Political movements rise and fall.  It’s part of political life in a democracy with a free market of ideas.

Of course, there’s nothing that the purveyors of central intellectual planning would like more than for the National Rifle Association to fade into obscurity. In this CNN article, the writer quite tangibly palpitates at the idea.

Could the National Rifle Association ever face a similar fate? Most Americans probably don’t think so. When a gunman murdered nine people at a community college in Oregon earlier this month, the President seemed to express what many Americans were thinking when he said, “Somehow this has become routine. … We have become numb to this.”

There’s a pervasive belief that any attempt to tighten gun laws would be futile because too many politicians are afraid to defy the NRA. But there are at least four examples from American history — including two snatched from recent headlines — where ordinary people and unforeseen events defeated a seemingly invincible lobbying group, and hardly anyone saw it coming.

Could the NRA vanish from political prominence? Of course.

But the article is wrong on three points:

Apples And Axles:   The author – John Blake – picked four groups as examples of “popular” opposition overturning “powerful lobbying groups”:  The “Anti Saloon League”, the “Tobacco Lobby”, the “Cuba Lobby” and AIPAC.

They’re all lousy comparisons:

• The “Cuba Lobby” became less relevant with the end of the Cold War.  Not to say they’re not right.
• The big defeats of the Cuba Lobby and AIPAC that Blake cites were the establishment of relations with Cuba, and the jamdown of the Iran treaty executive agreement.  Both were single-issue decisions by an ideological executive – in the case of the Iran “agreement”, very possibly a violation of the law.
• The “defeat” of the tobacco lobby was a result of decades of public health propaganda (which happened to be largely correct, outside the canard of “second hand smoke”) that didn’t need to be politicized to be effective (although it often was anyway), and cost billions and billions of dollars.
• The Anti Saloon League was opposed by an equally-large mass of countervailing opinion; this opinion took 15 years to get organized (Prohibition was nearly 100 years in the making); The ASL was, in fact, more analogous the gun control mement, and its opposition was more similar to the Second Amendment Rights movement between 1985 and 2000.

Which brings us to the second point:

NRA is the Vox Populi:  I’ve non-joke joked for nearly three decades now; the left has been jabbering about class warfare for a couple centuries.  And they finally got one; the battle over guns.  But they’re the patricians, and the Second Amendment movement are the uppity peasants.

As Jeffrey Snyder pointed out in his seminal essay A Nation of Cowards, that’s the reason the left has spent the last fifty years so knotted up about guns; not because they care about anyone’s lives, or “gun violence”; but because it’s the vox populi giving them a big bad veto, saying “the nannystate has its limits”.

In the early nineties, at the start of the Clinton Administration’s gun control efforts, the NRA reached a then-record membership of 4 million – people who paid a minumum of $35 a year for their memberships, frequenlty more.  At the time, the various gun grabber groups reached a peak strength of around 150,000 – at a time when “membership” meant, in most cases, saying “I’m a member!”.  The “Million Mom March” may have peaked out around 10,000 members, at a time when all a Mom had to do was…march.  Or indicate an interest in marching.

And focusing on the NRA is misleading in and of itself – because…:

The NRA Is Just A Part Of The Movement:  The NRA deploys some serious muscle at the federal level.  But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The Second Amendment human rights movement is a mosaic of dozens, maybe hundreds, of smaller groups that do most of the heavy lifting in the states, where most gun legislation takes place.  In Minnesota, the bulk of the actual work is done by GOCRA and MNGOPAC, with several other groups helping out in the various trenches as well.  The NRA has always been a utility player in Minnesota; they had almost nothing to do with Shall-Issue; they helped with the lobbying in 2012 through this past session, but they are part of a cast of groups, not the big gorilla.

Here’s the real measure of support; when GOCRA says “turn out to the capitol” to show legislators where the real political brawn is, hundreds of people from all over Minnesota turn out in a sea of maroon shirts; the Bloombergs might be able to get a couple of dozen wan-looking Highland Park “progressives” accompanying their half-dozen paid, mercenary lobbyists.   It has more in common with the people who rejected Prohibition than the people who enacted it.

And this process has only accelerated as the distribution of information has become more decentralized.  In 1993, the Gun Owners Action League (the predecessor of GOCRA) had to print and mails its newsletters at great expense, to a database maintained on heaven only knows what.  Today, grassroots gun rights groups can, and do, form around facebook pages and online discussion forums, and with a little work and diligence and messaging can actually go on to persuade the unpersuaded.

The same dynamic holds for the anti-gun side – but at the end of the day, all they seem to draw is liberal plutocrats with deep pockets, and people who look like they got lost on their way to a live presentation of “This American Life”.

Backwards:  So in its lust to silence the peasants, CNN has gotten things more or less inverted:  the NRA is not only utterly unlike the four “unbeatable lobbying groups” that they cite, but they aren’t even the real issue.

