Caught on Twitter a little while ago, Minneapolis Police chief Harteau said:
@ChiefHarteau: @CrimeWatchNE @MSP my officers and the community see too much gun violence and little if any is due to self-defense.
Not sure when Chief Harteau got so bloodthirsty. Self-defense only rarely ends with someone dead.
In theory, you’d think someone with 28 years in uniform would know that.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Some members of Summit Avenue Assembly of God Church wanted to show their appreciation for police. They planned a celebration, lunch, photos of kids with officers, petting zoo, a fun way for members to say “Thanks for your service” on a Saturday afternoon. Almost didn’t happen.
St. Paul’s Black Lives Matter objected to showing appreciation for police. Protesters disrupted worship service in the weeks prior to the event. The celebration had to be changed to include firefighters and other first responders to avoid further protests. The church had to assign members to a security detail (my wife was on the foot patrol team with radios to report any sign of trouble), the television news showed up hoping for conflict, the volunteers were so alert for trigger warnings and micro-aggressions they were exhausted from stress. That’s one “community celebration” that’ll never happen again.
You know, if I were a fiendish racist scheming to convince a bunch of polite, moderate Christians that Black people are selfish, hateful and bigoted, I could not possibly have conceived of a better tactic than these “activists” did all on their own. Way to go, morons; you’ve turned back the racial relations clock a hundred years in that congregation.
Joe Doakes
Y’know, it’s high time someone organized a group. Perhaps call it #BlackNeighborhoodsMatter. Represent the majority of people in inner city neighborhoods – who don’t condone police bias, but who support a strong aggressive police presence in the neighborhood because it helps lower the crime rate that disproportionally plagues the neighborhoods.
But of course, the people who’d start such a group are too busy working and raising families, I’m going to guess, to be able to do much organizing, marching and agitation.
All the effort from this past session paid off starting yesterday. The five new gun bills passed this past session are now in effect:
This is all to the good. But the question is – what next?
Obviously, we, the Real Americans of the Minnesota Second Amendment movement, need to focus on the big two; Stand Your Ground, and Constitutional Carry. Both of those will be long-term jobs, though, depending on an even more human-rights-friendly legislature than we have, and a pro-gun, likely GOP governor. That’s going to take some time and effort. We can do it – and this blog is going to focus on both.
But in the short term? I think banning physicians from asking about guns as part of routine patient screening would be a great place to start. It’s an entirely political exercise, suggested by the American Medical Association and the American College of Physicians and adopted by doctors both maliciously anti-gun and, mostly, those who don’t care. And it’s nothing but an attempt to use the prestige of the medical profession to bully people out of owning firearms. Several states have already acted; Minnesota should get doctors out of doing Michael Bloomberg’s work for him.
There are many things that need doing – but I think that’d be a good project on the way to the big win.
Spotify put together of the top Fourth of July music in their playlists.
And some of the results are a little surprising:
Click to see full-size.
The heartland is, perhaps a little unsurprisingly, into Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA”.
I was a little surprised to see Illinois go for “ROCK in the USA” by John Mellencamp – while Mellencamp’s native Indiana chose Greenwood over their rabid-blue favorite musical son.
A bit less surprising? California and Florida chose “America! F*** Yeah!”, from Team America: World Police.
The high-quality shock? West Virginia going with “American Girl” by Tom Petty. West Virginia – f*** yeah!
And while New Jersey went with Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”, I was gladdened to see New York State opt with “Fourth Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)”, from Springsteen’s 1974 The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle album. Kudos, WV and NY!
But the one that opened my eyes? North Dakota, New Hampshire and Maine going with Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA”.
This struck me as odd. So I dug deeper.
And I found this map:
Click for full-size image.
You’ll note that these are three of the five states in the lower 48 where Spanish isn’t the second most popular language.
The inescapable conclusion?
Latinos hate Miley Cyrus.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Never let a crisis go to waste.
Sen. Harry Reid wants expanded background checks: “Is that asking too much? Couldn’t we at least do this little thing to stop people who are mentally ill . . . from purchasing guns?” Reid said on the Senate floor.
Den. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va) specifically mentioned an effort aimed at keeping guns out of the hands of people diagnosed with mental illness.
President Obama noted last week that once again, someone got a gun who shouldn’t have had access to it.
The South Carolina church shooter sparked the talk but he wasn’t mentally ill, not according to existing law. So Democrats are using bait-and-switch tactics to argue for restrictions on people who have Not been diagnosed with mental illness but who act strangely, hold unpopular opinions or have few friends. After all, we must Do Something, before those lone-wolf weirdos snap and kill people. Sounds perfectly reasonable, right?
One small problem: it’s unconstitutional.
The Second Amendment was adopted to ensure Congress would not regulate firearms, because the Founders feared an arbitrary and powerful central government like the one they’d just thrown off. In the Founders’ time, it was universally understood that children, felons and the mentally ill shouldn’t have firearms and those limitations continue, under District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 US 570 (2008). But who are “the mentally ill?”
Federal law prohibits ownership by a “mental defective.” There are court cases discussing whether “mental defective” is different from “mentally ill” for gun control purposes (mental defective might mean “retarded but not dangerous” and thus not be a disqualifying condition). Leaving aside that hair-splitting, Federal law defines “mentally defective” as having been adjudicated such or committed to a mental institution. 18 USC 922(g)(4). The Code of Federal Regulations, 22 CFR 478.11, further clarifies that “adjudicated” means a determination made by a court.
