Scott Adams and Victor Davis Hanson on the Comey Firing.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air!

Today on the show:

• Democrats have always wanted to fire Comey.  No, never.  No, wait…
• A Bas la France!
• A New Berg’s Law
• What’s The Matter With Northfield?

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All the usual caveats apply:  it’s Breitbart.  Yadda yadda.

But this piece here jogged my thinking about something that’s been on my mind lately.

Kim Jong Un’s hold on power pretty much depends on keeping his nation convinced that he can defeat the United States in an open conflict.

Now the Norks have been plugging gamely away trying to build nukes, and the ICBMs to launch them with.

Do they ever have any hope of matching the US’s immense (if ageing) nuclear arsenal?  No, not a realistic one.

For that matter, could they even beat the Republic of Korea in a conventional war, much less the US?  No – the South’s army is huge, well-equipped, and highly motivated.

And yet Kim blusters away.  And naturally some of that is going to be the inevitable blustering of tyrants to their enslaved people.

But what if he believes he can not only bring down the US, but do it fairly decisively…

…and on the relative cheap?

Turns out there’s a solid chance he could do exactly that.  While Hiroshima-sized nuclear device can devastate an area a few miles across if it blows up 2,000 feet in the air, and spread radioactive dust hundreds of miles downwind if it blows up at ground level, if it explodes 50-60 miles in the air it will cause no direct damage on the ground – but it’ll fry every unprotected electronic circuit within hundreds of miles.

During the Cold War, some experts calculated that a half dozen nukes detonated in the trophosphere could fry nearly every non-hardenedelectronic circuit in the United States and most of Canada and Mexico.

Every non-hardened computer – and the switches, routers and other electronic hardware that the Internet runs on.  Every cell phone – and the switches and routers and modulators and demodulators at every cell tower and service center.  Every electonic ignition system and engine control computer in every vehicle that had one – which is pretty much every one built after about the mid-eighties.  Every bit of avionics – radar, GPS, transponders, altimeters, and, in the new “glass cockpits”, the flight instruments and the processors that link them to the controls in every airplane in the sky and on the ground, and in the air traffic control centers that route the air traffic.  The computers that monitor where all the money is, and who has it, and who’s getting it.   The processors that make many of our healthcare miracles possible.

And the electronic infrastructure that controls the “supply chain” that grows our food, harvests is, processes it and ships it to wherever you live, assuming you yourself are not a farmer.

Anyway – while the Norks’ nuke tests are being played as comedy fodder in the American media…:

“The April 29 missile launch looks suspiciously like practice for an EMP attack,” [Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, executive director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and= chief of staff of the Congressional EMP Commission] wrote. “The missile was fired on a lofted trajectory, to maximize, not range, but climbing to high-altitude as quickly as possible, where it was successfully fused and detonated — testing everything but an actual nuclear warhead.”

Western “experts” quoted by the likes of NPR scoff that the Norks’ missile technology would have a hard time reliably hitting a city-size target.

But that’s the thing with EMP – you don’t have to hit even a city-sized target.  You have to hit the trophshere, somewhere above a region of the country – and if you manage to do it half a dozen times – say, over upstate New York, near DC, over southern Georgia, Iowa, Bakersfield and Oklahoma City – you wreck the vast majority of America’s electronic infrastructure.  Banks?  The power grid?  The poiwer grid?  The internet – outside the bounds of the original ARPANet, at least?  All cell networks and land-line networks?  All major media?  A good chunk of the military, for that matter?  The control of the entire food supply chain?   Every non-carbureted vehicle in the US?   All shut down.

There are alarmist claims that an EMP attack could kill 100 million Americans.  I doubt those claims; humans are a lot more resilient than that.  But it’d be a huge hit – it’d send most of this country back a century.

Anyway – such are the things that keep me up nights.

Perhaps a more rational – or at least constrained – assessment here.

Why is it so hard to find old Bob Seger albums?

I mean, anything from before Night Moves?

