I remember going to a hearing on Senator Alan Spears’ attempt at an “assault weapon” ban back in the late eighties, up on Capitol Hill (Saint Paul, not DC).<\/p>\n
Despite the usual DFL shenanigans to keep outstate, pro-freedom people from making it to the Capitol to flood the hearing rooms, 600 of us showed up<\/a>.\u00a0 That was a hard, reliable count. Indoors.\u00a0 They had to link two more hearing rooms to the main one via closed-circuit TV. So the leader of the Public Safety Committee – a metrocrat DFLer – looked over the mob of animated but polite faces arrayed in front of her, cast her gaze the tiny coterie of lumpen stasi <\/em>wannabees on her side, and said for the records “I think both sides look about evenly represented here today”.<\/p>\n I think about that every time lefties try to count crowds.\u00a0 I remember the “Million Mom March”, which claimed somewhere in six figures (and the DC Park Police called more like 30,000, which is about 3,000 times as many as they can draw for a rally today.<\/p>\n And of course, here in Minnesota, it cuts both ways.\u00a0 During the great Tax Cut Rallies of the mid-nineties, the Twin Cities leftymedia would routinely claim audiences of around 1,000 – when I would count to 1,000 myself,<\/em> and could see that I’d gotten maybe 1\/5 of the crowd.And I came up with the following formula:<\/p>\n And that should generallly give you an accurate count.<\/p>\n Now, I wasn’t at last Saturday’s tax rally – I have little doubt that turnout was lower than normal if only because of the weather – but experience tells me that whatever the left says about these rallies is wrong at best, a lie at worst.<\/p>\n (And when lefties are qualified to lecture the rest of us about numbers<\/a>, we won’t see stories like this<\/a>.\u00a0 Give it up,lefties; leave the counting to the adults).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I remember going to a hearing on Senator Alan Spears’ attempt at an “assault weapon” ban back in the late eighties, up on Capitol Hill (Saint Paul, not DC). Despite the usual DFL shenanigans to keep outstate, pro-freedom people from making it to the Capitol to flood the hearing rooms, 600 of us showed up.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-minnesota-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2436\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nSix hundred.<\/p>\n
\nAgainst us, perhaps a dozen orcs sat at the right-hand of the hearing table.<\/p>\n\n