Now That He’s In Trouble…
Friday, March 14th, 2008Via Anti-Strib, I caught this:
Catch the party affiliation, there?
So who’s gonna tell Suzy Clueless?
Archive for the 'Crime and Punishment' Category
A Tale Of A Seemingly-Confused Blogger
Thursday, March 13th, 2008“Phoenix Woman” writes breathlessly scrawls:
If you Google “David Vitter prostitute“, you get around 30,000 references to the sex scandal that broke last July involving a sitting Republican Senator known for his straight-arrow “family values” image.
Wow – that’s ironic, isn’t it?
Senator Vitter has yet to resign.
(Perhaps he’s trapped in William Jefferson’s office freezer?)
If you Google Larry Craig prostitute, you get just under 48,000 references to the sex scandal that broke last August involving another sitting Republican Senator known for his straight-arrow “family values” image. Senator Craig has yet to resign.
And all 48,000 of those references must be to stuff written by morons; Craig didn’t consort with a prostitute; it was a “consensual” pickup, the kind that happens all night, every night over around Loring Park; the guy happened to be an undercover cop.
But if you Google “Eliot Spitzer prostitute“, you get over 261,000 references to the sex scandal involving a sitting Democratic governor with a straight-arrow image, and that scandal isn’t even 48 hours old yet.
Clearly, Spitzer could be free and clear right now if he’d only been a Republican. It’s really the ultimate Get Out Of Jail Free card.
Tell it to Randy Cunningham, Marc Rich or William Jefferson.
And then there’s the little matter of the accusations of racketeering and money laundering (of which Mr. Spitzer is innocent until proven guilty). I don’t believe Vitter or Craig were accused of any any felonies – were they?
No?
Because the real ultimate “get out of jail free” card is to not commit felonies.
“Phoenix Woman” – perhaps the only leftyblogger in town less clear on the law than MNob…
While in no way do I buy into Vox Day’s case to repeal the 19th Amendment, “Phoenix Woman” could actually be circumstantial evidence in the affirmative. Ladies – you might wanna do something about her.
That is all.
Cutting A Board With A Fish
Thursday, February 21st, 2008I’ve commented in the past about the futility of bureaucratic approaches to spree killers like last week’s tragic – and preventable – shooting at Northern Illinois University.
My comments have been largely caustic, because the bureaucratic solutions – “lockdowns”, communications (NIU, like Virginia Tech, sent out emails to students). My attitude about bureaucratic responses is a matter of record.
Joe Olson – professor of law at Hamline University and the avatar of Minnesota’s second amendment movement – has a more systematic approach.
Oh, no worries – the conclusions are exactly the same:
As the latest cycle moves to the planning phase — Connecticut hopes to have its latest reactive conference on school safety in March — expect efforts to focus on measures that will be as effective in stopping armed killers as the NIU e-mails were. It won’t dawn on conferees that rampages don’t occur at state police barracks, National Guard armories or military bases. Cowardly killers are nuts, but they’re not crazy enough to go where their victims might be armed.
Acknowledging that would require policymakers and educators to admit gun control in America has been wrong-headed, lethally so. So rather than consider conceal-carry laws for professors, ROTC students and others with gun training, they will reaffirm their no-gun policies, take “meaningful action to prevent gun violence” that doesn’t rise to the level of window-dressing and declare the nation’s campuses safe again. Until the next “disturbed individual” goes on a rampage.
Read, as they say, the whole goldurn thing.
Talking Point Watch
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008The latest talking point among the paranoid left in the Twin Cities is that the Saint Paul Police Department – a union operation in the third-most-liberal city in the nation’s fourth-most-liberal state – is secretly out to brutally squash leftist dissent at this September’s Republican National Convention in Saint Paul.
The local Sorosphere can be expected to, and forgiven for, doing what they’re paid to do – push lefty talking points. And Andy Birkey at the MinMon does his bit, expanding on a bit of lefty hysteria that’s been making the rounds lately:
St. Paul Police Department is requesting 230 Tasers to outfit the all of the department’s officers with the electroshock weapon, Fox 9 News reports. The SPPD will purchase the Tasers with $210,000 collected from drug raids. The St. Paul City Council will have to approve the purchase.
The purchase is expected to arrive in St. Paul just in time for the Republican National Convention prompting media speculation that the weapons are being purchased specifically for the convention. When asked by Fox 9 News whether the police will use the weapon at the convention particularly against protesters, police spokester Tom Walsh said, “Our hope is that no one will have to use any degree of force. If it becomes necessary, will that be one of the tools available to them? I suppose that’s safe to say.”
Now, the conceit among the local fringe-left is that the SPPDs is going to act as a tool of Karl Rove:
We need more of these lethal weapons when the wild and crazy protesters come to exercise their 1st Amendment Right to free speech.
Now, that’s the kind of rubbish we’ve come to expect from the local fringe left – the City government is bending over backwards, if not a little further, to make protesters welcome (in some quarters, more welcome than the delegates themselves). The tasers are for when the “anarkids” – the trust-fund fops that are promising violence in Saint Paul next September – get violent and won’t respond to a regular arrest, but the cops don’t want to over-escalate.
If one assumes that the critics of the SPPD are completely irrational, of course, you might assume that they’re unaware of what tasers are for.
Tasers – used legally – are a step in the escalation to dealing with a violent suspect that needs to be restrained for the public’s and, often, their own safety. They are used when the police need a relatively safe means to subdue and restrain a violent suspect, and simple holds and hand-to-hand techiques won’t work. It is both less violent than other means (of which more in a bit), and vastly less indiscriminate.
So let’s say some of you get your wish, and the SPPD doesn’t have tasers. What then?
Here’s what.
When (not if) someone gets violent, without tasers, the police will have to resort to…:
- Billy clubs and riot batons – which are much more violent than tasers, vastly more prone to cause injury, and a propaganda coup for the wackjobs.
- Pepper Spray, which is both less reliable at subduing people, and much more indiscriminate.
- Pepperball and beanbag rounds, and “Baton” rounds, which are high-impact “non-lethal” founds fired from shotguns and/or 37mm/40mm grenade launchers, respectively. They hit their target like Mohammed Ali in his prime, knocking them down quite violently. They are vastly more likely to injure their target than tasers. Worse, they involve firearms, which are a psychological crossing of the Rubicon that any sensible police department would like to avoid.
- Clouds of tear gas applied via hand grenades, grenade launchers and so on. An area weapon, it’d make huge parts of downtown Saint Paul un-usable until the clouds of irritant dispersed, and be both a nuisance and health hazard to everyone in the city downwind, and a potent propaganda symbol for the anarchists and the entire fringe left.
So if it’s safety you’re concerned about, you should SUPPORT the purchase of the tasers. I’d be willing to chalk the opposition to tasers up to ignorance…
…but underestimating ones’ opponent is a fool’s game.
