If you read the headlines – and the shrill gun-control groups who provide them to the media – you’d think it’d never been more dangerous to be in a school.

And usual when getting  your information about the Second Amendment, guns, gun crime, gun laws and gun facts, yoiu’d be wrong.  Schools – like the rest of society – are safer now than they were twenty years ago:

Four times the number of children were killed in schools in the early 1990s than today, Fox said.

“There is not an epidemic of school shootings,” he said, adding that more kids are killed each year from pool drownings or bicycle accidents. There are around 55 million school children in the United States, and on average over the past 25 years, about 10 students per year were killed by gunfire at school, according to Fox and Fridel’s research.

Yes, yes, one is too many,   But if the rate of shootings in schools is off by 3/4, and the rate in general socieity is off by 1/2 in the same time, then schools are getting safer, faster.

Which is of course why Big Left is pushing the “More Dangerous Than Ever” meme – because it’s not about making kids safer.  It’s about the culture war.

DFL Rep.  Dave PInto abused a House rule to get Linda Slocum’s “Give Up Your Guns” Act to a publc hearing.

The hearing is tomorrow morning at the State Office Building, kitty-corner southwest of the Capitol.

The Dreamsicles are going to try to pack the chamber – and given the money they spend on profesisonal organization, they’ll make a good run at it.

The good guys have to beat the Orcs.   While the bill likely isn’t going anywhere (not this session, anyway), it is out there to froth up the Metro DFL base for an election where they’ve got some challenges.  The optics of having a GOP-controlled Public Safety Commttee faciong a roomful of ELCA-haired duffers and hissing hipsters and Edina yentas in orange would be propaganda gold come election time.

So it’s time for Real Americans to come out.

MNGOC has the details here:

Thursday at 10:15 AM – 12:45 PM
100 Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr Blvd, St Paul, MN 55155-1200, United States

Come down as early as you can – 8AM isn’t out of line, earlier is better.  Of course it’s short notice; I’m 50-50 at best, myself, and that’s if things go well today.

But every warm body we can get into a seat in that chamber – hopefully wearing one of the classic GOCRA or new Gun Owners Caucus t-shirts – will be a win over Michael Bloomberg’s propaganda machine.

This won’t be the last time we’ll have to try to turn out the troops – but it’s an important one.

Please give it  your best shot.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

We are told ordinary citizens don’t need guns, we shouldn’t try to defend ourselves, we should leave it to the professionals who have training and experience to do the job safely and correctly.

In other words:  “Trust us, we’re from the government and we’re here to help.”

The School Resource Officer who hid outside the school instead of engaging the shooter inside, resigned in disgrace.  He’s not the only Deputy who hid and waited.  The Coral Springs PD walked past three more cowering deputies to go into the school looking for the shooter.  And that’s after years of warnings were ignored.  No wonder the sheriff wants to blame Trump and the NRA for this disaster. The officer who resigned may be the only honorable person in that whole department.

And I’m not sure he’s being justly blamed.  Think of the TSA screeners at the airport.  All federal law enforcement people, supposedly there to protect the public from terrorists. They put on a big show of confiscating a two-inch pen knife and badgering anybody making jokes about bombs, but imagine the Florida shooter had skipped school to show up at the airport.  Imagine he had started shooting at people standing in the rope line, or taking off their shoes.  How many of those TSA screeners would have charged the gunman?  I suspect the answer is “none,” because they’re not warriors, they’re window dressing, and everybody knows it.

Same as the School Resource Officer.  He might be a sworn peace officer carrying a pistol but God help him if he shot a kid causing trouble , if he pulled a weapon on one, or even spoke sharply to him.  Jesse Jackson would be on the first plane and Gloria Allred would be in the seat right next to him.  The school hired the guy to be Officer Friendly.  They can’t expect him to suddenly turn into Rambo and they would have been horrified if they thought he might.

