Further Evidence…

…that the DFL knows its voter base believes its own press and has no critical thinking ability whatsoever:

So – we’ve got a straw buyer problem, but DFL county attorneys would pursue charges “because the penalties aren’t high enough”, so the DFL demands more penalties to the camera, but then leads his entire ghouish, creepy, Orwellian caucus in voting against a bill that’d do just that.

We’ll need a whole lot of Minnesotans who are tired of being treated like gullible children to turn out this November.

Separation

SCENE: Mitch BERG, at the library checking out audiobooks, is too engrossed to notice Avery LIBRELLE has walked in.

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Uggggghhhh…er, hey, Avery. What’s…

LIBRELLE: Silence! Conservatives are violating the Constitutional separation of church and state!

BERG: Right – the new Alabama law on in vitro fertilization references a majority religious view in regulating the willy-nilly fertilization of frozen embryos…

LIBRELLE: Bla bla bla. They’re citing a flying spaghetti monster in trashing civil liberties.

BERG: So – the left doesn’t refer to…God…?

LIBRELLE: Superstition! Flying Spaghetti Monsters!

BERG: …in abridging a civil liberty?

LIBRELLE: No! We are people of science!

BERG: Right.

Hawaii’s highest court ruled Wednesday that Second Amendment rights as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court do not extend to Hawaii citizens, citing the “spirit of Aloha.”

In the ruling, which was penned by Hawaii Supreme Court Justice Todd Eddins, the court determined that states “retain the authority to require” individuals to hold proper permits before carrying firearms in public. The decision also concluded that the Hawaii Constitution broadly “does not afford a right to carry firearms in public places for self defense,” further pointing to the “spirit of Aloha” and even quoting HBO’s TV drama “The Wire.”

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LIBRELLE: Well, that’s different.

BERG: Because Hawaii…

LIBRELLE: Hawai’i.

BERG: Right – it’s indigenous and colonized?

LIBRELLE: Yes. Now – I’m off to find books for “restorative editing”.

BERG: Of course you are.

And SCENE

\\

“But Mitch…”

“Why do you say that no “gun safety” group ever says anything that is simultaneously substantial, original and true?”

Easy. That’s a hard, objective face.

“So what about the shooting in Burnsvile that killed two cops an a parameeic? Gifford got the basic facts straight”

Well, they got some of them.

Not the ones that show us, as uaual, that their political and legal stance is gibberish, of course:

According to records with the Minnesota court system, Gooden had a rap-sheet going back to 2004 when he was convicted for disorderly conduct. In addition to a variety of traffic-related infractions including driving after suspension, expired registration, and speeding, Gooden had a domestic assault charge dismissed in 2005.

In 2008, Gooden was convicted of second-degree assault with a deadly weapon and was subsequently sentenced to multiple years of probation.

After this conviction, Gooden lost his right to possess firearms. Years after the conviction and completing his probation sentence, Gooden applied to have his firearm rights restored. In 2020, a Dakota County judge denied Gooden’s application for restoration of firearm rights. The Dakota County Attorney’s Office opposed Gooden’s application, citing two order for protection petitions filed against him by two different women.

According to information from Crime Watch Minneapolis, Gooden was also “wanted or was to be arrested for 2nd degree criminal sexual conduct” at the time of the shooting.

CrimeWatch has more of the details the mainstream media will painstakingly avoid (Twitter thread):

So Giffords is to rep4ting actual facts about guns, gun laws, gun owners, gun crime and the Second Amendment as Melvin Carter is to fixing potholes.

i

And So It Begins

The Legislature is back in session. And the DFL lost no time trying to extend last session’s jamdown.

Gun control? Yep, they got it:

Details here.

Of course, the bill will get dissected in court, if it gets passed. Best to make sure it doesn’t – which means if you’re not a member of the MN Gun Owners Caucus, you should be.

Senator Isa Perez-Vega may be a contender to pass Erin Maye-Quade as the most cloyingly annoying DFLer in the Senate.

