the stink-eye!”  Nope.  Think of every non-justified shooting – like, second-degree murder – that you can remember.  Find one that that meets the four critera above.  Good luck with that.

I’m going to hope that saner heads prevail in this case.  Of course, the Henco Attorney’s office has a long record of not having many of them, when it comes to the law-abiding citizen’s right to self-defense.

But if I saw these two mug shots in a photo array with no other context…

Delbert (L) and Timothy Huber

…I’d probably guess they allegedly “shot someone over $50 and some tractor parts”.

According to the criminal complaint, Tim Larson arrived at his father’s small farm to find 81-year-old Delbert Huber and 45-year-old Tim Huber on the property. The two men said they were hired by Larson’s father to do the chores on the farm while Norman Larson was out of town. The 43-year-old son told the Hubers to move their farm equipment and come back Monday because he was going to be there all weekend.

Records show Delbert Huber was upset as they left because the Hubers had to move their equipment and also thought Larson stole $50 from Tim Huber’s wallet. Court records also show the older Huber thought someone took tractor parts from them.

According to the complaint, the two men returned to the farm the next morning and after a brief argument, Delbert Huber shot Tim Larson once in the chest with a rifle, killing him.

Huber later called the sheriff’s department to say he shot and killed a man.

They are, of course, innocent until proven guilty.

I was talking with another Second Amendment activist last night about the story behind yesterday afternoon’s shooting on I-394 or, rather, what was missing from it.

Police said the officer had tried to stop the woman, who eventually pulled over along the median shortly after 1 p.m. Thursday on westbound Interstate 394 in Minnetonka.

“The lone occupant of the vehicle, an adult female, was in possession of a handgun and was subsequently fatally shot by the officer,” according to a statement from Golden Valley police.

“Was in possession of a handgun?”

OK – and what did she do with it?

The observation is that usually in these types of shootings – dead civilian, unhurt cop – if there are details that explain the cop’s actions, like “she picked up the gun, racked a round, yelled “I’m gonna kill you, copper” and pointed it at the officer”, those are all over the media.

And yet…

The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office is investigating and declined Thursday night to release any additional details, including who the woman was, what led to the traffic stop and shooting, and whether she fired at the officer.

This will be interesting.

Michael Hansen was freed last month after six years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.

And now the county attorney has finally dropped the charges, aborting the new trial that was called for last summer:

…Douglas County Attorney’s Office dropped all charges against him and said it “no longer believes that it can prove the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

The exoneration came after a judge in July had vacated Hansen’s conviction and ordered a new trial based on evidence presented by the Innocence Project of Minnesota, saying that there was evidence that the Ramsey County medical examiner might have given “false or incorrect” testimony at the first trial. He was released from prison in August.

The death of Hansen’s daughter was a tragedy.   His conviction and imprisonment were partly the result of a bureaucrat’s botch…

In a review whose results were issued early this month, Ramsey County said [Ramco medical examiner Michael] McGee complied with all state laws and with his contract with the county.

…(in other words, “the dog ate his homework, but the rules say there’s nothing you can do about it), and the assumption that the father had to be guilty.

McGee couldn’t be reached for comment Sunday.

Erika Applebaum, executive director of the Innocence Project of Minnesota, said that if anything can be learned from Hansen’s experience, it’s that juries should not blindly accept all expert testimony.

Naturally, The System doesn’t like mere peasants getting uppity and questioning their “experts”; they’ve been bellyaching about juries asking too many questions – the “CSI Effect” – and in some places is taking action to stymie those exact questions.

It’s not the only question being raised about the work of McGee, the Ramco medical examiner whose testimony put Hansen away  Without casting specific aspersions on the work of McGee specifically – there will be plenty of litigation that’ll address those questions – perhaps the real answer is to have prosecutors and “experts” that flagrantly bugger justice start serving some of the time they rip from the lives of the innocent.

To:  Walgreens
From: Mitch Berg, Former Customer
Re: So Long, And Thanks For All The Drugs

To Whom It May Concern,

I’ve been a Walgreen’s customer for years now.

No more.