The real issue is this:  the part of America east of the Hudson and west of the Sierra Madre thinks the Second Amendment is at least a weird throwback, and at most a threat to their version of civilization.  Real Americans treasure the Second Amendment as all other civil liberties, and will fight for it as they have for the past forty years – without regard to the group that carries the flag.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

There will be no increase in Social Security in 2016, because there is no inflation.  The government’s official rate of inflation is 0.2%

Except . . . that doesn’t feel right, does it?  The price of gasoline may be holding steady, but nothing else is.  It’s almost as if the government’s official rate is understating inflation.

That’s because it is.  The way they calculate inflation was changed in 1980, and changed again in 1990, always to make things look as if the government is going a wonderful job of keeping prices down, despite what you see at the check-out.

Using today’s method, the rate is 0.2%; using the 1990 method, the rate of inflation is 4%; using the 1980 method, the rate of inflation is 7%.  This isn’t dry economist eye-glazing mumbo-jumbo, this is senior citizens eating dog food because their checks don’t go far enough.

I understand the need to limit spending to keep the system solvent.  The solution isn’t to send seniors to the pet store, it’s to reduce the number of participants in the Ponzi scheme.  Face it: 20-somethings are never going to see Social Security, it’ll collapse long before they get there.  Might as well enact the legislation that says so right now and get them used to the idea of saving for their own future.

Joe Doakes

Except that “saving for their future” is going to get riskier and riskier, if we keep going with the current debt bubble, too.

Liberals pine for Denmark and Sweden.

You can hear it from their politicians – Bernie Sanders is one of many that visibly palpitates for the “Danish system”.  And you can see it in their semi-offical propaganda; in the cable series Weeds, produced by the loathsome Jenji Cohan, Denmark is depicted as a civil utopia.

Or, to be accurate, Sanders and Cohan depict a version of Denmark (and by extension the other northern European welfare states) that existed in in mid-seventies.

As Kevin Williamson notes, history is yet again leaving America “progressives” behind:

For those of you who are keeping score, the Heritage Foundation, which literally keeps score, rates Denmark’s economy as slightly more free – slightly more capitalistic — than that of the United States. Denmark is in a rough spot just lately, but it has been undergoing a series of deep and intelligent reforms to its welfare state (as have many of the other Northern European countries) to counteract the ill effects of earlier excesses.

Williamson also notes that the Danes, like the Swedes, pay for the goodies with a fairly crushing level of middle-class taxation – something that no American Democrat has the guts to admit; apparently we’ll have to pass their version of socialism to see what it costs us.

Good old Saint Paul.

The business economy just continues to spiral down the vortex; it’s schools are a disaster for African-Americans and other minority students; it’s choking on traffic, and obsessed with choking it further.

But apparently none of that is so serious that the city, in its infinite wisdom, isn’t going to try to socialize… Garbage collection.

And the city, having learned so much for watching the Met Council jam down the Green Line, is going about getting its way the way it always does; anyway it has to to get what it wants.

A reader from Merriam park emails:

Gotta love this report– they received survey responses from 2,000 residents and conclude that based on those responses, “a majority of St Paul want organized trash collection.” They’ve also concluded that immigrants and minorities have too much trouble making decisions to make a good decision in choosing a trash hauler, so this is better for them. Of course, it doesn’t appear that they asked too many in the poorer neighborhoods of St Paul, since their map (see .pdf through link below) indicates that more than 800 responses came from Mac Groveland/ Summit Hill zip code.

The reports are at the link above.

But here’s the map of the survey responses:

So the “survey” drew 2,000 responses – and if we take each of the different “color” bands at their half-way point, it’s fair to estimate that 70-80% of them came from the city’s four most alpaca-wearing, Subaru-driving, NPR-listening, Jon Stewart-worshipping, Saint Olaf-alumni-ing, upper-middle-class, white, government-union-or-academia-employed, “Progressive” zip codes.

Seems pretty even-handed to me.

In a time when actual, intentional violence is actually proliferating, Israel is relaxing its ill-advised attempts at gun control.

Apparently scenes like these…:

…in a nation in which “genocide” is within living memory have an effect, and unlike certain Americans, that effect is not “be an idiot”.

Speaking of which – in a nation in which violent crime is falling and has been for twenty years, a candidate for governor of our largest state is pressing for…more useless “gun safety” security theater:

Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday will introduce a measure for next year’s ballot that aims to stanch the proliferation of gun violence, including a provision to require ammunition buyers to undergo background checks…In the last 72 hours – 68 people have been killed and 129 people have been injured due to gun violence in America,” Newsom wrote online Wednesday.

His measure, which requires nearly 366,000 signatures to qualify for next year’s ballot, incorporates provisions of bills that stalled at the state Capitol. It would ban the possession of large-capacity magazines – more than 10 rounds – and require anyone who currently has them to sell to a licensed firearm dealer, transfer them out of state or relinquish them to law enforcement to be disposed of.

None of which, naturally, would have prevented any of the “gun violence” about which Newsom spoke.

Gun control is to violence as the TSA is to terrorism; a lot of frenetic, intrusive activity that does nothing useful, because it’s not intended to do anything but provide the illusion of dooooooooooing something.

