To: Rep. John Lesch, HD66B and closet authoritarian
\nFrom: Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
\nRe: \u00a0“Local Control”<\/p>\n
Rep. Lesch,<\/p>\n
Last week, at the House Public Safety Finance Committee hearings on the DFL’s various gun grab bills – the one that’d funnel all carry permit applications through the local police chief, if applicable, rather than the county sheriff – you kept repeating “it’s about local control”, as if you were one of those old pull-string toys with the little tape recorder inside.<\/p>\n
Little story for ya, here, Leftenant.<\/p>\n
Perhaps you recall; back in the bad ol’ days before the Minnesota Citizens Personal Protection Act, when we had a discretionary-issue system where getting a permit depended entirely on ones’ connections, one of the metro-area police chiefs – I think it was Bloomington – said he’d never, ever, ever, ever give out a permit to a common peasant (although he issued one to his wife, as memory serves).<\/p>\n
Now, if citizens wanted to voice their displeasure at the transparent unfairness of the system, they had to organize a battle to win the mayor’s office – at whose pleasure the chief served. \u00a0Not the citizens’ – the mayor’s. \u00a0 Which means you need to go a couple of levels of government removed from the citizen in the street to voice any meaningful dissent from the system.<\/p>\n
But then the MPPA got passed. And the Sheriffs’ offices got the job, statewide.<\/p>\n
And perhaps you remember this, Rep. Lesch: \u00a0your old buddy Bob Fletcher got caught denying three times as many permits as any other sheriff in the state, including Hennepin County. \u00a0And a huge percentage of those denials, when contested, were coming back losers for the County, costing Ramco a\u00a0ton<\/em>\u00a0of money.<\/p>\n And it was us shooters – of all races, genders and social levels or, put briefly,\u00a0the people<\/em> – who were part of the coalition that tossed Fletcher from his job at the polls.<\/p>\n That –\u00a0<\/em>a law enforcement official who answers directly to us, as opposed to the local machine and bureaucracy – is what “local control” is.<\/p>\n That is all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" To: Rep. John Lesch, HD66B and closet authoritarian From: Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant Re: \u00a0“Local Control” Rep. Lesch, Last week, at the House Public Safety Finance Committee hearings on the DFL’s various gun grab bills – the one that’d funnel all carry permit applications through the local police chief, if applicable, rather than the county […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[132,22],"tags":[249],"class_list":["post-34206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mn-legislature","category-victim-disarmament","tag-open-letters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34206","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=34206"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38766,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34206\/revisions\/38766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}