Category Archives: Gun-“Free” Zones

A Tale Of Two Cities

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Tyler Gottwalt strapped on an AK47 and took a walk.  He was looking for trouble…

…in pretty much the same way Martin Luther King was.  He set out to flush out an illegal law.

And he found it.  While the Sauk Rapids cops knew the law – citizens with carry permits are allowed to carry uncased long arms in public – the Saint Cloud PD didn’t.  They arrested Gottwalt, citing a city ordinance.

We’ll let the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance take up the story next:

As Professor Olson notes in the video, Saint Cloud can’t regulate guns differently than the state does, due to the state’s pre-emption ordinance. Which makes the SCPD’s arrest an illegal one.

Gottwalt is sueing the city. I hope he wins and wins big.

Those Who Forget Stupid-People History Are Doomed To Repeat It

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The Early ’70s – the National Coalition to Ban Handguns distributes signs indicating that the home is “proud to be gun-free”.

They made the usual, predictable media splash – the nation’s opinion-pushers were pretty roundly anti-gun in those days, and they’d done a pretty fair job of bandwagoning a good chunk of American opinion into line with them.

But then a funny thing happened.

The robbery rates in “gun-free homes” shot through the roof; owners of posted homes found that they were being robbed at a rate vastly, vastly, utterly, screamingly, almost satirically higher than their neighbors.

So the signs disappeared almost as fast as the “no guns allowed” signs vanished from Twin Cities bars after “gun-free” bars found themselves getting stuck up at an alarming rate.

We’re seeing a pattern here – right?

And by “we” I mean anyone whose EKG is ticking in the least bit.

Because not everybody does.

UPDATE:  Hah!  It look like the “red light” story is from a satire site!   The story is fake…

…but accurate.

In other words, I’ve fallen for a line that is devoid of fact.  Just like Senator Latz, Representatives Norton and Schoen, Heather Martens, the Right Reverend Nancy Nord Bence, Joan Peterson and Nick Coleman.  Only mine doesn’t trample the Constitution and get innocent people killed.

Today’s Real American Hero

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Missouri Democrat introduces an amendment to “prove a point” about the “absurdity” of open carry…

…and loses track of time, and is unable to withdraw the amendment.

Rep Deb Lavender (D) introduced an amendment to a bill dealing with open carry and [concealed carry permittees]. Her amendment would open the capitol building up to lawful carry of firearms for every lawful citizen rather than just for the elected officials.

I think she was about to withdraw the amendment during her closing argument when she talked her way through the 1 minute limit for her closing speech and the speaker slammed the gavel and opened the board for her amendment to be voted on.

SHE TALKED SO LONG SHE RAN OUT OF TIME TO WITHDRAW HER AMENDMENT.

The amendment passed with about 115 voting YES and now the proposed bill is an even stronger 2nd amendment bill because of her amendment.”

Which passed.  

Absolute Moral Authority

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Jesse Hughes – lead singer of the band “Eagles of Death Metal”, the band that was playing at the Bataclan in Paris the night of the Paris Massacre – says what every gun rights activist already knows; the only response to bad guys with guns is good guys with guns:

“Did your French gun control stop a single [expletive] person from dying at the Bataclan?” Hughes said. “And if anyone can answer yes, I’d like to hear it, because I don’t think so. I think the only thing that stopped it was some of the bravest men that I’ve ever seen in my life charging head-first into the face of death with their firearms.”

The left’s answer, inevitably, is a series of academic postulates that wither as fast as the crowd at Bataclan under reasoned scrutiny, to say nothing of real-life events.

Dear MOA: With all due respect: QQQQ.

The only reasoned response?  You, and you alone, are responsible for your and your family’s protection.  And while the world is demonstrably safer than it was, 20 and 70 and 200 years ago, human nature means that evil, some time, some place, will be waiting for someone, somewhere – whether in the form of a lone mugger, a couple of rapists,  a gang of terrorists, or a government full of gangsters.

By the way – there’s been four terror-related mass shootings, and ten terror attacks altogether, since the Charlie Hebdo massacre, with a total death toll of 152, and 388 injured.

In Zürich, where handgun carry permits are relatively plentiful?  Holding steady at zero and zero.  While correlation doesn’t equal causation, it fits a pattern that we see here in the US, and that they saw in Israel in the seventies; terrorists (like delusional mass-shooters in general) avoid places where there might be resistance.

Cause And Effect?

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Panera is the latest large chain to succumb to the blandishments of “Harpies For A Criminal-Safe World” “Moms Want Action” (a fully-owned subsidiary of Michael Bloomberg).

Bakery-cafe chain Panera Bread has joined a growing list of retailers including Starbucks and Target  by announcing that customers should leave their guns at home.

It makes no difference to me – I have eaten at Panera exactly thrice, and the last two, it was because someone else was picking up the tab.   I never ever really want an $8 grilled cheese sandwich that bad.

