A Vote For Freedom
By Mitch Berg
The House passed the “Stand Your Ground” bill in a solid vote Saturday night. The margin was 79-50:
The bill sponsored by Rep. Tony Cornish, a Good Thunder Republican and a small-town chief of police, would give a person in a home, car, tent or other dwelling the legal right to decide how much force should be required to defend oneself.
(Although – and the media never notes this – the consequences for choosing wrong have not changed. The DFL narrative on this has been pretty universally, cynically misleading).
The bill has drawn the ire of gun-control advocates and is opposed by a number of chiefs of police and prosecutors around the state.
But let’s be clear – every single one of these “chiefs of police” and prosecutors are politicians – elected or appointed- who serve at the pleasure of a DFL city or county administration.
Just like every time a proposal to broaden our Second Amendment human rights.
Just like they did when the Minnesota Personal Protection was being debated.
They were wrong then, too.
A spokesman for Gov. Mark Dayton says the governor is likely to take that opposition into account.
He should “take into account” the fact that during the campaign, he neutralized the Second Amendment vote by claiming to be friendly to self-defense shooters – to have “a pair of 357 Magnums” in a lock box at home.
Think he might have lost 8,000 votes if he’s come out hostile to the Second Amendment?
Think whatever support he has outstate might have gotten gut-shot?
If he doesn’t remember 2000, and 2002, that’s just fine by me.
May 16th, 2011 at 7:10 am
My suspicion is that he remembers 2002, 2006, and 2010, when the election was determined by which side the third-party candidate siphoned enough votes from. I don’t think there’s any serious question that Dayton’s 8000-vote-margin “mandate” came from the Tom Horner vote.
Suggests that the most important strategy for 2014 for the Republicans is to work to ensure that the Independence Party nominates an unfrocked DFLer, next time.
May 16th, 2011 at 2:51 pm
I’ve been following the Strib’s remarkable coverage of the 61-year-old former Marine who was jumped by two guys as he got out of his car on the fringe of the Uptown neighborhood. The attack was a lot like a series of attacks in recent days in Uptown – multiple attackers, vicious beat-downs – except our guy got his gun out and fired 3 shots, perhaps wounding one of his attackers as they fled, even though he already had suffered a broken nose and fractured eye orbit by that time.
The remarkable thing about the Strib’s coverage is 1) they covered it, and 2) there was no moralizing about Wild West days and no mention of whether the guy had a carry permit or not. Even the police quotes said there was no crime here by the Marine – despite the “arrest the gun, sort it out later” policies of the MPD. That the Strib would play it this way (when they can’t report on a traffic fatality without mentioning whether the victims were wearing a seatbelt) is amazing and made me wonder if the debate on the Cornish bill was affecting this in some way.
May 16th, 2011 at 3:38 pm
Night,
To be fair, the Strib has actually done a decent job on the hard news side at covering gun issues for some time; Conrad DeFiebre was doing relatively fair, balanced coverage of the MPPA debate ten years ago.
Their reporters covered the bouncer shooting in Nordeast a few years ago very fairly, I thought.
As always, it’s the editorial and op-ed sides that are in the bag on the issue.
May 16th, 2011 at 3:59 pm
I think the reporter has done a good job on the story, except for the non-mention of whether the victim had a carry permit. You could infer that he did since he wasn’t arrested, but it’s something you’d expect to see regardless of where you stand on the issue.
My surprise was that the editors didn’t ignore or bury the story (which would have been extreme since they’d just done an article the day before about the string of violent robberies). I’d read that story and wondered then what would have happened if one of those attacked had been carrying. There was also a pretty good dialog going on in the comments section of the story. The Strib is pretty capricious about what articles it will open for comments, and then the comments were taken down when the story was updated.