A couple of quick notes here:

In addition to my usual light weekend posting schedule, posting on Monday and Tuesday will likely be very light.  It’s Christmas.  So sue me.  No, wait – I live in Saint Paul.  The Human Rights department just might.

But seriously?  Have a Merry Christmas if you’re of the Jesus Tribe, and a great long weekend otherwise!

The NARN will be on the air all this weekend.  Tomorrow, I’ll be talking about the new “Social Studies Standards”.  I’ll also be interviewing Representative Mary Franson (R Alexandria) about her effort to keep Minnesota informed about the push to unionize child-care providers.  Tune in from 1-3PM tomorrow!

The next time some Harvard-addled chanting-point-bot wants to declaim about the need for a “conversation about guns” – which, as we all know, means “a monologue about guns, with we 2nd Amendment types shutting up and speaking when spoken to” – I’m tempted to take the “conversation” more in this sort of direction.

“Here’s why I own guns:  because people like this were disarmed:

Stores burning after UK riots. Hey, at least the store owners couldn’t defend themselves!

“These people – well, former people – too:”

Mass graves in Srebrenica, Bosnia. Goodness knows how bad it’d have been if the hundreds of victims had been able to defend themselves, rather than rely on the Dutch “Peace-Keepers” who ran like scared bunnies.

Or here:

Mass grave in Chicago. No, it’s Cambodia. You’ve seen one “gun free zone” full of disarmed civilians, you’ve seen ’em all. The Cambodians, like the black children of Chicago, had the bad luck not to be white, suburban, and big Democrat contributors.

Or here:

It’s Darfur. Remember them?

How about here?:

Hey, Amitai Etzioni!  It’s a gun-free home!

Or these people:

Victims of the Chinese government at Tienanmen Square. Hey, in a couple of years, we won’t be able to insult our Chicom overlords anymore! Thanks, President Obama!

More people without guns:

Russian Gulag inmates. Men, women, children. Dead! Stalin – darling of the New York Times? Now he knew how not to waste a crisis!

“I could go on, but you get the idea.”

“That’s why I own guns.  I don’t give a rat’s ass about hunting. ”

“So if your idea is to disarm me, the law-abiding citizen, because of the misdeeds of someone I’d have happily shot with one or another legally-permitted firearm, here’s the “conversation about guns” we’re going to have…”

“YOU:  “Shut up and let’s “converse” about the need to disarm you, Mr. Berg”

“ME:  Go f**k yourself”

“YOU:  “With what appendage, sir?”

“How are you liking the “conversation” so far?”

No, I’m not going to do it.  But I thought I’d share it, just between us.  It’s fun to think about.

A few years back, I reported on the “education” my daughter, Bun, got in a summer “Economics” class at a Saint Paul Public School.

Among the lessons she “learned” from the teacher:

• We’ve had five black presidents: Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Harding and Coolidge were all afro-American.

• People are “disregarding their blackness” to “reap white benefits”: The teacher cited the “one drop rule” – people with “even a drop” of black blood, so says the teacher, are black – and disregard their “blackness” only for the swag, apparently.

• Minorities have “no rights”: the “teacher” didn’t elaborate.
•  The teacher told the class that the government “may have blown up” the levees in the poor black neighborhoods of New Orleans. He also said that White New Orleans put police on the bridge between Black and White New Orleans to send black refugees back to their deaths, as white people sat on the levees and watched the black people die. He apparently did an impersonation, in a “white trash” voice; “Hey, Bill, grab me a brewski; that n***er is trying to swim”. Because, says the teacher, “Black people as a rule can’t swim”.
• The class studied a packet from Ebony Magazine; the first one is called “A Child’s View/A Young Man’s View/An Elder’s View” of Obama; it was their considered opinion that most people who didn’t vote for Obama were motivated by race. The class is also supposed to write whether they do or don’t agree with Obama. According to Bun, it was intensely intimidating.
• “Hurricanes follow the path of the slave ships”, apparently as God’s punishment for slavery
•  “Sharks, to this day, folow the route of the slave ships”, as a matter of evolutionary adaptation.  According to the teacher, sharks “evolved” to live in the subtropical trade wind zone because of the centuries of slaves being tossed overboard from slave ships.

I used to think it was merely an incompetent, crank teacher (who happened to be Afro-American) abusing his position.

But after reading John Fonte at NRO reporting on Minnesota’s proposed new Social Studies standards for public schools, I’m starting to think Buns’ old teacher was merely ahead of the curve:

Nine years ago a group of history professors from the University of Minnesota sent a letter to the state’s education department. They complained that the history/social-studies standards for Minnesota presented American history too positively. The historians wanted early American history described in terms of “conquest,” “subjugation,” “exploitation,” “enslavement,” and “genocidal impact.” For these academics, the story of America primarily meant slavery for African Americans, genocide for American Indians, subjugation for women, xenophobia for immigrants, and exploitation for poor people.

And yesterday, the Department of Education held one of the pro-forma hearings that the bureaucracy always holds to give a rubber-stamp of “openness and transparency” before going ahead and doing what the DFL’s pet bureaucrats were going to do anyway.

Here – barring an unlikely ruling from an Adminstrative Law judge or, even less likely, a veto from Governor Dayton – is what Minnesota’s schools are going to be teaching your kids, if they go to a public school, according to Fonte’s piece:

For example History Standard 20 for the period 1870–1920 declares: “The student will understand that as the United States shifted from its agrarian roots into an industrial and global power, the rise of big business, urbanization, and immigration led to institutionalized racism, ethnic and class conflict, and new efforts at reform.” [italics added]

Less biased standards might suggest that “the student will understand” that the growth of business enterprise, urbanization, and immigration led to greater prosperity for most Americans, including African Americans who moved to large northern cities and Ellis Island newcomers who chose to become Americans. Further, the period 1870 to 1920 witnessed tremendous technological development and inventions for which Americans are famous: including great advances in medicine; the promotion of public health (including a clean water supply and indoor plumbing), the sewing machine, typewriter, phonograph, and electric light bulb.

So we’d like to think.