The deputy who resigned is a trained professional, all right.  But what’s he trained for?  Sensitivity to gender issues?  Minimizing racial arrest disparities?  Reducing truancy?  He was great at those jobs.  Don’t blame him for failing to do a job he wasn’t hired for, wasn’t temperamentally suited for, that nobody wanted him to do.

Joe Doakes

In the seminal essay “A Nation of Cowards” – an essay that may not have created an entire generation of Second Amendment activists, but certainly helped them focus their thinking –  Jeffrey Snyder wrote:

Is your life worth protecting? If so, whose responsibility is it to protect it? If you believe that it is the police’s, not only are you wrong — since the courts universally rule that they have no legal obligation to do so — but you face some difficult moral quandaries. How can you rightfully ask another human being to risk his life to protect yours, when you will assume no responsibility yourself? Because that is his job and we pay him to do it? Because your life is of incalculable value, but his is only worth the $30,000 salary we pay him? [In 1993 – Ed.]  If you believe it reprehensible to possess the means and will to use lethal force to repel a criminal assault, how can you call upon another to do so for you?

Adults who are kibitzing about the cops – but not calling for school sfaffers to assert their moral right, power and obligation to protect the children in their charge and themselves – are hypocrites.

And yes, I said “moral obligation”:

One who values his life and takes seriously his responsibilities to his family and community will possess and cultivate the means of fighting back, and will retaliate when threatened with death or grievous injury to himself or a loved one. He will never be content to rely solely on others for his safety, or to think he has done all that is possible by being aware of his surroundings and taking measures of avoidance. Let’s not mince words: He will be armed, will be trained in the use of his weapon, and will defend himself when faced with lethal violence.

I think this essay needs to circulate again.

“Nobody’s coming for your guns”, liberals like to coo in a parental, condescending tone when pro-civil-rights Americans point out the inevitable end goal of “gun safety” legislation.

The best response to any of this is forcing them to read Linda Slocum’s gun grab bill – House File 3022 – which in its own way is far worse and more draconian than anything the DFL proposed in their 2013 orgy of legislation after Sandy Hook.

The bill, if passed into law, would:

1. Make all your private data public, if you’re a gun owner; your home address as well as all the details of your carry permit.
2. Require Minnesotans to get licenses for their firearms from their local chief of police – effectively turning Minneapolis and Saint Paul (and Inver Grove Heights, Maplewood and Chaska, by the way) into Chicago or the District of Columbia. And we know how well limiting civilian guns has worked there, don’t we?
3. Making owning a suppressor – which just became legal in 2015 – a felony offense.
4. Confiscating guns if you’re late on a child support payment.  That’s right – lose a job and fall a payment behind, have the cops swarming over your house on the command of your DFL-dues-paying local Child Support administrator.
5. Ban all magazines over ten rounds. Yep – your classic Browining High Power is right out!  And by right out, we mean “You have to destroy any magazines of over ten rounds that you might own”.
6. Raising the legal age to own – not buy –  firearms to 21.  Say goodbye to your high school trap shooting team.
7. And, inevitably, an ” Assault Weapons” ban – with, of course, the unstated proviso that “Assault Weapon” means whatever a regulator wants it to mean.  It’s a provision that would have been too overreaching for a Soviet court to uphold.   You can grandfather any weapons you own (sans magazines over 10 rounds), but will be prohibited from giving, buying or transferring them to anyone else in any way, shape or form.   Got a couple of investment-grade pieces?  Wanna hand a couple down to your kids?  Sorry, citizen –  you own’t even be “allowed” to move them out of state.  You’ll have to destroy them oe hNS RHW.  Tough rocks, citizen.
8. Finally – along with the licensing (which is also registration) comes the obligation to allow the cops to inspect your home storage.  Annually.

With this, the DFL has shown that they know who their enemy is.

It’s not street criminals or those who supply them guns – they’ll be unaffected by this bill.

It’s not even spree killers.

The DFL’s enemy is you, law-abiding gun owner.

Now, the GOP controls the Public Safety Committees in both chambers – so this bill will go nowhere.

This session.