Possible saving grace for this session? It’s an even-numbered year – and DFLs from Greater Minnesota are getting nervous about how the Faerie Raenbow Agenda from last session is going to go over in Eveleth. In this case, Sen. Hauschild – who currently occupies Tom Bakk’s old seat – and a clear case of nerves over making Minnesota a “sanctuary state”:

And with a one-vote majority in the Senate, it’s making a bit of a difference.

The DFLers in Greater Minnesota have to be looking at…:

  • Joe Biden’s escalating unpopularity. Trump doesn’t have to win the national election for them to still lose their seats in counties that are, or are drifting, red.
  • The disproportionate impact of DFL policy on rural Minnesota

…and thinking it just might be time to reel in some of the worst excesses.

Hope Hauschild takes the hint on Isa Perez-Vega’s idiot bill.

A few phone calls and emails might certainly help him make up his mind.

Ignorance Is Bliss. Also Death.

After a year and a half, the final report on the Uvalde Massacre was released last week.

And it told us something we knew within about a year of the Columbine Massacre – because the Secret Service reported it, after doing a deep study of spree killers: when someone is engaged in a spree killing (a mass murder with no other motivation), the best response is to meet them with violent opposition. Spree killers almost invariably operate in a psychotic reverie – and violent resistance shatters that fugue state. The directive: Don’t negotiate. Don’t wait for SWAT. Go in – if you’re a cop, do it as soon as you have another cop to cover you. Move in in mutualliy-supporting groups of 2-4 cops, and get rounds on target. If nothing else, violent resistance breaks the fugure state, and usually causes the spree killer to give up or kill themselves. (The Secret Service report didn’t endorse armed civilian resistance – but the real-world record shows a myriad of cases of regular schnooks ending spree killings. It’s the principle, not the actor, that gets the spree killer to point the gun at their own head.

And the Uvalde cops? Like the Parkland cops before them, they didn’t forget all their training…:

Eleven officers from the Uvalde school district and Uvalde Police Department arrived on the scene within three minutes of the shooter’s entry into the school. Five advanced initially and two were hit by shrapnel. Police made three attempts to enter the classrooms, which are adjoined by an interior door.

But as at Parkland, there was apparently crisis in leadership:

Pete Arredondo, then the chief of the Uvalde school police department, “directed officers at several points to delay making entry into classrooms in favor of searching for keys and clearing other classrooms,” the report found. He also tried to negotiate with the shooter, and treated him as a barricaded subject instead of a continuing threat to children and school staff, the report says…”The report concludes that had law enforcement agencies followed generally accepted practices and gone right after the shooter to stop him, lives would have been saved and people would have survived,” [US Attorney General Merrick ]Garland said.

The only “negotiating tactic” to which spree killers respond is shots on, or near, the target. They are the target.

Unserious

The Sentencing Guidelines Commission has issued a report on how gun crime is dealt with in Minnesota.

It’s pretty putrid:

OF 958 convictions for gun crimes in MInnesota for a year ending last June, 413 had their mandatory minimum sentenes waived.

That was for the entire state. Any guesses on how that breaks down with Metro vs. Greater MN numbers?

Let’s look at the big stats – convictions and minimum sentences – for the four largest metro Counties:

CountyConvictionsBelow MinimumPercentage below Minimum Sentence
Hennepin42922252%
Ramsey1638653%
Anoka331742%
Dakota602338%
Four Metro Counties68534851%
The other 83 counties, combined2736524%

Literally half of the people conviced of committing a crime with a gun in the Metro are given less than the state’s minimum sentence for the act – double the rate of the rest of the state.

Guilt By Tangential Association

Brandon Herrera is one of my favorite Guntubers.

I watch him mainly for his detailed, frequently off-color, mostly hilarious, and technically interesting gun takedown vids. He’s sort of like Ian McCallum, only gleefully NSFW.

This clip – going over a lawsuit by one of the victims of a (thankfully) failed mass murder attempt against a long list of gun and accessory companies whose products weren’ t involved in the incident – is worth a watch.

Again – language exuberantly NSFW.