In the weeks and months leading up to this policy announcement, Panera Bread sought advice from Michael Bloomberg-backed Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, now part of the former Mayor’s $50 million Everytown nonprofit.

Behind every dumb decision about guns…

“Panera deserves our thanks and our congratulations for taking this important step, and I applaud the company for proactively consulting Moms Demand Action as it developed and implemented its policy,” said the group’s founder Shannon Watts, who has herself become the focus of ire from open carry activists and the NRA in recent months following efforts to see retailers and restaurant chains change their firearms policies.

And everyone deserves Moms Want Action’s(a fully-owned subsidiary of Michael Bloomberg) thanks for taking this action, which will end “gun violence” at Panera restraurants nationwide…

…oh, wait.   Never mind.

This Is “Gun Safety”

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Chicago has dragged their feet and obstructed the law-abiding gun citizen’s attempt to protect themselves ever since the day the Heller decisions was announced.

And the city’s murder rate is setting new records; January saw 51 homicides, the bloodiest January since the gory days of the ’90s.

Gang conflicts and retaliatory violence drove the “unacceptable” increase in homicides, the police department said in a statement. But the rise in violence also notably comes as the Chicago Police Department faces increased scrutiny following the court-ordered release of a police video showing a white police officer fatally shooting a black teenager 16 times, and as the department implements changes in how it monitors street stops by officers.

Chicago routinely records more homicides annually than any other American city, but the grim January violence toll marks a shocking spike in violence in a city that recorded 29 murders for the month of January last year and 20 murders for the month in 2014. In addition to the jump in killings, police department said that it recorded 241 shooting incidents for the month, more than double the 119 incidents recorded last January.

Some on the left – including, I suspect, Kim Norton – might think that the spike in violence is despite the city’s intransigence on guns in the hands of the law-abiding.

Some of us know better.

Those Gun-Toting White Christian Terrorists Strike Again

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Gun toting white Christianist terrorists armed with carry permits and a perfectly legal semiautomatic handgun and lots of hatred shoot a gay man seven times outside a gay bar in Lubbock Texas.

Clearly, that wave of white Christianist terror that Barack Obama, Janet Napolitano and wave after wave of earnest lefties have been warning us about is upon us.

Well, no.

They were Muslims.

And the attack happened in Sydney, Australia – where, President Obama assures us, hate crime can’t turn into a handgun homicide because law-abiding people can’t get those kinds of guns.

One thing’s for sure; when Mark Dayton says “if you don’t like immigrants, leave the state”, there are people out there who are ready to put some teeth into the demand!

Our Illogical Ninny Overlords

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Told that the State Capitol Police wanted to hold “active shooter” training for the legislature and its staff, Rep. Kim Norton decided to introduce a bill repealing last year’s law allowing law-abiding carry permittees to have their legally-carried firearms in the Capitol complex.

And the logic was…

…entertaining:

screenshot-www.facebook.com 2015-12-31 15-34-52

 

If law-abiding citizens can’t bring guns to the capitol, criminals won’t shoot anyone.

Just like nobody sells crack, drives over the speed limit or after too much to drink, or robs liquor stores any more; because they are laws against each.

Norton is wrong, by the way; at least 18 states allow law-abiding citizens to carry their legal firearms in the state Capitols in one way or another.

That’s the reason so many Real Americans have such a hard time taking gun-grabbers seriously; they’re not serious.

 

Good Spirit. Lousy Idea.

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Anyone with a living soul was nauseated by the display in Cologne on New Years Eve, where thousands of men of “North African” descent roamed the street in gangs, sexually assaulting women and impeding the police’s attempts to respond.

Here in the US – where this sort of thing is thankfully very rare – the responses depended on the responder’s politics.

People on the left strenuously denied there was a problem, or blamed it on fraternities affiliated with the NRA.

People on the right bought another box of ammo.

Either would be more productive, I suspect, than this group of…er, males in the Netherlands:

The sign says “If you’re not wearing pants, you make less of a mess when they attack you”. No, that’s not true. It says “Don’t make women dress chaste / keep your hands to yourself”. That’ll show ’em.

I’m sure the women of Cologne are thankful for the “solidarity”.

A more productive statement?  Germans are doing their best to arm themselves, as best they can given Germany’s patriarchal gun laws.

And where real people try to arm themselves, you can count on the media to get the Victorian vapours.

The caption says “The Weapons industry profits from the Refugee crisis”. Naturally. Blame Big Gun.

Or in this case, I suppose, the Hohenzollern vapours.

Which group do you suppose will actually benefit the women of Germany – the shooters or the Dutch guys in dresses?

Small Victories

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Making government follow the rules?  Should be a gimme.

It’s never a gimme.

But the folks at the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance (GOCRA) notched a couple of wins earlier this week.  You can, in fact, fight city hall.

First?  A DMV office in Anoka tried to post itself “No Guns Allowed” – which is in fact against the law.

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Click to see full-sized image. All photos courtesy GOCRA.