But as Big Left pours money into the smear campaign against you, the law-abiding gun owner, they hope to change the electoral math in this state.  Next year could easily see a Minnesota House and Governor’s ofice controlled by Democrats, and a Senate with a one vote GOP majority led by Paul Gazelka, who passed on a chance to go to the mattresses for you  last year.

So if you’ve been sitting on your hands for the past few years because the goog guys have been beating the orcs back?   Sleepy time is over.

Renew your NRA membership.   Don’t like Wayne LaPierre’s public persona?  Either do I. . Hold your nose and do it anyway.

Renew – or start – your membership with the MN Gun Owners Caucus. And pony up a few extra bucks.   (And tell your gun owning friends to join the MNGOC, and not “Minnesota Gun Rights”.  The group appears to be a fund-raising charade that doesn’t actually spend any significant time or money moving the needle in Minnesota.  I think they’re frauds and I’ll tell them to their face.

And hold some PTO time aside.   We’re going to need to pack some hearing rooms.  Gone are the days when the good guys would outnumber the orcs 30-1;  all that Bloomberg money means professional “community organizers”, which means lots of warm, dumb bodies in orange t-shirts coming out to events.

When it comes to defending your second amendment rights, the only easy day was yesterday.

Donald Trump’s proposal to allow teachers and school staff with carry permits to carry their firearms in school has drawn the predictable firestorm of uninformed knee jerk responses.  It’s a gun issue, that’s just how it goes.

It’s also provoking a slightly, if you will, off-target response from some shooters.

Don’t get me wrong – of course it’s better to have an armed staffer in the room, with the potential to respond, when and if the shooting starts.  Armed citizens have ended three school shootings (Pearl Mississippi, Edinboro Pennsylvania and the Appalachian Law School); there’s nothing superhuman about spree killers, or for that matter inherently less capable about school staff.

But here’s the bigger point.

Trouble:  As we’ve noted based before, spree killers – as studied by the FBI after the Columbine massacre – plan theire attacks for months, sometimes years. One of their key planning criteria– is resistance likely?

For example, James Holmes– the Aurora movie massacre shooter– had a choice of six theaters when he was planning his attack. He didn’t pick the biggest seater; He didn’t pick the closest theater; he picked the one feeder in the area that was a “gun free zone”.

Likewise, as we’ve noted, spree killers (as well as terrorists, for that matter) tend to avoid targets where resistance is possible   .Example – after Israel started allowing teachers to bring guns to school after a series of kibbutz school massacres in the 1970s, the number of school massacres drops to zero without any further ceremony.

In other words–The deterrent effect of knowing that people might have guns,Is enough to deter the attack.

It isn’t that what we’re looking for?

Or is that all just too logical for the American left?

As I’ve pointed out in the past – when you listen to Dreamsicles talking about the relatives they’ve lost to “Gun Violence”, you can listen long and hard…

…and hear not one word about a perpetrator.  At a Dreamsicle meeting, all guns are self-animating.

No perps.  No criminals.  (No black victims, outside of those killed by cops).

And no imponderable human frailties.    It’s not the mental illness  – it’s the gun.  That’s one of the latest memes from the grabbers; “it’s not the insanity – it’s the guns!“.

And like most such memes, it’s just not true.

California Dems refuse to endorse…

…Darth Feinstein?

Riven by conflict between progressive and more moderate forces at the state party’s annual convention here, delegates favored Feinstein’s progressive rival, state Senate leader Kevin de León, over Feinstein by a vote of 54 percent to 37 percent, according to results announced Sunday.

That whole “California secession” ting is looking better and better to me.

Mark my words:  Any police official who refers to citizens as “sheep” (and, perforce, to police as “Sheepdogs” or “Lions”) needs to be escorted from public life, sans badge, gun, and power, with extreme prejudice.