It‘s a long story, and an interesting one if you lurk about the edges of  music like I do.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The Star Tribune newspaper (using the term very generously) with their stable of leftist propagandists, is so far out of the reality loop that I am becoming convinced they are not merely pretending to believe this swill, they actually believe it.  I know this is a long and ludicrous review, but it’s informative to see just how outrageous things have gotten.

It’s utterly ridiculous.  The proposal to stop forcing taxpayers to pay for murdering babies in the womb is literally the same thing as enslaving women and assigning them to castes for breeding.  And that future is NOW!!!

The show, in the works before Trump’s election, “became more relevant than we ever imagined,” said Warren Littlefield, the executive producer, earlier this year. “A big part of what we deal with in ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ is the issue of women’s control of their body, and now we’re dealing with the possible defunding of Planned Parenthood . . . We didn’t want to be more relevant, but somehow we got that way.”

The inability to distinguish fantasy from reality is a symptom of mental illness.  Someone should intervene to help this woman.

Joe Doakes

You have to walk a long way from Hollywood to find someone capable of intervening.

Animal Farm, a Brit animated feature from the fifties, looks like a Disney feature – but it’s a pretty faithful re-telling of Orwell’s classic tale of the inevitable results of socialism.

It’s actually easy enough to find links to the film – most of which link back to sketchy download sites.  This version – Arabic subtitles and all – is the only full-length freebie I’ve found.

And it’s worth a watch:

Although you can pretty much watch video from Venezuela today and get the same results.

And if I do, it’s going to read “All claims of racist “hate speech” not delivered face to face by someone proven not to be a ringer should be presumed hoaxes until proven otherwise”.

Because when I got the first word of this “attack”, the first thing that crossed my mind was “No way, just  no way, that that actually happened”.

I was right.  I’m almost always right

Let me be clear (because liberals have a hard time arguing with anything but straw men, so a conservative must always straw-proof their argument) – any actual hate speech needs to be met by overwhelming opposition, as well as any rules that apply (and don’t violate everyone’s free speech rights).

It’s just that it’s so very hard to find such an episode that isn’t a hoax perpetrated by social justice weasels looking for a headline.

Steven Colbert went in front of his audience on Tuesday afternoon and broke the news that Comey had been fired.

That’s where it got interesting:

COLBERT: Trump fired Comey
NY AUDIENCE: YEAAAAAAAAAAAH
COLBERT: No guys, this is bad. Here’s some awful jokes to explain why.
AUDIENCE: Boo? https://t.co/5wqNWuUuWr

— Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) May 10, 2017

Colbert’s audience roared their approval…

…having not yet been told that Democrats never wanted Comey fired for never ever blaming him for Hillary’s campaign collapse, and weren’t, nosirreebob, demanding his ouster mere moments before Trump whacked him.

Further proof that badly-trained apes that make up the audience at shows like Colbert, Bill Maher, Samantha Bee and The Daily Show are  actually as dumb and manipulable as the left thinks the right’s audience is.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I had a day off last week and caught a bit of Rush Limbaugh’s interview with Vice President Pence.

Rush hammered the Vice President from the word go and, I thought, justly so. His tone was respectful but his questioning was direct and gave no ground. It was completely clear Rush thought Republicans got rolled.

Pence did his best to spin the bill as a victory. He said: “Look, the President has made it clear, his number one priority is national defense and national security.”

Yeah? I don’t recall that being the slogan from the campaign. I don’t recall enthusiastic crowd screaming for more military spending. I remember it more like this:

“What are we gonna do?”

“Build the Wall.”

“Who’s gonna pay for it?”

“Mexico!!”

I think Trump ought to tell Congress he’s going to veto the bill and shut down the government unless he gets money to build the wall. It can be any amount, even as little as $1, just so long as he gets to say that he’s keeping his promise. Hell, his salary is $400,000 and he’s agreed to forego it to be a dollar-a-year man; use some of that money to fund the wall. We don’t care where the money comes from, only where it goes to, and that’s got to be funding to build the wall or there’s no deal.

