Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

North Korea claims to have detonated a nuclear weapon.  There is much consternation: a rogue state with an H-bomb would be dangerous.

The report is false.  It’s simply not possible.  President Clinton solved the problem of North Korea nuclear weapons decades ago.

And North Korea has nothing to do with Iran.  To even hint that President Obama is repeating Clinton’s mistake – that he’s not only enabling but actually funding a rogue state’s acquisition of a weapon of mass destruction – is totally raciss and therefore an unacceptable topic of discussion.

Joe Doakes

To the governing class, it’s not the facts that matter; merely that the process was followed.

In Charles C.W. Cooke’s fantastic piece in National Review last week on the power of emotion in the gun debate, he made an excellent point; facts and statistics aren’t enough.   This series is about making the case not in terms of statistics, but in terms of grabbing you in the freaking liver.

Den Velregulerede Hjemmeværnet:  In 1940, the Nazis conquered Denmark in less time than it takes to play an NFL football game.    One of the flattest, most featureless places in all of Europe, Denmark was a terrible place to try to form a resistance movement; it had no mountains like Norway, Yugoslavia or Greece or southern France; no wooded highlands like Poland; no forests like Russia or Ukraine; not even swamps like Belarus or urban warrens like Warsaw or Paris.  Like the Netherlands, the prospect of guerilla warfare in Denmark was about as appetizing as doing it in North Dakota, only with a tiny fraction of the space.

The foothills of the Stordenbjarl mountains, the most rugged geographic feature in central Denmark. Kidding. It’s a typical lane in rural Denmark. Quick, all you infantrymen out there; there’s an enemy column on the way. What do you do?

And yet the Danes resisted, passively and actively, occasionally to earth-shaking effect.   Fighting against many brutal handicaps, the Danes spawned a ferocious and cunning resistance.

British cavalrymen meeting with Danish resistance fighters near the end of the war.

And at the end of the war, when Denmark’s various constituencies gathered to reconstitute the Danish nation, the men and women who had fought in the Resistance had a seat at the table.

It was more than a token seat, and they weren’t there to make nice; the Resistance was intensely angry at King Christian X for surrendering the nation with only a token fight.  Christian had had his reasons, of course; Denmark was nearly demilitarized in 1940, and had few features other than the water between its islands to stop a modern military; Christian, seeing the foregone conclusion, wanted to spare the Danes the bloodbath that Europe had watched the Poles suffer seven months earlier.

Danish resistance fighters, in action against German holdouts in Copenhagen, 1945.

The former guerillas saw the results; trading freedom for security still left the Danes dispossessed in their own land.

And so when Denmark restructured itself in 1946, it rebuilt its military around four basic branches; the traditional Army, Navy, Air Force…

…and a fourth branch, the Hjemmeværnet, or Home Guard.  The branch specifically traced its roots to the resistance, alone among Europe’s militaries (although infantry regiments in the Netherlands and Belgium  trace their lineages to their various resistance movements).  And among the missions stated in the Home Guard’s charter, other than the obvious stuff about defending the nation from invasion and serving as the nucleus of a guerrilla movement against any future occupiers, was to prevent any future Danish government from betraying the nation and its people.

Mary – the Danish Crown Princess – in Home Guard marksmanship training.

To serve, in short, as a “well-regulated militia” for “the protection of the free state”.

No, they weren’t lifting the Second Amendment; the Hjemmeværnet’s charter existed for purely Danish reasons.   And since the end of the Cold War, that particular proviso in the Hjemmeværnet’s DNA has been shuffled further and further to the back of the political stove.  For the past two decades, that aspect of the Home Guard has gotten less and less emphasis.

But it existed for reasons that resonate with many other societies.

Israel, surrounded and outnumbered 100-1 by people that vowed to drive them into the sea (and most of them still do), has armed nearly every able-bodied member of their population.

Israeli reservists, present and future.

And those citizens are indeed part of a national military, rather than a decentralized “militia” – but a military constituted on the ideal that it’s the citizen’s responsibility to defend the freedom (and, in Israel’s case, sanctuary) they have.  Military service is an intrinsic part of Israeli civic duty.