But the sign is gone now.   Which is a reminder, BTW – state and local government offices, except for courthouses and buildings that include courtrooms, can not be posted (Federal buildings can – don’t carry there).

And the city of Brooklyn Center added its own special, extra-intrusive, and extralegal questionnaire to its “permit to purchase” process:

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Nosey much? Click to see full-size.

But it‘s gone now, too.

That, by the way, is a way you can help.  While most of the “No Guns Allowed” signs disappeared from private businesses within months of the passage of “Shall Issue” (gun owners are better customers and better tippers than the general public), every few months we see the occasional government office trying to sneak one in.

No dice, people.  Our civil rights are not negotiable.

Just a quick reminder – GOCRA has been in the civil rights business for 26 years, now.  It’s one of a number of great civil rights groups in the Twin Cities – and, on 2nd Amendment issues, it’s the big one.

 

 

A Republican Is A Democrat Who’s Been Mugged

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A week ago this past Monday, we wrote about the tear-squirting in Kansas, as Kansas’ state-run post-secondary schools get ready for the legal mandate to allow concealed carry on campus to take effect.

And today comes the story of a student and victim from the mass-stabbing a few weeks ago at University of California at Merced, who, after a terrible experience that included being stabbed (and waiting 20 minutes for police to arrive)(…:

…After that horrifying experience of being stabbed, Price was able to drive himself a couple of miles from the university, to Mercy Medical Center, to be treated.

Amazingly, within a couple of hours, he was able to drive himself home.

“I’m not going to get upset over one loose cannon,” said Price.

Infact, he plans to head back to the university, to get back to work.

The contractor is just thankful, he’s able to go home to his family, still puzzled over why.

“To become a university student and throw it all away like that, I don’t know why he’d want to do that,” said Price.

…undertook the sensible conclusion:

Price says he now thinks differently about having a concealed weapon.

He wishes he had one when this all unfolded.

Police chiefs and politicians may hem and haw at the idea – but the people who actually live where this crap happens know better.  A guy with a gun saves lives.  Even if it’s just their own.

Enough Is Enough

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I’ve been offline for a bit, so I guess I’m just catching up, here.

My condolences to the victims of yesterday’s episode of workplace violence in San Bernardino.

Clearly, the avalanche of white-supremacist violence that the left, media and Administration (pardon the redundancy), and especially against the Planned Parenthood clinic just two miles away from the event, in our climate-change-afflicted nation, have been warning us about is coming rapidly to pass.

The real tragedy is this: if California merely banned magazines larger than ten rounds, as well as a much wider range of “assault weapons” than Federal law currently addresses, and instituted much more intrusive background checks than the rest of the country, none of this would have happened.

We can still be thankful that none of the victims, being in a “gun-free” government building, were able to resist, or who knows how bad it could have gotten?

UPDATE:  Oh.

Surely There Must Be Some Mistake

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UPDATE:  As always we follow the 24 hour rule here in SITD.

But – and I’m strictly speculating here – am I the only one who thinks it’s odd that the killer or killers (news reporters are conflicted on that point) didn’t stick around to go out in the usual blaze of media glory, but shot up the meeting and drove away in a “black SUV?”

Another mass shooting in California.

That is to say, a state that has every restriction that gun owners want (or admit to wanting so far):  magazine limits, background checks on private sales, the works.

A state that does its best to prevent a “good guy” from getting a gun.

How could this possibly be?

Watch for the media and the “President” to try not to waste the crisis – and for a lot of lies from both.  And above all, remember the 24 hour rule with media coverage.

 

Deja Vu All Over Again

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Liberals hate civil rights.

Oh, not the civil rights that involve snarking at religion or aborting babies or waving ones’ privates about in public.  Those are pretty sacrosanct on the left.

But actual rights that matter?  Life, liberty, personal property, economic freedom, freedom of conscience, freedom from dependence?  Not so much.

And whenever The People get more of those freedoms, the left – Chicken Littles, all – get very, very nervous.

A change in Kansas law now will allow students and staff with carry permits to bring their legal firearms to school.

Some folks get it:

As Kansas moves toward a time when guns will be as welcome on university campuses as laptops, students are starting to take notice and talk about how they’ll handle that day when it comes.

For many, it’s no big deal. For students who grew up in a largely rural state, surrounded by guns, having the student at the next desk carrying one in pocket or purse doesn’t feel particularly unfamiliar or uncomfortable.

And others – following in the tradition of generations of legislators, pundits and non-profiteers – insist that, notwithstanding thirty years of such predictions

Others are predicting disaster when any student or employee over 21 can carry concealed on campus, without a permit or training in how and when to deploy a deadly weapon…Kennedi Grant, a junior from St. Louis who also is involved in the group, said marginalized students feel danger on campus already without concealed weapons and that “adding that to the mix will only cause more chaos.”

Grant, a journalism student [no cigar for guessing that – Ed. ], said allowing concealed firearms on campus increases the likelihood of a shooting. “It’s not even a matter of if anymore, it’s become a matter of when,” she said.