SCENE:  Interior shot at local hardware store. Mitch BERG is grabbing a bag of sidewalk salt.  Suddenly, Avery LIBRELLE, holding a bag of various parts, steps around the corner.

LIBRELLE:  Hah, Merg!  Your statistical analysis is shit!

BERG:  Say that again like you’re having a civil conversation in polite company.

LIBRELLE:  Your statistical analysis is bad.

BERG:  That’s a little more like it.  Care to get more specific?

LIBRELLE:  Tuesday on your blog, you said that urban gun violence correlates with Democrat-controlled cities.

BERG:  Yep.  Because when you run through the numbers, both homicide and violent crime rates are statistically much higher in cities controlled by Democrats.

LIBRELLE:  Hah!  Those were crap statistics.

BERG:  They were from the Department of Justice.

LIBRELLE:  Well, look at this!  Stats from the CDC!  And lookie there!  All those red counties with higher gun death rates than all those blue cities!  Hah!  You are an idiot and stupid and your head is full of poop!  Hahahahahaahahahahahaahaha!

BERG:  Yeah, Avery – we’ve dealt with this same exact chart on this blog before.  You don’t see how this is a non-sequitur, don’t you?

LIBRELLE!  It’s science!

BERG:  Yeah – it’s also comparing apples to axles.  My story yesterday covered homicide and violent crime rates.  This chart covers all gun deaths.  You do see the difference, don’t you?

LIBRELLE:  I see that you are a stupid idiot.

BERG:  “All gun deaths” also counts suicides, Avery. Suicides are between 65-70% of the gun deaths in this country. And it’s a form of suicide “preferred” by rural, white men, mostly lonely and socially isolated, very frequently deeply depressed and/or terminally ill. It’s especially prevalent in…the rural west.  And, being prevalent in lots of sparsely populated rural western and southern counties, it means that the gun death rate will look very high – and it comparably will be.  But that’s not the homicide rate.  Which, you will note, is almost nonexistent in most of those rural, western counties with a high “gun death rate”.

Suicide is a tragedy – but no worse than any other form of suicide (the US’s suicide rate is much lower than many countries that control guns strictly).   And it’s morally not the same as murder – which is taking someone else’s life, by definition against their will.  Which was what my story covered.

So, Avery – what does this mean.

LIBRELLE:  It means that you hate women and science and are a racist…

(LIBRELLE, gesturing expansively, knocks an elbow against a shelf.  A gallon can full of paint falls, conking LIBRELLE on the head)

BERG:  (Rushing to LIBRELLE’s assistance)  Are you OK?

LIBRELLE:  (head lolling about in mild delirium) What it really means is that it’s my statistical analysis that is “shit”, and that I should really stop playing at being a “fact checker” until I learn how to do the job, because I make myself look like an ignorant laughingstock.

HARDWARE STORE ATTENDANT:  (Rushing from the counter) Is h…,er sh…is this person OK?

BERG:  Just having a moment of clarity.  It’ll pass.

(And SCENE)

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Obama-care is the federal program, but Minnesota Democrats rushed to set up our own parallel Minnesota Care system so every Minnesota family could easily find affordable health insurance.  But insurance companies are dropping out of Minnesota Care to avoid administrative hassles and taxes to reduce overhead, and that makes their plans even more affordable than the Minnesota Care plans.

The Democrats’ proposed solution?  No, not decrease administrative hassle or lower taxes to make Minnesota Care competitive.  Certainly not.  No, the proposed solution is to impose administrative hassles and taxes on insurance companies who are NOT participating in Minnesota Care, so that everybody is equally hassled and taxed.  The name of the guy proposing that – Jim Schowalter – may sound familiar.  That’s because he was Mark Dayton’s Commissioner of Budget who oversaw setting up the Minnesota Care system at a cost of half-a-billion dollars, now he’s the chief lobbyist for the insurance companies in the system.

I say there’s something fishy about this story.  It’s all about people losing their plan and paying more for it.  But if you like your plan, you can keep your plan and every family saves $2,500 – we know this because The Light-bringer told us so.  There’s something not right about this new story.

Joe Doakes

It’s the Minnesota way.

SCENE:  The handheld camera walks to the door of the basement headquarters of “MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com”.  A crudely hand-lettered sign on the door reads “Wingnuts NOT ALOUD”.   

The camera steps down the stairs into the hidden lair where the magic happens.  Around a table, eyes glued to TV in an entertainment center along the wall, are MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com’s writing staff; Aaron Roston, Gutterball Gary, Cat Scat, Leaky The Beagle, Betty Rae Torstengaardsen and Avery Librelle.   At the head of the table, slouching in a folding chair, nervously running his hand through his hair, is Edmund DuChey, wearing a name-tag that identifies himself as the “Publisher” and “Senior Managing Executive Editor” of MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com.  

The assembled group is watching as the closing credits roll on the Democrat debate.  Starting with DuChey, the group breaks into wan applause.  

GUTTERBALL GARY:  YEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!  (Nobody bats an eye)

LEAKY THE BEAGLE:  (Speaking in an absurd phony German accent)  Very intereshtink.

CAT SCAT:  And every word was entirely true!  I Googled it!