The Israeli system (as well as that of Singapore and Finland) was borrowed from Switzerland, where most adult men (and since 1972, many women) have kept their service (and non-service) weapons at home, entirely to deter invastion from the nations that surround them.

Swiss beginning their National Service hitch.

They’re on friendly terms today – but 75 years ago, they were not.

Norway has a similar Home Guard – the vast bulk of the strength of Norway’s military.  And while they don’t have the same constitutional internal focus as Denmark’s (Norway’s monarchy escaped the Nazis and fought without cease until liberation), Norway’s post-war constitution not only specifically directed the military to disobey any orders from the monarchy, administration or parliament that would betray Norwegian sovereignty, but the posted the specific provision and directive in every Norwegian military office, barracks and installation until long after the Cold War ended.

Norwegian Home Guard on maneuvers

In other words, each of these nations, and peoples, discovered a few key points about their freedom, independence and sovereignty:

• It truly is not free.  The Voltairean perfect world does not exist.  Left to their own devices, there are plenty of people and governments in this world who will seize your independence, your freedom, and your lives, to say nothing of your stuff.  None of those things defend themselves; coherent philosophies, brave words and noble intentions certainly don’t do it, or Norway, the Netherlands and Denmark would never have been invaded in 1940!
• It takes people with guns, when worse comes to worst.  Which is why we have governments.
• But you can’t always trust your government to defend your freedom; indeed, the historical record of standing militaries actually defending freedom is really bad.  And even when your government isn’t, well, evil, sometimes they make lousy decisions.

Rerun:  Of course, those were things our founding fathers knew 200-odd years ago; that any whiff of Voltairean “ideal state” we managed to wrench from this Hobbsian world would have to be done by non-ideal means; that not only was the permanent government and its military at best an imperfect instrument for ensuring freedom, any government was just a hair-trigger (as it were) from doing just the opposite.

And so in an ugly, awful world, the best guarantor of freedom was, in fact, a people who had the means to not only protect it from external enemies, but ensure their government doesn’t seize it, or just deal it away out of real or imagined expediency.

The Danes learned the hard way what our founding fathers predicted in 1793.

And protecting that legacy is an integral part of the intellectual DNA of every single Real American that fights for the Second Amendment today.

To sum it all up in a sentence: – it’s not about the guns.  It’s about defending our freedom.

This Series:

• Part I:  “History“
• Part II:  Enemies Foreign and Domestic
• Part III, Tomorrow:  The Public Good
• Part IV, Thursday: The Underdog

If you live in Senate District 35, it’s Primary day today.

And I urge you to get out and vote for Andy Aplikowski.

I almost never “endorse” candidates – but I’m going to urge those of you who live in 35 to vote for Andy. He’s a long-time friend of this blog, a former mayor of the MOB, and more importantly, a solid conservative who will do is bit to keep moving the Senate to the right.

It’s a very red district – so, in effect, the election is happening today.  If the Democrats field someone, it’ll basically be a warm body on the ballot for appearance’s sake.

He’s running in the primary against former long-time State representative Jim Abeler. Abeler’s a good guy; he’s been right on a lot of issues (he was as solid Second Amendment guy as they come). But he was a reliable vote for spending more money; he was one of the “Override Six” back in 2007, which voted to override Governor Pawlenty’s veto of the DFL’s epochal gas tax hike.

Anyway – get out and vote for Andy!

2014 – Sexual Assaults (on campus, a “crisis” of baked statistics and many hoaxes):  Huge crisis for Western Civilization.

2016 – Gangs of roaming men, carrying out various degrees of sexual assaults in a coordinated, planned wave of terror?   Let’s not get carried away, people!

I mean, when David Frum gets it…

…they are misinformed (at best) or lying.

Real Americans can never, ever give one inch on registration – via the front or back doors.

…did gun control fail.   Civilian guns are pretty much trayf in Canada.

The question is not were the two shooters acting in the interest of Jihad.

No.  The question is “How will Kim Norton try to blame this on the law-abiding gun owners of Minnesota”.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Muslim asylum seekers who flooded into Germany are being blamed for crimes far in excess of their proportional representation in the population.
“Last month, the interior ministry in the large south-west state of Baden-Wurttemberg published figures on criminal offences committed by asylum seekers between January and November 2015.