Yes, but so what? Federal law, federal regulations, Congress can simply change them, right? That’s where it gets tricky. There are a long line of Supreme Court decisions holding that when the government acts to deprive a person of a fundamental Constitutional right, that person is entitled to Due Process consisting of, at a minimum, notice of the charges and a meaningful opportunity to be heard before a neutral decider. That means a court must make the decision, after hearing, at which the burden is on the government and the accused has a chance to rebut the state’s case.
You’ve heard it’s nearly impossible to get a person committed these days, no matter how much they need it? Clayton Cramer’s book “My Brother Ron” is a heartbreakingly frank, scrupulously researched account of how civil liberties lawyers created the case-law that now controls. And the case-law is not limited to civil commitments: Due Process extends to mental illness for purposes of gun control, which means the government cannot deny guns to people merely because they are weirdos, act strangely, hold unpopular opinions or have few friends.
What the President and Democrat Congressional leaders propose to do is precisely what the Founders explicitly designed the Constitution to prevent. The plan is unconstitutional on its face. Of course, that’s never stopped Democrats before.
Joe Doakes
As we saw last week, the left isn’t above writing new law from the bench to suit “community” demands.
A – what else? – university professor claims that honky can’t help but mass murder.
If you’ve had a checkup over the past ten years, you may have noticed your doctor (or their nurses) asking you or your kids if there are any guns in the house.
It is, of course, part of a politically-motivated campaign to a) try to compile “public health” data attacking our right to keep and bear arms, and b) an attempt by left-leaning medical organizations to use the prestige of the medical profession to bully people out of owning guns.
I’ve always answered “No”. I figure “backdoor to registration”.
Turns out there may be a better approach to take.
For decades – like, four or five of them – the old municipal shooting range in Jamestown North Dakota was where people went to plink, to practice their skeet, or to polish their aim or, in my case thirty years ago this summer, learn how to shoot.
Now, when we say “Municipal Range”, that may conjure up images of grandeur. Or civilizaation. Not so with the Jamestown range, located by the Pipestem Reservoir, about seven miles north of town on US 281. There was a firing line with a couple of rough wooden stands and a log hot line. There were some target stands downrange, and, 300 or so yards out, a big berm that someone had bulldozed into place.
And for decades, it sufficed; most people followed the rules, because someone would teach them. One of my friends from the neighborhood, an Air Force veteran of sorts, hauled me out there when I was 22, lugging my Remington Nylon 66 that I’d just bought with my returned dorm key deposit ($50 at Gun and Reel Sports), and showed me the unbreakable rules, and started me plinking.
Some didn’t have the same benefit, or just lacked common sense; when we were downrange setting our targets once, a couple of moron kids with a 20-gauge shotgun started popping off at clay pigeons. They were off on the right side of the range, away from the rest of us (me and a couple of other guys who were off to my left, and also downrange with me). Yes, I remember what birdshot sounds like passing by 20 yards away from me. I also remember the sound of the guy who’d been to my left, apparently a service veteran, barreling across the field yelling like all the hounds of hell turned loose on the kid with the shotgun, who I’m going to bet has never made that mistake again.
And there the range sat, decade after decade, without any problems – until now:
Shooting sports enthusiasts will be without a range to shoot here after July 1. Bob Martin, manager of Pipestem Dam for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said the rifle range located west of the dam will close on that date due to safety issues.
“The safety concerns started popping up eight years ago,” he said. “There have been additional buildings adjacent to the down-range area. Outbuildings there have three or four (bullet) holes in them”
…Larry Kukla, secretary of the Jamestown United Sportsmen, said it was unfortunate the range had to close.
“It is a sad day, but for safety reasons we have to close the range,” he said.
Kukla – father of a classmate and a former teaching colleague of my dad’s – and his group did all the caretaking on the range for years and years. Which is how a lot of stuff got done back there; local groups taking care of things of local interest, without much need for governement.
But always, always, there’s gotta be idiots; even though they adjusted the range, nearby buildings and even the range’s safety signs kept turning up with bullet holes:
“Between careless, inexperienced and just being stupid,” Martin said, referring to the source or sources of the stray bullets. “If you are shooting at the proper targets, it’s impossible to shoot off the range. But you know they’re not just shooting at the targets by looking at the (damaged) signs.”
And so America’s real one percent – the one percent of people who can’t be trusted to use a public toilet without smearing something on the wall – as ruined everything for everyone else, yet again.
It’s July 1.
And Mark Dayton, amazingly, is still “in office”.
And that means my entry in the Dayton Retirement Pool is officially out of the running.
Best of luck to the rest of you.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
I overheard a young woman in the building talking on the phone in the break-room. She’s stressed out today. She thought she was current on her debt consolidation loan but the bank claims she’s been a month behind for ages. Out of every $60 payment she makes, $40 goes to interest and $15 to late fees which means the principal has hardly been touched. She and her live-in boyfriend have no more available credit and can’t get caught up because neither of them have an extra $60 that isn’t already promised to someone else.
I remember those days, when my family was young and struggling, when $60 was not a modest dinner at Red Lobster but an insurmountable obstacle. Seems like a lifetime ago. I suppose everybody must go through it – no other way to learn sacrifice, delayed gratification, habits of thrift.
Unless you’re a politician. Then you just spend whatever you like on whatever you want. Must be nice.
Joe Doakes
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