The interesting part is at the end; Herrera challenges the defendants to not settle this specious, frivolous lawsuit out of court, and the viewer to hold them accountable if they do.

I’m going to try to find the list (and the current status of the case).

As The Hung-Over, Indolent Giant Rouses And Thinks About Heading To The Gym

Scene: MItch BERG is picking up a piece of litter and throwing it into a public trash can. He almost walks into Avery LIBRELLE

BERG: Oh. fuuuuuuurcryingoutloud Avery…

LIBRELLE: Merg! Shut up. I’m as giddy as a little menstruating person! NRA president Wayne LaPierre has resigned! The pro-murder movement took a huge hit.

BERG: Heh. That’s kinda funny.

LIBRELLE: Yeah…wait, what?

BERG: You’ll notice it’s all us shooters and Second Amendment activists doing the cheering, right? Start this about 1:42.

BERG: LaPierre essentially neutered the NRA for the past decade.

LIBRELLE: Pfft. Everyone knows they’re the black heart and soul of the American gun movement.

BERG: Kinda racist, but whatever. The NRA for the past decade or so has been basically a fund-raising machine that stopped operating at the state level. Most of the work for the past fifteen years has been the Second Amendment Foundation and a whoooole bunch of state groups that sprang up to fill the vacuum – like the MN Gun Owners Caucus.

LIBRELLE: But…they’re the evil empire.

BERG: “Evil”. Heh. Look – if the NRA is smart enough to elect a president who wants to use all that power and money to move policy, along with that huge legal and activist infrastructure that got built up while the NRA was spending all that fundraising money, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

LIBRELLE: Blah, blah, blah. I’m actually here to protest in favor of the Palestinians. I’m here to block you.

BERG: Cool. I’m waiting to cross this street, at the crosswalk, once the light changes. Block me there.

LIBRELLE: All right!

(LIBRELLE walks into the intersection as traffic honks and zooms around him.)

PASSING DRIVER: Hey, get out of the road, bud…er, lad…er… (looks at BERG, who is crossing the cross-street with the green light. BERG shrugs.)

And SCENE

“Show Me The Gun Owner, I’ll Show You The Disorder”

Yesterday – four days after the DFL’s vaunted “Red Flag” swatting-enablement and gun confiscation bill came out – the form to file to appeal a Red Flag order is out.

And it’s worse than you might have expected:

It should go without saying that your metro county attorneys – the ones that can’t be bothered to charge actual violent criminals – will turn up at court to oppose your appeal, and that the legal bills to litigate the issue against the bottomless resources of a hostile county attorney will be on you.

By the way – as bad as you think the new ERPO law is, it’s actually worse. The MN Gun Owners Caucus explains it here

News You Can, And May Well Need To, Use

What to do if you’re surrounded by a mob on the road?

Like most self-defense law, it’s a lot more complicated than you think.

While the lawyer is talking Washington State law (talk with a Minnesota defense attorney before assuming anything) they highlight the episode that happened in Minneapolis, by the Walker, a month or so ago.

Forewarned is forearmed.

The Army Of Davids

The good guy with the gun does in fact make a difference.

But according to the Crime Prevention Research Center, they make a much bigger difference than even I thought:

Evidence compiled by the Crime Prevention Research Center shows that the sources the media relied on undercounted the number of instances in which armed citizens have thwarted such attacks by an order of more than ten, saving untold numbers of lives. Of course, law-abiding citizens stopping these attacks are not rare. What is rare is national news coverage of those incidents. Although those many news stories about the Greenwood shooting also suggested that the defensive use of guns might endanger others, there is no evidence that these acts have harmed innocent victims.

Part of the problem is that the FBI is a little sluggish about counting episodes where the spree killer commits suicide after being confronted; the two events are not separate when they are inextricably linked.

But some of it is just plain bureaucratic dishonest. One fairly bald-faced example:

For example, the Bureau’s report about the Dec. 29, 2019 attack on the West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement, Texas, that left two men dead does not list this as an incident of “civic engagement.” Instead, the FBI lists this attack as being stopped by a security guard. A parishioner, who had volunteered to provide security during worship, fatally shot the perpetrator. That man, Jack Wilson, told Dr. John Lott that he was not a security professional. He said that 19 to 20 members of the congregation were armed that day, and they didn’t even keep track of who was carrying a concealed weapon.