They made alarming reading. Asylum seekers represent one per cent of the population of the state but were involved in five per cent (27,255) of all registered crimes, among them 1,000 cases of grievous bodily harm, 22 of attempted murder, and 700 of domestic burglary. The highest number of offenders were Syrians, committing 5,576 of the offences.
Andre Schulz, head of Germany’s criminal police association, said recently that in his experience 10 per cent of the migrants would turn to criminality, including theft, sexual assault or drug dealing.”

SITD readers know that singling out one minority group for punishment is discrimination and the St. Paul School method is the only fair way to go:  stop arresting Muslim men, regardless how many offenses they commit, and release as many convicted criminals from jail as required to achieve proportional representation.

Joe Doakes

It no way contradictory to say “most Muslim immigrants may be perfectly fine additions to American society” and “an unprecedented, large minority believe in murder and rape as instruments of jihad, and are out to do just that”.

In Charles C.W. Cooke’s fantastic piece in National Review last week on the power of emotion in the gun debate, he made an excellent point; facts and statistics aren’t enough.

We Real Americans absolutely crush the gun-grabbers at every turn on the facts and the statistics.

And it shows; the American people are casting off the detritus of decades of leftist, statist propaganda; gun control is now a minority position (and while support for gun control even at the worst was a mile wide and an inch deep, America’s shooters are passionate and committed), and the NRA is more popular than President Obama.

But it goes way beyond facts.

So this week, I’m going to leave statistics aside for a moment, mostly, and focus on the the philosophical, historical, and yes, emotional reasons to support the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

(more…)

David Jones – who had to change his surname to “Bowie” after the Monkees debuted in the UK, almost fifty years ago – passed away yesterday, way too early, at age 69.

He’s been a longtime candidate for one of my “Things I’m Supposed To Love…” bits.  I have always been ambivalent about Bowie’s music – and like a lot of music I started out as ambivalent about, it’s probably something I should look into further.

Historically?  It probably doesn’t help that I first encountered Bowie at at time when he was at his most pretentious – and I was, personally, at my most pretentious in my disdain for pretense.  And even some of his biggest fans will cop to the fact that, especially earlier in his career, a lot of style had to cover for not all that much substance; he started out as a pretty rudimentary lyricist.  And, duh – rock and roll is more about style than substance; never let anyone tell you rock and roll is “poetry set to music”; it’s doggerel set to music slathered in style!

But it wasn’t my style.

So one way or another, Bowie had very little music that really, truly grabbed me where I lived, at least initially.

But it’s not quite that simple.  It never is with music, is it?

(more…)

One of the mixed blessings of being involved with an issue – the human right to self-defense – as long as I have is that every couple of years, I’m treated to the spectacle of a whole new generation of gun-grabbers excitedly making arguments that they just know are going to send the Real Americans scurrying for mama…

…not realizing that they are probably the fourth or fifth generation of gun grabbers I’ve heard use the argument since I started.

“Put a 1000% tax on bullets?  You mean like Patrick Moynihan proposed in the seventies the National Coalition to Ban Handguns talked about in the eighties, and Chris Rock in the nineties?  No, ma’am, that one’s new to me.   Does that also mean that the First Amendment protects speech, but that the government can regulate newsprint, or that it protects freedom to worship, but the government can censor the Bible, the Torah and the Quran?  That the Fourth Amendment says we can be secure in our papers and possessions, but that we need to give the cops a master key to our front door because it’s not made of paper?”

That one’s been pretty beaten down again; it’ll be another generation – 3-5 years, in gun-grabber terms (Heather Martens notwithstanding, although she makes the same “arguments” every generation anyway) before we hear that one.

The other one that pops up every time a new wave of naive proto-statists takes the stage is “the founders never envisioned assault rifles”.  Which might be true – but while everyone from Leonardo DaVinci to James Puckle had designed firearms that were conceptually similar to “assault weapons” by 1789, the founders hadn’t the faintest inkling of lithography, radio, television, the Internet, chat rooms, Craig’s List, megachurches, the supercomputer, the NSA, electronic surveillance, photo-cops, photography itself, the electric chair, standing municipal police forces, cradle-to-grave social welfare, the Internal Revenue Service and do you still really want to go there, Ms. “Progressive?”