But “social studies” aren’t about history, or fact of any kind; the new standard are about indoctrination:

But, American achievements are downplayed while the overarching theme becomes “institutionalized racism.” Of course, this logically means that the major “institutions” of American liberal democracy — the courts, Congress, the presidency, state and local governments, businesses, churches, civic organizations — and the entire democratic system and its civil society are racist and therefore, clearly, illegitimate.

The stated purpose of the Minnesota 2012 standards is “to identity the academic knowledge and skills that prepare students for post-secondary education, work and civic life in the twenty-first century. . . . Students need deep knowledge of this information in order to make sense of their world.”

While the 2004 Standards specifically examined 9/11, the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, and terrorism, the 2012 Standards, incredibly, include no references to 9/11, the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, the Iraq War, the war in Afghanistan, the Gulf War of 1991, or terrorism itself. Nor is there any hint of a global conflict with terrorists described either as President Bush’s “War on Terror” or President Obama’s “War against violent extremists.” True, there are two tepid references to the “Arab Spring,” but this is hardly adequate to provide the “deep knowledge” needed for students “to make sense of their world.”

As I’ve observed for years, the last set of standards, from 2004, were bad enough; in my kids’ time in the public schools, all they really were taught was slavery and civil rights.

Read Fonte’s entire piece; it only gets worse.

And I’m afraid we’ve finally gotten to the time when our public school system in Minnesota isn’t merely expensive, incompetent and befuddled.  With these standards, our school system is the enemy.

Forget about the “the terrorists have won” jokes; even most of the dumbest people know you need to resist those who are trying to kill you.

But these standards?  They are the entire agglomerated intellectual and moral rot of the American left, wrapped up a cutesy “Raise Your Hand For Minnesota’s Kids!”-chanting package.

My dad and both my mom’s parents were teachers.  If there’s a family out there where American public education was the family business, it’s mine.

But the time has come where people who value what this country really means have to either abandon the public schools – all our kids, every single one of them – or get serious about fighting for them.

Me?  I”m torn.

For us Second Amendment activists, especially those of us who’ve been at it for a while,  there’ve been a few constants.

One of them:  the rank hypocrisy of the leadership of the gun control movement; then, now, and always.

For almost two decades, exhibit #1 has been Diane Feinstein, who has made gun control a creepy fetish for over two decades now.

And yet…:

Opponents of the Assault Weapons Ban point to Feinstein’s hypocrisy on the issue, as the Senator herself said she obtained a concealed carry permit in California when she felt her life was threatened.

You find this, over and over, with gun control leaders; you, the hoi-polloi, should be content to call the cops; as elites, they’re different; their lives are worth defending.

In 1995, Feinstein described this experience:

“Less than 20 years ago, I was the target of a terrorist group. It was the New World Liberation Front. They blew up power stations and put a bomb at my home when my husband was dying of cancer and the bomb was set to detonate around 2 ‘o clock in the morning, but it was a construction explosive that doesn’t detonate when it drops below freezing. It doesn’t usually freeze in San Francisco, but on this night it dropped below freezing and the bomb didn’t detonate.
“I was very lucky, but I thought of what might have happened. Later the same group shot out all the windows of my home and I know the sense of helplessness that people feel. I know the urge to arm yourself, because that’s what I did. I was trained in firearms. When I walked to the hospital when my husband was sick, I carried a concealed weapon. I made the determination that if somebody was going to try to take me out I was going to take them with me. Now having said all of that, that was period of time ago and I’ve watched through these 20 years as terrorism has increased both on the far extremist left and the far extremist right in this country.”.

And throughout that time, her line has been the same:  her life is vital and worth protecting; yours is mundane and can wait your turn.   When she was mayor of Sant Francisco, she revoked all civilian carry permits – but got her converted to a “police” permit.

Her “training” was no more involved that what all of us carry permit holders get.

You find this level of hypocrisy throughout the gun control movement; the lists of prominent gun-grabbers who’ve gotten themselves carry permits, or wangled permits for their bodyguards, or who’ve been busted with illegal guns, is legendary among 2nd Amendment Rights activists…

…and unknown among anyone that depends on the media – frequently among the biggest hypocrites – for news on the subject.

After a couple of terms of “serving” as the Eddie Haskell of the MInnesota House, Rep. Ryan Winkler finally has to start earning what passes, in DFL legislative circles, for “his keep”.

His first assignment in the majority?  Get Minnesotans working!

House Speaker-Designate Paul Thissen, DFL-Minneapolis, said in a news release today that Rep. Ryan Winkler, DFL-Golden Valley, will chair the Speaker’s Select Committee on Living Wage Jobs. Thissen said the group of DFL and Republican lawmakers will research, investigate, report and propose legislation to address the decline of living wage jobs, and look for ways to grow the economy and strengthen the middle class.

So let’s do our bit for government efficiency.  Let’s write Winkler’s report for him.

What kind of a report do you think Winkler – a guy whose “day job” is working for Ted Mondale, the heir apparent to the Mondale secular “The State Is My Mother” church – is going to write?  What kind of legislation will he propose?

Put your thoughts in the comment section.

I just read that December 21st was the traditional Mayan “April Fools Day”…

Joe Doakes from Como Park has a question that’s occurred to me as well:

I don’t have time today to look this up, maybe some of your readers do?

I’m getting the feeling the media is under-reporting a crucial element in the shooting stories: what stopped the killer?

Is it correct the most recent school shooter stopped killing when he was confronted by a cop with a gun? The cop didn’t shoot him, the kid killed himself, but the cop with the gun was the motivator? You ran the story about the CCW guy in the shopping mall – same result.

Mother Jones magazine claims armed citizens only stopped mass murders 1.6% of the time. Slate Magazine on-line points out some of that is how you count it (it’s not a “mass murder” until there are already four dead) other studies disagree.

Here’s the question: regardless of WHO was holding the gun that stopped the killing, is it correct that the killing continued until SOMEONE with a gun confronted the killer?

The NRA’s Armed Citizen column is devoted to proving from real-life experience that the mere presence of a gun in the hands of a good citizen can prevent crime, without a shot being fired. Are they right?

If so, wouldn’t more good guys holding guns be better?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

That one occurred to me when discussing the Portland shooting on December 11.  As we reported earlier this week, a man with a rifle started shooting at the Clackamas Mall in Portland.  He fired over sixty shots, and miraculously killed “only” two people.  At some point, his AR15 jammed – reports vary, and it may or may not have been well before the time he was confronted by an armed citizen with a carry permit and a handgun.  He apparently fled, and shortly thereafter shot himself.