Like Broward County sheriff Scott Israel – whose office didn’t have time to investigate nearly forty contacts with Nikolas Cruz, but has had time to act like…

…well, a Democrat pol in office:

Israel had been a Republican but ran for office as a Democrat. He was first elected sheriff in 2012, then re-elected in 2016. According to the Sun Sentinel:

The outreach workers, who mainly attend community events, are in addition to political activists and others Israel hired into community affairs roles, writing and designing printed pieces about the agency, and sharing it on social media. The employee log shows six hired into community affairs roles, their salaries totaling $388,729.

Israel’s opponents say he’s built a publicly funded political machine, paying back supporters with jobs and using them to keep him in office. They say the money could be better spent, particularly after the sheriff complained about not having enough funding to secure the county courthouse, where a murder suspect recently escaped.

Sound like the priorities in a city rhyming with “Every schmiberal city in the schmunited shmates” to anyone but me?

Oh, yeah – and this next bit?

Asked about the allegations, Israel responded, “What have I done differently than Don Shula or Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King, Ghandi?”

He also said, “Lions don’t care about the opinions of sheep.” That’s a paraphrase of a quote from the Game of Thrones character Tywin Lannister, a villainous public administrator known for promoting his family’s interests ahead of the government’s or the people’s.

Sheep.

That’s what he thinks of citizens.  Not unlike way too many cops.

It’s time for some changes in Broward County.

Growing up in North Dakota, I saw a house that had its roof ripped off by a tornado once.

The homeowner darted out into the street, turned, and . yelled “What about my right not to have the weather destroy my property?”

Uncannily, just a week later a friend was driving through a parking lot when an intoxicated and uninsured driver jammed down the gas backing out of his post – t-boning her, and causing a lot of uninsured damage.

She implored all and sundry – “what about my right not to have an accident?”

A few years later, when I moved to Minneapolis, a co-workers house was burgled; he lost a lot of valuable stuff.

I remember watching him rending his garment (I’d heard about it in the New Testament, but had never actuallyi seen anyone actually rending anything, much less rending it so decisively asunder) beseeching all of heaven and earth – “what about my right not to get robbed?”

If you’re thinking none of those actually happened – well, you know me too well.

But someone just as stupid is happening now, as it happens after every mass shooting (of white suburban kids).

In discussing the moral, legal, constitutional, policy and practical effects of the Second Amendment and proposals regarding gun laws, many of us are forthright about saying we’re standing up for a civil right that, in its turn, protects other civil rights.

Too many times, they respond “What about our right not to get shot?”

If you’re one of them, let me break it down for you.

Your “right to not get shot” is exactly the same as your “right” not to get hit by a tornado; nonexistent. Nature has no mind; it obeys laws of physics, not morality or ethics. And. being not human, it has no mercy, much less moral scruples. But you do; it is your responsibility to not just have homeowners insurance to repair the damage, but to protect your family from the effects of bad weather.

Your “right not to get shot” is even more similar to the right not to get backed into by an idiot. It, too, doesn’t exist – there is no “right to back into . you”, but that’s not the same as a right to be immune to accidents, carelessnes and stupidity. You do have a responsibility, though, to ensure your safety and thqat of your family when you drive; wear seatbetls, carry insurance, drive defensively, the works.

The “right not to get shot” has the most in common with the ‘Right not to get burgled’but human nature, frailty and carelessness does. be sure, the burglar has no right to rob you – but that, by itself, stops nothing . You have a responsibility, though, to protect yourself, your family and your property from the burglar.

So let’s recap: there is no “right not to get shot”.

There is a responsibility to protect yourself, your family, your community and your freedom from what we can broadly call “evil”, though – anything from street crime to mass murder to tyrannical overthrow.

Now, if you’re a teacher, you have options for how you carry out that responsibility. I’m the last person who’ll ever tell you how you’re “supposed” to do it.

You also have a right to learn what’s the best way to carry out that obligation. And at some point or another, “agitating for legislation” and “virtue-signaling . your stances” might be useful (or at least “feel-good”) responses.