If Congress won’t put $1 into the bill to show its symbolic commitment to enforcing the national borders, then the country isn’t worth saving and we might as well shut the whole thing down now and be done with it.

Joe Doakes

It’s getting harder to disagree.

It’s been a little over 11 years since I coined the term “we-ist” – the notion that everyone in the world is more comfortable around, more forgiving of people more like themselves, and less so around those less like them.  In extreme cases that turns to intolerance, bigotry and hatred.

And it covers everyone in the world; just as the white redneck might be less tolerant of the black teenager, so might the middle-class black woman look down her nose at the blue-collar Mexican latino, who is at least thankful that he’s more creole than the native-looking Latino, who disdains the Korean grocer, who has no time for the Japanese-American customer, who is thankful she’s not Chinese, who think Anglos in general are annoying…

And it’s not just race; liberals are every bit as intolerant as conservatives are:

Research over the years has shown that in industrialized nations, social conservatives and religious fundamentalists possess psychological traits, such as the valuing of conformity and the desire for certainty, that tend to predispose people toward prejudice. Meanwhile, liberals and the nonreligious tend to be more open to new experiences, a trait associated with lower prejudice. So one might expect that, whatever each group’s own ideology, conservatives and Christians should be inherently more discriminatory on the whole.

But more recent psychological research, some of it presented in January at the annual meeting of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), shows that it’s not so simple. These findings confirm that conservatives, liberals, the religious and the nonreligious are each prejudiced against those with opposing views. But surprisingly, each group is about equally prejudiced. While liberals might like to think of themselves as more open-minded, they are no more tolerant of people unlike them than their conservative counterparts are.

Surprisingly?

Not if you’re a conservative in a liberal town, it’s not.

Steven Colbert – a person who’d still be playing character parts on Law and Order if there weren’t a wave of pervasive liberal smugness to ride – is in a bit of “trouble” for saying the sort of thing that would have gotten a Congressional hearing if Rush Limbaugh had said it.

It’s all just wind in sails, of course; Urban Liberal Privilege means that there’s no penalty for violating PC codes when one is attacking apostates (and as an NYC plutocrat, who should be a “progressive” and was a Democrat, Trump is surely an apostate).

Honestly?  Up until the last year or two, I’d have figured it would fly for the same reason that black people can drop the n-bomb or the Irish can call themselves “harps” but have license to pound the stuffing out of anyone else who does; I always figured Colbert was gay.

I’m told he’s not.

Now, I don’t care either way.  I’ve seen a lifetime grand total of 40 minutes of Colbert.  I don’t plan to add to it.  Ever.  Even if he has a late-life epiphany and becomes a conservative firebrand.  His delivery, his style, and even the timbre of his voice annoy the living bejeebers out of me. Also, he’s just not very funny.

Ed Driscoll:

‘\I’m enjoying the sight of Democrats who were calling for Comey to be fired suddenly turning him into a Saturday Night Massacre martyr.

It’d be a Berg’s Law, except it’s almost too obvious:  logical consistency would make most liberal positions self-refuting.

My prediction:  there’s no there there.  But the chattering classdes – and the Hillarycrats whose only source of information those chattering classes are – will chase this around and around and around their pole until they run out of leash. because there’s no there there.

(And if there is a there, there, Truimp is an idiot and deserves what he gets.  That would fit with the dumbest two or three quartiles of Democrat opinion – the same people who were calling Trump stupid and crazy even after he beat The Greatest Candidate Ever™.

Progressive Lino Lakes City Councilwoman Melissa Stockman-Maher contributed to this nation’s civic discourse in commenting about a Tom Emmer “town hall” meeting on a 6th District farm:

If you live in Lino Lakes, you might want to ask if Councilwoman Stockman Maher is threatening only Congressman Emmer, or if there are parts of Lino Lakes that conservatives in general should try to avoid, lest the Councilwoman likewise sic an armed mob on them.

Or maybe just make sure someone runs against her, with this tweet as part of their campaign literature.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

This is genius.  One satellite launched at Pluto could balance the budget forever.