But notwithstanding the fact that he fired sixty shots, and could have fired a lot more, just watch; it won’t be called a “mass shooting”, because “only” two died.

Because he was deterred by a citizen with a gun.  That the left will studiously avoid calling a hero for ending a mass shooting because it won’t be shown as a mass shooting in the stats.  Because the citizen prompted it to end before it became a mass shooting.

It’s a Catch 22, although in this case, it beats the alternative.

At any rate, there’s a list of mass shootings, and would-be mass shootings, that’ve been stopped by citizens – not police – with guns:

• The Pearl, Mississippi school shooting, where a teacher grabbed a gun and stopped the two shooters.
• The Appalachian Law School shooting, where a would-be mass-murderer was stopped by a couple of armed students.
• A robbery that was devolving into a mass-shooting in Virginia was stopped by a CCW permittee.
• This interesting incident in Texas recently
• An episode in Richmond, VA in the nineties where a shooter who intended to copycat the Luby’s Cafeteria massacre (in Killeen, TX) was stopped after killing one person, by another citizen with a legal handgun.
• Allen Crumb, who helped in the counterattack on Charles Whitman, the U of Texas Clock Tower shooter, was an armed civilian with a borrowed rifle who’d been deputized on the fly.  Some would say  “Crumb was a veteran”.  He was a veteran of the Air Force.  Go ahead, veterans, especially all you USAF people; tell us how much Close Quarters Battle training the Flyboys get. About the same as any civilian.
• The New Life Church shooting spree in Colorado Springs in 2007, ended by Jeanne Assam.
• This episode in Texas, where an armed man killed a mass shooter (and died, himself); it’s generally aggreed he saved several lives in the process.
• And, as mentioned above, the Clackamas Mall shooting, which was stopped by a man with a legal permitted firearm.

Eugene Volokh also has a list with a few more as well as a few repeats from my list.

Now, if you look at most of these incidents, most of them aren’t “mass shootings”  – because most of them were stopped before they topped that magic “four dead” threshold.

Which is what we want.  Right?

I used to play in a band with a guy, a keyboard player.  He was a bit of a prodigy; he’d been sent off from North Dakota to the Berklee College of Music in Boston; he was one of the most amazing keyboard players you’ve ever seen.

Of course, like a lot of prodigious talents, he had some issues.  He was bipolar.  The illness left him unable to function at Berklee, so it was back to North Dakota.  Psychiatrists put him on lithium – which enabled him to function.  To thrive, really – when he was on his meds and everything was well-tempered, he would practice, perform, put on recitals that’d stun the locals, play in bands, hold a job, function in society.

Then he’d feel he could function without the meds. He’d go off ’em…

…and, inside of a few weeks, wind up in the papers for having driven to Fargo and remodeled the inside of a Catholic church with a sledgehammer.  Followed by another bout of treatment, and then another course of lithium.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

He functioned about 95% of the time.  About 5%, he was incapacitated.  Was he a success story, or a failure?

———-

Psychotropic medication has been a boon to many people.  They’ve helped pull back the gray fog on the lives of millions who suffer from depression.  They allow many with serious mental illnesses to function, and often thrive.

But as my keyboard-playing friend showed, there’s a downside; when the medication doesn’t work, or when the doses get changed, or abruptly stopped?  Bad things can happen.

As at least one Catholic church in Fargo discovered back in the early eighties.

And sometimes, much, much worse.

The site “SSRI Stories” – it stands for “Seratonin-Specific Re-Uptake Inhibitor”, a class of anti-depressants that includes Zoloft, Paxil and Wellbutrin among many others – catalogs crimes and other violent and bizarre incidents that have some link to psychotropic meds.   The stories on the site are open to some discussion – and there is discussion – and correlation doesn’t equal causation.  But the site chronicles a hell of a lot of correlation.

The list of school shootings alone is below the jump.  The incident at the Red Lake Reservation school seven years ago is on the list.  There’s much, much more there.

Speaking of correlations that don’t necessarily equal causation – is it any wonder the Psychiatric community is so hell-bent on calling gun crime a “public health issue?”  It’d sure be more convenient than addressing their own stake in violent crime, especially spree shootings, wouldn’t it?

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One of the reasons the Democrats and media are working so hard to drive a wedge between the “establishment” GOP and the Tea Party is that the Tea Party wins elections and, more importantly, represents the real future of the GOP.

 Haley, a little-known state senator before being elected governor, would never have had a chance at becoming governor against the state’s good ol’ boy network of statewide officeholders. Scott would have been a long shot in his Republican primary against none other than Strom Thurmond’s youngest son. Marco Rubio, now the hyped 2016 presidential favorite, would have stepped aside to see now-Democrat Charlie Crist become the next senator, depriving the party of one of its most talented stars. Ted Cruz, the other Hispanic Republican in the Senate, would have never chanced a seemingly futile bid against Texas’s 67-year-old lieutenant governor, seen as a lock to succeed Kay Bailey Hutchison.

But all those upset victories–all of which at the time seemed shocking–took place because of the conservative grassroots’ strong sentiment for outsiders who campaigned on their principles, and not over their past political or family connections. Even a decade ago, party officials would have been more successful in pushing these outsider candidates aside, persuading them to wait their turn. (In Rubio’s case, it almost worked.) Now, in an era where grassroots politicking is as easy as ever thanks to the proliferation of social media, more control is in the hands of voters. And contrary to the ugly stereotypes of conservative activists being right-wing to the point of racist, it’s been the tea party movement that’s been behind the political success of most prominent minority Republican officeholders.

That, of course, is not the current left and media (ptr) narrative about the Tea Party.  The media, and its rhetorical camp followers in the Leftyblogosphere Stupid Caucus, have been banging the “Teh Tea Partie is teh ignerent racisst” drum for close to four years now.

And in that time, the GOP overtook the Democrats in the number of elected minorities at the state level.

This is potentially good news, in the long term.

If the GOP deserves to keep it going.

Looking at Boehner’s performance this year, I’m seeing an obstacle or two.

Patrician Brit attacks American gun owners.