Coverage of the actual episode right here. The FBI also treated this similar shooting as a “security guard” incident.

Shall Not Be Infringed

“But Mitch – why are you so intransigent a Second Amendment advocate?”

Glad you asked.

Growing up left of center as I did, the first real inkling I had that gun control was a stupid idea was reading about the Holocaust, and realizing that armed people don’t get shoved into boxcars.

And seeing the same story – modern Nazis trying to murder modern Jews – is a refresher.

Like this story, of three good guys with guns:

Seeing what’s going on in streets of the West today isn’t anything to make you feel like this sort of thing isn’t possible in the US.

Last month, as eighty years ago, the difference between death and at least a chance at life was having a gun.

From.

My.

Cold.

Dead.

Hand.

Compromise

Someone walks up to you with a baseball bat. They say they want to kill you.

Your response is “no, I don’t want to get beaten to death with a baseball bat”.

Looks like you have a standoff. A controversy. A conundrum.

Someone else steps in and asks “How about we compromise? Will you settle for a traumatic brain injury?”

It’s the middle way, after all. The guy with the bat might even say “sure, I just wanna hit you, hard!“

You might respond “No – in fact, I don’t want anyone hurting me in any way. At all”

And the buttinski responds “Why won’t yiou compromise?”

Who’s right?

You?

The guy with the bat?

Or the person striving to find the middle ground between the two of you?

If your response is “I’m putting my foot down; nobody is hitting me with a bat for any reason at all“, and the other to ask “why do you hate the guy with the bat?“, does that change anybody’s mind?

Point being, sometimes the middle path, the compromise, is not the most moral path forward.

Someone Else’s Shoes

Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:

The Minnesota Court of Appeals issued an opinion which clarifies the duty to retreat in defense-of-others cases.

Let’s imagine a situation where Lilly is the Victim lying on the ground, Trevon is the Assailant kneeling astride Lilly beating her with a baseball bat, and Tom is the Rescuer, a lawfully armed citizen who sees the situation.  Tom determines that Lilly is likely to suffer great bodily harm or death if Tom does not intervene using lethal force to stop Trevon’s attack.  If Tom shoots Trevon, can Tom claim he acted in self-defense?  In the past, we often heard that the Rescuer steps into the Victim’s shoes.  If the Victim could use self-defense, the Rescuer could, too.  But there was no case which clearly said so.

We know that in defense-of-self cases (if Trevon was attacking Tom), Tom must retreat if he can do so safely, before using lethal force.  That’s not the situation here.

The State was arguing that in defense-of-others cases, Tom as Rescuer must also retreat if he can do so safely, leaving Lilly, the Victim, to die.  It’s more important to prevent a shooting than to save a life.

The Court of Appeals decided that was wrong.  The duty to retreat is the duty of the VICTIM to retreat, not the duty of the RESCUER.

If Lilly could not safely retreat, then Tom might be justified in shooting Trevon to stop the deadly attack.

Of course, Tom is taking a risk in doing so.  The other rules of self-defense still apply.  Lilly may have initiated the confrontation, Trevon may be using a bat to stop Lilly from stabbing him with a knife again, Tom is still stuck in Lilly’s shoes for those elements of the defense.  But at least the leave-her-to-die argument has been laid to rest.

So that’s good news.

Joe Doakes, no longer in Como Park

It’s about time.

Induced Helplessness?

The FBI has a long history of underreporting defensive gun use by civilians.

Foir example, in the early 1990s, when criminologist Gary Kleck was estimating civilians used firearms for legal, justified, defensive purposes between 500,000 and 2,000,000 times a year – roughly 99% involving no shots fired. At the same time, the FBI’s estimate was closer to 80,000.