The point, of course, is one that I also sometimes get so far down in the weeds of the minutiae of the subject that I miss it; the Founders, in their much-greater-wisdom-than-today’s-brand-of-bobbleheads, wrote the Constitution not to guarantee things, but to guarantee broad, unalienable rights.

Charles C. W. Cooke had the reminder I needed:

Because, our contemporary rhetorical habits notwithstanding, the right to keep and bear arms is not so much a right in and of itself as an auxiliary mechanism that protects the real unalienable right underneath: that of self-defense. By placing a prohibition on strict gun control into the Constitution, the Founders did not accidentally insert a matter of quotidian rulemaking into a statement of foundational law; rather, they sought to secure a fundamental liberty whose explicit recognition was the price of the state’s construction. To understand this, I’d venture, is to understand immediately why the people of these United States remain so doggedly attached to their weapons. At bottom, the salient question during any gun-control debate is less “Do you think people should be allowed to have rifles?” and more “Do you think you should be permitted to take care of your own security?”

And to a large – and, at its logical conclusion, disgusting – part of our population, the answer is “isn’t the state’s security more important?”

Which is what we’re fighting, here.

Read Cooke’s entire article.  It’s a good primer for the battles we’ll face in the coming year.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Remember this photo?

Boko Harum, a band of Muslim terrorists, kidnapped 300 Christian girls and sold them into sexual slavery, citing as justification an interpretation of the Koran that permits sexual relations with captured infidel women.  The kidnappers were not ashamed because they believed their actions were morally justified.  Mrs. Obama’s sign is an indicator of her abject cluelessness about the cause of the problem and the solution to prevent it in the future.
On New Year’s Eve, there were hundreds of groping incidents in European cities, some outright rapes, all reportedly committed by recent immigrants from North Africa/Middle East, men who are overwhelmingly Muslim and who believe infidel Nordic women who fail to cover their bodies are acting like whores just asking for sex.  So they got it.  What’s the problem?
Naturally, European women are outraged that Muslim men behave like Muslim men.  But what led Europe to this level of cluelessness?  People like this woman, protesting after New Year.

Wishful thinking, lady.  There won’t be any hard-body Arabs in your future, they’re after your daughter and granddaughter and there won’t be anything respectful about it.
But hey, they have a government to protect women from sexual assault, right?  So what’s the government recommend?  The Mayor of Koln tells women to stay arms’-length away from men you don’t know, travel in groups, and don’t drink to excess.  In other words, it’s not the rapists’ fault, ladies, it’s your own fault: you were acting like whores just asking for sex and you got it.
Okay, good to know.
Joe Doakes

The best single article you’ll read about Rape Jihad, anywhere, end of sentence, is Andrew McCarthy’s piece on the Cologne rape attacks on New Years, fittingly titled “Unassimilable Muslim Migrants Crash Europe’s Fantasy Islam“.

We’ll be coming back to this article, later in the week, in re the “fantasy Islam” bit – a fantasy shared by Mark Dayton, Betsy Hodges, and a whole lot of otherwise well-meaining Minnesotans.

Blanketed in snow, the fortress at Erzurum looked almost peaceful.  In reality, with 235 pieces of field artillery, and 11 different forts and gun batteries, after Constantinople, Erzurum was the most heavily defended city in the Ottoman Empire.  Indeed, it was one of the most heavily defended cities in all of the Great War.

Within the forts sat 40,000 Ottoman soldiers; a mix of veterans from the Caucasus campaigns of early 1915 and young recruits.  Behind them sat another nearly 90,000 Ottoman troops of the massive Third Army.  Nestled in the safety of one of the most complex defensive systems in the world, and surrounded by snow banks as high as four feet in some places, the last thing the Ottomans worried about on January 10th, 1916 was a Russian attack.

A month later, Erzurum would be in Russian hands and 15,000 Turks had been left behind.