In related news, Nazis condemned George Patton, Al Capone ridiculed Elliot Ness, the Chinese Communists rattled off a list of charges against the Tienanmen Square demonstrators, and the Ku Klux Klan presented an alternative view of Martin Luther King.

It was thirty years ago today that Men Without Women by Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul was released.

“What? By who and the whaaa?”

Shaddap, siddown and listen.

———-

If there was a place in America that was hermetically sealed against the influence of  rhythm and blues music, it was rural North Dakota in the seventies and eighties.

Although that may have been a function of life in the Berg house.  I grew up playing classical music – my parents liked that – and then switched to whatever bits and pieces of Rock and Roll leaked through in late junior high.   Of course, R&B at the time – the mid-seventies – had more than a whiff of the sort of excess that was off-putting, for purely trivial reasons; bands with a dozen people in lamé suits and purple pimp-wear was a hard sell to a narrowly-focused Scandinavian kid.  See The Ohio Players, and get back to me.

But bits and pieces leaked through.  Long about eleventh grade, I was working at KEYJ, and some shards of R&B leaked through to me; the gleeful-unto-overflowing soul of Smokey and the MIracles, the naked pain of Levi Stubbs and the Four Tops, and best of all, the raw, unbridled, hormones-with-sweat groove of the Stax/Volt bands, especially my then and always favorites, Sam and Dave.

And along about my freshman year of high school, I ran into Bruce Springsteen.  And if you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you’ve read my writing about his music, how his music impacted me as someone who became a conservative, and the influence his band had on me when it came to music.

But in the days when only Al Gore had access to the internet, stuck in the middle of the prairie, it was hard to get news.

——–

And I’ve never been more bummed about the slowness of news to reach North Dakota than I was about this time 29 years ago.  In the summer of 1983, I was in Edinburgh, Scotland.  I was walking by a bar.  I saw a poster for a band, “Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul”.  I remembered the name, but kept walking; I didn’t know much.

It was months later, early in my junior year of college, probably in October of 1983, that I read Jay Cox – always one of the better music critics, in those days – doing his “Ten Best Albums of 1982” piece, in the end-of-the-year edition of Time Magazine.

And #2 on the list was Men Without Women, by LIttle Steven and the Disciples of Soul – the first solo project by the erstwhile “Miami Steve” Van Zandt, Springsteen’s longtime second guitar player, recorded with a who’s who of obscure Jersey Shore and New York musicians.  Cox raved about the album – a collection of Stax/Volt-style horn-driven soul with a hard, emotionally naked edge to it.

It was months before I read the Cox review in Time. The album couldn’t be found in Jamestown, of course.  I conjured up a reason for a road trip to visit friends at NDSU in Fargo, went to Mother’s Records…

…and there it was.

I raced to Jamestown to find a turntable.

And it’s hard to describe how hard the album smacked me.

We’ll come back to that.

———–

Men Without Women was a throwback in many ways.  In musical style, it was horn-driven R&B, a genre that’d retreated to America’s self-styled roadhouses for years. Black R&B was ditching the horns for cheaper synths; white rock and roll (forget about synth-pop) was driven by the guitar.

But the bigger throwback was the recording style.  In the fifties and sixties, most “Rhythm and Blues” and early Rock and Roll had been recorded by gathering the band around a few microphones connected to a tape deck, and playing until they got a cut they liked.  Listen to “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen; it was recorded on a single microphone, with the band gathered around; one of the reasons the vocals in the song are so famously inscrutable is that the singer was literally yelling over the band to be heard.  It was only a little more crude than the usual style of recording at the time.

In the mid-sixties, the Beatles led the rush to multi-track recording; Sergeant Pepper had been recorded using linked four-track tape decks, allowing musicians and engineers to layer many parts on top of each other.  By the late sixties and early seventies, eight-track decks at Motown allowed musicians to record, overdub remix, and partially-re-record tracks; recording engineering became an art form unto itself, and that only accelerated as 16, 24, 48 and 64 track studios became the technical lingua franca of the music industry.  By the mid-seventies, the Rolling Stones were able to recordExile on Main Street with Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman laying down tracks in the Caribbean, ship ’em to Keith Richard and Ron Wood for guitar tracks in London, and thence to Mick Jagger in New York for vocals.

For Men Without Women, Van Zandt – who’d just left the E Street Band to try to establish a solo career – took a huge step back, stylistically and technologically.  Recording the old-fashioned way – capturing a live performance – was risky.  It depended on capturing a really, really good live performance.  For the MWOW sessions, Van Zandt gathered the whole band around a couple of microphones (after a few rehearsals), and had them play the songs straight through; most of the cuts on Men Without Women were done in one or two takes.  Van Zandt overdubbed a few guitar and wind tracks later – but it was a very sparing production job.  Most of what you hear was exactly as it came out on the floor of the studio.

And it worked.  It was huge, raw, sloppy in places, and just a glorious collection of music.

One of the reasons?  What a band.

The Disciples featured a group of musicians that were household names among obscurantists and music wonks.  The horn section was borrowed from Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes – and is best known today for having been, mostly, the horn section from the Max Weinberg Seven, of the old Conan O’Brien show.  Bassist Jean Bouvoir, a black guy in a striking white mohawk, had just left the seminal shock-punk band The Plasmatics.  Drummer Dino Danelli was most famous as the drummer for The Young Rascals, a sixties-era “white soul” band; organ player Felix Cavaliere was also a former Rascal (and was only involved in the recording sessions, not the touring Disciples).  A few other players – percussionist Monte Ellison, and cameos from the Gary “U.S.” Bonds and the E Street Band’s Clarence Clemons, Roy Bittan, Max Weinberg and Danny Federici on a few cuts – rounded out the lineup for the big, beefy, breakneck recording sessions.

The result?  Men Without Women was compared to the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Mainstreet – both were raw, horn-driven, R&B drenched sets.  But while the Stones album exuded cynical dissipation, and sounded like a hangover set to a rave-up (and before you jump all over me – it’s my favorite Stones album), MWOW was eagerly earnest, with a big, sincere heart right out on its leather sleeve.

Videos below the jump.

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The nation wracks itself in grief – justifably – over the deaths of 20-odd children in Connecticut.  I’d shudder to meet the monsters that don’t recoil in horror and outrage.