Recently, one of your pharmacists in Michigan opted not to be a victim of violent crime when two armed men charged him at 4:30AM.

Your pharmacist, Mr. Hoven, responded correctly:

Drawing his own gun, Hoven fired at the attackers and drove them off, saving not just himself but two Walgreens co-workers as well as the pharmacy’s valuable prescription drugs.

By way of saying thanks, Walgreens fired him.

Hoven, in an interview with the Benton Township Herald-Palladium, said he had acted out of fear. “The adrenaline was taking over,” he said. “You could have probably taken my pulse from my breath, because my heart was beating that much.” Only 42 seconds elapsed, start to finish.

However, Walgreens, your store has a “no weapons” policy – which says, in effect, that your superstition about gun owners is more important to you than your employees’ lives.

While I respect the rights of employers to set conditions on employment, this is an unreasonable requirement for a law-abiding, legally-permitted citizen.  Legally-armed, law-abiding Americas are better Americans, better citizens, better employees and better risks, at large, than the unarmed ones (and especially the illegally-armed ones).

At any rate, until Mr. Hoven is re-hired, and restitution paid for his firing (last May), I will never spend another dime at Walgreens, and I’m going to convince as many people as I can to follow suit.

That is all.

Mitch Berg

Ann Althouse notes that it looks like Bradley was trying to be “first to the Courthouse” in her physical and then legal scuffle with David Prosser:

 Who gets to frame the story of the workplace bully? A person who fears accusation as the aggressor might opt for a preemptive strike, and that could have been the case here. During the incident, Justice Roggensack pulled Bradley away from Prosser and said, more than once, “This is not like you.” Bradley describes herself becoming very emotional. Perhaps she was shocked by her own behavior and self-defensively saw it as in her interest to portray Prosser as the aggressor

Read, naturally, the whole thing.

A New Hampshire man allegedly faked a brain injury to get women to change his diapers:

Hooksett police said Thursday that Eric Carrier is facing

charges of indecent exposure and lewdness.

 

The 23-year-old is accused of pretending to have a brain injury to lure the woman to his home, claiming he needed help changing his adult diaper… Police say Carrier placed an ad on Craigslist seeking home health care. Investigators say nurses would change his diaper, not knowing he was scamming them.

No word on whether the Minnesota Second District DFL has approached the man to see if he’ll run against John Kline.

It’s a good thing Chicago persecutes the law-abiding gun owner, even in the wake of Heller and McDonald, so conscientiously.

Otherwise, who knows how bad this episode might have gotten:

Moments before she was slain last week on Chicago’s Southwest Side, 17-year-old Charinez Jefferson begged the gunman not to shoot because she was pregnant, prosecutors said today.

Despite her plea, Timothy Jones, 18, opened fire on Jefferson anyway, yelling an expletive at her as he shot her in the head, prosecutors said. He then stood over her as she lay on the ground and fired several more times, striking her in the chest and back…

…

Jones had seen Jefferson walking with a rival gang member in the 3000 block of West 64th Street and approached them in a car, Dillon said. He got out of the vehicle and fired at least one shot at the rival, who ran off, leaving Jefferson to fend for herself. After begging Jones for mercy, Jefferson was shot at “point-blank range,” Dillon said.

While I opposed the death penalty, I can’t imagine the world being a whole lot worse if the alleged shooter, if found guilty, somehow ends up very very dead.

A (presumably) couple had (an apparently) gnarly breakup.

Cops are called.

But that’s not the whole story…:

​”Gotcha” moments don’t come more classic than the one that happened in Montgomery County recently.

The Sheriff’s Office blotter says two officers were called to an apartment to investigate a sexual assault.

“The alleged victim stated to the deputies that her 26-year-old male friend had sexually assaulted her,” the report says.

Fair enough, and with that friend standing in the same apartment, no big manhunt needed.

And your typical womyn’s studies major would have convicted the guy and given him a lethal injection right about there.

But wait!

Not so fast: “Upon further investigation the deputies watched a video recording the male had made that showed the female telling him that she was calling the police because he was making her leave the apartment and she would tell the police he assaulted her.”