—

Russian troops with captured Turkish guns at Erzurum

At the beginning of 1916, the confidence of the Ottoman army was high and growing higher.  After starting the Great War with a failed offensive against the Suez Canal, and a debacle against the Russians in the Caucasus, the fortunes of the 600-year old empire had markedly improved.  They had won tremendous victories against the British in Gallipoli and Mesopotamia, and were in the process of capturing an entire British/Indian army at Kut.    (more…)

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Minnesota is no longer a Christian state (if, indeed, it ever was).  We have homosexual marriage.  Sodomy, fornication and adultery are still crimes on the books but never enforced because of court decisions or prosecutor’s policies.  We have legal gambling, eat shellfish, and covet our neighbor’s goods (Hell, the entire DFL party platform is based on coveting they neighbors goods).  We curse, shave our faces, drink strong liquor, eat pork, suffer witches to live, sow fields with hybrid seeds and wear cotton/wool blend sox.  We kill our unborn children, get tattoos and work on the Sabbath.  There’s very little left of the Biblical list of profane acts that aren’t commonplace in Minnesota.

Why not legalize prostitution, tax it, license it, regulate it, use the money to pay for early childhood education or midnight basketball or any of the myriad feel-good programs we’ve adopted to replace morality?

Some are forced into prostitution?  Well, yes, now, because it’s an illegal, underground activity where there are no unions and no inspectors.  Bring it into the open, subject employers to OSHA and Fair Labor Standards, let the workers organize and give the government a financial incentive to crack down on slavers who don’t pay taxes – that problem will go the way of child labor and indentured servitude.

All we have to lose is our souls.

Joe Doakes

The DFL would have the profession unionized and be mining it for graft right out of the gate.  Guaraneed.

Details on MN Gun Owners Lobbying Day.

Here’s the AbelerTruth website.

And of course, ♫ here’s today’s music playlist.  

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air! I will be on live from 1-3PM today!

Today on the show,

• Andrew Rothman of GOCRA, about the Town Hall Meeting, the upcoming session, and Minnesota Gun Owners Lobbying Day.
• We’ll talk with Senator Dave Osmek about the SD35 Special Election.

Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on Business Radio 1440, and Brad Carlson has “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!

I went to a “watching party” to check out President Obama’s town hall meeting on guns last night.

Just a couple observations.

Huh?:  Anderson Cooper was actually pretty good; he kept Obama on his toes with a couple of lines of questioning.

For that matter, the President actually did his best to curb his condescending inner Ivy Leaguer.  Perhaps it’s because his popularity is lower than the NRA’s.

Didja Catch The License Number On That Truck?:  It took a second for this picture…

…to sink in.  Let’s zoom in:

CNN has eschewed the neutral, euphemistic “Gun Safety” or “Gun Violence” for the more accurate “Gun Control”.

I’m amazed, frankly.

The Reason For The Meeting?:  Every day we’re talking – and talking, and talking – about guns, we’re not talking about the First Husband Presumptive.

And now it all comes clear.

Elvis Presley was born 81 years ago today.

And while normally I’d write something…

…to talk about why it mattered to me (because that’s who the blog is about, after all)…

…I figure I’ll just throw some vids out there – including a fairly cool fifties-era live vid from the decks of the USS Hancock, which I’d never seen…

…and let Sheila O’Malley – a certifiable Elvis fanatic – do the writing – including this piece here, on what may be one of his best performances, “If I Can Dream”, the finale from his legendary 1968 “comeback” special:

Happy 81st, Elvis!

I was among the conservatives who shook their heads in (in my case) muted mockery during the President’s “gun grab” speech on Tuesday.

Like most shooters, I’ve prided myself for decades on being able to run factual rings around gun grabbers, whether they be politicians or activists, without breaking a sweat; about knowing their case better than they did; about being able to meet challenges like this with a humble “well, actually, not much here surprises me”.   Ever since I was a 24 year old kid with a talk show at KSTP in 1986, I’ve happily made the grabbers look like the ignorant, emotion-based naifs that the imponderably vast majority of them are.

But a lawyer friend of mine once told me an attorney’s adage; “When the law is against you, argue facts; when the facts are against you, argue the law; when they’re both against you, argue like hell”.  In other words, accentuate the positive; play to your strengths.

All the gun-grabber movement has is emotion – so the President plays emotion.