See also: Every single jurisdiction where the law-abiding citizens have won the right not to be defenseless sheep, and their solons wet their collective (heh) pants.  I’ll direct you in particular to Minnesota’s own “debate” on the subject in 2003, where Senator Wes “Lying Sack of Filth” Skoglund predicted gang-bangers getting carry permits and shooting people up at random (because they weren’t doing that before, and aren’t doing it now, and it’s because they can’t get carry permits, clearly).

(Has anyone noticed how very afraid of Black people our Democrat legislators seem to be?)

Of course, it never happened; it didn’t happen in the idiot Twin Cities, and it won’t happen in sane, sensible Kansas.

But we knew that.

“There Are Certain Sections Of New York, Major, I Wouldn’t Advise You To Invade”

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ISIS – or someone claiming to speak for them, anyway –  released a list of American cities they plan to attack.  The ostensible “list” has, in some cases, the parents of something that was compiled by throwing darts at a map.

And when I saw the list, I couldn’t help but remember this scene, from Casablanca:

Which led me to this bit, from a piece Kevin Williamson has out today on NRO:

he Sunday after the shootings at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, I attended Mass at a Catholic church in a very conservative suburb in a Western state where gun rights are in the main unquestioned. As he spoke about the massacre in Charleston, the priest, who showed no sign of indulging himself in ecclesiastical theatrics, grew genuinely angry — that such a thing had been done at all, and that it had been done in a sanctuary among Christians at prayer. Later I asked him what he would have done if it had been his church. “This congregation?” he asked with a little smile that was meaner than you want a priest’s to be. “Probably administer his last rites.”

I thought about that good pastor as reports of the horrors in Paris came in. There was the usual sentimental outpouring on social media…All of that is useless, of course, but one feels the need to do something. But the only thing one can really do is the one thing that Parisians cannot do: shoot back.

With that in mind, I noticed one of the cities on the “target list”;  Minot, North Dakota.

I had to laugh.

Go ahead, Abu.  Go to North Dakota. On any eight random months, your thin, low octane Levantine blood will freeze as solid as the coolant in the 74 Fiat Spyder.

Casing your targets?  North Dakota isn’t quite as overwhelmingly caucasian as it was when I grew up there – but if you wanna case your targets in Minot, you’re gonna stand out from the crowd in a way that you don’t in Chicago or Minneapolis.  It’s not that big of a place.

And North Dakotans are strapped, Abu. #8 in the country in terms of guns per capita.   The oil workers will rip you into long thin strips; run afoul of the wrong farmers, and they will be picking pieces of you out of cattle stools for months.

Perhaps you think all Americans are like University of Missouri students, or Yale university social justice warriors, or espresso guzzling Manhattan lumbersexuals.  Go ahead.  Come to NoDak.  Not only would you die a lonely, painful death – from freezing, if not from crushing return fire – but the media would never know your attack, and demise, happened.  Your deaths would be lonely, and utterly unheralded – even within the state.

Just saying, Abu – f**k with North Dakota, and you might want to go back home and take a chance with the French Air Force.

———-

More seriously?

I had the pleasure of talking with Peter Johnson of Archway Defense over the weekend, on the show; I’ll urge you to listen to the whole hour; it’s pretty good.

The bad news:  the terrorists are learning yet again to use our strengths against us.  Rather than flying would-be terrorists to Afghanistan or Somalia for training, and giving western intelligence another set of data points and drone targets, they’re distributing information on attack preparation, bomb-making, and close-quarters combat (against the unarmed) via the internet – and doing a great job of it.

The “good” news?  They look for undefended targets.  Whether lone-wolves attacking Fort Hood, or the Chattanooga military offices, or the Washington Navy Yard, or bigger, better-financed, paramilitary operations like the various Paris attacks or the Nairobi Mall attack or Mumbai, the terrorists seek out the helpless to slaughter.  They avoid places where anyone could trip things up.

Yet another reason to flout, en masse, the Mall of America’s idiotic and dubiously legal gun ban.

#GunDense

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I’ve recently became aware of “Muggeridge’s Law” – I have an article coming up on the subject.  Muggeridge’s Law states that it’s impossible to be funny, since one’s most hamfistedly satirical “predictions” will inevitably be borne out in fact.

When I first heard the news of the terrorist attacks in Paris, I thought – I kid you not – “some gun grabber group will blame this on the NRA”.

Muggeridge reared his head; the ghouls at “Moms Want Action” struck over the weekend:

http://twitter.com/MomsDemand/status/665294443638075392/photo/1

I won’t bother asking if “Moms Want Action” is aware that the terrorists used plenty of explosives, or that their guns were the kind of fully-automatic AK47s that are illegal in Wyoming and Kansas, much less France, where the law-abiding citizen can’t easily get permission to own, much less carry, a handgun.   They don’t know the difference, and if they did, they wouldn’t care, because their  goal isn’t to convince people who know what they’re talking about (99% of whom are pro-Second-Amendment), but rather to Lie First, Lie Last, Lie Always to keep the uninformed in line.