AARON ROSTON:  Stupid wingnuts won’t know what hit them.

BETTY RAE TORSTENGAARDSEN:  You know what I liked about Bernie Sanders?  The positions he was talking about were almost identical to the positions of Nelson Rockefeller…

DUCHEY:  (hissing, making “puke” symbol with his finger) He was a Republican

GARY:  Rerthuglicon!

TORSTENGAARDSEN:  Right – the point is, the Democratic party of today is right about where the Republican party was in 1968.

ROSTON:  Right.  And not that different from President Johnson.

DUCHEY:  Peace be unto him.

LIBRELLE:  And that was a time when the US was at its political and economic peak.

SCAT: Let me Google that…yes.  It says so right here on “SmirkingChimp.com!”  It’s a fact!

DUCHEY: I just wanna tell the stupid ignorant wingnuts to suck on that:  when the US government was at its most progressive, we were at our economic and political peak.

BEAGLE:  Very intereschtink.

(A brief burst of static and feedback erupts.   A VOICE FROM ABOVE breaks in)

VOICE FROM ABOVE:  Oh, that’s just stupid, people.  Use your brains.  In 1968, the US was the world’s only significant economy.  Japan and Germany were just barely recovered from World War II.  South Korea was trailing North Korea, economically.   Singapore was a poverty-stricken third-world hellhole.  Russia and China were gangster playgrounds that could barely feed their own people – indeed, China was still suffering famines.  India was just descending into the nadir of its experience with socialism, and there was speculation that half of its people would starve to death by 1980.   And we were able to import whatever oil that we didn’t produce, at incredibly favorable rates from impoverished countries that were happy for the business.

In 1968, the US was one of two military superpowers – but it was the only economic superpower.  The entire world was its market.  So the likes of LBJ and Nelson Rockefeller could feel free to  write post-dated checks for fripperies like bottomless entitlement programs and count on the Growth Fairy to let future generations pay for them – because it’d worked just fine for…the previous 20 years or so.

We were like someone who’d just won the lottery, and was spending like there was no tomorrow.

ROSTON:  Who is that?

SCAT:  Let me google that…

TORSTENGAARDSEN:  It’s a voice from above…

SCAT:  Hah!  Johnson wasn’t president until 1972!  It says so on Crooks and Liars.com!

VOICE:  In the seventies, Germany and Japan’s economies became competitive with ours, and OPEC and Iran sent tremors through our economy by jiggling the oil market on  us.  In the 1980s, South Korea and Singapore became significant players.  In the 1990s, India threw off the worst excesses of socialism, and China pragmatically moved into state cartel capitalism, and suddenly they were legitimate competitors, too.

In other words, the US is no longer an economic hegemon.  Extremely powerful, yes – but not dominant in the way we were in 1968.  Which means we actually have to compete, and be smart.

So it’s fair and accurate to say that the US was at its political and economic peak in 1968 in spite of the likes of Rockefeller and LBJ, not because of them.  And that our position of extreme economic dominance made their variety of entitlement-based government sustainable, for a while, provided that we retained absolute economic supremacy over the entire world.

ROSTON:  This is freaky.

BEAGLE:  Yezz, it izzz

GUTTERBALL:  IT’S A SIGN!

TORSTENGAARDSEN:  What the…

(Camera cuts to exterior shot.  Mitch BERG, holding a bullhorn up to a window casing, looks into the camera lens, as he stands up to walk away)

BERG:  What?  I don’t get to have a little fun, too?

(BERG walks away to a waiting car, as the scene in the basement descends into panicky pandemonium)

(And SCENE)

To: John Oliver, this month’s Rachel Maddow
From:  Mitch Berg, ND Native
Re:  Anger

Mr. Oliver,

The other night, during your largely erroneous segment on oil in North Dakota, you patronizingly told North Dakotans that they should “get angry”.

I was born there, and I’ve spent years watching our self-appointed  “elites” – from Minnesota Public Radio to the documentary film industry to, now, you –  go from calling for the entire Great Plains to be ceded back to nature, to sniffing down their aquiline noses at the notion of all those red-state rubes getting all that unseemly, unregulated, private-market prosperity.  So while I’m not from there anymore, I spent 22 years there – so I’ll speak on its behalf if I want to.

I’m all about the help.

“Get mad!”, you say.

OK, John Oliver. I’m mad.  Your segment, as Rob Port showed, was crap, and you are beggaring the notion of “journalism” in your snooty, condescending attack on my homeland.

So go f**k yourself.

There.  I feel better.

That is all.

There were four terror attacks – all with knives, cars and axes – in Israel yesterday.

In one, a Palestinian man rammed a bus stop full of mostly elderly Jews, and climbed out of his car to finish one of them off with an ax.  (WARNING:  Watching someone getting murdered with an ax is just as disturbing as you might expect it is.   You’re been warned).

It was then…

…that a good guy with a gun – an Israeli with a legal permitted handgun – shot the terrorist.

As has been noted here before, the Israelis have slipped a bit into the madness of gun control – but thankfully not too far.  We’ve seen many examples of good mensches with guns ending terror attacks.