And as David French cautions, “emotional” isn’t necessarily bad politics.   I’m going to add some emphasis here and there:

And while I don’t think this campaign will work, it is incumbent on gun-owners to persist in making the moral case for carrying a firearm. Too often we find ourselves locked into wars over statistics — comparing gun violence across national and cultural boundaries, examining the effectiveness of a particular gun-control measure, or measuring the lives saved by the use of personal weapons in self-defense against the lives taken through suicide and homicide. But gun ownership is about values that are far deeper than any set of statistics.

That last sentence?  Read and absorb.

Gun ownership goes to the heart of what it means to be a responsible citizen in our constitutional republic. It goes to the heart of what it means to be a responsible parent or spouse. It isn’t merely about hunting, or the joy of an afternoon at the firing range, or “looking tough.” It isn’t about fear. It’s about autonomy, independence, and a deep and self-sacrificial regard for the lives of those you love. It’s about exercising the fundamental human right to defend oneself and others. And that can’t be stressed enough, unless we want “gun culture” to live on in ever-shrinking regional enclaves, with each generation bowing just a bit lower to a relentless, motivated political and cultural elite.

I worry, at times, that Real Americans have gotten complacent; many of today’s shooters weren’t around, or don’t remember, the nadir of the late seventies through the early nineties – when gun-grabbers ran the show, when Real Americans were a minority in fact as well as perception.

Never again.

Barack Obama won’t be the last president to feel this deeply about gun control, and his tears reflect the deep feelings of millions of Americans, including those who effectively control the entertainment consumed by millions more. Politics are downstream from culture. We ignore that reality at our own risk.

This is going to be a big subject tomorrow on the NARN, and next week on the blog.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

See, we need to get rid of this concealed carry law cause this is what happens.  Shots going off in Target because somebody with a concealed handgun …….

Yeah, except that he was a felon ineligible to possess a gun, clearly didn’t have a carry permit.  But let’s not have that cloud the discussion on the need for more gun control to take guns away from permit holders and other legally owning guns.

Joe Doakes

Remember – according to Rep. Kim Norton, if law-abiding citizens can’t carry guns at the Capitol, there will be no risk of mass shootings.

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is walking out of the downtown Saint Paul Dunn Brothers coffee. He runs into Chuck DUUUUHHHH,  third-shift Twitter operator for “Minnesotans for Rand Paul”.

DUUUUHHHH:  Hey, Merg!  Did you seen the NEWS of the hotel FIRE in DOOBBAI?

BERG:   Well, yeah – but before we get to that, I gotta say I’m amazed that you actually talk like you type on Facebook and Twitter, with occasional interjections in all caps.

DUUUUHHHH:   Ha HAH.  So there was a building fire, but it wasn’t hot ENOUGH to melt STEEL.  Why DIDN’T the hotel fall TO the ground?

BERG:  Because the fire was apparently in the cladding, on the facade, and never had a chance to weaken the structural steel.

DUUUUHHHH:  Because steel melts at 2000 DEGREES FARRENHEIGHT, and so it didn’t LIQUIFY the GIRDLES.

BERG:  Girders.

DUUUUHHHH:  THAT is your opinion!

BERG:  Sure, whatever.

DUUUUHHHH:  So by your logic, since it wasn’t not enough TO liquify steel, the HOTEL should HAVE fallen to the ground! Like Building SEVEN!

BERG:  That’s kinda a non-sequitur.

DUUUUHHHH:  That’s JUST your opinion!  You’re not an engineer!

BERG:  No, that’s true.  But I have some command of basic logic.   Look – you see to be of the opinion that if every skyscraper fire doesn’t end in a complete implosion, then 9/11 was an inside job.

DUUUUHHHH:  Don’t be a sheeple!   The GOVERNMENT lies to people all THE time!  Why would a building fall when jet fuel doesn’t burn hot enough to melt steel?

BERG:  Sure, government lies. No argument

But steel doesn’t have to melt to be a problem. Steel loses its strength and becomes basically pliable hundreds of degrees below its melting point:

DUUUUHHHH: He’s no engineer!~ And that doesn’t explain why all three BUILDINGS fell inside their FOOTPRINCE.

BERG: All three buildings transferred their weight via a web of girders to their central cores, which transferred the weight to the ground. Since the weight is all going down the middle of the building, where would you expect them to fall?