Insert the obligtatory “I support free speech, and the right of the peaceful protester, bla bla bla” here. And let’s be honest – neither I nor any other Republican is afraid of any of the violence these screeching little weasels are planning, since ANY Republican is an even match for 20 lefties in ANY kind of scrap, rhetorical or otherwise (and this forum is evidence of it).
But let’s not be stupid; there is a significant faction among the demonstrators that doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the safety of the protesters. They WANT a riot. They WANT the psychological images of tear gas and grenade launchers and cops in riot gear. They WANT to reap the propaganda bounty of an indiscriminate, violent response to their provocations (as they did with the Critical Mass riot last year).
Tasers enable a measured response to small acts of unreasoning, illegal activity.
And that’s just not crazy enough to suit the demonstrators’ purposes. They want to provoke a massive, polarizing response.
You can practically see the genitals tingling when some of these fops talk about the violence – indeed, as we noted last week, some of their actions seem calculated to provoke panic reactions – the panic that will play into the propaganda plans of those who seem bent on provoking a riot.
I’m sure Andy Birkey doesn’t want that.
Some of the rest of them? Well…
The Harvest Home
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008I was a 20 year old college kid working a grindingly-boring Sunday afternoon shift at KQDJ Radio in Jamestown, ND on February 13, 1983.
I was doing what I usually did on those boring Sunday shifts; playing records, doing homework, taking transmitter readings.
Then, the police scanner in the “newsroom” next door, which normally burbled with the desultory reports of DWIs and bar fights and traffic stops that make up the lives of most small town cops, suddenly erupted. There’d been a shootout; officers were down; cops and sheriff’s deputies were being dispatched to Medina, a town of about 400 people about 35 miles west of Jamestown on I94.
It took hours to untangle the story, which became perhaps the most famous crime in North Dakota history, the Medina Shootout.
Two US Marshals, dispatched from Fargo to try to arrest a group of tax-protesters affiliated with the neo-Nazi-sympathetic “Posse Comitatus”, had been killed in the shootout that ensued. Their leader, Gordon Kahl, and several others fled the scene. The scanner reported ambulances on their way to the hospital in Jamestown bringing the wounded, which included Yorie Kahl, criticially injured by a gunshot; in one of the many ironies that day, Kahl’s life was saved by the doctor on duty in the Emergency Room that day, Dr. Evan Kostick, father of my high school pal David (himself a doctor today), and one of Jamestown’s tiny Jewish community.
News organizations in North Dakota today are remembering the 25th anniversary of the shootout – the Fargo Forum led and leads the coverage; others from the Bismark Trib pitched in; former Forum staffer James Corcoran wrote “Bitter Harvest”, the definitive book on the event, relating not only the shootout and the apocalyptic trial of the survivors, but the social sturm und drang that the event caused on the Northern Plains.
———-
Times were brutally tough in the Dakotas in the early ’80s. The rest of the US was slowly recovering from a recession; it’d be hard to call what happened on the Plains anything less than a depression. What the foreclosure crisis is to the inner city today, the farm crisis of the ’80s was to the Great Plains.
Some farmers – and some of the workers whose livelihoods depended on agriculture, which in North Dakota back then accounted for pretty much every job in the place – did what human nature naturally bids some people to do; blame someone else. And for some – like Kahl and a thin film of like-minded people – it wasn’t a big leap from “losing your farm to the bank” and “losing your farm to Jewish Bankers”. The Times’ review of “Bitter Harvest” notes:
The book that turned his head at an early age was ”The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem,” and it was written by Henry Ford.
It is based on a 1918 treatise called ”The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which purported to be the minutes of a cabal of Russian Jews plotting to destroy Christianity and the white race and take over the world. Ford wrote ”The International Jew” in 1920, and it was not until 1929 that he finally conceded that ”The Protocols” was a fabrication concocted by czarist Russian anti-Semites.
Even so, as a young man in the 1940’s, Mr. Kahl believed it totally. He had considerable encouragement. He came of age at a time when the velvet voice of the Rev. Charles Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest who reached into almost as many homes with his weekly radio show as Fred Allen, broadcast some of the nastiest anti-Semitic propaganda ever heard on the airwaves; when Gerald L. K. Smith established the Jew-baiting Christian Nationalist Crusade in Arkansas and gained a national following, and when Gerald Winrod, an apocalyptic fundamentalist preacher in central Kansas gained tens of thousands of adherents to a movement that came to be known as the Jayhawk Nazis.
Winrod’s son, George Gordon Winrod, kept the ministry alive. I remember his followers leaving corrosively anti-semitic leaflets under the windshield wipers of cars in the church parking lot when I was in ninth grade.
Nobody in my circle bought into it, of course – but we all knew people for whom it rang true. There was an audience, out there.
And they – like Kahl – weren’t necessarily easily identifiable:
When Mr. Kahl came home from World War II, he was 25 years old, and he was regarded as a hero. He had shot down 10 enemy planes as a turret gunner on B-25’s, and he had won the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, two air medals, a Presidential unit citation and two Purple Hearts. That was not all the metal he brought home. Surgeons never did get out all the shrapnel he took in the jaw, chest and hip.
So the combination of hard times and ready scapegoats found some adherents.
———-
Kahl escaped that day; with two federal agents dead, the federal law-enforcement machinery sprung into place. Two blocks from the house where my father still lives in Jamestown, in Stutsman County’s then-brand-new courthouse, the FBI and an alphabet soup of other federal law-enforcement agencies set up their command post; local hotels were jammed with brusque men and women in sharp suits and/or, occasionally, battledress utilities.
And they were not happy. Rumors began to circulate; the Feds were tramping about the prairie with big, nasty boots; they were conducting no-knock raids, presuming the locals guilty until proven innocent, acting like a hostile occupying power – or so said the rumors.
The previous summer, I’d worked at KDAK, a little station in Carrington, a town of about 2,000 about 40 miles north of Jamestown. The station had also just hired a new “News Director”, a pretty mid-20-something named Peggy Polreis who’d just come from Carrington’s newspaper. One of my jobs had been to make her broadcast-worthy. I did a good job.
One day, a few days after the shootout, Peggy got a tip from a source that the Feds were going to search a farmhouse near nearby Fessenden. She arrived on the scene to find that the press were being cordoned away from a farmhouse located a solid half-mile up the road, behind a shelter belt.
Peggy slipped away from the group, and crawled – so the story went – a quarter of a mile along the shelter belt, keeping out of sight of the cops. She was, apparently, the only non-cop to see what happened.
The police – and, as I recall, a North Dakota National Guard armored personnel carrier – had surrounded the farmhouse. A dog darted from an outbuilding; a policeman shot the dog dead. The gunshot sparked more gunfire, and before long the farmhouse was completely riddled with bullet holes. Finally, the police moved in…
…to discover the farmhouse empty.
It was one of many incidents that angered, and occasionally alienated, the locals from the Feds.