I’m  struck, though, by the lack of outrage over the carnage in President Obama’s home town, the town run by the machine that put him in office, the city run by his former Chief of Staff.

In Chicago, since 2008, 622 children have been murdered.  That’s almost thirty Sandy Hook classrooms full of kids.  They didn’t have the “luck” to look, largely, just like the children of our nation’s “elite”, our media, business and wonk classes – white, exurban, upper-middle-class.  The died in ones and twos, not in a bloody pile that became a media feeding frenzy.  They weren’t killed by children of privilege, shot by weapons that the dominant political class was trying to turn into a boogeyman and political wedge; they were mostly murdered by their neighborhoods’ own criminal underclass, carrying mundane, mostly-stolen pistols and illegally-modified shotguns, almost none of them by any “assault weapon” anyone would recognize.

No – they’re mostly black and latino.  They’re mostly from poor families, students at Chicago’s wretched public schools.  And they live – lived – in a city that has been the American left’s social laboratory for the better part of a century.  And they died in a city that is a fully-owned subsidiary of the American left, and a key part of its national power base, and a place that has made it harder for the law-abiding citizen to buy guns than to buy crack, heroin or a hooker. A city that trumpets the ambitions – and exhibits the failures – of everything American “progressivism” stands for.

They’re minority, they’re poor, they’re rhetorical guinea pigs in America’s biggest leftist lab.

And they’re dying at the rate of seven or eight classrooms-full a year – not on one horrible bloody Friday, but every year, for years past and for years to come.

And outside their communities, their families, their neighborhood’s churches?  They die anonymously.

And there is the American left’s concern for “the children”.

So let’s do make sure that’s part of the “Conversation about Guns”, shall we?

The answer? “Gérard Depardieu est Jean Galt!”

Few Frenchmen are more recognizable at home and abroad than the movie star Gerard Depardieu. Last week, Depardieu caused a great controversy in his native land by moving to Belgium – partly to avoid the 75 percent income tax on the wealthy that was introduced by the socialist President of France,

What was it that Gandhi said? “First they ignore you, then they mock you, then you win?”

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“Why do you need teh gun?” – Because it’s the duty of every law-abiding American to own and be proficient with firearms.

“You’re joking, right?” – Oh, sort of.

“You know what I think?  I think gun owners are compensating for something?” – Oh, haha.  Never heard that one before.  Honest.

But no, you’re right.  We’re compensating for the fact that our society is full of the depraved, the amoral and those that think their ends justify their means.

“Owning a gun is about teh fear!” – The same way buying insurance is about “fear” of fire or accidents, or the same way packing blankets and candles in your car is about “fear” of icy roads and blowing snow.  In other words, baloney.  It’s about responding prudently and reasonably to things about which one might be legitimately afraid.

“Aren’t gun owners just a bunch of teh flaby bald white guys?” – Sure, in the same sense that gay marriage proponents are a bunch of mincing, flouncing, buttless-chaps-wearing effeminate show-tune-singing poofters.

“Hey, that’s nothing but teh derogatory stereotype, designed to try to negate your opponents arguments by dehumanizing them without ever engaging any of teh facts!” – Bingo.  The difference is, I don’t believe the thing about gay marriage proponents.

“But teh conservative GOP Senator with teh “A” rating from teh NRA said big clips are useless for hunting!”  – Then that “conservative Senator” should get docked a few points.  The 2nd Amendment doesn’t protect hunting!

“OK, smart guy, why does a citizen need a gun with teh big clip for?” – For starters, it’s only a “clip” if it “clips” the bullets together.  Like this:

If it’s a metal box, like on an AK47 or an AR15 or a Glock, it’s called a “Magazine”.

Remember that and you’ll sound marginally less ignorant.

OK, now to answer your question – and I say this without acknowledging if I do or do not own one or more weapons with high-capacity magazines; if I do have them, I need them because the threat, out there – robbers, burglars, gang-bangers of all stripes – have them.  Indeed, gun and magazine prohibitions make them more likely to have them.

Now, I don’t hunt, and I never likely will.  But I am a self-defense shooter, and anti-gunner wives’ tales to the contrary, there have been cases when armed intruders and home invaders, whether high or highly motivated or both, have opted not to turn tail and run when the home/business owner fired six, seven, eight or ten shots.  It’s happening often enough that most cops have not only traded in their six-shot revolvers for semi-auto handguns with 15-18 rounds, but retired their good ol’ shotguns for AR15s and M4s – fully-automatic assault rifles, not merely ugly “assault weapons” – in the trunk (leaving lots of surplus Remington 870 Express 12 gauges going for really nice prices at area gun shops!)

“So you think your life is as valuable as a cop’s?” – Yep.

“But robbereys like that hardly ever happin!” – Either do car crashes.  But you wear your seatbelt, don’t you?”

“No!  That’s what teh Police are for”  – OK, then.

“But conservative Republican Joe Scarborough, who says he’s a member of  teh NRA, says there’s no need for guns that can fire 30 shots in teh second!” – Joe Scarborough was a conservative in 1994.  He makes vaguely Republican noises these days, on some issues.  But it’s with this remark he not only shows why he can’t get a show on a real network, but that he must be one of those rare NRA members that knows nothing about firearms.  Guns that “fire 30 shots a second”, fully-automatic firearms like machine guns, submachine guns and real honest-to-pete military Assault Rifles, have been illegal for most citizens since 1934.

“But killings with assault weapons are out of control!” – As usual, no.  Murder in general dropped 14% in the past four years, and the drop among firearms deaths led all others.  And out of 10,000 or so firearms homicides in, say 2007, 358 involved rifles, which is down sharply since the mid-20002, and about a quarter of the 1,704 knife murders, not to mention much much lower than the 540 involving blunt objects, or the 745 people killed with fists and hands. And I’m going to bet that the vast majority of those were not legally purchased, by the way.

“Well, you are kidding yourself!  No citizen has ever stopped teh mass murdor!” – Sure they have.  I listed the ones I could find here.  And those were just the cases where the authorities said in as many words “there was a mass shooting incident underway”, which they usually won’t if it stops before anyone’s hurt.  Check it out.

