Joel Rosenberg – firearms instsructor to the stars – has been involved in an ongoing kerfuffle with the City of Minneapolis. And when I say “kerfuffle”, I mean “series of intricately interlocking kerfuffles” complex enough to warrant a book of their own (which one might expect Rosenberg, a science fiction writer with a long bibliography, to be working on).
Last month, he got into a kerfuffle – I guess it’d be a “sub-kerfuffle” in this case – with Minneapolis Police Department Sergeant William Palmer when he went to a pre-arranged interview with Palmer at the MPD headquarters. He was carrying a number of handguns openly.
Here’s the video of the event (most of the action is right up front):
Now, “Erin Carlyle” at the City Pages – former alt-journalism powerhouse, now a glorified small-college newspaper – ht tackles the story in a way that’d do the late Twin Cities Reader’s Margarete Grebe proud in terms of pure incurious superfluity.
Because besides the names of the people involved and the location of the incident, Carlyle gets pretty much everything wrong:
Joel Rosenberg tried to bring a gun into the Minneapolis Police headquarters and the cops wouldn’t let him.
Now Rosenberg is accusing the cop who took his gun of assault.
Er, yeah. We’ll come back to that.
Earlier this month, Rosenberg, who says he is ascience fiction writerand handgun instructor,
…which is something he “says” because he is a sci-fi author of some renown, and one of the state’s leading handgun instructors – including mine.
paid a visit to the MPD chief’s office to pick up some documents he’d requested. Sgt. William Palmer, the public information officer, saw that Rosenberg was packing, and asked him to dump the gun. Rosenberg refused. He insisted he had the right to wear his gun.
Palmer explained that a court order prevented him from carrying the gun. Rosenberg disagreed.
So Palmer physically took the gun away from Rosenberg and unloaded the cartridge. He handed it back when Rosenberg agreed to put the gun in his car.
And if you left it right there, it’d seem like a Catskills comedian’s joke; “A cop and a gun nut walk into the lobby of the cop shop…”
But Ms. Carlyle didn’t apparently see fit to report that Rosenberg’s “accusation” resulted in Rosenberg walking away from the event scot-free, but Palmer looking at potential legal nastiness.
Ms. Carlyle apparently either didn’t bother to check that out, or think it was important for her smug, cossetted, know-it-all liberal audience to know it.
What’s the rest of the story?
More tomorrow in Shot In The Dark.
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