Joe doakes

It’s just crazy enough to…

…drive the space industry from California.

As we noted earlier this morning, the mayor of Seattle is expanding his “soda tax” to cover diet pop¹ because apparently minorities drink more sugar-sweetened pop than honkey does.

And the tax – which was ostensibly about taxing people into health – became a matter of crushing white privilege.

As commenter Mammathus Primigenius noted in the comment section, the idea that upper middle class honkeys drink diet pop is sooooo 1986.

If the Mayor of Seattle (and let’s be honest, Minneapolis will want to keep up with the social justice joneses; it’s the city’s one productive industry) wants to stick it to honkey, I think we need to create a list of things that are genuinely associated with his and Betsy Hodges’ main voting bloc  upper-middle-class urban “white privilege”.

I’ll start things out.  You feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments.  I’ll send them to the Mayor when we’re done:

• Kombucha
• Coconut Oil
• Raw Denim
• Beard-care products
• Any coffee or tea beverage that includes more than coffee or tea
• Riding bicycle paths
• Skateboarding
• Art crawls
• Skiing and snowboarding
• Yoga classes and accessories
• Four year private colleges
• Membership fees in “gun safety”, environmental and animal rights groups and the ACLU.
• Subarus
• Whole Foods goods of any and all types
• Doulas
• Anything purchased from Etsy

Carry on!

It’s time once again for my annual pledge drive.

The Earl Mayor of Seattle, Ed Murray, proposed a Bloomberg-style pop tax.

Bad enough?  Sure.

Then, the social justice warriors sounded off, pointing to statistics saying that minorities drink more pop than honkeys.

At first, the tax was to make distributors of sugary drinks pay 2 cents per ounce with the mayor claiming it would bring in $16 million.

It won’t.  But, again, not the point.

The mayor changed his tax when his staff told him that it would disproportionately affect minorities, who apparently have higher soda consumption rates than white people.

The tax has now become an “issue of equality” as far as the mayor is concerned because “upper-middle-class white people” who consume diet drinks more frequently must be taxed to fight “white privileged institutionalized racism”, according to Reason.

I’m beyond thinking the laws actually affect this sort of behavior on the part of government.

As the American left continues to indulge its long-suppressed penchant for violence, this editorial from National Review will only continue to get more relevant:

For those at Berkeley celebrating what they believe to be a moral victory, consider this: As much as you may detest Ann Coulter, she has never used violence or the threat of violence to keep someone from speaking. She is a better citizen than you are, with a deeper commitment to genuinely liberal and humane values. You may call yourselves the anti-fascists, but your black-shirt routine — along with your glorification of political violence and your rejection of liberal and democratic norms — suggest that the “anti” part of that formulation is not entirely appropriate. Perhaps you are only young and ignorant, but if you had any power of introspection at all, you would see that you are the thing you believe yourselves to be fighting. You are the oppressors, the censors, the violent, the hateful, the narrow-minded, the reactionary.

All true.

Unfortunately, the left is becoming an entire community of clinical narcissists; they live by gaslighting those around them, and have trained themselves to shunt all their crimes off onto others.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I understand Republicans saying they had to vote for this crappy spending bill because now is not a good time to stand up for our principles.  Okay, you guys are the experts, I’ll trust your judgment.
It’s just that I’ve been voting Republican for nearly 40 years and I haven’t seen you stand up for me yet.  Never quite enough votes for a super-majority and always the danger of being called names by the media.
I’m really interested to know: will it be time to stand up for our principles soon, do you think?
Joe Doakes

The time is never quite right, is it?

Remember Paul John Scott?

He’s the “writer from Rochester” who wrote the infarmous op-ed in the Strib last year telling fellow (what else?) liberals that it was OK, even necessary, to expunge all Trump voters from  your life and social circle.

Rochester?  You Owe Us An Apology:  Scott has a writing style reminiscent of a junior high girl writing Sylvia Plath fan fiction while listening to Goth-teen music.  And that’s the best thing I can say about him and his writing.