I won’t even ask if they’ve noticed that this is the the third major terrorist attack in gun-free Paris involving guns and explosives this year; the death toll among them all is hovering close to 150 – almost as bad as Chicago – and there’s no way we’re done.

The Twin Cities gun grabber groups don’t want a conversation, much less an open debate.  They made this clear last month.

I’m about done waiting for them to come to the debate.

Opposite World

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Another school, another shooting, more people dead, this time in Sweden where a young man wearing a Star Wars mask attacked a school.

No, the killer didn’t do the shooting.  The killer was stopped by a good guy with a gun.  Who shot him.  In a school.

And stopped him from killing more children.  By shooting him.  In a school.

So does that make this the Good Kind of School Shooting?

Joe Doakes

No.  It makes it the kind of shooting you never hear about in the American media – shootings like these – that interrupt the narrative that “gun violence” is out of control.

Righteous

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Attack a pastor during Sunday worship service and get shot . . . by the pastor?

Gives new meaning to the phrase “The way to stop a Bad Man with a gun is a Good Man with a gun.”

The police are trying to decide whether to charge the pastor for violating the Gun Free Zone (Michigan law doesn’t allow guns in church).

Save a pile of lives, go to jail?

Joe Doakes

It’s one of the ugly conundra of self defense; no matter how, er, righteous the shooting, you’re only as safe as the most zealous prosecutor is in the mood to let you be.

Lott Of Facts

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Many thanks to Dr. John Lott – partly for his piece in National Review yesterday expanding on the work that is rapidly ripping the guts out of the left’s meme that “a good guy with a gun” doesn’t save lives and that gun free zones are anything but safe-criminal areas…:

But the deterrent and life-saving effects of concealed-handgun laws on mass public shootings aren’t just anecdotal. Bill Landes of the University of Chicago and I gathered data on mass public shootings from 1977 to 1999. We studied 13 different types of gun-control laws as well as the impact of law enforcement, but the only law that had a statistically significant impact on mass public shootings was the passage of right-to-carry laws. Right-to-carry laws reduced both the frequency and the severity of mass public shootings; and to the extent to which mass shootings still occurred, they took place in those tiny areas in the states where permitted concealed handguns were not allowed.

…and partly for giving me a solid half-dozen more cases of “good guys with guns” that have interrupted mass shootings, to add to this blog’s rapidly-expanding “Good Guy or Gal With A Gun” page.

More Guns (In The Hands Of The Law Abiding) And Fewer Liberals = Less Crime

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After every mass-shooting incident, both sides in the Second Amendment debate sound off.  The left believes “commonsense gun control” leads to less crime.  The right believes “more guns equals less crime”.

Both sides tend to leave it at the level of chanting points, without ever really submitting evidence, much less proving anything [1].

So I thought I’d give it a shot.  What brings more “gun safety” – more guns, or less?

Definition Of Terms:  To start with, I took crime data from the states and the the 70 or so largest US cities – places with over 250,000 people.

For lack of a better measure, I used each state’s governor s the bellwether of the city’s political makeup – which may not be academically perfect, but as a practical matter it’s as useful a measure of each state’s sympathies as we have.

States of Affairs:  And the murder rates break down like this:

  • Democrat States: 12.2 murders per 100,000
  • GOP States: 11.0 murders per 100,000 (all figures henceforth will be per 100,000).

Well, that looks pretty even; that’s like an 10% variation.  Hardly outside the margin of error, really (although as we discussed some time ago, there’s plenty of variation there, too).

The differences in violent crime, robberies and aggravated assaults and rapes and the like, are a tad more dramatic – but only just:

  • Democrat States: 841.18
  • GOP States: 749.12

Democrat states have 12% more violent crime.  Again – could be just statistical noise.

Urbanity:  But if you’re from Minnesota, or most states with a large urban area that controls half the population, you know that state politics don’t tell you everything.  In places like Illinois, Wisconsin, Oregon, Washington, Michigan, Iowa, even New York and California, solid-blue cities float in huge placid prosperous lagoons of red.

Again – I broke out “control” by the city’s current mayor, or in the case of the few cities using  Manager/Commission government, the control of the commission.

So when you break out the murder rates of American cities of over 250,000, they come out more like this:

  • Democrat Cities: 12.9
  • GOP Cities 7.77

So the murder  rates in cities that have mayors from the Democrat Party are 60% higher than in GOP-run cities.

OK, that’s significant.  And the violent crime rates are similarly skewed:

  • Democrat Cities: 875.3
  • GOP Run Cities: 561.0

There is 56% more violent crime in cities run by Democrats.

More Guns, Less Guns…:  But when cornered by Gun Rights supporters, gun control activists punt to the line that “it’s all about the availability of guns”.

The only true measure of the availability of guns is “can you find one that you can afford without breaking the law?”