But if – heaven forfend – you are in a school with a bunch of your community’s kids, and someone starts shooting? Your effective options for carrying out that responsibility diminishes to a very concise list:

• Run. (not an option unless your charges can run with you)
• Hide – and hope that the killer won’t trip upon you and your room full of screaming children.
• Fight. You can fight a lot of ways, of course; throwing books and chairs and erasers at the shooter might by you some seconds. Throwing 120 grains of hollow-point pain at him may just buy your children a lifetime of looking back at a psychological trauma rather than a lifetime measured in seconds.

Choose wisely.

So let’s count it down:

A deeeeeeeply troubled kid with a long, long record of violent outbursts – who, by law, could not be expelled, because school districts need that per diem for having kids in the seats.

Multiple credible reports of a kid who “wanted to shoot up the school”, received by the sheriff’s offie and the FBI. 1: the schools had a problem kid with violent outbursts including assaults and threats. But could not expel him by law.

39 calls to 911 for the kid in a short time.

Statemens about Nik Cruz that just keep coming out of the woodwork.

And to top it off, the cop (the ones who Big Left sayis should have all the guns) sat outside the school, literally in a defensive position, and did nothing as the massacre went on inside. 

The armed school resource officer assigned to protect students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School took a defensive position outside the school and did not enter the building while the shooter was killing students and teachers inside with an AR-15 assault-style rifle, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said Thursday.

Israel said he suspended School Resource Deputy Scot Peterson on Thursday after seeing a video from the Parkland, Fla., school that showed Peterson outside the school building where the shooter was inside and attacking.

“What I saw was a deputy arrive at the west side of Building 12, take up a position, and never went in,” Israel said.

Sheriff Israel noted what readers of this blog have known for years; that the deputy’s job was to get in there and put shots on target.  To shake the killer out of his narcissistic reverie.   They’ve known this – and, ostensibly, trained on this – since Columbine.

Not charging toward gunfire is a pretty normal human reaction.

On the other hand, everyone who is getting the victorian vapours over the thought of letting school staff carry guns for self-defense?  This is your alternative; lived dependent on the frailty of human nature to defend them from the depravity of human nature.

Why not use one of human nature’s more automatic traits – self-preservation – to our advantage?  Especially since repealing “gun free zones” will deter the attacks in the first place? 

…I’m a William Shatner fan again.

Gibson – one of America’s iconic guitar makers – is spiraling toward a massive restructuring:

Less than six months out from those crucial deadlines, the prospects for an orderly refinancing — Gibson has hired investment bank Jefferies to help with that — look slim, observers say. And the alternative scenarios look likely to sideline longtime owner and CEO Henry Juszkiewicz.

“At the end of the day, someone will take control of this company — be it the debtors or the bondholders,” Debtwire reporter Reshmi Basu told the Post this week. “This has been a long time coming.”

The culprit would seem to be corporate overextension – going into debt to buy subsidiaries like Baldwin Piano, and an assortment of home and pro audio marques – rather than the guitar business itself, which is still a good home base:

Gibson needs to report by next week its final numbers for its fiscal third quarter to stakeholders. One thing bond owners will be watching for is an improvement in the company’s electronics business, which has been built up in the past few years via debt-fueled acquisitions but has seen sales slump of late.

Still, even a solid turnaround on that front won’t be enough for Juszkiewicz to avoid difficult conversations.

“Some type of restructuring will be necessary,” Cassidy said. “The core business is a very stable business, and a sustainable one. But you have a balance sheet problem and an operational problem.”

If this results in a fire sale of Les Paul Standards, on the other hand, that could improve my fundamentals…

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails re the feckless cynic Tim Walz:

When he represented Southern Minnesota, Tim Walz proudly wore an NRA hat.  Now that he’s running state-wide, he’s “changed the ideology.”  Is that another word for “principles?”  Does he have any?
Why yes, yes he does.  His guiding principle is to gain power over others.  Say anything, do anything, pretend to believe anything, to get the power.   He’s not unique, he’s standard DFL, right off the rack.  Clinton kept the promises he meant to keep.  If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.
The sad part is so many voters are perfectly happy to reward such bald-faced liars by giving them the power they so desperately crave.
Joe Doakes

Most Minnesota voters  go by that “feel good” gut feeling.  Look!  She baked a casserole!  Just like mom did!