———-
How you look at the events of that winter (and the ensuing spring and summer, when the manhunt for Kahl led to a final shootout in Arkansas that left Kahl and another Christian Identity supporter dead) depends on who, and where, you were back then.
If you were a local, you knew that North Dakotans tend to be good, law-abiding people; they’ve voted Republican in pretty much every Presidential election since statehood, making them marginally less conservative than Utah. And yet the Posse, and Christian Identity, found recruits and adherents – and it was no mystery why. Radical fringes were no stranger to the plains; the Non-Partisan League, the Grangers, the Bund and other fevered activists had gestated in the area in response to other crises since the 1890’s.
So we weren’t surprised that some of the locals were sympathetic. It was a minority – a small one – but it drew attention. One of them even wrote and recorded – on a home cassette player, I think – a song praising and rooting for Kahl, during the manhunt and before the final fatal shootout in Arkansas. It got a little play – mostly from news organizations who were reporting on the acceptance Kahl, the Posse and other extremists got from the area.
If you weren’t from the area, and didn’t understand it, it must have seemed odd. And maybe a little scary.
———-
Hollywood certainly knows nothing of the area, and understands less about it. But that didn’t stop it from making a made-for-TV movie, based rather loosely on Bitter Harvest, in 1991. Line of Duty: Manhunt in the Dakotas starred Rod Steiger as Kahl, and Michael “Family Ties” Gross as an FBI agent from New York who flew to the state to help solve the crime.
The show got the basic facts right; the names, the places (most of the show was putatively set in Jamestown), the timeline (sort of).
But the Hollywood take on the area, and the locals, was bemusingly warped. Part of it was the Central Casting version of small-town people; although North Dakota is a place where you can hear the Fargo accent (“Yah, sure, you betcha”) in a hundred little main street cafes and bars, the show had the local farmers speaking with cornpone Arklahoma drawls. The locals, to Hollywood, were out of Gomer Pyle or, given the sinistry of the subject matter, maybe Deliverance.
Worse? While there was support for Kahl (and even more criticism of the Feds’ heavy-handedness, arrogance, and occasional contempt for due process in the way they carried out the manhunt in the immediate wake of the shootout), Manhunt in the Dakotas showed something that was almost an active guerilla movement, with rocks and shots aimed at passing police cars, threats, Gross (and Larry Hunt as “Chief Walters”, a composite and sympathetic Jamestown police chief) being harrassed while driving in the countryside, and – in the movie’s climactic scene – the two walking, nervous, down “Jamestown”‘s main street as the “local radio station” played the pro-Kahl song (with a cheery intro from the DJ), both of them keenly aware of the hateful gazes of the locals (by now all of them seemingly Kahl-sympathizers) boring through them both, as if they were fully-bedsheeted Klansmen scurrying through Compton.
It was crap, of course, factually (no station in the state played the song, except as news) as well as socially (Jamestown is a college town of 16,000 that hosts a state hospital, and a school for the profoundly disabled, where Kahl had little traction; Kahl’s base of support was out on the isolated drift prairie). But it was interesting, seeing how inscrutable “flyover land” was to the people who actually produce these things, and the almost-superstitious fear the place engenders.
———-
That part of North Dakota is a huge place in terms of the land and the sky; the human geography is much smaller. In the 22-odd years since I left the place, whenever I meet other expats, it’s hard to go more than thirty seconds without finding a common acquaintance.
It’s the same with events. Besides Dr. Kostick, and Peggy Polreis, I knew Darrell Graf – Medina’s police chief at the time (and Graf has actually turned up on this blog) and people in his family. Scott Kopp was another – a guy I remember as a Stutsman County deputy who lost a finger from a Kahl shot that could have done much worse. Another guy – a Medina cop who was on the periphery of the action – was my friend’s sister’s boyfriend (and, the last I checked, husband of about twenty years).
The internet can make you acquainted with even more people. Scott Faul – one of the Posse members who was arrested, tried and did prison time for his role in the shootout – has a blog.
Twenty five years is a long time, even out there. But memories are longer still.
Why I Oppose the Death Penalty: Part CCXLII
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008The reliability and justice of the death penalty is only as the integrity of the prosecutors who press for it.
And as we see in this case, we have a way to go:
Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood announced that 51-year-old Albert Johnson had been arrested for the brutal rape and murder of two three-year-old girls in the 1990s. Johnson had been an early suspect in both cases, but despite the fact that the state had samples of his DNA on file for more than a decade, it never bothered to test it against the DNA found in the little girls.
That’s because Mississippi District Attorney Forrest Allgood decided early on in both cases that he had his man, and little could convince him otherwise. One of those men is Kennedy Brewer, a mentally handicapped man who served more than a decade on Mississippi’s Death Row, then served another five years even after DNA evidence had cleared him. Allgood insisted on retrying Brewer anyway, arguing that bite marks on the little girl’s body matched Brewer’s teeth.
Curiously, Allgood resisted testing the DNA from the crime scene against that of a man he had earlier convicted of an eerily similar crime—another rape and murder of a young girl in the same area. It now seems clear why Allgood resisted the test. As it turns out, the man he’d convicted for that crime, Levon Brooks, is innocent, too. Brooks had been sentenced to life in prison.
Hood is expected to announce on Thursday that Brewer has been completely exonerated. A similar announcement for Brooks could also come Thursday, or perhaps a few days after.
Science – DNA testing, in this case – might be a cure for human imperfection. But as we’ve seen, it takes more than science to fight duplicity and depravity.
Can’t Win For Losing
Tuesday, February 5th, 2008Joel Rosenberg apparently got a lot of crap from cops for his coverage of the Hixon case – in which a couple of police, responding to a bank robbery they’d been told involved a white guy, grabbed and (according to the ensuing lawsuit) “jumped-and-thumped” a black guy. The case resulted in a big lawsuit and settlement in Hixon’s favor.
Later, Joel heard:
“I showed that to another friend of mine,” he said. “Retired cop.”
“And?”
“He went off. ‘Who is this bastard and why is he saying this shit?'”
“So, I said, ‘he’s right, you know.'”
“‘Yeah, but that bastard shouldn’t be saying it.'”
We get a lot of that.
Ghastly
Saturday, February 2nd, 2008A robbery led to the shooting deaths of five women at a Lane Bryant store in Tinley Park, Illinois, in suburban Chicago.
When police arrived, they found multiple victims shot and killed in a back room of the store, Tinley Park police Sgt. T.J. Grady said.
As of 6 p.m., police confirmed that the motive in the case was robbery. In a press conference Saturday night, Grady said there is no indication that the suspect is still not armed.
“They are taking it very methodically,” Grady said about the search for the suspect, including working with a witness to try to get a composite of the shooter. Police have also pulled video from stores and establishments in a mile and a half radius around the store to see if the shooter stopped in anywhere prior to the shooting.
I hope the police find the shooter, although it looks like the first ten hours of manhunt have gone unrewarded.
