In the first 150 odd years of the Minnesota State Fair, law abiding citizens were discouraged, and perhaps even told in as many words not to bring guns to the Minnesota state fair.
And yet they did. From statehood until 1974, law-abiding Minnesotans didn’t need a permit to carry a firearm, so it’s completely preposterous just say not a single law abiding citizen brought their firearm to the fair.
And we know that in the “shall issue” era, people might have brought a gun or two. In fact, I know of at least one radio station where every single staffer at the fairgrounds may have had a legal firearm, and a clean criminal record to go with it.
 And in that 150-odd years, there were countless fights…
… and exactly one incident with a gun, an armed robbery probably five or six years ago – an incident that happened about the time the fair stepped up the “gun free zone“ signs and rhetoric. If you guessed that the perpetrators were legal gun owners, actually entitled to hold, much less own, a firearm or carrier in public legally, you would have guessed wrong.
So that’s the first 160 years of Fair history..
Then, last year (before the Covid-addled 2021 Fair), the Minnesota State Fair announced that they were going to put some teeth behind the “gun free zone“ designation, putting up metal detectors and searching fairgoers. They took that policy to court, and prevailed (so far).
The official policy of the Minnesota State Fair is that law abiding citizens should be defenseless against whatever miscreancy any ne’er-do-well wants to carry out.
After about 160 relatively tranquil years, it took exactly 10 days for some party pooper to settle his argument – probably over a fish story or a bet on a Gophers game, I bet – with a gun that just couldn’t possibly have been there, because it’s a gun free zone.
There is a lesson here that we can, and should, apply to the sort of spectacular violence that has the white middle-class part of our society so exercised, the mass shootings in places like schools and government offices and schools and grocery stores and schools.
If you want to deter violence, nobody actually needs to carry a gun. All that’s needed is the knowledge that nothing prevents good people from protecting themselves.
Criminals aren’t as a rule the brightest people – but they have a sense of self preservation.  in the months after Minnesota past its “shall issue“ carry permit statute in 2003/2005, something weird happened: an alarming number of bars that posted themselves as “gun free“ wound up getting robbed. Most of those signs – especially in the less than posh neighborhoods – disappeared from bars by about 2006.
There are two lessons in last nights story:
1) The Minnesota State Fair board values the anxieties and aesthetics of its white, upper middle class governing board and political circle more than your safety.
2) an ounce of prevention is worth all the self righteous politically correct hubris in the world.
160+ years of law abiding citizens carrying firearms on the fairgrounds: zero shootings.
Two years (one of them after Covid) of security Cedar and at law abiding citizens: the first ever shooting on the fairgrounds (an increase in violence around the fairgrounds).
Correlation doesn’t necessarily equal causation. But in this case, I’m pretty sure it does.
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