To:  Parkland High School Students / Sudden Media Stars
From:  Mitch Berg, peasant
Re:  Your sudden stardom

Students,

First things first – I’m sorry for the trauma that happened to you and your school.  You might want to have a word with not just the FBI, but your school board, who was apparently aware of Nik Cruz’s growing madness.

Anyway – condolences.

Now – you’re not gonna like this, but some of you will thanks me, someday.  I’m going to do something none of the adults in your life – especially those people whew flew down from Washington and New York with the bales of airline tickets and hotel reservations, barely hours after the shooting – are going to do.

I’m going to tell you the truth.

You’re being used.

I get it.   You’ve been through a traumatic experience.  But you need to know that none of the things you’re ostensibly campaigning for would have prevented the shooting at your school.

Background checks?  Florida has a huge gap it the mental health information it reports to the feds.  Just like Minnesota.  It wouldn’t – didn’t – work.

Banning “Assault Weapons?”  It’s been tried – you were toddlers when the last ban ended.  Even its supporters said it was just a feel-good law that did nothing about crime.

Bagging on the NRA?  Yeah, that’ll save lives.

Repealing the Second Amendment?   Please.  Mass shootings and denying the right to keep and bear arms is not correlated with mass shootings.

Look, I get it; when I was your age, I thought the NRA was a CIA plot to make gun companies rich.  it was an idea put in my head by the parents and grandparents of the people chaperoning you around DC and the CNN studios.  They are using you as another way to try to turn the tide in a political battle they’ve been losing for thirty years, now.

You are being used as props.  Pawns.  Stage dressing.

Most of you will figure it out someday, with any luck.

That is all.

CNN knows the story they want to be told

A survivor of the Florida high school massacre said in an interview that CNN rejected his proposal to discuss armed guards in schools and instead handed him a “scripted” question to ask during Wednesday night’s town hall on gun rights.

Colton Haab, 17, a junior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and an ROTC member, reportedly used Kevlar vests to shield students during the massacre. He said he decided not to attend the town hall after CNN presented him with the prepared question.

a) There’s some hope for the younger generation.

b) I’ll call CNN “journalism” when CNN calls me “Admiral”.

Kevin Williamson sums up a vast expanse of “suck” in re the NYTimes’ coverage of gun issues:

he New York Times is uniquely bad on the subject of firearms. There are two ways to understand that sentence, and both apply: Among major news publications, the Timesregularly exhibits an unparalleled level of illiteracy on the subject of firearms, and it exhibits comparable illiteracy on practically no other subject. Even on such self-acknowledged weak spots as American religion, the Times rarely sinks to the level of outright stupidity that characterizes its coverage of firearms and related crimes.

That’s just the introduction.  It gets worse.  Read the whole thing.

In 1996, Christina Hoff Summers and Camille Paglia – two embattled minorities in the feminist academy – predicted feminism, as a worst case, was going to slide into a form of intellectually and morally dystopic Orwellianism.

In 2016, they – now more “endangered species” than embattled minorities in the modern feminist academy – reprised the discussion to note that things were worse than they’d predicted.

It’s well worth an hour.

For 12 years, now, Tim Walz was perfectly happy to bamboozle his district by accepting the NRA’s endorsement – pretty8 much a requirement in the rural south of Minnesota.

Now – running for the DFL endorsement for governor against impeccably-Metrocrat Rebecca Otto – he’s calling for all sorts of gun controls, including gun bans.

You read it here first, two years ago:

It may look like a Nazi women’s prison camp guard re-union, but in fact it’s Rep. Walz meeting with Moms Want Action  – a subsidiary of Everytown, Michael Bloomberg’s group, which outspent all pro-gun groups 17-1 in the 2016 election.