It’s worth noting that while, unlike the Westroads Mall in Omaha where a shooting on December 7 of last year claimed eight, the Lane Bryant in Tinsdale Park was not posted against concealed carry permit holders. The reason, of course, is that Illinois has the toughest state-level gun control laws in the country – and Chicago is worse still. And while there was a private-property case to be made for Westroads (and other stores) being able to bar the law-abiding gun owner from their premises, it’s the State of Illinois and the City of Chicago that keeps the locals disarmed and helpless in this case.
The upshot another disarmed population being slaughtered like sheep.
When will the brain-dead cretins who legislate gun bans (against the law-abiding) learn? Or, better yet, be held accountable for the rivers of innocent blood on their hands?
The Case Of The Diced, Spiced Ham
Thursday, January 24th, 2008LAW AND ORDER
SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT
EPISODE (redacted)
SCENE 1: SMALL GREENWICH VILLAGE APARTMENT, SPATTERED WITH BLOOD AND GORE.
A MAN IS IMPALED TO THE WALL, APPROX. FIVE FEET OFF THE FLOOR, BY A LONG PIECE OF METAL DRIVEN LONGITUDINALLY THROUGH THE LENGTH OF HIS BODY.
DR. HUANG AND MEDICAL EXAMINER WARNER ARE ON SCENE WITH THREE CRIME SCENE (CSU) OFFICERS AND DETECITIVES MUNCH AND TUTUOLA. DETECTIVES STABLER AND BENSON ARRIVE ON THE SCENE.
STABLER (HOLDING HANKIE OVER FACE): Wow. What’s up?
MUNCH: It’s a bad one. Vic was shot 24 times with a .22 pistol. We’ve got casings…well, all over the place.
BENSON: How’d the killer get in?
CSU1: Killer blew the lock off its hinges with three shots from a .44 Magnum. We have the slugs here (points), there and there. Vic was killed over there (pointing to desk with computer); see the blood pooled on the floor?
STABLER: Yep. Good job. So he blows the door open with a big gun, but he kills the vic with a tiny little popgun?
TUTUOLA: Look at this; CSU found the gun’s magazine.
BENSON: (Examines metal object). It holds eight rounds.
MUNCH: The perp would have had to have fired eight shots, reloaded, fired eight more, and reloaded again.
STABLER: Wierd. (Ponders). Wonder why, when he had the .44 handy?
HUANG: He wanted to cause pain. A single .22 hit hardly ever kills; it takes a hit to the medulla or heart, pretty much.
WARNER: Look at this – all 24 shots hit the stomach. All those nerve endings – it had to be incredibly painful.
BENSON: That had to hurt!
TUTUOLA: Word.
HUANG: What we have here is a deliberate attempt to cause intense pain.
STABLER: OK. Perp comes in, confronts vic, fires eight shots, reloads, fires eight shots, reloads, and fires eight more times. And then…
MUNCH: Then, the perp dragged the body over there…
BENSON: Blood smears on the floor in a trail from the desk to the wall…
MUNCH: …took this (points at victim) nine-foot-long piece of rebar and used this mallet to hammer it down the vic’s mouth, all the way through and out the…
BENSON: Spare me that detail, thanks…
MUNCH: …and then nail the whole thing to the big beam along the wall, five feet up.
STABLER: Like a pig on a spit.
BENSON: A monster…
WARNER: Judging by the lividity and the blood spattering on the floor below the body, I’d say he was alive while the perp put in the rebar.
MUNCH: Ow.
CAPTAIN CRAGEN WALKS IN.
CRAGEN: Whadda we got?
STABLER: A real sick puppy!
CRAGEN: I need a collar on this one. The media’s camping out on the commissioner’s front door demanding answers. Canvas the neighbors?
TUTUOLA: Neighbors heard nothin’.
BENSON: What motive could someone have to kill someone like…this?
CSU OFFICER 1 (sitting at computer along the wall opposite the body): Detectives? Take a look at this.
DETECTIVES, CRAGEN AND HUANG GATHER AROUND, LOOKING OVER CSU1’s SHOULDER
CSU OFFICER 1: It looks like our victim wrote spam and trojan horses for a Russo-Nigerian online “marketing” company.
BENSON: (Reading) Get…A…$500,000…mortgage…for…$25 a month…
BENSON, STABLER, CRAGEN, MUNCH, TUTUOLA, HUANG and WARNER TRADE GLANCES.
STABLER: I call it a suicide.
BENSON: Me too.
CSU OFFICERS ABRUPTLY PACK UP THEIR GEAR.
CRAGEN: Bagels, anyone? I’m buying.
AND…SCENE.
Watching The Detectives SWAT Team
Wednesday, January 16th, 2008
Joel Rosenberg – who follows police issues, especially excessive use of force issues, as closely as anyone – writes:
If you’re interested in the issue I’ve been covering, you might want to read this, right about, well, now.
He links to a piece by Steve Perry in the Daily Mold that does something the rest of the Twin Cities media should do; reports on allegations of excessive force complaints against the Minneapolis Police.
Read Perry’s piece; while he’s a reliably-apoplectic lefty, he (and, when he ran it, the City Pages) intersperses some good reporting into the droning cant.
Death Penalty and National Self-Esteem
Friday, January 11th, 2008So I was reading this week-old op-ed by Vince Beiser in the Strib, about the arc the Death Penalty has had in this country over the past forty or so years.
Beiser notes that the Death Penalty withered away on its own, for a while; indeed, in 1968 there were no executions in the US. The Supreme Court stopped executions in 1972.
And then…:
But just a few years later, the nation began an astonishing about-face. The Supreme Court reopened the door to capital punishment in 1976, launching an era in which the country didn’t just bring back the death penalty, it feverishly embraced it…What happened? By the mid-1970s, much of middle America was deeply uneasy about how the very fabric of society seemed to be unraveling. Drug use and crime were rising; minorities, women and homosexuals were demanding more power and respect. And the mighty United States was humiliated, first in Vietnam and later by Iranian hostage-takers.
In this milieu, politicians increasingly learned that crime could pay — for them.
Shocking – a political expedient being embraced by petty politicians.
And yet, starting a few years later, the United States took some political prozac, got out of its national funk and, today, 25 years later, are doing pretty well; compared to the rot and malaise of the 70’s, the misery of the pre-Reagan years I remember growing up, we’re doing fantastic. And crime – media hype aside – dropped.
And now…:
Today, however, the nation is again losing its enthusiasm for capital punishment…Although about two-thirds of all Americans still support capital punishment in principle, that number is considerably lower than what it was just five years ago. In practice, we’re ever more reluctant to impose it. That’s largely because of the more than 100 men and women who have been freed from death row in recent years, thanks to DNA testing and other advances. That shocking proof of the system’s fallibility also has made juries, judges, prosecutors and politicians much more wary about pushing for the ultimate punishment.