“Well, you are teh coward.  A real man doesn’t need teh gun and I’m proud of it!” – Well, that’s your choice.  Go for it.  In fact, take that feeling to the next level.  Put one of these in your front window.

No, seriously – your masters have decreed it, so you have no choice.  Put your ass, and your family’s safety, where your precious little mouth is.  Deal?

Get right on that!

“Well, it’s time to have a conversation about guns” – We’ve been having one for almost forty years.  And the gun-grabber side lost.  And they’ll lose this time too, because outside the self-referential, self-adoring, rhetorically-onanistic lefty cluster-cuddle between the media, the alt-media, academia and the lefty wonk class, most of America has been convinced that you’re wrong.

Which doesn’t mean people like me – law-abiding citizens who believe in and practice the Second Amendment – are going to stop working to keep the battle won.

Because we’re always “having a conversation about guns”.  It’s just that you want the other side, my side, to shut up and let you do all the talking.

And as much as you’d like that, I for one decline.  Thanks.

Sean Higgins at the WashEx finds yet another case of a major-media “fact-checker” burying inconvenient facts to slander gun owners.

Washington Post Fact Check columnist Glenn Kessler gives Rep. Louis Gohmert, R-Texas, “three pinocchios” for claiming, as he did yesterday on Fox News Sunday, that so-called right-to-carry laws reduce crime. So, that’s settled then? There’s no evidence that the laws do that? Err, no … as Kessler’s own column indicates.

“When right-to-carry laws had a surge in popularity in the 1990s, a common liberal argument against them was that this would lead to an increase in gun violence. Stands to reason, right? More guns means more gun crime.”

“Except it didn’t happen. Gun violence overall has declined, horrible incidents like Friday’s notwithstanding. Economist John Lott has argued in his book, More Guns, Less Crime (written with David Mustard) that the concealed carry laws actually reduce crime. It was his work that Gohmert was presumably referencing.”

Well, among others.

Read the whole thing.  Sean Higgins at the WashEx shows where the WaPo left the whole “fact” thing behind.  It seems they find facts that conflict with a tidy narrative to be just too confusing.

Y’know, as the mainstream media slowly dies off, you’d think one of them might figure out that a feature that checks the facts of the MSM’s legions of biased, narrative-driven “fact-checkers” would be good business.

Unless the media, like the Democrats they support, are banking their entire future on the “low-information consumer”.

…as Dennis Prager said.

But Amitai Etzioni, writing in the Huffpo, truly truly is that stupid.

To: Dick’s Sporting Goods
From: Mitch Berg, Law-Abiding Gun Owner, Occasional Customer
Re:  Your Cowardice

Dear Dicks,

I’d be lying if I said I shopped at your chain much, even for firearms and ammo.  Your prices are adequate (Frontiersman in Saint Louis Park is much better, Fleet Farm and Joe’s clobber you on ammo prices, and even Gander Mountain is better than you are on sale prices), but I’ll stop by and grab the odd purchase once in a while.  Indeed, a trip to the neighborhood Dick’s for some camping gear was on my noontime agenda today.

But no more.

Crises come and go. And while the Democrats vow not to waste them, they do pass.  The vast majority of the American people – Real Americans, not the “elite” media, who are nothing but Frenchmen in Lexuses – aren’t fooled.

I’m done with you.  And I urge all Real Americans to follow suit.

That is all.

UPDATE:  You too, Cheaper Than Dirt.

Senator Daniel Inouye died yesterday at age 88.

Inouye is one of the few people in American politics that I admired almost equally after I became a conservative as I did when I was still an annoying little liberal.

(more…)

In the wake of the shootings in Connecticut last week, some – myself included – said it might be time to look at the response the Israelis took to repeated terrorist attacks on schools in the seventies; allowing teachers to carry their own, legally-obtained weapons in school.

Lefties, armed with a small sheaf of convenient Google results and an Ezra Klein column that was, er, riddled with errors, responded “But no!  Gun laws in Israel are teh tight!  You are wrong!”

The answer?  Somewhere in between and, as usual, a little to my side of the divide (and, as always, “distrust but verify Ezra Klein”), according to this piece in “The Table” from Liel Leibowitz.

(more…)

A quick look back in time:  last summer and fall, the “coalition” of groups that handle all the DFL’s messaging (it’s really more a syndicate than a coalition, but tomayto tomahto) ran a wildly successful campaign to scupper the Marriage Amendment.  It was wildly successful at the polls, playing a key role in taking down the Voter ID Amendment and the GOP majorities in both chambers of the Legislature.

The campaign’s key points went something like this:

• “We don’t vote on people’s civil rights!”  – In other words, the “Right” to marry is absolute, not subject to “popularity contests”.  That’s the phrase not a few Amendment opponents used, in fact.
• “People who love each other should be able to marry!” – Note the phrasing.  It wasn’t “people who love each other shouldn’t have to undo constitutional rigamarole to continue their legislative efforts”.  No.  “Marry” was the word they used.   Every single time.
• “They’re just like the rest of us!” – With the unmistakeable inference that they should have the same rights we have.

Since then?  Nothing but weasel words from the DFL.

So – all of you pro-gay marriage people who came out in droves to defeat the Amendment?   The DFL used you for your idealism, and is now sitting on their hands on the issue because…

…why?

Because they don’t want to use the political capital it’d take to legalize gay marriage.

Their complaint in 2006-2009 was that the governor would just veto it (which was a stupid excuse, if you truly believe in principle; pass it anyway, and get the other side’s votes on record, if you believe you’re right! The GOP did!).

But now the DFL has both chambers and the governor.

And yet they’re sandbagging.

So when are you gay marriage supporters going to realize that you were used?

That it was all talk?

That the DFL will never follow through on their implied promise?

Ever?

Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

Problem: people who are mentally ill and dangerous commit crimes with firearms.

Potential Solution 1: remove firearms from society. Objections: Unconstitutional under Second Amendment, difficult to implement door-to-door and as impossible to enforce as prohibition of alcohol, drugs and illegal aliens.

Potential Solution 2: remove people who are mentally ill and dangerous from society. Objections: Difficult under 1970’s Supreme Court equal protection rulings and current Minnesota law because the legal standard of proof is so high.