Is he after all that Bloomberg money?  All those Metrocrat votes?

Who cares?  All we know is, he’ll be back looking for shooter votes once the DFL convention is over.

He’s cast his lot.  Will it cost him?  He doesn’t seem to think so.

He may have been the greatest evangelist in history, claiming to have preached to over 200 million in person over the years.  Billy Graham passed away yesterday at age 99.

Like Charlton Heston, he broke a lot of Big Left’s narratives:

In the 1960s, he ardently opposed segregation, refusing to speak to segregated audiences.

“The ground at the foot of the cross is level,” he once said, “and it touches my heart when I see whites standing shoulder to shoulder with blacks at the cross.”

He was incredibly influential:

Graham also was noted for consulting and praying with every U.S. president from Dwight Eisenhower to Barack Obama, who in April 2010 visited Graham at his mountaintop cabin in North Carolina. He also met with President Harry Truman in what was initially a contentious meeting after Graham spoke to the press, but the two men later viewed the episode as a humorous incident.

Modern times tangent;  I’ll be staying away from Twitter today.  I can imagine the left’s comments about Graham will be down to their usual standard.

The mainstream media is, if not predictable on Second Amendment issues, at least prone falling into patterns.  The usual ones are:

• Broad-based ignorance of – and at worst, incuriosity about – the actual facts of gun related issues, beyond the chanting points provided by the anti-gun groups that dominate the “thinking” in most reporters’ social circles.  It’s not malicious, it’s just uninformed, or lazy, or sometimes entitled.
• Occasional bursts of good solid reporting  – like Pat Kessler’s excellent piece on Channel 4 last week pointing out what this blog has been telling you for a couple years now; while Minnesota has a very high per capita rate of carry permittees (almost triple the rate estimated when the Legislature passed the law), our crime rate is among the lowest in the country.
• Inevitably, the overwrought editorial or op-ed demanding a repeal of the Second Amendment.

That latter usually comes from the “elite” level of the media – the NYTimes, the WaPo and the like.

So it was with a chuckle I read about an episode from the Civil War, when “journalists” had to be made of sterner, more realistic stuff.

It was right after the draft – and its  onerous exemption provisions, allowing the wealthy to pay for substitutes – was instituted.  Mobs began rioting – and one of their targets was the New York Times.

At the time, the Times was a Republican paper, and supported Lincoln, abolition and the war.  The rest of New York City, then as now, was Democrat – and was also fairly squarely against abolition, since much of New York’s economy was based around cigars and textiles – which depended on cheap tobacco and cotton, which depended on slavery (which is why I relish the times when smug little liberal moppets try to rip on “slave states’, knowing that NYC prospered more from slavery than anyplace else).

But I digress.

The rioters descended on midtown Manhattan.  And there, the publishers of the NYTimes were waiting:

The riot quickly spread through adjoining parts of the city, with rioters attacking leaders of the Republican Party and their property, as well as “such symbols of privilege and power as police stations, arsenals, and the homes and shops of the wealthy,” Gilje wrote. The offices of abolitionist New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley were attacked twice. The New York Times was defended by its staff, who wielded several Gatling guns borrowed from the Army. Manning one of the Gatling guns was millionaire speculator Leonard Walter Jerome, Winston Churchill’s maternal grandfather and a major investor in the paper.

The paper’s publisher issued rifles to the staff – there was apparently a cache of firearms in the Times offices – and an armed skirmish line of reporters, printers and other staffers were all that stood in the way of the mob burning and looting the Gray Lady…

…and, in the end, deterred that attack.

So – the news media used the Second Amendment to protect the First Amendment.

Huh.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails

I like this line:
“if your day has reached the point where you’ve had to pull a gun and start shooting, it’s already taken a statistically unlikely turn and is unlikely to get any more normal from that point. You don’t want to be the one to forfeit for inability to shoot back.”
What’s the consensus at SITD – extra mag, or no?
Joe Doakes

If I owned a gun – which I don’t, because they terrify me and I could never shoot anyone – I’d say “Yes”.