But he’s gotten another op-ed in the Strib, which makes me think that the Strib must be getting paid by some government program to employ otherwise unemployable writers.  Or maybe that Scott saw some senior editor in bed with a live boy or a dead girl.

Now, I’m not writing you to “fisk” Scott’s op-ed – entitled  It’s the guns, stupid. But that doesn’t affect you, right?” in the hyperventilating, “everyone’s a hypocrite!” style that’s become so popular among the snowflakes.  The article – which is little but a bunch of “Everytown” chanting points gurgitated with no more critical analytical thought than my dog puts into fetching my shoes in the morning – isn’t worth my time; I’ve it a million time.  I’ll blow through its most egregious offenses later.  Probably.  It’s almost too stupid to bother with.

But I’m not here to talk about John Paul “I Have Not Yet Begun To Whinge” Scott.  I’m here to talk about the Strib.

Not Even Punching Tickets Anymore:  It’s been a pattern at the Strib for decades, now.   If you’re anti-gun – no matter how dim, fact-free and risible you are (Heather Martens, Nancy Nord Bence and their ilk seem to have an open invitation to write any time they want) or even the dreary Scott – you can pretty much measure the curtains for your byline.

Dissent?  Well, other than a few letters to the editor from “Fudds” seemingly chosen for their half-literate irascibility, the Strib will not publish an op-ed, no matter how good – especially, I suspect, because it’s good.

So who did the Strib pass over for including in the op-ed section?

My friends at the MN Gun Owners Caucus have been diligently trying to place an op ed – any op ed – challenging the flood of anti-gun drivel that romps and plays in the Strib’s op-ed section.

Among them was this piece by Sarah Cade, a shooter and activist.  Also   She wrote a piece in defense of HF238 and HF188 – the “Self-Defense Reform” and “Constitutional Carry” bills that were introduced this session (and, shamefully, died).

I’m going to publish her submission to the Strib in its entirety – because someone has to.  Judge for yourself which is a more worthy effort:

COMMUNITIES OF COLOR NEED STAND YOUR GROUND

Sarah Cade

Minnesota desperately needs common sense gun laws – just not the ones you might think. Bills HF238 and HF188 sought to remedy unreasonable components of the current system, but were not included in the public safety omnibus.  These bills should be included as amendments.

Sarah Cade.   Photo: Oleg Volk. Courtesy Sarah Cade.

HF238 included a provision commonly known as “stand your ground.”  Stand your ground laws serve an important purpose for communities of color: they defend the innocent from overzealous prosecution. Ideally, a self defense claim should center on whether your use of force was reasonable under the circumstances, not on whether you could run faster than your attacker or whether you memorized the blueprints of the building before making the split second decision to defend your life.

Stand your ground removes the requirement to prove you could not retreat in court.  Rather than forcing you to prove a negative, it places the burden of proof where it belongs: on the state. The concept that a person is innocent until proven guilty is a cornerstone of American justice – or at least it’s supposed to be.

In reality, exercising your right to self defense leads to further victimization by the legal system. As a person of color, I know that racial stereotypes make a judge and jury less likely to give me the benefit of the doubt than my white peers. I also know that the legal system will attempt to intimidate me into taking a plea bargain for a crime I didn’t commit. These problems are compounded if I’m poor, don’t know my rights, or can’t obtain competent defense.  Stand your ground laws help protect me from a system that chews up and spits out people who look like me.

Contrary to the misinformation put out by Minnesota’s leading gun control group, stand your ground does NOT allow you to shoot people for wearing a hoodie, it does not allow people to “shoot first,” and it does not allow people to shoot anytime they feel subjectively threatened.  In fact, it’s hard to repeat those statements with a straight face if one has even a passing familiarity with Minnesota’s byzantine web of self defense laws (although they helpfully make the point that our laws need simplification and reform so laypeople can understand them).

