Remember the bloodbath that Minnesota was in 1973 and before?\u00a0<\/p>\n
I remember the episode in November of 1971, in rural Hitterdahl, Minnesota, about 20 miles west of Detroit Lakes.\u00a0 Oscar Gundersson, a plumber and handyman, was playing bridge with his wife Trina and their farmer\u00a0neighbors, Rolf and Edna Berndsen.\u00a0 Oscar though Edna had cheated on a hand.\u00a0 Being a second-generation Norwegian-American, he skipped straight past accusation, anger and argument, and pulled a pistol from his overalls, shooting the woman.\u00a0 Then, anxious to kill all witnesses, he shot Rolf and, finally, his wife, before jumping in his car and driving toward the Canadian border in a killing spree that left six additional dead and ended with Gundersson living in Indonesia, scoffing at the law.<\/p>\n
Or the sad episode of Ruth Slorbie, who was shopping with her husband, Olaf, at the downtown Minneapolis Daytons in October 1970.\u00a0 Weary of waiting in lines, she pulled a revolver from her purse and, according to a Minneapolis Star <\/em>article, calmly executed six people who got in her way, calmly “changing clips” as she wandered from department to department, her husband indolently shuffling behind her holding bags of purchased merchandise, until the police responded.\u00a0<\/p>\n Er…wait.\u00a0 None of those happened.<\/p>\n Before 1974, Minnesota did not require the law-abiding\u00a0citizen to have\u00a0a permit of any type to carry a firearm, concealed or otherwise.\u00a0<\/p>\n You may recall – Minnesota was a pretty low-crime state, back then.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Of course, being a Democrat-dominated state, when the winds of Political Correctness bade the left to restrict guns back in the seventies, at the Second Amendment’s legal and social nadir, Minnesota followed suit – for no real empirical reason, of course.\u00a0 Which is, of course, a common thread among most gun-control legislation, and all such rules that affect only the law-abiding; none are ever <\/em>supported by evidence.<\/p>\n Minnesota became a “may issue” state in 1974 – carry permits were issued entirely on the whim of local police chiefs, meaning that the law-abiding citizen’s Second Amendment rights were subjected entirely to the whim of their local police chief.\u00a0 Police chiefs in Greater Minnesota issued permits pretty liberally; in the Metro, it was entirely based on political connections; law-abiding citizens were routinely turned down, while pals of cops and local pols could get permits even with lengthy criminal records.\u00a0 The chief of Bloomington’s police department famously said that nobody in Bloomington really needed <\/em>a permit, but made sure his wife – alone among the city’s women – was issued one.\u00a0<\/p>\n MInnesota rolled part-way back, ten years ago, with the passage of our “shall-issue” law; there are currently nearly 160,000 permits active in Minnesota, nearly double the number estimated in 2003.\u00a0<\/p>\n But what if <\/em>we rolled the laws back even further?\u00a0 To 1973?\u00a0<\/p>\n Last week Senator Branden Peterson and Representative Steve Drazkowski introduced a bill that would do just that; institute “constitutional carry” in Minnesota.\u00a0 A law-abiding citizen would require no state permit to exercise their constitutional right to carry a firearm in a safe, responsible manner.\u00a0 It’d give us the same law as Vermont, Arizona, Alaska and Wyoming.\u00a0<\/p>\n