But I figured I’d meet the left and the gun grabbers halfway on this one; I measured all cities by the “Brady Campaign Scorecard” rating of the state in which they reside (which is a little unrealistic, since some cities have “tougher” gun laws than their states; I’ll work on that).

The assumption:  A “high” Brady rating, an A or B, implies “tougher” gun laws and, by extension, fewer guns (for the law-abiding).

And the numbers break out like this (“winners” will be in bold type):

Brady Rating  All Cities Democrat Cities GOP Cities Difference
A 12.48  13.3  8 Democrat cities rate 66% higher
B 12.75  13.75 None No B-rated GOP cities.
C 14.16  16.1  6.4 Democrat cities have 251% higher murder rate.
D 10.22  10.7 11.25 (two cities) GOP cities 5% higher.  Skewed by Oklahoma City’s crime rate.
F 10.51  11.77 8.03 Democrat cities 47% higher.

Violent Crime by Brady rating

 Brady Rating All Cities Democrat Cities GOP Cities Difference
A 816.73  909.88  499.5 Democrat cities rate 82% higher
B (only Boston and Chicago) 835  835 (only Boston reported)  NA No B-rated GOP cities
C 913.85  1032.2 440 235% higher in Democrat cities
D 727.97  770.35  558.45 38% higher in Democrat cities
F 758.1 805.75 673.56 20% higher in Democrat cities.

So the big variables seem to be not so much the availability of guns or the strictness of gun control laws, which doesn’t seem to be correlated with any rises and falls in murder or violent crime rates.

But being controlled by the Democrat party?  There’s a straight line correlation there.

Now, I’m not saying that Democrats cause crime.  Democrats bleed just like the rest of us do.

But the pathologies that one-party “progressive” Democrat rule inevitably brings do seem to be correlated with higher murder and violent crime rates.

Correlation doesn’t mean causation.  But it suggests a possible path to causation.

[1] I know – the Second Amendment crew does submit evidence, and has proven its case to everyone but our idiot media.  I’m just saying it for purposes of argument.

With More “Victories” Like This…

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SCENE:  Avery LIBRELLE is switching a regular cucumber label to an organic cuke when he sees Mitch BERG picking out a piece of ginger root.  LIBRELLE walks over to BERG.  

LIBRELLE:  Hey, Merg!

BERG: Huh?  Oh, sh…hi, Avery.  What’s up?

LIBRELLE:  We won a huge victory over the NRA!

MITCH:  Oh yeah?

LIBRELLE:  Yeah!  Now, people won’t be able to kill people in schools!

MITCH:  Er, Avery?  Guns are already illegal on school grounds. It’s federal law.  Of course, the only people it affects are people with carry permits.   It’s already illegal for anyone who doesn’t have a California permit to carry a gun in public, much less on school grounds.

LIBRELLE:  Right!  So they can’t go nuts and shoot up schools!

MITCH:  And your example of a person with a carry permit shooting up a school is…who?

LIBRELLE:  Hundreds!

MITCH:  Name one.

LIBRELLE:  It’s settled science.

MITCH:  OK.  One example?

LIBRELLE:  It’s settled.  That means the information has been sealed.  Anyway – this is a huge win.

MITCH:  Because now, people who carried guns legally, but not on school grounds, and who never have caused any problems at schools much less killed anyone, are double-barred from carrying guns…

LIBRELLE: Yep!

MITCH:  While the criminals continue to do as they please.

LIBRELLE:  Hey! Trigger warning!

MITCH:  Huh?

LIBRELLE:  “Criminal” is racist!

(And SCENE).

Keep Guns Out Of The Hands Of Straw Men

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Watch Mitch Berg ANNIHILATE More Liberal Hamsters!  Mind Blown!

UPDATE:  A key “source” in the piece I fisk has turned out to be fraud.  See the Update at the bottom of the story.. 

One of my long-time stalkers – who’s been tweenting about me at least ten times a day for the past six years, which may be as perfect a definition of “a wasted life” as I can imagine – has been spamming the Northern Alliance’s hashtag on Twitter and Facebook with…well, random collections of factoids gathered from Googling, apparently.

And in so doing, he introduced me to yet another article in Raw Story – aka “liberal-friendly news even dumber than The Awl.”

This time, it’s entitled (with that usual online news biz subtlety) “‘It’s insane’: Combat veterans shoot down NRA ‘fantasy world’ of ‘good guys with guns’”

Now, we’ve pretty well  shredded Raw Story – whom I suspect just sold a ton of ads to “Everytown” or “MoveOn”or some other group that’s trying to run a PR war against the NRA, given the enthusiasm with which they’re reporting gun issues generating half-informed anti-gun content.

But even by Raw Story’s dubious standards, this is a dumb piece.  So dumb, in fact, that I’m not going to fisk the whole thing (as I did earlier this week).  Because while it’s a deeply stupid piece, it does touch on a key theme you need to know when you try to engage gun-grabbers.