Thoughts?

The DFL is trying to suspend the rules to try to jam down some gun control legislation while nobody’s paying attention.

They’re doing this because they know that once all the Civil Rights activists show up at the Capitol, it’ll be no contest.

If they get away with it, it’ll mean they can get a vote with

• No committee hearings
• No  public debate
• No chance for gun owners to counter their arguments

This is an attempt at a Chicago-style jamdown.

Bryan Strawser from the MNGOC explains what’s up.

Call your legislator today.  Not just today – now.  If you don’t know who they are, find out here. Tell them you do not support new gun control initiatives.  Tell them all legislation should go through the committee process with opportunity for public input. No suspension of the rules to ram through an anti-gun agenda!

The City Pages gave me an idea:

Do you worry about getting carpal tunnel from continually typing your thoughts and prayers?

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was an easier way to show your artificial concern? One that didn’t require work? Or any caring at all?

Introducing Thoughts & Prayers, the new app that allows you to conspicuously care with no effort whatsoever!

 

A review of the movie The Final Year  – about the Obama Administration’s, well, final year – reveals more between the lines than in the actual script, according to Kyle Smith in NRO.

Pullquote:

The Obama foreign-policy masters see their three accomplishments as the Paris Climate Accord, the opening to Cuba, and the Iran deal. Given that the former wasn’t presented to Congress for approval, was nonbinding, and was later dumped by President Trump, while the other two amounted to making concessions to American foes in exchange for virtually nothing, this is a bit like bragging that you suckered the Franklin Mint into giving up a souvenir Elvis plate for only $34.95. But to understand why Rhodes and Obama are so pleased with their foreign policy, you have to understand the way they think. The documentary is revealing about that.

A contest to determine the worst Secretary of State of the past fifty years between Madeline Albright, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry would be a spirited one indeed.

Paddy Coolican did a piece dissecting how the DFL’s gubernatorial nomination race may be Tim Walz’s to lose, as this point.

We’ll come back to that later.

To me, the interesting part was near the bottom, in an aside about one of the special elections last week and What It All Means to the DFL in Greater MInnesota:

Jeremy Munson won the special election in southern Minnesota last week to replace fellow Republican Tony Cornish in the state House, and he won easily, running about even with President Donald Trump’s 2016 result.

Not a huge surprise; Cornish’s district has a pretty solid reputation.

Maybe more solid than the facts warranted, at least recently, according to Coolican; Dayton and Obama ran just a couple of points behind the votes their GOP opponents – but Munson won in a snoozer, with double digit advantage.

This points up a problem for the DFL: The House GOP’s ruthless greater Minnesota messaging — DFL equals city slickers who don’t care about you or your people — continues to work.

It absolutely does.  It’s not that I don’t think the “elites” in StPaul and DC dont’ get how much distrust and downright emnity there is for them out in the rural areas, as that they think they don’t need to care about what a bunch of rubes think.

Which was easily my favorite part of Trump’s election.  And as we’ve been pointing out on this blog for the past year, the left doesn’t get it (and here’s hoping they don’t).  There’s a current on Big Left that believes that Red America / flyover land / the square states are not only cultural, social and intellectual wastelandns, but financial drags on Blue America – freeloaders, if you will.  Much of that is based on Paul Krugman’s deeply dim op-ed from about ten years ago – which compared discretionary spending in states to the amount of tax revenue states provided.  Krugman – and the even dimmer lights that parrot his findings – didn’t bother to mention that

• Red states tend to have sparse populations with lower standards (and costs) of living – so they pay less.  (What – big left suddenly doesn’t like progressive trasation?)
• They get a lot of farm bill subsidy money – spread over a smaller population
• They get a very disproportionate amount of military spending.  As if the money spent on a wing of B1 bombers in South Dakota is of direct benefit to the locals.

The “F” in “DFL” – “Farmer” – has been a misnomer for probably 40  years, now.  It’d be great if rural Minnesota made it official this fall.