Hope it turns up on “Smoking Gun’s World’s Dumbest…” one of these days.

35W Bridge Memorial vandalized two days after opening:

Construction worker Rob Bailey went to the Mississippi River on Monday evening, as he had every Aug. 1 for the previous three years, to remember his co-worker and friend Greg “Jolly” Jolstad.

He watched as a new memorial to the 35W bridge collapse was unveiled about a quarter-mile upstream from the site of the tragedy.

“I go down there to pray every year at 6:05 p.m.,” said Bailey, who had just stepped off the bridge moments before it collapsed.

Two days after making his pilgrimage, he was stunned to hear that the memorial had been vandalized, with 22 stainless steel letters ripped out of a message affixed to the memorial’s granite wall.

The vandals in the Twin Cities are getting out of control.

On the one hand, it’s just plain depressing.

On the other hand, it’s tempting to buy two walls on a high-vandalism street, like University or Lake or whatever.  Paint them both a pristine white.  Post one of them “Free Public Graffiti Mural”, and the other one “No Graffiti”.  See how many people go out of the way to deface the “No Graffiti” wall.

And maybe taze them.

Fearless Prediction: the chorus of lefties who are now chanting that Anders Behring Breivik is “conservative” – to try to equate the accused mass-murderer with Eric Cantor and Michele Bachmann, naturally – will be chastened to learn that he was more “anti-Muslim” than actually political – and that “right-wing” means something very different in the context of European racial and religious politics than it does here…

…oh, who am I kidding?  Left wingers are never chastened for making overwrought, bigoted statements about American conservatives.

(See: Jared Loughner, Bill Sparkman, Larry Piderman, John Patrick Bedell, Maurice Schwenkler, the Tea Party “racist chants”…)

It’s only a prediction.

Can you imagine a racial beating – something that in every possible way is a hate crime – getting allocated a county attorney who’d never tried a jury case?  Can you imagine a county that spends millions on squeezing people for child support starving a hate crime prosecution of funding?

After a trial marked by rookie flubs on the part of the rookie prosecutor, the SEIU goons who were captured on video beating the crap out of Kenneth Gladney – a black conservtive…

…were acquitted.

Does it help that the case was tried in Saint Louis – one of the most Democrat-clogged cities in the country?

Just asking.

Anyway – they’re not guilty.

Lesson learned:  onservatives’ free speech, and safety itself, is only as secure as the local establishment wants it to be.

A “wave” of gun violence prompts a Philadelphia ‘burb to send the entire city to time-to-think:

Darby Borough, Delaware County is under a State of Emergency due to a recent uptick of gun violence.

Five shootings in three days led to the announcement Friday night.

Mayor Helen Thomas [heh] announced the state of emergency telling residents the gun violence had to stop.

“I Mayor Helen R Thomas declare a state of emergency.”

Officials say the shootings were not fatal and they seem unrelated, but something had to be done to curb the violence.

And that answer; keep the law-abiding majority penned up in their houses.

An 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew is in effect for adults and juveniles for at least 10 days.

Anyone outside during that time can be stopped and questioned by police, though Police Chief Bob Smythe says they’re more concerned about groups loitering or causing trouble.

“You’re in a group of more than three people and you are causing a disturbance. You’re going to be stopped and you’re going to be cited,” says Smythe.

A larger police presence is expected on the streets and Mayor Thomas says after the 10 days, officials will re-evaluate and go from there.

Hopefully they’ll evaluate the crushing ridicule (that they certainly deserve) that they get for adopting a banana-republic solution to a law-enforcement problem.

Bill C in the comment section yesterday pointed us to h Ann Althouse’s coda on the Prosser/Bradley flap:

Everyone who thinks Prosser must to resign if he attacked Bradley ought to say that if Bradley attacked Prosser, she should resign.

Note that almost none of the people who were crying for Prosser’s resignation over the weekend are saying any such thing.

If that happens, then the tactic of leaking the original version of the story to the press will have backfired horrifically for Democrats, as Governor Scott Walker will name the Justice to replace Bradley. If both Justices erred and must resign, that will be 2 appointments for Walker, both of whom, I would imagine, will be stronger, younger, and more conservative than Prosser, and, with Bradley gone, the liberal faction on the court will be reduced to 2, against a conservative majority of 5.