Chalk it up to reporting, or bureaucratic “conservatism”, or a statistical model that demanded a fairly high standard of confirmation for unreported episodes (like this one). Heck, even ascribe bad motives, like “trying to convince people that armed resistance to crime is counterproductive and futile” – although this was long before federal law enforcement (outside the BATFE) was widely presumed to be in the bag for the Democrats.

But some things never change:

The shooting that killed three people and injured another at a Greenwood, Indiana, mall on July 17, 2022 drew broad national attention because of how it ended – when 22-year-old Elisjsha Dicken, carrying a licensed handgun, fatally shot the attacker.

While Dicken was praised for his courage and skill – squeezing off his first shot 15 seconds after the attack began, from a distance of 40 yards – much of the immediate news coverage drew from FBI-approved statistics to assert that armed citizens almost never stop such attackers: “Rare in US for an active shooter to be stopped by bystander” (Associated Press); “Rampage in Indiana a rare instance of armed civilian ending mass shooting” (Washington Post); and “After Indiana mall shooting, one hero but no lasting solution to gun violence” (New York Times).

The FBI reports that armed citizens only stopped 14 of the 302 active shooter incidents it identified for the period 2014-2022. The FBI defines active shooter incidents as those in which an individual actively kills or attempts to kill people in a populated, public area. But it does not include those it deems related to other criminal activity, such as a robbery or fighting over drug turf.

But as with all information from government and media “experts”, the standards is “distrust and verify – and, almost invariably, distrust some more”.

Because the facts are a lot more interesting:

Evidence compiled by the Crime Prevention Research Center shows that the sources the media relied on undercounted the number of instances in which armed citizens have thwarted such attacks by an order of more than ten, saving untold numbers of lives. Of course, law-abiding citizens stopping these attacks are not rare. What is rare is national news coverage of those incidents. Although those many news stories about the Greenwood shooting also suggested that the defensive use of guns might endanger others, there is no evidence that these acts have harmed innocent victims.

The errors in the FBI’s stats are legion, and egregious. For example – remember this case? I sure do.

The FBI? Enh:

For example, the Bureau’s report about the Dec. 29, 2019 attack on the West Freeway Church of Christ in White Settlement, Texas, that left two men dead does not list this as an incident of “civic engagement.” Instead, the FBI lists this attack as being stopped by a security guard. A parishioner, who had volunteered to provide security during worship, fatally shot the perpetrator. That man, Jack Wilson, told Dr. John Lott that he was not a security professional. He said that 19 to 20 members of the congregation were armed that day, and they didn’t even keep track of who was carrying a concealed weapon.

It’s not just a few case:

Seriously. The undercount is egregious.

If the CPRC is correct – and it always is – citizens respond effecivelty to, not 4%, but rather to almost 36% of active shooter situatons.

The whole thing is very much worth a read.

And as always, repeat after me. Disturst and verify.

And, usually, distrust with greater vim and vigor.

Make Those Trains Run On Time

Democrats warned me that if we voted GOP, we’d have fascism in the US.

And they were right:

Last Friday, New Mexico governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat, announced a 30-day ban on the right to carry open or concealed firearms in public. She and the state health secretary, Patrick Allen, declared, “Gun violence and drug abuse currently constitute statewide public health emergencies,” and that provided sufficient justification for the governor to repeal the concealed-carry law, first passed in 2001, as well as the state’s open-carry law.

In New Mexico, about 46 percent of adults have at least one gun in their home.

The New Mexico state legislature is not under fire, missing, or incapable of performing its duties. It adjourned on March 18, and is scheduled to begin its next session January 16, 2024. The state legislature meets for a 60-day regular session in odd-numbered years, and for a 30-day regular session in even-numbered years. The governor can call a special session to deal with emergency legislation that needs attention before the next regular session; the state legislature can also declare its own “extraordinary session” and meet outside of the normal session, if three-fifths of each chamber agrees.

No Democrat can be allowed to live this down.

Only Human

The Minnesota Gun Owners Caucus has one at least one level of its case to legalize citizens ages 18 to 20 for carry permits.

Keith Ellison, being Keith Ellison, is fighting them:

So just so we are clear on this: in the state of Minnesota, if you’re a 10 year old who has decided they want to get themself chemically castrated, you have full legal standing.