Recommendation: try the easier one first. Convince the Supreme Court to change the law back to the earlier standard, making it easier to remove people who are mentally ill and dangerous from society leaving the rest of us free to use firearms responsibly.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

I think Obama is going to use the classic totalitarian means of splitting the difference; calling dissenters “insane” and locking them all up.

Both problems solves – if you hate freedom.

Mayor Bloomberg of New York took time off from his busy schedule of banning Big Gulps and not restoring power to the Rockaways to give us an object lesson in what gun control is and how it works.

1) Start with an illogical premise:

With all the carnage from gun violence in our country, it’s still almost impossible to believe that a mass shooting in a kindergarten class could happen. It has come to that. Not even kindergarteners learning their A,B,Cs are safe.

What is the “it” that’s “come to that?”  Some mammoth conspiracy to kill children that started with senior high kids in Columbine and has been working its way down, neglected by society?

No.  “It” – the fact that our most vulnerable are, well, our most vulnerable – has always been the case.  It’s why society – the decent among us, anyway – endeavor to protect them.

We’ll come back to that.

2) A self-righteous demand for “action”…

For every day we wait, 34 more people are murdered with guns. Today, many of them were five-year olds…Calling for ‘meaningful action’ is not enough. We need immediate action. We have heard all the rhetoric before.

And of those 34 people murdered (and you want to check his numbers) how many were killed by people with no legal right to own a gun – by criminals, parolees for violent crimes, and the insane?  How many victims were in places like Chicago and Washington DC, where the law-abiding citizens already needs authorization from the Supreme Court to own a firearm?  How many were kiled as a direct or indirect result of the War on Drugs, which has killed more people than Vietnam and Korea and which the Obama Administration is going to carry on in spite of the wishes of several states’ electorates?

I’ll wait on that answer – no doubt in vain.

3) …that has already failed miserably. 

What we have not seen is leadership – not from the White House and not from Congress. That must end today. This is a national tragedy and it demands a national response. My deepest sympathies are with the families of all those affected, and my determination to stop this madness is stronger than ever.

Mayor Bloomberg?  Plutocrat d*psh*t?  Your response to a tragedy in another state is to demand “leadership” in putting sanctions against the law-abiding citizens who didn’t and  will never kill anyone?

Steve Timmer – hey, when did he get an actual name? – writing at MNBlue MNProgressive MN MNLib whatever he rechristened Cucking Stool, exhumes an anti-Second-Amendment argument that isn’t the oldest one, but is certainly the least compelling and convincing; “if you think an “assault weapon” is OK, why not a nuclear weapon?”

No, my synopsis is actually better than Timmer’s piece, but since good form demands it, I’ll give you a quote or two:

 Scalia believes the test is your right to own a weapon depends on your ability to carry it — to “bear” it, in other words. There’s no room here for consideration of a weapon’s lethality, dangerousness, or complexity.

(Except for all of those “prudent restrictions” that Scalia himself talked about in in the Heller decision.  But don’t stop him.  He’s on a roll)

One can imagine signs in gun shops: If you can carry it out the front door, you can own it!

In the shops are rocket-propelled grenades, bazookas, hand gernades, the aforesaid MANPADS [shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles], 50 caliber machine guns, fully-automatic rifles, etc. *

And what if Timmer’s fantasy came true?

Let’s just say that a law-abiding citizen, one who’s never stolen so much as a candy bar in his life, walks into a store that, per Timmer’s fantasy, has one of just about everything  from the international arms market that doesn’t require wheels or tracks to move?

Let’s hypothetically say that that law-abiding citizen…:

• …has in his possession a document indicating that several levels of government have put on the ol’ rhetorical rubber gloves and poked and prodded his criminal background, and found that he had no crime record?  No record of dangerous mental illness?  That the cops and sheriff hadn’t had to pull him out of a succession of brawls, and that he didn’t have a record of picking pointless fights?  And that…
• …as a result of having that documented clean history, he had the legal right to carry a concealed handgun, and had done so for, say, seven years?  And that…
• …over those seven years the only time that gun had come out of his pocket for cleaning, overnight storage and practice?   That in fact that citizen, who had never stolen so much as a candy bar, had not been inveigled to, say, kill someone, notwithstanding the fact that they had a gun in their pocket?  That in fact, in seven years, not a single person had guessed that the citizen had a gun in his pocket, because there was no reason to guess it?    This is rare thing – there are only 110,000 of them in Minnesota, after all.
• The citizen walks into the shop and does some shopping?

The citizen is a history buff who minored in German, so he buys an MG42 machine gun (think the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan) (Image NSFW, if you work around liberals).  Or perhaps to commemorate a Marine ancestor he grabs an M2-2 flamethrower?

Or perhaps in a Slavophile moment he grabs an SA7 Grail man-portable anti-aircraft missile launcher – think “bazooka with a heat-seeking rocket”?

Or perhaps he has a wicked sense of irony, and decides to blow the lid off of every lefty strawman (but only figuratively, ghuk ghuk), and buys the fabled “Davy Crockett“, a (very technically) man-portable “spigot launcher” that fired a small nuclear charge, with a lethal radius of about 500 feet, to a range of about a mile and half.

Or heck, he has a Groupon deal, so he gets all four!

Question:  As our citizen – who, remember, has never committed a non-traffic crime in his life, has never picked a fight, has never given society the faintest reason to doubt his stability, and has proven it by carrying a legal, permitted, loaded handgun for years and years without even a whiff of an incident – walks away carrying the four weapons he just bought and, what the heck, an M-2 .50 caliber machine gun to boot (he wants a workout), what happens?

Your choices are as follows:

1. Our citizen, who has never committed a violent act in his life, is overcome by a psychic force emanating from the weapons he owns.  Our hypothetical placid schlemiel, who has carried a 9mm semiautomatic boogeyman handgun for most of a decade without incident, is suddenly overcome by voices telling him to mow down commuters with the machine guns!  To cut loose with the flamethrower at the mall!  To plink at passing aircraft with the SA7!  To lob nukes at the Metrodome just to watch the light show?  Or…
2. Nothing.  Same as before.

Of course, all the weapons above are illegal, and nothing the SCOTUS, or Scalia himself, has said or done, officially or not, has changed the “prudent restriction” we put on these sorts of things.