Because like pretty much all aggressive, inflammatory anti-gun “journalism” cribbing fromn other left-leaning news sources today, it’s made up of:

  • Appeals to ridicule
  • Non-sequiturs
  • Strawmen

Har De Har Har:  Officialdom – cops, soldiers, paramedics, bureaucrats – always, always believe that nobody could do their jobs.  Sort of like union teachers believe homeschoolers can’t possibly, y’know, teach kids:

The NRA’s chief spokesman, Wayne LaPierre, infamously claimed following the Sandy Hook child massacre that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” — but Rivera and other combat vets say that’s ridiculous.

“I think they would absolutely panic,” [Sgt. Rafael Noboa y Rivera] told The Nation. [Editor’s note: Rivera served as Raw Story’s associate publisher in 2013.]…“I think there’s this fantasy world of gunplay in the movies, but it doesn’t really happen that way,”…

Well, thanks, Sergeant Obvious.

To be fair (something Raw Story will not), it’s entirely possible there are law-abiding shooters out there who do think it’s like the movies.

But you don’t go through any sort of concealed-carry training with any such illusions – any more than any cop or soldier.

But while we’re on the topic of cops and soldiers…:

“When I heard gunfire [in Iraq], I didn’t immediately pick up my rifle and react. I first tried to ascertain where the shooting was coming from, where I was in relation to the gunfire and how far away it was. I think most untrained people are either going to freeze up, or just whip out their gun and start firing in that circumstance.”

Right.  In combat, where the situation is fluid and confusing and the adrenaline and stress are overwhelming, lots of training is required to survive, much less make sure you don’t kill the wrong person.   And for police work, where there generally isn’t an “enemy” and situations can be incredibly ambiguous (ambiguous enough that police departments grant cops a lot of qualified immunity for the inevitable, inadvertent, accidental shootings of the wrong people in the line of duty), lots of training is a legal, moral and tactical imperative.

However…

Complete The Thought, Now…:  …self-defense is not combat, and it’s not police work.

As we pointed out in Monday’s piece, there are 3-4 criteria that a civilian – not a soldier in combat, or a cop on duty – must follow for a shooting to be considered legal self-defense [1].  And “hearing a shooting, and running to engage the shooter”, depending on your state and the zeal of the prosecutor, might very well violate two of them (“The Threat Must Be Immediate” and “Duty to Retreat”).

There’s a flip side to that; while hearing gunfire in the distance is chock full of nasty, lethal ambiguities, there are certain situations that are not ambiguous at all:

None of these situations are remotely ambiguous.  You don’t need military training, or police experience, or even to have an IQ above 75, to know exactly what is going on.  You need nothing special in terms of knowledge to know that each of these situations is an immediate threat to your life.  Right now.  

And you don’t need any special training (although practice and drilling and, yes, training certainly help) to respond.

Which brings us to the next non-sequitur:

Stephen Benson first learned during Navy SEAL training that carrying a gun would be more likely to expose him to gun violence.

That lesson directly contradicts the message promoted by the National Rifle Association and increasingly cited by gun owners as their motivation for buying a firearm, reported The Nation [There’s a freaking shock].

“It’s insane,” Benson said, recalling how his military training exposed the lie behind the most persistent pro-gun argument.

“We put on our issue .45s, and our instructor said, ‘Gentlemen, the first and most important thing you’ve done by putting on that weapon is you’ve increased your chances of being in a gunfight by 100 percent,’” he said.

[By the way – this last couple of paragraphs tripped my BS detector.  And as Joe Doakes showed in the comments, my BS detector is better than Raw Story’s, or my stalker’s.  See the UPDATE below]

After which the SEALS (who are not, to the best of my knowledge, “issued” .45s, although it’s entirely possible Mr. Benson went through “SEAL training” before 1985) did what?  Learned de-escalation techniques and put the guns away?

No – they learned how to win gunfights.  It’s their job.

For civilians, it is a non-sequitur; if you carry (concealed, usually – not openly, inviting a pre-emptive strike), it should decrease your chance of ever getting into a fight of any kind, since avoiding fights becomes an imperative.  It also decreases your chance of being defenseless against a lethal threat.  To zero?  No – sometimes it just doesn’t work, But the record is good: hundreds of justifiable homicides a year; tens of thousands of defensive gun uses, mostly with no shots fired; crime rates lowered with no gun use needed at all.

Said No Law Abiding Civilian Gun Owner, Ever:  The rest of the article is more of the same; this sort of thing:

“Unless it’s constantly drilled into you, it’s very hard to maintain discipline in those situations,” [former ATF agent and Vietnam veteran ]  told The Nation. “You’re immediately hit with a massive thump of adrenaline…conscious thought shuts down because you’ve been taken over by your nervous system, and your nervous system is saying, ‘Holy sh*t, things just got really bad.’”…“Someone can always say, ‘If your mother is being raped by 5 people, wouldn’t you want her to have a gun?’ Well, okay, if you put it that way, I’d say yes — but that’s not a likely scenario.”