Stand your ground would not change the requirement to act reasonably. Just like under current precedent, in order to present a valid claim of self defense, a person must have BOTH an “actual and honest belief that he or she was in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm,” AND “the existence of reasonable grounds for that belief.” (State of Minnesota v. Baker 1968)

“The lack of a duty to retreat does not abrogate the obligation to act reasonably when using force in self defense.   Therefore, in all situations in which a party claims self-defense, even absent a duty to retreat, the key inquiry will still be into the reasonableness of the use of force and the level of force under the specific circumstances of each case.” (State of Minnesota v. Glowacki 2001)

Despite overblown claims of racism, stand your ground is not in itself a racist law — mostly because there’s nothing to enforce. Instead, it is a DEFENSE that is invoked to protect the rights of an individual in court. It helps people of color defend themselves successfully from a predatory legal system that is stacked against them at every level, from arrest to sentencing.

According to data collected by the Tampa Bay Times, stand your ground provisions are more likely to be used to successfully defend black people than white people.  Black people are 16.8% of Florida’s population, but make up 33% of SYG acquittals, while white people are 77.7% of the population, but account for only 56% of acquittals (note that the homicide rates for blacks did not increase, so this discrepancy is NOT due to the myth of suspicious whites shooting first. Instead, it means more blacks are avoiding unjust prosecution).

As a person of color who is also a gun owner, I know that HF238 and HF188 would help me, and people who look like me, to protect ourselves. I know similar provisions are common in other states (the majority of states have some version of stand your ground; over ten have permitless carry), and that the hysteria about these laws is fueled by fear rather than rational analysis.

I also know that our justice system is plagued with racial inequality at every level. Stand your ground doesn’t change that, as it’s outside the scope of one bill to solve such pervasive problems. However, it does help defendants of color avoid unjust persecution, and that’s a step in the right direction.

Sarah Cade is a competitive pistol shooter and a volunteer Team Leader for the Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus.  

So let’s get this straight.  The Strib spiked Cade’s well-written, reasoned, impeccably researched article upending the left’s narrative on the gun issue, but published a rank, uninformed recitation of fallacious chanting points by the mopey Plathbot Paul John Scott.

Surprised?  No.

Want better from our media?  Absolutely.

I’ll deal with the few points in Scott’s little outburst that need addressing below.

Read the rest of this entry »

Another episode in Texas last week of an armed citizen intervening in what police term a potential spree shooting.

One James Jones walked into the “Zona Caliente” sports bar in Arlington, got into an argument, and shot manager Cesar Perez,  killing him.

Then, a man – unnamed, except for the cops’ appelation “good samaritan” – with a carry permit shot Jones in the back an unnamed number of times.

Jones was carrying not one but two guns, one of them with its serial number filed off.  He had no carry permit.

The police were cautiously thankful, as usual in these situations:

“We’re thankful that the good ‘Samaritan’ acted quickly and decisively to end the threat,” Cook said. “We never recommend people get involved. That’s a personal decision that a citizen has to make.”

Use of force and firearms expert Emanuel Kapelsohn told NBC News that, from his understanding, the man who took down the shooter reacted appropriately.

“I think it’s to be applauded,” he said. “Not everybody in the world ought to own a gun. Not everybody in the world ought to carry a gun. Not everyone in the world ought to engage an armed criminal where innocent people could be potentially injured.”

“But this good Samaritan obviously had the ability to do what he did,” Kapelsohn added. “Who knows how many people would be dead if he had not acted?”

That’s twice in one week in Texas.

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The spending bill doesn’t fund The Wall.

The Republican strategy appears to be “remove everything that might be objectionable to Democrats so we can get the bill passed and keep government running – otherwise, we’ll get blamed for the shut-down.”

That strategy is indistinguishable from “let the Democrats run the country.”

Look, there were a dozen Republican candidates.  Trump won the nomination on a single issue:  Build The Wall.  That’s his signature issue and it’s the only reason he’s President today.

The spending bill doesn’t have to cover the entire cost of The Wall – a symbolic down payment of even a lousy $1 would be enough to show he was keeping his promise to his base while rebuilding the military and draining the swamp.