Correlation does not equal causation, of course – but it’s interesting to note that peaks in capital punishment seem to be associated with troughs in national self-image, and vice versa. During the Depression, Death Rows were humming; during the long post WWII boom, they slowed way down and, 23 years after the war as the US was on the way to the moon, stopped. During the aftermath of Watergate, stagflation, Iran and the other detritus of the Carter meltdown, it boomed again. And now – troubled as we are, but still generally in a good national mood (compared with the nadir we endured 30 years ago) – it seems to be going out of fashion.
The ingredients for a resurgence seem to be out there, though:
According to Amnesty International, 133 countries have abolished the death penalty. Last month, the United Nations voted for a worldwide moratorium on capital punishment.
And since we have a depressingly-likely shot at getting an overly UN-influenced government in place in Washington in November, the national self-image will peak and start back toward the trough by mid-2009.
Maybe It’s The Matches, Maybe It’s The Fire…
Wednesday, January 9th, 2008Town ponders banning swearing in bars:
A St. Louis-area town is considering a bill that would ban swearing in bars, along with table-dancing, drinking contests and profane music. City officials contend the bill is needed to keep rowdy crowds under control because the historic downtown area gets a little too lively on some nights.
City Councilman Richard Veit says he was prompted to propose the bill after complaints about bad bar behaviour.
I’m wondering if there mightn’t be another problem – a “root cause”. I’ve heard rumors of mood-altering drug. It comes in liquid form, and is usually found in bottles or glasses.
No confirmation on this rumor, yet…
Your Wife…
Monday, January 7th, 2008…is an unstable child star who’s going all Dana Plato on us.
What’s the perfect birthday gift?
We can reveal that Kevin Federline feared his ex would use the Beretta pistol he bought her as a birthday gift to MURDER their two young sons.
I’m not sure I’d want to be the lawyer for either of those crazy kids.
(The “funny” part to note, of course, is that either Britney or KFed would have a better shot of getting a carry permit in New York City than would, say, a rape victim or a person living in a crappy neighborhood. Good thing they don’t live in New York, hey?)
Treptow: The Theory
Monday, December 31st, 2007Ed and I talked about this theory with Joel Rosenberg on the NARN show the other day – and since Joel mentioned it on his blog yesterday, I figured I’d elaborate.
I’ve been talking with some lawyer friends of mine about the Treptow case. By no means can I take credit for all of the reasoning (or, heh heh, legal literacy) below. I will, however, claim to be the first person to consolidate all of this info and publish it.
Here are the facts as we know them, with some law-based asides interspersed:
- Martin “Scott” Treptow, in an SUV with his pregnant wife and two small children, and Robbinsdale Police officer Landen Beard, in a sporty little red car, exchanged gestures, words, and aggressive maneuvering. Pesky Legal Point: By continuing to drive, he established that he was not a willing participant in the altercation.
- Treptow pulls up to a stoplight – behind another car, in the right lane.
- Beard pulls up next to him, on the right. Pesky Legal Point: At this point, Treptow was reasonably unable to disengage any further.
- Words are exchanged. What words? Again, we’re not entirely sure, but more on that later.
- Someone pulls a gun. Who drew first – Treptow, in his SUV full of kids, boxed in at a stoplight, or Landen Beard? We don’t know – not officially. More below. We do know that Martin Treptow’s story – that Beard boxed Treptow in at the stoplight, unable to move, threatened Treptow, and then drew a gun and pointed it at the pregnant Rebecca Treptow – has stayed consistent from the first 911 call. Pesky Legal Point: assuming Treptow’s version of the incident is correct, that would constitute a “threat of death or great bodily harm” that a jury would find compelling. – if they had to hear about it. But they don’t. Because Treptow won’t be defending himself against any sort of Assault or Attempted Murder charge, where he’d have to prove self-defense at all.
- Martin Treptow fired three shots, wounding Beard about as superficially as is possible under the circumstances. Pesky Legal Point: Self-defense with lethal force requires that the force used be “reasonable”. You can’t spray fire indiscriminately; you can’t shoot your target when he’s down and incapacitated. Again, irrelevant, since Treptow won’t need to defend his claim of self-defense.
- Rebecca Treptow called 911 on her cell phone as her husband drove to a convenience store and reported the shooting, apparently not knowing that Beard was an undercover cop. Pesky Legal Point: this is necessary; one may not “shoot in self-defense” and then just let the chips fall. Indeed, the record shows that Rebecca Treptow was the first person to call 911 about the incident.
- Police responded – told at first that Treptow was the “victim” defending himself against a road-rager, and then that Beard was a cop and Treptow was a suspect.
- Treptow was arrested, and taken to the Anoka County jail, where…
- …the next day, he was released. No arraignment, no charges. He didn’t even have his Concealed Carry permit revoked – which would have taken the Anoka sheriff five minutes, and is basically pro forma in cases when there’s the faintest doubt. Which – after a day of interviewing witnesses, there apparently was not. Inconvenient Legal Point: At this point, the Anoka County Attorney could have charged Treptow with whatever charges applied, had Treptow’s claim of self-defense not stood up (i.e, not met the four criteria for self-defense – that he was an unwilling participant, and that he reasonably feared death or great bodily harm, made reasonable efforts to disengage, and that he used reasonable force. The charge would have been something involving violence against a person; assault, aggravated assault, assault with a deadly weapon, attempted murder.
- Months later, Anoka County convenes a Grand Jury. Legal Point: the Grand Jury only hears the prosecution’s side of the story; no defense is offered; Treptow didn’t even have an attorney available to him. And the Grand Jury refused to bring any of the big charges – the various flavors of assault or attempted murder, the kind one would expect from a wrongful claim of self-defense -against Treptow. Rather, they brought three charges that were…well, we’ll get to that below.
The Grand Jury, while refusing to indict Treptow for any type of Assault or Attempted Murder, did return three indictments:
- Drive by shooting. MS 609.66 subd 1e(b)
- Reckless discharge in municipality sub 1a(3)
- Terroristic threats. 609.713 sub (1)
Let’s look into these.
Remember – a defendant in the United States is innocent until proven guilty. And the prosecutor has to prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt every “element” of the offense to get the conviction. The defense has to provide one (or better yet, twelve) jurors a “reasonable doubt” of any of the elements of the charge to get the acquittal.
And – and this is important – as I understand it, none of the charges in the indictment has a “lesser included” charge; for example, if someone is charged with First Degree Murder, and a jury doesn’t find that the prosecution met the burden of proof for First Degree, but did for Second Degree murder, the jury can vote to acquit for First Degree, but convict for the “lesser included” charge of Second Degree Murder. But the jury may not vote to acquit Treptow of “Drive-By Shooting”, but convict for the lesser-included charge of, say, “Reckless Driving”, because it doesn’t exist; the “Drive By Shooting” indictment has no lesser included offenses. (Lawyers – so far, so good?). Ditto for the other two charges; the jury has to find Treptow guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of every element of the other charges, or…nothing. They can’t unilaterally ratchet the charges down to something else.