There and here.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The problem with socialism is, sooner or later, you run out of Other People’s Money – Margaret Thatcher.

 

Joe Doakes

And we passed “Sooner” some time ago.

Today, as we look at the prospect of a President whose entire portfolio as a “feminist icon” was hitching her political wagon to a lothario, enabling him in a way that’d no woman on Mad Men would have done for fear of looking contrived, and “Serving” as a hack Senator and the worst Secretary of State since Madeline Albrecht, it’s useful to remember when a real feminist held sway.

Today would be Margaret Thatcher’s 90th birthday.

And none of today’s “gender identity”-obsessed self-styled campus radicals are fit to carry her gig bag, as a human or as a feminist.

It’s timely, and it’s quite frankly too good to care whether it’s apocryphal or not.

After every mass-shooting incident, both sides in the Second Amendment debate sound off.  The left believes “commonsense gun control” leads to less crime.  The right believes “more guns equals less crime”.

Both sides tend to leave it at the level of chanting points, without ever really submitting evidence, much less proving anything [1].

So I thought I’d give it a shot.  What brings more “gun safety” – more guns, or less?

Definition Of Terms:  To start with, I took crime data from the states and the the 70 or so largest US cities – places with over 250,000 people.

For lack of a better measure, I used each state’s governor s the bellwether of the city’s political makeup – which may not be academically perfect, but as a practical matter it’s as useful a measure of each state’s sympathies as we have.

States of Affairs:  And the murder rates break down like this:

• Democrat States: 12.2 murders per 100,000
• GOP States: 11.0 murders per 100,000 (all figures henceforth will be per 100,000).

Well, that looks pretty even; that’s like an 10% variation.  Hardly outside the margin of error, really (although as we discussed some time ago, there’s plenty of variation there, too).

The differences in violent crime, robberies and aggravated assaults and rapes and the like, are a tad more dramatic – but only just:

• Democrat States: 841.18
• GOP States: 749.12

Democrat states have 12% more violent crime.  Again – could be just statistical noise.

Urbanity:  But if you’re from Minnesota, or most states with a large urban area that controls half the population, you know that state politics don’t tell you everything.  In places like Illinois, Wisconsin, Oregon, Washington, Michigan, Iowa, even New York and California, solid-blue cities float in huge placid prosperous lagoons of red.

Again – I broke out “control” by the city’s current mayor, or in the case of the few cities using  Manager/Commission government, the control of the commission.

So when you break out the murder rates of American cities of over 250,000, they come out more like this:

• Democrat Cities: 12.9
• GOP Cities 7.77

So the murder  rates in cities that have mayors from the Democrat Party are 60% higher than in GOP-run cities.

OK, that’s significant.  And the violent crime rates are similarly skewed:

• Democrat Cities: 875.3
• GOP Run Cities: 561.0

There is 56% more violent crime in cities run by Democrats.

More Guns, Less Guns…:  But when cornered by Gun Rights supporters, gun control activists punt to the line that “it’s all about the availability of guns”.

The only true measure of the availability of guns is “can you find one that you can afford without breaking the law?”

But I figured I’d meet the left and the gun grabbers halfway on this one; I measured all cities by the “Brady Campaign Scorecard” rating of the state in which they reside (which is a little unrealistic, since some cities have “tougher” gun laws than their states; I’ll work on that).

The assumption:  A “high” Brady rating, an A or B, implies “tougher” gun laws and, by extension, fewer guns (for the law-abiding).

And the numbers break out like this (“winners” will be in bold type):

Violent Crime by Brady rating

So the big variables seem to be not so much the availability of guns or the strictness of gun control laws, which doesn’t seem to be correlated with any rises and falls in murder or violent crime rates.

But being controlled by the Democrat party?  There’s a straight line correlation there.

Now, I’m not saying that Democrats cause crime.  Democrats bleed just like the rest of us do.

But the pathologies that one-party “progressive” Democrat rule inevitably brings do seem to be correlated with higher murder and violent crime rates.

Correlation doesn’t mean causation.  But it suggests a possible path to causation.

[1] I know – the Second Amendment crew does submit evidence, and has proven its case to everyone but our idiot media.  I’m just saying it for purposes of argument.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

There will be no Social Security increase in 2016 because there is no inflation, according to the government.  But I notice that prices in the POS market are not slumping:

2004 Saturn L300. 133,000 miles. $2,750 or best offer.

2004 Ford Ranger. 65,500 miles.$9,500 OBO.

2000 Lexus ES300. 141K miles. $3900 or offer.

1997 GMC Safari. $2500 firm.

Lingering effect of the disastrous Cash for Clunkers program?

Joe doakes

The used car market has been utterly brutal since then.

Today’s Columbus Day.  Which, to me, is the 30th anniversary of the day I set out to move from my hometown of Jamestown, North Dakota to the Twin Cities…

…and failed.  Long story, which I told here about ten years ago.