DUUUUHHHH:  That’s just your opinion!  You’re JUST closing your mind to all the engineers AND physicists who QUESTION the OFFFICIAL 9/11 story!

BERG:  And you’re closing yours to the many engineers who point out that steel bends at a lower temp than jet fuel burns, and that buildings fall in the direction their weight transfers, absent some other force.

DUUUUHHHH:  But you’re ignoring the fact THAT steel melts at 2000 degrees!

BERG: I answered that above.

DUUUUHHHH:  And why did all three buildings FALL INSIDE their own footprint?

BERG:  We just talked about that.

DUUUUHHHH:  And why DID THE buildings collapse when the TEMPERATURE wasn’t enough TO LIQUIFY steel?

BERG:  Um…?

DUUUUHHHH:  And without getting STEEL UP to 2000 degrees, it had to be a controlled demolition, OTHERWISE how do you explain the building FALLING IN its footprint?

BERG slowly tiptoes away. 

And SCENE.

GOCRA goes all MST3K on the President’s misty-eyed gun speech:

Watch it, and pass it along.

A civilian gun saves the day – again:

Claxton said she was in the vehicle with her four young children while her husband was pumping the gas.

Claxton said she reached over to try to lock the doors as the man approached, but she accidentally rolled down the window. Claxton said the man opened the door, leaned into the car and brandished a long knife.

Claxton said she yelled for her husband, Matt, to get his gun, and the man then began to leave.

“He said ‘You’re lucky he has a gun,'” Claxton said. “And then he shut the door and started to back away.”

Claxton said her husband pointed his Beretta handgun at the man and called 911 as the man slowly walked away.

The couple followed the man as he attempted several carjackings to try to escape, before the police finally caught him.

So – if you’re one of those people who believe one has a “right not to be killed”, then the parents did a good job of exercising that right.  Correct?

To: Democrat Party

From: Mitch Berg, cantankerous peasant

Re: A Heartfelt Request

Do you Democrats,

Please, please, please, please please please nominate Bernie Sanders for president.

He is the only candidate genuinely acceptable to real progressives – and you are real progressive, aren’t you?

Just saying – given Senator Sanders keen grasp of the issues, it be insane not to nominate him.

Right?

That is all.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

President Obama supposedly issued some Executive Orders relating to guns.  Both sides are in an uproar.  But wait – what did he actually do?

The White House has a website, naturally.  It lists all Executive Orders.  There are no new orders relating to guns.

Okay, well, maybe the orders were issued but staff is slow updating the website?  No, his speeches and remarks are right up-to-date.

So maybe they’re not technically Executive Orders, maybe they’re some other Presidential Action?  Doesn’t look like it.  The only new Presidential Action relating to guns is a memo directing the AG and the Army telling them to put together a research proposal to investigate the possibility of inventing some future technology that might make guns safer someday.

The White House did post a FACT SHEET about guns.  It refers to Executive Actions.  Is that the same as Executive Orders?  Apparently not.  Looking through the Actions, we find:

 

1. ATF is finalizing a rule clarifying who needs an FFL to sell a gun.  The federal rule-making process is a well-established procedure for making administrative law, this isn’t a spontaneous action by the President

2. The Attorney General sent a letter telling states to follow the law and also held a conference call.  That’ll take a bite out of crime.

3. The FBI will hire more people to do background checks.  Good, they’ll need help processing all the applications generated by panic over the media’s reporting of the President’s unconstitutional power grab – which doesn’t seem to have happened, yet.  Keep reading.

4. Democrats want to spend more money, $500 million for mental health care.  This is, in fact, the right place to spend money because the mental health system is a disgrace that all too often leads to tragedy; but considering the history of Democrat spending, I’m not convinced any of the money actually will reach the mentally ill.  Instead, I fear it’ll end up being block grants to mental health advocacy groups who will hold picket signs and issue press releases demanding . . . another $500 million.

5. Social Security will begin the rulemaking process to strip seniors of their right to self-defense, if they mis-manage their finances. Rulemaking takes forever and mis-managing your finances isn’t the same as posing a danger to yourself of others.  I doubt that proposal will go anywhere.