If you’re a 20 year old veteran of the Armed Forces who wants to defend themselves, you are not only not old enough, you are an unperson.

This may be the perfect metaphor for the state of Minnesota today.

NOTE: Nobody of any age should write blog posts using “voice to text“ without taking the time to edit.

For Those Who Don’t Already Know

When the left talks about gun control / “gun safety”, it’s talking about you.

Not them..

During the relevant time frame, the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office rarely issued [carry permits]. Indeed, the office’s practice was to not even process an application for a CCW license absent a special instruction to do so…

…Thomas Moyer is Apple, Inc.’s head of global security. The company’s executive protection team is under his supervision. In 2016 and early 2017 the team began receiving more serious threats against Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, and became concerned about its ability to respond to these threats. As a consequence, in early 2017, Apple decided its executive protection team should be armed and began taking steps to obtain CCW licenses for team members…

…two Apple officials—David Gullo, senior director of global security, and Eric Mueller, senior director of operations for the security team—met with Undersheriff Sung [whose boss was running for re-election] to discuss CCW licenses…On March 26, 2019, members of Apple’s executive protection team were told to pick up their CCW licenses, which they did at the Sheriff’s Office…

Government licensing is a wealth transfer – on the table, or under it.

Facts

SCENE: Mitch BERG is getting canning supplies at Fleet Farm, when Avery LIBRELLE walks round the corner.

LIBRELLE: Merg!

BERG: Fuc…crying out loud, Avery, how are you?

LIBRELLE: Shut up. We figured out how to get white ammosexuals like you to support common sense gun safety regulations.

BERG: I can’t wait.

LIBRELLE: Give guns to black men!

BERG: Like this guy…

…who’s been getting universal, comprehensive praise from gun owners of all ethnicities?

LIBRELLE: No, no. I mean if we gave stereotypical black men guns and got reactions from stereotypical white ammosexuals.

BERG: That…is, uh, ,probably factual. and uncommonly frank of you. Did you just have a wisdom tooth pulled?

LIBRELLE: They did just legalize weed in Minnesota.

BERG: Aaaaah ,yeah. Hey, look!

(BERG points at…something, LIBRELLE slowly ambles around in the other direction, at which point BERG makes his escape).

And SCENE

Question For The Lawyers

A friend of the blog emails:

ATF Form 4473 question 21.g reads:

“g. Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance?
Warning: The use or possession of marijuana remains unlawful under Federal law regardless of whether it has been legalized or decriminalized
for medicinal or recreational purposes in the state where you reside

Yes No”

If your neighbor routinely sees you setting on your deck smoking weed and you come home one day with a terrifying AR-15 does the inference that you lied on your Form 4473 justify them invoking one of Minnesota’s Red Flag laws to have the authorities take away all your guns?

I am no lawyer – I will await input from one of them – but I suspect “It depends on how much your county attorney hates law abiding gun owners” is at least part of any correct answer.

A Nation Of Boogiemen

It’s this blog’s considered position that DFL politicians can say pretty much anything they want; they know that the typical DFL voter, while invincibly smug about their education, is incredibly badly informed and, being a trained regurgitator of dogma, has no capacity for critical thought. They also know that the Twin Cities’ subservient news media – being mostly from that same population – won’t do anything to fix that.

Which is why Melvin Carter can write bilge like this:

Now, you know gun store owners aren’t clairvoyant. And I know it.

And so does Melvin Carter.

He knows that a “straw buyer” is someone who:

  1. Uses his or her clean criminal record – with no indication they might be a probem, and
  2. Knowingly sells or gives guns to criminals.

And Mayor Carter also knows that neither the Hennepin nor Ramsey County attorneys, going back decades, is especially enthusiastic about going after straw buyers. Nobody ever got elected Senator by putting a gang-banger’s girlfriend in jail.

But they typical DFL voter? Someone who learned their law enforcement from a video game or an episode of “Criminal Minds?” They likely do think there’s some way for a gun store worker to tell if the person showing their ID is one of the 99.999% of gun buyers who are legit, or that other one who’ll sell a gun to a ne’er do well who goes on to shoot up a bar in Saint Paul.