It was October of 1985.  I’d graduated from college almost six months earlier – and, as they say, “failed to launch”, at least immediately. I’d worked on a roofing and siding job, and at a bookstore, and put some money away as I’d tried to figure out what I was going to do after college – until I made the decision in a bout of drunken whimsy two weeks earlier.

(more…)

…about anything you see on John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight” is that if John Oliver says it, it’s probably BS.

SCENE:  Avery LIBRELLE is switching a regular cucumber label to an organic cuke when he sees Mitch BERG picking out a piece of ginger root.  LIBRELLE walks over to BERG.  

LIBRELLE:  Hey, Merg!

BERG: Huh?  Oh, sh…hi, Avery.  What’s up?

LIBRELLE:  We won a huge victory over the NRA!

MITCH:  Oh yeah?

LIBRELLE:  Yeah!  Now, people won’t be able to kill people in schools!

MITCH:  Er, Avery?  Guns are already illegal on school grounds. It’s federal law.  Of course, the only people it affects are people with carry permits.   It’s already illegal for anyone who doesn’t have a California permit to carry a gun in public, much less on school grounds.

LIBRELLE:  Right!  So they can’t go nuts and shoot up schools!

MITCH:  And your example of a person with a carry permit shooting up a school is…who?

LIBRELLE:  Hundreds!

MITCH:  Name one.

LIBRELLE:  It’s settled science.

MITCH:  OK.  One example?

LIBRELLE:  It’s settled.  That means the information has been sealed.  Anyway – this is a huge win.

MITCH:  Because now, people who carried guns legally, but not on school grounds, and who never have caused any problems at schools much less killed anyone, are double-barred from carrying guns…

LIBRELLE: Yep!

MITCH:  While the criminals continue to do as they please.

LIBRELLE:  Hey! Trigger warning!

MITCH:  Huh?

LIBRELLE:  “Criminal” is racist!

(And SCENE).

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Dear “Protesters:”

Holding a “die-in” at the St. Paul Marathon to let people know that Black Lives Matter is an asinine display of narcissism.  That event is packed full of Volvo-driving Alpaca-wearing Liberals who already support your cause.  Your antics will change no minds and raise no consciousness.  I want to see you laying down blocking traffic on Charles Avenue in Frogtown late at night when the ganstas are busy making deliveries.  Those are the people your message needs to reach.

Joe Doakes

What was it that Dinesh D’Souza said – crediting his high school teacher in India – about the social justice warriors of his day?  “If Gandhi had tried his form of passive resistance under the Germans instead of the British, he’d have become a  lampshade”.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air!

I’ll be out on assignment today.  Brad Carlson will be sitting in.

Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1570, and Brad Carlson will also be doing his usual “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 1-3PM.

So tune in the Northern Alliance! You have so many options:

• AM1280 in the Metro
• Streaming at AM1280’s Website
• Streaming on IHeartRadio
• On Twitter (the Volume 2 show will use hashtag #narn2)
• Via my UStream video and chat channel.
• Send us an SMS text message – 651-243-0390
• Good ol’ telephone – 651-289-4488
• Podcasts are now available; for my show and for Brad’s
• And make sure you fan us on our new Facebook page!

Join us!

Jason Lewis,longtime Twin Cities talk show host, files paperwork to run for Congress in the Minnesota Second Congressional District.

i’m going to guess David Gerson never expected to be outflank on the libertarian wing…

I thought I’d post a quick guide to every single debate every single Real American has with every single gun-grabber.

Note that not all Grabbers go through all four rounds; the less-depraved and less-vacuous they are as people, the earlier they drop out.

Round 1:

GUN CONTROLLER:  <Starts with a round of “facts” that may or may not be in context, or even remotely true>

2ND AMENDENT ADVOCATE: <Debunks the first round of “facts” with actual facts, without breaking much of a sweat if it’s not their first time at the rodeo>

Round 2

GUN CONTROLLER:  “But we’ve got to doooooooooooooo something”

2ND AMENDMENT ADVOCATE:  “Crime is down 50% in 20 years; no single problem in society has responded as quickly and effectively as crime has responded to what we’re already doooooooing – which is liberalize gun laws for the law-abiding, and increase penalties for the criminals”.

Round 3

GUN CONTROLLER:  <Insert one of the following>:

• Ad Hominem: “You’re paranoid”
• Strawman:  “You care more for your guns than the lives of children!”
• Non-Sequitur:  “What’s wrong with common sense gun control?”

2ND AMENDMENT ADVOCATE:  <Points out that each is not only a logical fallacy, but still easily debunked on factual grounds>

Round 4

(Note:  Only the most logically depraved Grabbers get to this point).

GUN CONTROLLER:  “Clearly you’re compensating for something”

2ND AMENDMENT ADVOCATE:  “Yes – the presence of evil in this world”, usually followed by checking out of the “Debate”.

And SCENE.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

 Do armed civilians stop mass shootings? The evidence is equivocal because, of course, if someone stops the shooter before he starts killing, there’s no way to prove for certain how many victims he would have shot.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/10/03/do-civilians-with-guns-ever-stop-mass-shootings/

Gun owners should adopt the Obama method: he claimed his economic policies resulted in nine million jobs created or saved. Can’t prove that, of course, because how do you prove a job-not-lost any more than a life-not-lost? But saying it’s so makes it so, right?