Let’s look at the first charge, “Drive By Shooting”, (MS 609.66 sub 1e). The ordinance says (with emphasis added):
Subd. 1e. Felony; drive-by shooting. (a) Whoever, while in or having just exited from a motor vehicle, recklessly discharges a firearm at or toward another motor vehicle or a building is guilty of a felony and may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than three years or to payment of a fine of not more than $6,000, or both.
(b) Any person who violates this subdivision by firing at or toward a person, or an occupied building or motor vehicle, may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than ten years or to payment of a fine of not more than $20,000, or both.
The prosecutor needs to prove each of the following beyond a reasonable doubt:
- That Treptow was in a motor vehicle. Nobody argues this: Treptow’s admitted as much.
- That while in the motor vehicle Treptow discharged a firearm. Again, no argument.
- That the discharge of the firearm was reckless. Fussy Pointillistic Legal Point: And there’s your reasonable doubt. Treptow was responding to a legitimate fear of death or great bodily harm, while an unwilling participant in the incident, while using force that was apparently reasonable enough that the Grand Jury refused to indict for assault. Under those conditions, self-defense is a right – and had Treptow acted “recklessly”, there’d be no legitimate claim to self-defense. Had there been the faintest hint of “recklessness”, Treptow would have been charged with some flavor of Assault or Attempted Murder, probably before being released from jail last June. He would not have been released uncharged, without bail, and with his carry permit un-suspended.
- That the reckless discharge of the firearm from the motor vehicle was towards an occupied motor vehicle. Hypothetical Legal Point: Although the defense counsel can argue in the alternative – sort of a legal, rhetorical “I’m not saying, but…what if” defense – that Treptow wasn’t trying to shoot toward an occupied car, in theory…well, you see how this works, right?
So – how about “Reckless Discharge of a Firearm”? Again – if the prosecutor can’t prove “reckless” behavior for the Drive-By Shooting charge, the same should go for this count. In State v. Richardson, 670 N.W.2d 267, 283 (Minn. 2003) , the Minnesota Supreme Court has said “reckless discharge of a firearm . . . requires proof that the defendant intentionally discharged a weapon in a municipality in a manner that the defendant should have known created an unreasonable risk of harm to others.” Legal Point: Self-defense – especially the whole “force used was reasonable” bit – should take care of that “unreasonable risk of harm to others” bit. Remember – had the force Treptow used not been “reasonable”, he’d have been charged for it months ago.
Onward to the Terroristic Threat charge.
Subdivision 1. Threaten violence; intent to terrorize. Whoever threatens, directly or indirectly, to commit any crime of violence with purpose to terrorize another or to cause evacuation of a building, place of assembly, vehicle or facility of public transportation or otherwise to cause serious public inconvenience, or in a reckless disregard of the risk of causing such terror or inconvenience may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than five years or to payment of a fine of not more than $10,000, or both. As used in this subdivision, “crime of violence” has the meaning given “violent crime” in section 609.1095, subdivision 1, paragraph (d).
Let’s break it down:
- A person threatens directly or indirectly to commit a crime of violence
- The threat has the purpose of terrorizing another
This one boils down to one question; can the prosecutor prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Treptow threatened, directly or indirectly, to commit a crime of violence, for the purposes of terrorizing Landen Beard?
Before you answer that, remember – self-defense is not a crime. (Assault is – but Treptow isn’t on trial for that. The Grand Jury refused to return that indictment). And then there’s the little matter of “what will the eyewitnesses say?”. And while nothing official (beyond the 911 transcripts) is known about the eyewitness accounts, rumor has it that one or more eyewitnesses pretty completely corroborate Treptow, and impugn Officer Beard.
Now, the Anoka DA knows this. They KNOW they have a crappy case against Treptow.
So why bring it?
So here’s a theory for you; the Anoka County Attorney brought the three indictments against Treptow as a dog and pony show to cover the county’s ass from:
- the civil action that Martin Treptow will bring against (at least) the Robbinsdale PD when he’s acquitted on all charges.
- the administrative action that Robbinsdale might eventually bring against Officer Beard – which, procedurally, it can not bring until all court action is resolved (because the administrative action against Beard depends in part on the outcome of the court cases).
As to Officer Beard’s indictment for Terroristic Threats – well, there’s some other info out there that’ll come out at trial, assuming the case isn’t dismissed. Stay tuned; the legal maneuvering could get REALLY interesting.
Anoka County’s actions so far – the Grand Jury, the (arguably) potemkin indictments combined with the Grand Jury’s *refusal* to indict for any type of assault or attempted murder – might tend to indicate that the county is punching its procedural tickets, to…:
- keep the county attorney from looking like he’s selling a cop down the river
- help shield Anoka County (and, maybe, Robbinsdale) from civil litigation after the criminal cases are resolved.
So to sum up: Anoka County, under pressure to do something about the case, brings three indictments against Treptow that pretty much any lawyer can see will be relative cakewalks to win in court. It’s a CYA exercise, whose denouement won’t take place in a courtroom.
At least, not a criminal one.
PS: Again, the Treptow Defense Fund:
Martin and Rebecca Treptow
Anoka Hennepin Credit Union,
3505 Northdale Blvd. N.W.
Coon Rapids, MN 55448.
The Treptow Fund
Saturday, December 29th, 2007Joel Rosenberg and I had an interesting time talking about the Treptow case on the show today. And I don’t mean “interesting” in the classical Hindu sense of the term, either.
Expect much more coverage on this blog over the next few months; this case isn’t going to get any less interesting, that’s for sure.
As I promised on the air, here’s the address to help out the Treptow defense fund. While my opinion of Treptow’s legal position has changed very much for the better in the past few days, there’s no way around the fact that defending oneself against a felony charge is expensive. If you have a post-holiday buck or two to share…:
Martin and Rebecca Treptow
Anoka Hennepin Credit Union,
3505 Northdale Blvd. N.W.
Coon Rapids, MN 55448.
Stay tuned, natch.
When In Sartell
Friday, December 21st, 2007Two morons in Sartell pin a woman to the bar and cut off her underwear…:
The two men walk over to the woman, seated at the bar, and Baumgardner pulled out a pocketknife, while Puhalla held her down on the bar by her wrists and forearms.
Baumgardner walked around her from the back, reached in her pants and cut each side of her underwear. At this time, she said, another man came up to her, poked at her chest, and said they should cut that off next. She believed the third man was referring to her bra.
…as a bunch of other “men” stood by:
She yelled for help several times and asked for the bartender to intervene, but he said, “I can’t or they will make things worse for me.” She said there were up to six other men in the bar at the time, and none of them came to her aid either.
During the altercation she lost her shoes. Eventually, she ran barefoot into the bathroom, attempting to hold up her pants.
For the two perps, jail – with ripped underwear – is probably just barely too good for ’em.
For the other “men” involved? Being forced to spend every night at the “Dam Bar” in Sartell is probably punishment enough, assuming it passes Eighth Amendment muster.