If only the SCOTUS would put “prudent restrictions” on red herring arguments.

Question to Steve Timmer:  if I put one of the “MANPADS” (man-portable anti-aircraft missiles) you wrote about in your hands, showed you how to use it (if I knew) and told you to hang onto it for an hour, do you think you could restrain yourself from shooting down an airliner?

Yes?  OK – why?

Because MANPADS, machine guns, flamethrowers and nuclear spigot bombs don’t actually kill people.  There is nothing about them that overpowers a person and makes them need to kill.

Jed Babbin gets the basic facts right…:

Politicians and media are preoccupied with the idea that gun control is the only answer to these murders and that nothing else is worth discussion. But the inconvenient facts include that the Oregon mall shooter used a stolen weapon. Adam Lanza, the Newtown murderer, used weapons stolen from his mother who had them legally and registered them under Connecticut law. He reportedly shot his way into a locked school. The time and political energy that’s being wasted on gun control could be put to better use. That’s our job, so let’s get to it.

He posts some proposals for making schools more secure.  He opposes arming teachers – and I can see many reasons for that, and we’ll come back to them.

One – getting more realistic about the extremely mentally ill, who make up all of our crop of school shooters – makes obvious sense.

The other – improving school security, without turning them, as Babbin says, “into armed camps” – is a little dodgier.

Babbin quotes a friend, a former SEAL who works as a security consultant, who advocates putting ballistic doors and mag locks on classrooms, issuing “ballistic blankets” (think “flak blankets”) and drilling the kids on their use, and teaching the staff to “buy time” for the police to arrive.  Which makes sense, from a purely security perspective; make the target harder.

The consultant advises against arming teachers: “It would probably cause more problems than keeping them unarmed.”   Maybe, maybe not – people in law enforcement and the military tend to think the rest of society are mindless sheeple, but I can see the argument.  There are problems.

Which brings us not only to the beef I have with Babbin’s thesis – which is a perfectly valid one – but what I think the real problem is.

Look at the issues facing school security:

• Schools are big, fat, juicy unarmed targets full of helpless victims.  Never more so than now; as school districts centralize more and more kids to “cut costs”, schools get bigger and bigger. You don’t need to be a terrorist or a nutcase to know that; how many times has Hollywood turned to the “evildoer at a school” plot?  Everyone knows; if you want to screw with a society where it really hurts, screw with the kids.
• As schools get bigger and bigger, the kids at the margin – the kids with emotional, behavioral and mental health issues – get pushed further and further to the fringe.  The emotionally-disturbed kids get more alienated; the mentally-ill kids get more siloed.  Teachers and administrators get more involved in the endless process of running a huge, institutional, “factory” school, and less in what’s ticking with each individual kid.
• Some of the kids on the fringes will act out on their adolescent hormonal aggression, and on the criminal behavior they currently pattern themselves after in our society, and commit stupid crimes of opportunity.  Which, if we did happen to arm teachers, would likely involve students jumping teachers and stealing guns.  It’s a fair point – in a school where students can form an in-school criminal underclass.
• Other kids on the fringe – after years of bullying in a huge, soulless school that already resembles a prison – will, like Columbine’s murderers or the kid at Cold Springs/Rokori, get their revenge in the way that seems most satisfying to their troubled minds; killing their schoolmates and destroy the thing that, in their warped little adolescent minds, left them so alienated.  Others, like the shooter at the Red Lake school or at Dunblane, Scotland, will hear voices telling them to find a school and start shooting.  Or, like Lanza, react to God only knows what – but through whatever motivation, find the biggest, fattest, least-defended target they can; a mall, a movie theater, or in too many cases, a school.

What do these all have in common?

The big, soulless, impersonal megaschool.  They’re everywhere; big cities are cramming thousands of kids into huge “campus” schools, like Columbine, where the staff can barely keep up with the paperwork, much less the states of mind of their individual kids.   Rural America is consolidating its schools into ever-bigger buildings, to save money (or, really, redirect more of it to administrative overburden).

There’ve been examinations of the psychological effects of cramming children into huge schools.  They’ve been shunted into the circular file by an education establishment that created the status quo.

But you didn’t see these kinds of shootings when schools were in the neighborhood, when staff knew their kids, and could tell when something needed attention.

Along with looking at what makes American schools so insecure, maybe it’s time to look at what makes so many people what to destroy them.

Right in the nick of time as even non-political Americans start to get concerned about tax hikes and the “fiscal cliff”, some good news from the Strib!

Yes, Senators Klobuchar and Franken both oppose the Medical Device Tax!

Minnesota’s two senators sought Monday to delay a tax on medical devices that was expected to add $28 billion over the next decade to help pay for health care reform.

Democratic Senators Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken pointed to thousands of high-paying jobs that device companies support in Minnesota, headquarters to such giant devicemakers as Medtronic and St. Jude Medical. The industry has painted the tax as a job killer that would hurt innovation.

“The delay would give us the opportunity to repeal or reduce that tax,” said Klobuchar, co-author of a letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid seeking the delay.

So that means the Senators will join 3rd CD Congressman Erik Paulsen and support his bill in the House to repeal the tax, right?

Franken is among the letter’s signers who would not support Paulsen’s plan. “I felt the offset in the Paulsen bill would have undermined the architecture of the Affordable Care Act,” Franken said.

Oh, don’t bother us with details!  Franken and Klobuchar – and say, doesn’t she just look stunning in the photo the Strib opted to use? – are coming out strongly in favor of delaying the tax!

So what’s missing from the Strib story, bylined to Jim Spencer?

Look it over.  Carefully.  Carefully…

How about any mention that both Senators voted for the tax initially?  

Both Franken and Klobuchar participated eagerly in jamming Obamacare down the American people’s collective throat; both have timidly objected via friendly media in the least obtusive way possible; never bucking their caucus, never ruffling the Administration’s narrative, never standing up for the thousands of constituents that are already being harmed by the tax in any way that would bring them any risk whatsoever.  Both of our Senators have invested facile lip service to delaying or repealing the tax – but neither of them have ever put a vote, or any substantive political capital, on the line.

Spencer’s loathsome Strib piece is what we call “public relations”.  It’s what the Strib and most of the rest of the Twin Cities media is there for.