Armed citizens have saved millions and millions of lives as murderers were discouraged before they started killing or stopped before killing many victims. Saying it’s makes it so. Prove it’s not.

Joe Doakes

and remember – the standard on the left is “if it saves just one life…”

We are way, way past that…

Watch Mitch Berg ANNIHILATE More Liberal Hamsters!  Mind Blown!

UPDATE:  A key “source” in the piece I fisk has turned out to be fraud.  See the Update at the bottom of the story.. 

One of my long-time stalkers – who’s been tweenting about me at least ten times a day for the past six years, which may be as perfect a definition of “a wasted life” as I can imagine – has been spamming the Northern Alliance’s hashtag on Twitter and Facebook with…well, random collections of factoids gathered from Googling, apparently.

And in so doing, he introduced me to yet another article in Raw Story – aka “liberal-friendly news even dumber than The Awl.”

This time, it’s entitled (with that usual online news biz subtlety) “‘It’s insane’: Combat veterans shoot down NRA ‘fantasy world’ of ‘good guys with guns’”

Now, we’ve pretty well  shredded Raw Story – whom I suspect just sold a ton of ads to “Everytown” or “MoveOn”or some other group that’s trying to run a PR war against the NRA, given the enthusiasm with which they’re reporting gun issues generating half-informed anti-gun content.

But even by Raw Story’s dubious standards, this is a dumb piece.  So dumb, in fact, that I’m not going to fisk the whole thing (as I did earlier this week).  Because while it’s a deeply stupid piece, it does touch on a key theme you need to know when you try to engage gun-grabbers.

Because like pretty much all aggressive, inflammatory anti-gun “journalism” cribbing fromn other left-leaning news sources today, it’s made up of:

• Appeals to ridicule
• Non-sequiturs
• Strawmen

Har De Har Har:  Officialdom – cops, soldiers, paramedics, bureaucrats – always, always believe that nobody could do their jobs.  Sort of like union teachers believe homeschoolers can’t possibly, y’know, teach kids:

The NRA’s chief spokesman, Wayne LaPierre, infamously claimed following the Sandy Hook child massacre that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” — but Rivera and other combat vets say that’s ridiculous.

“I think they would absolutely panic,” [Sgt. Rafael Noboa y Rivera] told The Nation. [Editor’s note: Rivera served as Raw Story’s associate publisher in 2013.]…“I think there’s this fantasy world of gunplay in the movies, but it doesn’t really happen that way,”…

Well, thanks, Sergeant Obvious.

To be fair (something Raw Story will not), it’s entirely possible there are law-abiding shooters out there who do think it’s like the movies.

But you don’t go through any sort of concealed-carry training with any such illusions – any more than any cop or soldier.

But while we’re on the topic of cops and soldiers…:

“When I heard gunfire [in Iraq], I didn’t immediately pick up my rifle and react. I first tried to ascertain where the shooting was coming from, where I was in relation to the gunfire and how far away it was. I think most untrained people are either going to freeze up, or just whip out their gun and start firing in that circumstance.”

Right.  In combat, where the situation is fluid and confusing and the adrenaline and stress are overwhelming, lots of training is required to survive, much less make sure you don’t kill the wrong person.   And for police work, where there generally isn’t an “enemy” and situations can be incredibly ambiguous (ambiguous enough that police departments grant cops a lot of qualified immunity for the inevitable, inadvertent, accidental shootings of the wrong people in the line of duty), lots of training is a legal, moral and tactical imperative.

However…

Complete The Thought, Now…:  …self-defense is not combat, and it’s not police work.

As we pointed out in Monday’s piece, there are 3-4 criteria that a civilian – not a soldier in combat, or a cop on duty – must follow for a shooting to be considered legal self-defense [1].  And “hearing a shooting, and running to engage the shooter”, depending on your state and the zeal of the prosecutor, might very well violate two of them (“The Threat Must Be Immediate” and “Duty to Retreat”).

There’s a flip side to that; while hearing gunfire in the distance is chock full of nasty, lethal ambiguities, there are certain situations that are not ambiguous at all:

• Having a car pull up next to you (let’s say, for sake of argument, you’re a 120 pound woman), and a man climbs out and says “get in the car, bitch”
• The sound of someone trying to kick your back door in
• The sight of someone with a knife, approaching you and demanding money
• Someone right year you, walking through the mall or your church or your workplace, calmly shooting people, one after the other.

None of these situations are remotely ambiguous.  You don’t need military training, or police experience, or even to have an IQ above 75, to know exactly what is going on.  You need nothing special in terms of knowledge to know that each of these situations is an immediate threat to your life.  Right now.  

And you don’t need any special training (although practice and drilling and, yes, training certainly help) to respond.

Which brings us to the next non-sequitur:

Stephen Benson first learned during Navy SEAL training that carrying a gun would be more likely to expose him to gun violence.

