Heather Martens – “Director” and likely sole member of “Protect Minnesota”, and sometimes ad-hoc legislative representative from House District 66A – has sent out a fund-raising email.
Because trying to squat on peoples’ civil rights isn’t cheap, even if you do it badly.
And in this email, Martens – who has never, not once, uttered a single, substantive, original true statement about the Second Amendment, gun owners or guns in her career – gives us a little surprise.
Here’s the fundraising letter:
Dear Friend,
In Colorado on Halloween morning, a woman called 911 when she saw a black man walking down the street. During the six-minute call, the dispatcher lectured the caller on the fact that it is legal in Colorado to be a black man walking in public. Then black man started shooting people. He murdered three people before being killed by police, when they finally arrived on the scene.
Can you support Protect Minnesota on Give to the Max Day, to fight the laws that enable such black people to perpetrate such tragedies?
[Several paragraphs of bla bla bla about PMs purported accomplishments]
Thank you for all you do,
Heather Martens
Executive Director
Protect Minnesota: Working to End Gun Violence
“Wait – did Heather Martens actually send out a letter saying that a woman called in to report a black man walking down the street?”
Of course not. Even a director at a PC non-profit can’t get away with that – unless they’re talking about Ben Carson or Tim Scott.
No – where you see references to “black man” in the letter above, fill in “a man carrying a gun”. Here’s the actual fundraising email from Martens. In the episode Martens writes about, a woman called 911 about someone openly carrying a firearm. The 911 operator told the woman that it’s legal to open-carry in Colorado…
…and something else. This story has a twist at the end.
Put a pin in that. We’ll come back to it.
Then, six minutes into the 911 call about a man carrying a gun, something illegal happened – the man started shooting. People died. It was a tragedy.
But here’s the rub; Martens wants the police to respond to someone doing something they have every right to do, in a place they have every right to do it. And they want them to do it when they know full well that the overwhelming majority of people who open-carry firearms are utterly and completely legal, and will never break a single law.
Martens thinks the police should respond to her fear, her paranoia, and her bigotry about people doing what they do, utterly legally, because of her paranoid assumption that a guy with a gun is a crime waiting to happen – which is not even a little bit different than assuming a black guy is a crime waiting to happen.
And that alone is reason to mock the hapless Martens.
But there’s more. Heather Martens also lied.
Details, Details: Buried further down in the fundraising letter, we see this little bon mot; emphasis is added:
:45 Naomi Bettis calls to report that she sees a man on her street carrying a big black rifle and several cans of gasoline. Over six minutes of conversation, she relays to the dispatcher the activities and a description of the man, noting that he had gone into another building and then emerged also carrying a handgun. She tells the dispatcher that she is “scared to death.”
So it turns out that Ms. Bettis not only called in to report the legal and overwhelmingly unremarkable fact that the man had a gun, but also the fact that he was carrying gasoline and acting suspiciously.
As, by the way, she should have.
And then the dispatcher responded…:
The dispatcher relates to her “It is an open carry state, so he can have a weapon with him or walking around with it. But, of course, having those cans of gasoline it does seem pretty suspicious, so we’re going to keep the call going for that.”
So in other words, the police responded to Ms. Bettis’ call, exactly as if they’d have responded to the killer’s legal behavior. The dispatcher acted correctly, and the police responded to the part of Ms. Bettis’ call that actually addressed something objectively and legally worthy of a response given the facts at the time, exactly as they’d have done if carrying the gun had been the act they responded to.
Martens lied about the content of the phone call, and about the police response, to give the misleading impression that Colorado’s open carry law led to the deaths of innocent people.
It’s misleading, and it’s cowardly. It’s a lie.
And yet the news media uses her as a source, without question.
Question For The Media: It’s not a new one. It’s the same one I ask every time Martens pulls a stunt like this.
When I was a reporter, we learned that when a source burns you, especially multiple times, you stop using them as a source. At the very least, you get lots of corroboration.
Heather Martens has burned you. She’s burned you so often that the parts of the Minnesota media that care about accuracy and credibility have quietly started downplaying, or burying, her side of the story below that of credible sources like Joe Olson, Andrew Rothman and Bryan Strawser.
But if you’re one of those who still puts Heather’s stuff out there unquestioned, I have to ask you – why?
Ignorance? Call me. Email me. I’ll show you the problem.
Not ignorance? Then I really wanna talk with you.
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