Well, duh.  It’s not likely to happen to anyone’s given mom on any given day.  But if it’s any given mom, and that mom doesn’t wanna get raped, is Mr. Benson saying that there’s any ambiguity in the situation requiring any special training ?

Any at all?

 “The question is: If you see someone running out of a gas station with a gun in their hand, do you want an untrained person jumping out and opening fire?” the former ATF agent said. “For me, the answer is clearly ‘no.’”

Far be it from me to question the qualifications of an ATF agent – an elite, utterly-qualified federal agency that gave guns to narcotraficantes  but the “answer is clearly no” to any citizen with a carry permit and no badge, too.   Jumping out and firing at people who aren’t a direct threat to you can get you in trouble with the wrong prosecutor – and even, sometimes justifiably, the right ones.

Look – we get it.  If you have a heart attack as you’re walking down the aisle at Target, you’d like the first person to come along to be a cardiologist, not a receptionist with a cell phone and a six-months-old Red Cross first aid card.  If you’re is stranded in a blizzard, you’d like it to happen as you pull up to a Embassy Suites with a trunkful of “Free Evening With Champagne” coupons rather than in the middle of the prairie with a candle, a bag of Snickers bars and a space blanket.  And if you’re stuck in a room at your church when a pasty-faced forty-something loser in a “Minnesota Progressive Project” t-shirt barges in with a .25 automatic, you’d like there to just happen to be an off-duty cop with a service  Glock in the room with you rather than some random guy with a carry permit.

But if the only thing standing between you and personal extinction is that secretary, that candle and those snickers, or tha pudgy projectile-sweating middle-aged guy holding a pistol in his shaky hands, are you going to say “No! I choose death on priciple, you mere pretenders!”

I’m gonna guess not.

Especially since – all the derision from Raw Story The Nation notwithstanding – the regular schlemiel’s record is pretty good, all in all.

UPDATE:  Mr. Benson, the “SEAL”, who gave the spiel about the “Instructor” in “SEAL Training” that “warned him” about the risk of “gunfights” if he”carried a gun” like “SEALs” do, tripped my BS detector even as I quoted him.  I thought Mr. Benson sounded more like Heather Martens than Marcus Luttrell.

And as Joe Doakes pointed out in the comments– my BS detector is pretty darn good after all .  Mr. Benson, the “SEAL”, is a fraud.  He duped The Nation:

The original story identified a source as a combat veteran and former Navy SEAL. A records search has since revealed that he significantly exaggerated his military record. His comments have been removed from the article, and the headline has been changed. We apologize to our readers.

Of course, Raw Story doesn’t favor us with that factoid in their copy and paste job.  And my not-very-smart stalker is probably gonna find it a surprise as well.

Continue reading →

A Nation Of Classical Philosophers

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

America was founded on the belief that people were endowed by their Creator with certain rights, including the right to life, which carries with it the right to defend one’s life from those who would take it.  A gun-free zone denies effective self-defense which jeopardizes the right to life; it is an unjust law.

The classical philosophers from St. Augustine and Abraham Lincoln through Thoreau, Martin Luther King and Gandhi agree we have a moral duty to disobey unjust laws.

Turns out, guns are common on that Oregon college campus despite the gun-free policy.   Lots of classical philosophers there.  Good for them!

Wonder how long before someone complains that students who carry on campus make others feel “unsafe” so the school must expel them?

Joe Doakes

Just you watch.

Watch Mitch Berg DESTROY This Liberal Hamster’s Argument With This One Weird Trick

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Check Out Paragraph Nine.  Mind Blown.

The website “Raw Story” is, in general , almost as useless as Buzzfeed; at least Buzzfeed has some really cool recipes, which Raw Story utterly lacks.

Raw Story (henceforth RS) is as useless as “The Awl”.  There.  Got it.

Anyway, they ran a piece last week about the Oregon shooting that claimed that guns were useless for defending against mass shootings because…

…one shooter has a solid sense of physical and legal self-preservation.

But they sure think they’re onto something, as evidenced by their cool-handed, measured, sober headline:

Armed vet destroys gun nuts’ argument on mass shooters by explaining why he didn’t attack Oregon killer

So let’s look at the story and see what gets “destroyed”.

Continue reading →

Random Thoughts

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Random thoughts after a pretty awful day yesterday:

Incongruity: So if #BlackLivesMatter, why do they only make the news the relatively small percent of the time when there’s a white shooter?

X Marks The Lack Of Spot: Speaking of shooters, MNGOPAC has a little reminder for everyone that’s jabbering about “commonsense gun control”:

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They should add a line for “repeal gun free zones”.

It wouldn’t necessarily result in a green check box.  We’d need a third tick mark; a blue question mark labeled “would probably deter killers, give victims a chance“.

We Need More Like This:  Sheriff John Hanlin – the Douglas County Sheriff in whose juridiction the shooting took place – has long sparred with gun control hamsters.

And yesterday, his office refused to name the murderer – doing his best to deny the human roach the infamy and publicity he desired.