That lesson directly contradicts the message promoted by the National Rifle Association and increasingly cited by gun owners as their motivation for buying a firearm, reported The Nation [There’s a freaking shock].

“It’s insane,” Benson said, recalling how his military training exposed the lie behind the most persistent pro-gun argument.

“We put on our issue .45s, and our instructor said, ‘Gentlemen, the first and most important thing you’ve done by putting on that weapon is you’ve increased your chances of being in a gunfight by 100 percent,’” he said.

[By the way – this last couple of paragraphs tripped my BS detector.  And as Joe Doakes showed in the comments, my BS detector is better than Raw Story’s, or my stalker’s.  See the UPDATE below]

After which the SEALS (who are not, to the best of my knowledge, “issued” .45s, although it’s entirely possible Mr. Benson went through “SEAL training” before 1985) did what?  Learned de-escalation techniques and put the guns away?

No – they learned how to win gunfights.  It’s their job.

For civilians, it is a non-sequitur; if you carry (concealed, usually – not openly, inviting a pre-emptive strike), it should decrease your chance of ever getting into a fight of any kind, since avoiding fights becomes an imperative.  It also decreases your chance of being defenseless against a lethal threat.  To zero?  No – sometimes it just doesn’t work, But the record is good: hundreds of justifiable homicides a year; tens of thousands of defensive gun uses, mostly with no shots fired; crime rates lowered with no gun use needed at all.

Said No Law Abiding Civilian Gun Owner, Ever:  The rest of the article is more of the same; this sort of thing:

“Unless it’s constantly drilled into you, it’s very hard to maintain discipline in those situations,” [former ATF agent and Vietnam veteran ]  told The Nation. “You’re immediately hit with a massive thump of adrenaline…conscious thought shuts down because you’ve been taken over by your nervous system, and your nervous system is saying, ‘Holy sh*t, things just got really bad.’”…“Someone can always say, ‘If your mother is being raped by 5 people, wouldn’t you want her to have a gun?’ Well, okay, if you put it that way, I’d say yes — but that’s not a likely scenario.”

Well, duh.  It’s not likely to happen to anyone’s given mom on any given day.  But if it’s any given mom, and that mom doesn’t wanna get raped, is Mr. Benson saying that there’s any ambiguity in the situation requiring any special training ?

Any at all?

 “The question is: If you see someone running out of a gas station with a gun in their hand, do you want an untrained person jumping out and opening fire?” the former ATF agent said. “For me, the answer is clearly ‘no.’”

Far be it from me to question the qualifications of an ATF agent – an elite, utterly-qualified federal agency that gave guns to narcotraficantes  but the “answer is clearly no” to any citizen with a carry permit and no badge, too.   Jumping out and firing at people who aren’t a direct threat to you can get you in trouble with the wrong prosecutor – and even, sometimes justifiably, the right ones.

Look – we get it.  If you have a heart attack as you’re walking down the aisle at Target, you’d like the first person to come along to be a cardiologist, not a receptionist with a cell phone and a six-months-old Red Cross first aid card.  If you’re is stranded in a blizzard, you’d like it to happen as you pull up to a Embassy Suites with a trunkful of “Free Evening With Champagne” coupons rather than in the middle of the prairie with a candle, a bag of Snickers bars and a space blanket.  And if you’re stuck in a room at your church when a pasty-faced forty-something loser in a “Minnesota Progressive Project” t-shirt barges in with a .25 automatic, you’d like there to just happen to be an off-duty cop with a service  Glock in the room with you rather than some random guy with a carry permit.

But if the only thing standing between you and personal extinction is that secretary, that candle and those snickers, or tha pudgy projectile-sweating middle-aged guy holding a pistol in his shaky hands, are you going to say “No! I choose death on priciple, you mere pretenders!”

I’m gonna guess not.

Especially since – all the derision from Raw Story The Nation notwithstanding – the regular schlemiel’s record is pretty good, all in all.

UPDATE:  Mr. Benson, the “SEAL”, who gave the spiel about the “Instructor” in “SEAL Training” that “warned him” about the risk of “gunfights” if he”carried a gun” like “SEALs” do, tripped my BS detector even as I quoted him.  I thought Mr. Benson sounded more like Heather Martens than Marcus Luttrell.

And as Joe Doakes pointed out in the comments– my BS detector is pretty darn good after all .  Mr. Benson, the “SEAL”, is a fraud.  He duped The Nation:

The original story identified a source as a combat veteran and former Navy SEAL. A records search has since revealed that he significantly exaggerated his military record. His comments have been removed from the article, and the headline has been changed. We apologize to our readers.

Of course, Raw Story doesn’t favor us with that factoid in their copy and paste job.  And my not-very-smart stalker is probably gonna find it a surprise as well.

(more…)

Airman First Class Spencer Stone – one of the heroes of last summer’s episode on the French train, when Stone and two American friends disarmed and subdued a Muslim terrorist with an assault rifle – has been stabbed in the chest.

Stone is apparently in stable condition.

Sacramento police said it was a random happenstance, not related to the incident in France.

Still looking to see if Homeland Security is rounding up “right wing terrorists” as suspects.