Unclear On The Motivation
Wednesday, December 19th, 2007I’ve read articles more or less exactly like this one, from Insight News, a local Afro-American community paper, since I was probably ten years old (although few of those pieces have buried the lede as far as this one, down in paragraph nine or ten. For your convenience, I’ll try to exhume the lede for you):
According to the State Council on Black Minnesotans, as of the year 2000 census, Blacks make up approximately 18.03% of Minneapolis and 11.71% of St. Paul. However, the number of Blacks in Minneapolis accounted for 40.12% of the Black population statewide, while the St. Paul population accounted for 19.565% statewide.
Minnesota blacks are concentrated in the metro – got it.
Now come the all-important Minnesota incarceration rates, and according to Tom Johnson, former Hennepin County Attorney and current president of the Council on Crime and Justice, “We know for example that in 1999 in Hennepin County you had [a number equal to] over half of all African-American males between eighteen and thirty arrested in that one year.”
It’s the “Blacks are overincarcerated” meme.
And it’s true. The number,and per capita rates, are astounding, and a national scandal – one that should shame…
…well, lots and lots of people. Almost forty years worth of leaders, in both the black and white communities.
But we’ll get back to that.
(And what’s this “[a number equal to] over half of all African-American males between eighteen and thirty arrested” number supposed to mean? Could the writer even pretend to give this statistic some meaning? Does it mean “half of all black males in Henco were arrested?”, or does it mean “Five percent were arrested ten times each?”, or…)
The reaction by some is that the police are patrolling in minority neighborhoods whether they are Hmong, Native American, Hispanic, Somali or African-American, because that is where the majority of the crimes are occurring.
But according to Johnson, the numbers do not support this: “To use who is arrested as a gauge to make a decision about who is committing crime isn’t accurate or fair.”
Er…why?
I mean, could we be bothered with some evidence of this claim? Because it’s a big one and, given that North Minneapolis and Frogtown and Phillips and Dayton’s Bluff seem to be where most of the crime in the cities themselves happens, I’d be interested in knowing – both as a city resident and someone who is concerned about equality in our society, exactly how that’s “inaccurate and unfair”.
Because from where I sit, it sounds like lawyer weasel-words.
Others look to racial profiling – where police stop Black people just because of the color of their skin – as a potential cause for increased incarceration rates for African Americans.
In a study conducted over a six-month period in 2000, Minneapolis police stopped Black drivers at a rate of more than twice the numbers in their population, and an examination of St. Paul police records showed a similar trend.
Question for those “others” that look to racial profiling; are these “stops” (as opposed to arrests for specific incidents of crime) converted into convictions? Is there any evidence that these convictions are based on wholesale fraud?
Because if there is evidence of masses of Afro-American citizens being framed and railroaded, we do have a scandal here.
Consequently, when studies show further that once they are in the Hennepin County or Ramsey County criminal justice system, Blacks are more likely to be charged with certain crimes like drug offenses, and Blacks are more likely to serve time in jail.
And again – and I ask this knowing I’m skirting on the edge of the usual, tiresome charges of “racism” by the usual bleating classes – is there any evidence that this likelihood of being charged is disconnected with a likelihood of having actually offended?
The resulting statistics equate to Blacks in Minnesota having the highest incarceration rates in the country as compared to whites. In addition, seven out of every ten inmates who leave prison come back, so the question then becomes: what, if anything, can be done about this alarming trend?
The article – incoherent as it often is – focuses on recidivism programs. Which is, I suppose, more manageable than, say, trying to reverse the damage caused by forty years of debilitating nannystatism, which began about the time 400 years of slavery and discrimination ended.
Perhaps It’s Another of Lori Sturdevant’s Spending Ideas
Wednesday, December 19th, 2007Sean Aqui from Midtopia – a gratifyingly prolific MOB blog – notes that our new surveillance culture may have officially gone too far:
Welcome to Buhl, Minn. Population 1,000. It’s a small, sleepy community where nothing much ever happens. Indeed, it disbanded its police force in 1999.
Which is why it clearly needs surveillance cameras to keep the peace.
Local law enforcement officials are pushing a plan to place six surveillance cameras around this Iron Range town of less than a thousand people.
Sgt. Pat McKenzie of the St. Louis County Sheriff’s office, which has overseen law enforcement in Buhl since the city disbanded its police department in 1999, said it’d be a tool for solving and deterring crime. But some residents are asking: What crime?
Scratch your head, ask “why?”…
…and read Midtopia more often. It’s a great, and undertrafficked, blog.
Attention, Democrat Underground
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007A Christian-hating guy walks into a crowded megachurch with three guns and 1,000 rounds of ammo, after shooting several and killing two in the parking lot (and, it seems likely, more at the missionary training center earlier in the morning).
1,000 rounds.
Suuuure he really just intended to shoot himself, and the three hits to the chest that incapacitated him were superfluous.
You stick with that story.
Morons.
The Ham Sandwich
Wednesday, December 12th, 2007An Anoka County grand jury has handed down indictments in the Coon Rapids “Road Rage” case from last summer:
Two men involved in a road rage shooting incident at Foley Boulevard and 99th Avenue N.W., Coon Rapids, June 7 will make appearances in Anoka County District Court next week.
Martin Treptow, 35, Coon Rapids, is scheduled in court Wednesday, Dec. 19, 1:30 p.m., while Landon Beard, 27, Coon Rapids, is due in court Thursday, Dec. 20, also at 1:30 p.m., according to prosecutor Paul Young, assistant Anoka County attorney.
Young took the case to a Anoka County grand jury this week.
A couple of things to remember here:
- It’s been six months since the incident in Coon Rapids. Shooting cops is, shall we say, unpopular, especially in the ‘burbs. Had Treptow done anything genuinely illegal, the County Attorney could have indicted him almost immediately.
- But he didn’t. As a variety of Second Amendment bloggers reported last summer, Treptow was released from jail almost immediately (by the standards of these cases), and not charged with anything; the Anoka County Sheriff didn’t even bother to revoke Treptow’s carry permit, which is normally pro forma in these sorts of incidents.
- The Anoka County Attorney is as politically safe as any elected official in Minnesota. Indicting a “cop shooter” would have caused not a shred of political fallout. But tossing charges completely? That would have caused problems, if only between him and the various police departments with which he has to work. So he sent the case to the Grand Jury.
- A couple of little birds tell me that the charges against Treptow are purely window-dressing, designed to further a cover-up of Landen Beard’s behavior that evening.
- Finally – more little birds tell me this case involved at least one egregious ethical violation by another metro police department in dealing with a media outlet that would seem to have, let’s just say, an unseemly link to this story.
Stay tuned. And Joel Rosenberg always has the latest and greatest on this case.
Call For David Lillehaug!
Tuesday, December 11th, 2007The woman that killed the Colorado spree-killer was a “security guard” in the same sense that I’m a “news reporter”.
