In my sixteen years of writing this blog, punching bags have come and, mostly, gone. Nick Coleman? The MInnesota Monitor? Mercury Rising? Ken Weiner? I’m still here. They’re all gone.
But Lori Sturdevant? She just keeps on ticking.
Maybe “ticking” isn’t the right word. She keeps on scolding Minnesotans Republicans for not acting like “Republicans” did (so says the myth Sturdevant pushes) in the sixties and seventies, where the MNGOP was basically Democrats in better suits, and in many cases ran to the left of the DFL. This was, of course, at a time when Amerca, and Minnesota, had no competition; a time when the entire world was the US’, and Minnesota’s, market. A time when business could thrive and pay confiscatory taxes and support hiring kids with high school diplomas to bolt headlight bezels onto Fords at the Highland Park plant for upper-middle-class wages with no worry about being uncompetitive – because there was no competition.
This is the world Lori Sturdevant pines for.
The “Good” Republican: Dario Anselmo is the GOP rep from Edina. As befits a Republican in a district that’s turning blue – clogged with refugees from Minneapolis’ accelerating failure, but who brought their brick-headed DFL politics with them – Anselmo is “purple”. I get it – I get along with Rep. Anselmo OK, although I disagree with a bunch of his positions.
Including his very luke-coolness on 2nd Amendment issues. Sturdevant points out that Anselmo is the son of Barbara Lund, a Duluth heiress who was murdered by her estranged husband in the early nineties. His aunt it Joan Peterson, an erratic an impervious woman who has been one of the Minnesota gun grab movement’s leaders for a couple decades, now.
Anyway – Anselmo is a “moderate” Republican, which means “the example Sturrdevant wants the entire GOP to follow. Now, I like Rep. Anselmo, and will hope he gets re-elected (he may actually be in line with Buckley’s Law, the most conservative candidate who can win in his district full of soccer moms and petty functionaries.
Reconstructive History: But never let it be said Lori Sturdevant lets facts get in the way of her narrative – that the DFL is the same moderate party she grew up shilling for, and the GOP should strive for the same.
Anselmo says he likely would not be backing the universal background checks bill but for his family’s experience. He also sees gun violence from the perspective of a downtown Minneapolis property owner.
Which sounds good…
…until you remember that neither of Dave Pinto’s bills would have prevented Barbara Lund’s murder; the Gun Violence Protective Order bill would have done nothing; there were no domestic violence charges against Russell Lund. From a PiPress article at the time:
Kim Lund would not say whether her father had ever flashed a violent temper or physically abused Barbara Lund. She said the slayings stunned her family.
“The problem is we don’t know what happened,’” she said. “We have to wait for the criminal justice system to do its role.”
And ‘Universal Background Checks” would have prevented neither the Lund murder nor the crime that vexes Anselmo around his Warehouse district bar, the “Fine Line”. Criminals don’t take background checks now, and they won’t when they’re “Universal”. .
Lori The Parrot: The rest of the column is proof that the only things Lori Sturdevant knows about the issue, she was told over drinks at Murray’s by her friends in the Gun Grab “movement”, and seeks only to serve their ends:
The gun issue, too, seems to be swelling into something bigger than the perennial partisan wedge it has been for decades. Gun violence is so pervasive — especially when one counts suicides as well as homicides — that many Minnesotans now see it in personal terms.
Gun violence is down 50% in 20 years. Gun violence is schools is down 75% in that same time.
In 2016, more than 38,000 Americans died gun-related deaths.
2/3 of which were suicides, not one of which would have been prevented by any of the DFL’s bills.
What’s more, a new generation is rising and — even in rural places — claiming a campaign to stem gun violence as its own.
Well, that’s the word the media is trying to get out – go counter the fact that the “new generation” may be more pro 2nd Amendment than mine. Which is saying something.
The Phantom Right: Sturdevant trips into my new favorite topic:
They’re recasting the argument in personal and moral terms, asking whether someone else’s right to own a semiautomatic weapon should outweigh their right to go to school without being shot and killed.
They’re asserting a right to safety.
That may not be in the Bill of Rights. But woe be unto any democratic government that fails to secure it.
Which is a fraction of the woe that betides a “democratic government” that gets this simple fact wrong:
There is no “right to safety”,
No more than there is a “right not to get hit by lightning” or “right not to have a fire break out in your kitchen”, or “right not to get t-boned by a drunk driver” or “right not to get robbed”. There is no right to t-bone people, and there’s certainly no right to rob people. It’d be absurd as claiming that lightning or fire had a “right” to strike you. And yet there is no “right” to be free of any of these things.
There is only a responsibility to protect your family, your property, your community and your self from nature – natural and human. And that includes a responsibility to protect the students that society has ordered be gathered in your care, or else.
Of course, Lori Sturdevant represents – shills and parrots for, really – a party and movement that has sought only to erode the notion of responsibility on every front, not just safety, for much longer than Sturdevant’s been in public life.