If the Never-Trumpers in Congress won’t fund The Wall, President Trump should refuse to sign the spending bill.  Shut down the government and take the heat from the media.  Tweet everyday “Democrats willing to spend your dollars to kill babies but not protect children.”  “Democrats replacing Americans with Mexicans on your dime.”  “Democrats, party of KKK, still keeping Blacks out of work.”  “I earn a dollar, Democrats won’t let you earn that.”

Joe Doakes

All is proceeding as foretold.

Here’s the link to Cardiac Arrest by Howard Root.

Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air!

Today on the show:

• Apparently Minneapolis has solved all is problems.
• What’s The Point Of A Majority
• And Howard Root joins us again.

Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1440, and Brad Carlson is  on “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 2-3PM.

So tune in the Northern Alliance! You have so many options:

• AM1280 in the Metro
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Join us!

With the collapse (for now) of the Democrat majorities in Saint Paul and Washington, and especially the election of a pro-2nd-Amendment president, with the concomitant appointment of a suitably pro-2nd-Amendment replacement for Antonin Scalia, the threat to our Second Amendment rights has ebbed just a bit.  The pace of gun purchases and carry permit applications has slackened a bit.  You can find ammo on the shelves again.  You can find a decent AR-pattern rifle for less than the cost of a quality handgun.

The immediate, existential threat to a right that separates citizen from subject has faded just a bit.

And it shows.

This past legislative session, with a bipartisan pro-2nd Amendment majority in Saint Paul, not a single gun bill advanced through the GOP-controlled legislature.  Two excellent bills – a self-defense reform bill (aka “Stand Your Ground”), which  would have lessened the requirement to be a lawyer to use a gun in self-defense, and a Constitutional Carry bill – stalled in the House.

Part of the blame rests with Senate Majority Leader Warren Limmer, who made it clear early in the session that he didn’t want to risk his one-vote majority on “risky” bills that would expose his vulnerable freshmen to controversial votes.

Four years before the next Senate election.    In a session where his Senators wijll be as far-removed from re-election pressure as it’s possible to be.

But OK – part of the job of the majority leader is to keep the majority; to win elections.  And part of politics is picking your battles, and drawing as few targets on your people as possible.  And the GOP in the legislature remembers what happened in 2012, when they overreached on issues that were much more vital to many constituents than they were to the rest of Minnesota.

So risk-aversion is understandable.  Right?

Yeah – but the Senate is hearing two bills on abortion restrictions that are going to draw Liberal Plutobucks and busloads of irate women in pussy hats to the capitol to vent their ninety seconds’ hate for weeks on end.

So the real question is, who are the real risks to the MN State Senate.

Judging by the legislation the GOP majority has agreed to work on, it’d seem leadership ranks those risks in the following, descending order:

1. Pro-lifers, who turn out by  the thousands for pro-life events at the Capitol, give until it hurts, and treat it as a life-or-death issue (as, indeed, it is) always.  No pause.  And who make their electoral muscle utterly nakedly visible every time they need to, by mobilizing money, volunteers, and (in most of Minnesota), decisive numbers of votes.
2. The DFL. 
3. Second Amendment Groups.  Because while nobody, but nobody, turns out the troops on the defensive like the shooters, when the alarm turns off, we all go back go normal, like the battle is won.  We don’t turn up for hearings.  We don’t donate money – MInnesota’s 2nd Amendment lobby has not one paid staffer; Everytown pays four or five people to organize the issue, full-time, in Minnesota alone.  The good guys?  All volunteers.  And volunteers burn out, need to find jobs, get families – they do all the stuff real people have to do.

The pressure seems off now.  But all it took was a decade of taking our eye off the ball in the seventies and eighties, and we very nearly lost the Second Amendment.  The game can turn faster than a late-inning Twins lead.

There is no relaxation when it comes to protecting freedom. And when politics is your medium, you have very few friends, and an awful lot of people who need to respect you.

And sometimes, you gotta give them a reason to respect you – if not your reason, then your power.