And they just don’t care that much anyway.

Frozen

I’m never going to be the one to pile on someone who freezes up at the thought of charging toward mortal danger.

It happens to the best of people; trained cops and soldiers freeze solid when the immediate threat becomes real. Even soldiers who’ve been there, over and over, will freeze up – think of the Gunner Sergeant from Percy Sledges memoir The Old Breed, who fought through battle after battle against the Japanese, only to freeze up in his final battle.

Nobody can predict how they’d do.

Of course, there are still consequences. They may even be just consequences.

Of course, we know a couple things about spree killings: left unchecked, they rack up horrific death tolls. And the best way to end them is to respond with immediate lethal force .

Something that cops have been taught, now, for a few decades.

I’ll let God decide whether Scot Peterson – the cop who busied himself searching the buildings on the Parkland campus that didn’t have gunfire coming from inside during the Stoneman-Douglas High School massacre – is truly culpable for freezing up, not “under fire” but under the threat of it. He was 56, nearing retirement, probably not too unlike Danny Glover’s character in the (fictional) Lethal Weapon series, and just “too old for this s**t”.

Because due to double jeopardy, that’s the next judgment that matters. Because a jury acquitted him of culpability in those deaths last week:

“If they need to really know the truth of what occurred… I’ll be there for them,” he said.

Mr Peterson, 60, put his head in his hands and began sobbing as the verdicts were read out in court in Fort Lauderdale.

After the verdict, Mr Peterson told reporters that he would like to talk to the parents of the students who were killed.

I am not the one to judge.

But I’ll defer to someone who is (emphasis added by me):

But Tony Montalto, whose daughter Gina was one of the students murdered, said he continued to blame Mr Peterson for not trying to stop the shooting.

“His inaction contributed to the shock, the devastation of students and teachers at that school,” Mr Montalto told reporters. “We don’t understand how this jury looked at the evidence that was presented and found him not guilty.”

“All I can say to the members of the jury is: ‘I think your school should hire him to protect your children,‘” he said.

The person who should be at trial, Sheriff Scott Israel, who held his officers back from confronting the maniac who murdered 17, and spent the rest of his disgraceful career as a gun control activist to deflect away from his own uselessness, has not been charged with anything. I don’t suspect he can be.

It’s a shame.

Dreamworld

Fantasy: Group of mewling progressive soft (among other things) racists “plan” to “buy every eligible black American an AR-15”:

Progressive activists concerned about gun violence are launching a campaign to drum up the support they need to pass more restrictive gun laws. The group plans to purchase an AR-15 for every eligible black American to scare Republicans into backing stricter regulations on firearms.

“We’ve known for a long time that racist Republicans are terrified at the thought of black men owning guns,” said Shelby Harris, chief operating officer of “Unpull the Trigger,” a non-profit anti-gun group. “By making sure every black man has a rifle, we can finally get Republicans to support universal background checks, gun buybacks, and confiscation of assault weapons.”

Dubbed the “Scare the Racists Straight” initiative, this controversial proposal is intended to get Republican politicians and their conservative constituents on board with the effort to limit gun ownership as much as possible.

“It’s a really exciting project,” said Tiffany Petit. “When these racist rednecks see video after video of black men shooting assault weapons at the range and carrying them in public, they’ll get on the phone immediately to tell their Congressperson to support more gun control pronto!”

Reality: a day at the range is more egalitarian than almost anything in modern society…

…especially a DFL executive meeting of any kind.

Also – let the record show that “23 and Me” says I have a black ancestor in the past 6-7 generations. Please make mine a .300 Blackout if you’d be so kind.

Pounce!

Democrat have been trying to wedge hunters apart from other gun owners for decades.

And they’re not happy that its not working.

“Jilted”

Oddly, that’s not the word the Strib used when Klink refudiated his “A” rating with the NRA. I’d use “stabbed in the back”, personally.

Anyway – welcome to the party, deer hunters.