6. DHS is finishing up rulemaking to clarify that HIPPA does not prevent shrinks from reporting psychos to the background check folks.  Rulemaking, again, not bold new initiatives to make playgrounds safer.

7. ATF is proposing a rule to outlaw gun trusts used to hold title to machine guns, which have been used to kill exactly zero children and will do precisely nothing to make Americans safer.  More rulemaking, wait and see.

8. ATF issued a final a rule that gun dealers who lose a gun in transit must report it.  Not controversial, everybody supports that.

Frankly, I don’t see that the President did anything today.  This looks more like a publicity stunt to rally the base and deflect attention away from other administration failures, at home and abroad.  This Presidency started with vacuous promises of hope and change but it’s ending with tearful press conferences about memos and conference calls.  It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad.

Joe Doakes

It does indeed look to be shaping up that way.

I was listening to a segment on MPR with Tom Weber, interviewing Bryan Strawser of the MN Gun Owners Political Action Committee about President Obama’s big gun speech.

But one of the callers reminded me of a pet peeve that’s developed over the years of listening to gun control activists.  It was a woman from Sioux Falls, who said…

…well, we’ll come back to that.

But First:  If a thunderstorm springs up, do you have a right to take your family out for a walk without being hit by lightning?

Of course not.  You have…:

• A responsibility to not endanger your family
• The free will to decide if you’re going to take a walk in the rain (and lightning, and maybe hail)
• The means to avoid the rain, hail and lightning by staying inside.

But what if humans are involved?

Do you have a right to drive your kids to the mall and not get struck by another car?

No.   What you have is…

• A responsibility as a driver and as a parent to assess the risks inherent in driving your family in a car.  At 2PM on a Saturday afternoon, those are probably pretty low.  At bar closing time on Saint Patrick’s Day, probably less low.
• A moral imperative as a citizen and moral being not to endanger other people via your own behavior on the road.
• An obligation to use all prudent means to keep your family, passengers and the rest of the driving public safe; wear seatbelts, put your small children in car seats, carry insurance, maintain your vehicle, drive defensively, prudently and without distractions.
• You have legal recourse if someone breaks the law and violates the principles above, and damages your vehicle or harms you or your passengers.  Law enforcement may also have something to say about it.

You have a right to try to drive your kids to the mall.   It is your responsibility to see to it that you get there and back safely.

Anyway:  The woman from Sioux Falls referred to something I hear from a lot of less-informed people on the issue – most of whom, I suspect, are repeating a chanting point that neither they nor the person they heard it from understands all that well.

“My kids have a right not to get shot”.

No, ma’am.  They do not.

Nobody has a right to shoot them, it’s true (let’s assume “self-defense” is off the table).

But there is no “right not to get shot” .

You have…:

• Moral imperatives to:
  • Not kill innocent people yourself
  • Avoid being in a position where “violent death” is a significant likelihood.  As much publicity as rampage and spree killings get, you are still vastly more likely to be a homicide statistic if you’re involved in a life of crime
  • Keep your children out of danger – whether it’s not hanging out among drug dealers, or being observant of the situation around you as you go about your law-abiding business.
• A common sense imperative to avoid places where lethal trouble might break out, and be observant about the situation around you.
• A responsibility to see to your own safety by whatever means you deem (as a responsible, law-abiding adult) necessary and your worldview finds acceptable.  That can mean anything from pure pacifism (being OK with giving up your stuff, and maybe your life, rather than resorting to violence) to avoidance, to prudent preparations for self-defense.   For some, that means developing the ability to deter or counterattack against violent attack.
• A responsibility to see to your family’s safety.   What does that mean?  Oh, boy, is that complicated.  Do your kids go to a school full of kids in black trench coats who listen to Slipknot?  You might wanna look into their environment.  Do your kids to go a school where the official response to the possibility (remote!) of a spree shooter is to hand out suspensions for talking about spree shooters?  You may need to have a talk with your principal, as fraught as that can be.  (I had a conversation with my kids’ principal after 9/11 – and it was depressing indeed).

Too picky about semantics?  Probably.

But even if there is a “right not to get shot”?   Like all other rights, it’s your responsibility to know how to practice it, and your imperative to protect it.  Because nobody is obliged to do it for you.