She – former Minneapolis cop Jeanne Assam – is a citizen with a standard Colorado carry permit. She and other parishioners volunteered to watch over the church in the wake of news of an earlier shooting. She was not employed as a guard; she was, literally, a civilian from the congregation who’d volunteered to keep an eye on comings and goings at the sprawling megachurch in the wake of the earlier shootings at the missionary school.
David Hardy notes:
Many people are expressing relief that a volunteer security guard used her own gun to stop a man on a shooting spree Sunday. “She probably saved over 100 lives,” the Brady Boyd, the pastor of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, said on Monday… Ahab has confirmed the lady who brought down the killer was not a church employee, and was carrying her personal gun.
The media – nationwide and locally – seems to be making an effort to make Assam look like an “official” security guard rather than an armed citizen:
But the AP coverage describes her as “a member of the church’s armed security staff” and “the security guard.” Since it quotes the pastor much the same way as the CNS story does, it sounds like a report on the same interview or conference. And the Rocky Mtn News describes her as “a church security officer.”
They want to see a big herd out there.
This is a huge setback to the anti-carry movement.
UPDATE: Ms. Assam would seem to be a hero…:
Boyd said Assam was the one who suggested the church beef up its security Sunday following the Arvada shooting, which it did. The pastor credited the security plan and the extra security for preventing further bloodshed.
…but I’m just waiting to see how the Sorosphere and John Stewart titter over this bit…:
There was applause as Assam spoke to reporters and TV cameras saying, “God guided me and protected me.”…”I was praying to God that he direct me” in what to do in life, Assam said. “God made me strong.”
Any bets?
Me? No action on that bet. Too sure a thing. The only real question is “how scatological and insulting will they get?”
UPDATE 2: Greetings, CQ Readers. Ed was right – we talked about “Gun free zones” over the weekend on the NARN show, before the Colorado attacks. Ed notes:
And this is the folly of “gun-free zones”. Lunatics looking to kill people either will attack at places for which they have some animus (as in the case of the church) or where they can find a lot of unarmed people (as in Omaha). They don’t stop because someone puts up a sign designating a site as gun-free, any more than people stop taking drugs because a city puts up a sign that designates a neighborhood as a “drug-free zone”, as in my own neighborhood.
All that sign does is prevent the Jeanne Assams from being able to defend the defenseless. That’s all it does. It doesn’t make anyone more secure or safe, and it has the potential to make a lot of people into victims.
After the Virginia Tech shooting, people asked whether a CCL holder could have made a difference once the shooting started. Jeanne Assam answered that question on Sunday.
And I want to make sure that answer gets to David Lillehaug, former US Attorney for Minnesota, occasional DFL Senate candidate, and lawyer who – on behalf of a well-heeled left-leaning congregation in Edina, tried to get churches declared a de facto gun free zone without needing to bother to post any notices, and to exempt church parking lots from the state regulation that carry permittees are allowed to keep their guns in the trunks of their cars. He was behind the court case that led to the Minnesota Personal Protection Act’s temporary blockage at the hands of a DFL-pet judge for about nine months starting in June 2004.
Lillehaug leads the group that is, for me, the most insufferable pack of anti-gun zealots – the ones that wrap themselves in a suffocating mantle of misplaced piety, ignoring the words of St. Thomas Aquinas: “In order for (violence) to be justified, three things are necessary: First, the authority of the soverign [an archaic reference to Americans – we are all soveriegn, and at any rate the permit is a sign the government, acting on behalf of all of us sovereigns, thinks you’re capable of defending yourself]. Secondly, a just cause. Thirdly, a rightful intention”.
Does protecting the innocent – especially our children – from mass murderers fit these criteria?
If you say “no”, be prepared to withstand a rhetorical wolverine ripping at your logical butt.
On The Docility Of The Herd
Friday, December 7th, 2007Glen Reynolds on the Omaha massacre:
it’s worth noting — since apparently most of the media reports haven’t — that this was another mass shooting in a “gun-free” zone. It seems to me that we’ve reached the point at which a facility that bans firearms, making its patrons unable to defend themselves, should be subject to lawsuit for its failure to protect them. The pattern of mass shootings in “gun free” zones is well-established at this point, and I don’t see why places that take the affirmative step of forcing their law-abiding patrons to go unarmed should get off scot-free.
If any lawyer wants to file that case, I’ll send money. Promise.
There’s even an academic literature on mass shootings and concealed-gun carriage.
Worth, as always, a read.
Assuming it’s “facts” that you’re after.
“We’re Gonna Need Some More Police Chiefs
Wednesday, December 5th, 2007Tracy at Anti-Strib on Minneapolis top cop Tim Dolan’s, er, faux pas on the Loesch murder:
Police Chief Tim Dolan uses the letters to the editor page of the Red Star to squander what good will he had by trying to weasel out of the mess his department created by ruining the name of Mark Loesch.
Flashback: the MPD tried to write off the Loesch murder – in which a fortysomething father of four was beaten to death on a nighttime bike ride through the Phillips neighborhood – as drug-related. Loesch was trying to score weed, or so they hinted in public last month.
I’ve never indulged, but it strikes me (and many of Tracy’s commenters) as highly unlikely that a successful middle-aged guy would be buying chiba from gang-bangers on the street; anyone who gets to be forty-something and hasn’t done jail time for buying drugs likely buys it from a long-trusted, safe source.
Keep this up and you’ll be gone in a year Tim.
Read the whole thing.
Pigs at 12 O’Clock High
Monday, December 3rd, 2007Joel Rosenberg notes a flock of durocs flying over 425 Portland:
I’d definitely want further confirmation before declaring this an Official Flying Pig Sighting — but it’s possible that Nick Coleman has written a sensible column
.
I think Joel may be right. We may be witnessing that annual – maybe semiannual – phenomenon, the “good Nick Coleman column”.
Read it and judge for yourself.
And, if true, seek overhead cover.
And Justice For Some
Tuesday, November 27th, 2007Doug Hester of The Northern Muckraker has been following the case of Woodbury cop Jeffrey Gort. Gort has been involved in the criminal justice system since his service pistol accidentially discharged in a Saint Cloud hotel room – a crime called “negligent discharge” [*]. Hester’s been following the denouement of the case. Or trying to.
But we might be getting a bit closer:
Officer Jeffrey Gort, the cop from the Woodbury, Minnesota Police Department who experienced a negligent discharge in a St. Cloud, Minnesota hotel room on August 2, 2006, has been scheduled for a pretrial hearing on November 26, 2007 at 2:30 p.m. in Stearns County Court.
Since he had previously been scheduled for a settlement conference, it seems likely that any suspected backroom games-playing is now off the table, and Gort will now have to appear in public to answer for his screwup, just like any other peasant would have to do.
We plan on being there to document what happens, in the assumption that this case will finally be resolved sometime this decade.
Stay tuned.
[*] All jokes involving the phrase “negligent discharge” are hereby pre-empted. Sorry, Angryclown. Move along. Nothing to see here.