Kinda makes  you want to apportion blame evenly, doesn’t it?

No – I have a hunch that’s not what’s going to happen.  More on that below.

AND: Remember, the legislature has the power to impeach, so it is Bradley who is at the greater risk as the story, suppressed for 11 days, comes out. The legislature could play neutral and impeach both Prosser and Bradley, but that would give 2 appointments to Scott Walker.

I can think of a lot of women who, when physically assaulted by a co-worker, might not call the police immediately.  Alcoholic women from trailer parks, women with Alzheimers and women on parole who get attacked by other parolees while buying crack, mostly.

Not a lawyer and judge.

Eleven days?  It just doesn’t pass the stink test.

ALSO: People may assume that the man is larger than the woman, but — from what I have heard — Bradley is significantly larger than Prosser. Bradley is also 7 years younger than Prosser, who is 68.

My hunch – Bradley did it, and has spent the couple of weeks trying to make it go away.

My prediction – the Wisconsin Dems will play the gender card for all its worth.  They’ll try to set up a (utterly false) equivalence with Prosser’s alleged verbal confrontations with the Chief Justice.

Those are no-brainer predictions, of course.

Over the weekend, the usual pack of Sorosbloggers and Trotskytweeps came out with a “story” – that recently-re-elected Wisconsin Supreme Court Judge David Prosser had “choked” one of his fellow justices.  The “progressives” were in high dudgeon, which is about the only kind of dudgeon any of them can do.

Having read a lot of lefty alt-media, I thought I’d defer my judgment, based on two key rules one must follow when appraising the leftymedia:

1. Everything they say is a crock of s**t until proven otherwise, and it is rarely proven otherwise.  I know – that sounds harsh.  But on “story” after “story” after “story”, it’s proven true.  If a leftyblogger writes it, distrust and then verify.  You will almost invariably end up distrusting some more.
2. Remember Berg’s Seventh Law, which for those of you who don’t remember, reads “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds”.

So what about the allegations against Prosser?

What do you think?

To be fair, there are competing stories; Justice Bradley (one of the court’s stable of liberals) claimes Prosser attacked her; other witnesses disagree (emphasis added):

…the justices were arguing over the timing of the release of the opinion, which legislative leaders had insisted they needed by June 14 because of their work on the state budget. As the justices discussed the case, Abrahamson said she didn’t know whether the decision would come out this month, the source said.

At that point, Prosser said he’d lost all confidence in her leadership. Bradley then came across the room “with fists up,” the source said. Prosser put up his hands to push her back.

Bradley then said she had been choked, according to the source. Another justice – the source wouldn’t say who – responded, “You were not choked.”

In an interview, Bradley said: “You can try to spin those facts and try to make it sound like I ran up to him and threw my neck into his hands, but that’s only spin.

“Matters of abusive behavior in the workplace aren’t resolved by competing press releases. I’m confident the appropriate authorities will conduct a thorough investigation of this incident involving abusive behavior in the workplace.”

Ann Althouse owns this story among the blogs so far.  She says:

I’m reading the Journal Sentinel’s account as referring to 3 — not 2 — sources, with 2 of the 3 versions portraying Bradley as the aggressor: “the source… another source… [a]nother source….”

I want to know not only what really happened at the time of the physical contact (if any) between the 2 justices, but also who gave the original story to the press. If Prosser really tried to choke a nonviolent Bradley, he should resign. But if the original account is a trumped-up charge intended to destroy Prosser and obstruct the democratic processes of government in Wisconsin, then whoever sent the report out in that form should be held responsible for what should be recognized as a truly evil attack.

So far, if I had to speculate (and that’s what I’m doing), it looks like Bradley threw a shrieking fit and hauled off on Prosser, then dried to engineer a press hit against Prosser, and cry “abuse!” like some feckless Jerry Springer guest when busted.

I could be wrong.

But I’m feeling pretty comfy with that interpretation of the events so far.