Yesterday was Minnesota Gun Owners Lobbying Day – where Real Minnesotans came together to lobby their legislators to pass Second-Amendment-friendly legislation, and shun the stupid bills that Michael Bloomberg is paying for.

And since the legislature was busy talking about all the bills they were introducing, the other side – to the extent you could call it that – was also at the Capitol.

Let’s compare and contrast.

The Herd:  Here is the “group” from the pro-slavery group “Moms Want Action”.  

Count ’em.   That’s 26 people.  And most of them were being  paid, directly (DFL pols, people on the Bloomberg payroll) or indirectly (cops representing the Police Chiefs Assocation) to be there.

If one-third of the people in that photo above were not present for vocational reasons, and being compensated in some way for their time, I’d be amazed.

In other words, at the most Moms Want Action drew eight “activists”.  And that’s being generous.

Drone photo courtesy Dustin Doyle

The Pack: Meanwhile at the foot of the Capitol Mall, there was a different crowd – distinguisted by being an actual crowd.  It was GOCRA’s “MNGOLD” group – or as the sensible refer to them, the “Real Americans”.
I was proud and honored, by the way, to have been invited to be the Master of Ceremonies.   We were joined by an array of speakers, each of them authorities in their area of the issue; Speaker of the House Kurt Daudt (who pledged a lonely death for all of Bloomberg’s bills this session), Oleg Volk (who talked about life without freedom in his native USSR), Rep. Jim Nash, a second-Amendment leader in the House, Professor Joe Olson, the longtime leader of GOCRA, as well as GOCRA president Andrew Rothman and Rep. Tony Cornish, who noted “a bill won’t get passed if it never comes up for a hearing” – which, in his committee, none ever will.

I counted about 170 people – mostly younger, almost exclusively working people, outdoors in temperatures that hovered below 40 degrees as the rally started,  taking a few hours off from their mostly private-sector jobs to come and fight for freedom; most of the crowd, clad in their maroon GOCRA t-shirts, went straight in to the Capitol to buttonhole their legislators and let them know the votes they expected (and to thank the good ones for the pro-freedom votes they made, if applicable).

And not a single one of them was there because it was their job (other than the state’s NRA rep).

That is, conservatively (how else) about seven times the crowd of unemployed/underemployed wannabe social justice warriors and other layabouts that came out to work toward your enslavement.  Or more like 20:1, if you just count people there voluntarily.

If it’d been a Saturday – or a vital hearing – the odds would have been 2-3 times as strongly in the Real Americans’ favor.

Welcome to hell, pro-slavery activists.