I’ll urge prayers, or whatever your worldview calls for, for Chris Mintz, an Army veteran who was shot seven times trying to save others during yesterday’s mass-murder in Oregon.

While the details are still sketchy, it appears Mintz was shot repeatedly trying to either protect others, or to stop the murderer during his killing spree.  He’s still in very serious condition with seven gunshot wounds, in the back, abdomen, hands and apparently legs.

Mintz is, by all indications, a hero.

And hopefully via the grace of God he’ll come out of this a living hero.

But to paraphrase the vacuous suit that 52% of our low-information neighbors put into office, heroism is not enough.

Chris Mintz is a big, strong guy – he’s apparently done some cage-fighting – trained to a peak of physical power.  And he was laid low – hopefully temporarily – by a coward with a firearm.

But another hero – a 110 pound woman, a 70 year old man, a handicapped guy in a wheelchair – would have had a decent chance of taking the coward down even with a feeble little pocket .380.

Exactly as happened on December 11, 2012, just 120 miles north of Umpqua Community College, when Nick Meli confronted a man intent on mass-murder at the Clackamas Mall in Portland. Meli and his Glock didn’t even need to fire a shot; the man, intent on mass murder and who’d already killed two innocent people.  The killer saw Meli, realized the jig was up (as happens with most mass-murderers when confronted with unexpected lethal force), and slunk away to kill himself.  Exactly as has happened at many other episodes, where a “good guy or gal with a gun” ended a mass shooting before it became too “mass”.

Victory for the good guys.

But Umpqua is a gun free zone.

How’d that work out?

PS:  Heroism under fire seems to be in the water out there; one of the heroes from last month’s French train episode was from the same area in Oregon.

First things first: Like every human being with a living soul, I abhor the violence that took place yesterday in Charleston, South Carolina.

While one can expect the Obama Justice Department’s to politicize this episode for all it’s worth (more later), in this case the hate crime investigation seems entirely warranted; the alleged shooter, who seems at first glance to be a fairly demented young man, gives off a lot of the surface signs of being motivated by some form of racial hatred or another, rather than mere insanity.

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As the Twin Cities mulls over the news that Al Shabaab – the Somali terrorist group – has called for jihadists to attack the Mall of America and other large symbols of commerce, it’s worth noting that virtually every single mass shooting that’s happened at a mall has been at one that is, like the MOA…

…posted “No Guns” for law-abiding people.

Because the more dead civilians there are, the more chances for Pulitzers for local media?

Remember Cindy Sheehan?

The woman whose soldier son was killed in action in Iraq, and became an anti-war crusader, and a hero of the left (until she started attacking Barack Obama, when she became an untouchable).  Before she parted ways with the left, the left said her ordeal gave her “absolute moral authority”.

And indeed it’s not unusual for people to grant a little extra credence and tolerance to people who’ve directly suffered because of something they’re protesting against.

So I expect lefties with integrity to belly up behind a Colorado bill drafted by a Columbine survivor, which would allow law-abiding citizens with carry permits to carry at schools:

Colorado Rep. Patrick Neville, R-Castle Rock, was a student at Columbine High School in 1999 when two seniors went on a massacre that killed 13. Now he has introduced legislation that would allow anyone with a concealed weapons permit to be able to conceal and carry in public schools, according to The Denver Post.

“This bill will allow honest law-abiding citizens to carry a concealed firearm for protection if they choose to,” Neville said in a statement. “But most importantly, it will give them the right to be equipped to defend our children from the most dangerous situations.”

Can you hear that?  That’s moral authority talking.

Everytown USA – one of Michael Bloomberg’s astroturf gun-grabber groups – circulated a map claiming that there had been 74 school shootings substantially similar to Newtown since the Sandy Hook shooting.

But what have we told you about anti-gun groups?

Distrust but verify.  Then, almost inevitably, resume distrusting (emphasis added):

The news outlet circulated the graphical map, which came from the group Everytown for Gun Safety, after a shooting that occurred Tuesday at a high school in Oregon which left two dead, including the 15 year-old gunman.

Everytown for Gun Safety, which is backed by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, headlined their graphic “School Shootings in America Since Sandy Hook,” suggesting that the shootings it listed had a link of some kind to Sandy Hook — in which Adam Lanza killed 26 people at an elementary school.

CNN and various other media outlets used the graphic in news segments.

Of course they did.

But…

“So on Wednesday, CNN took a closer look at the list, delving into the circumstances of each incident Everytown included,” reads CNN’s report.

It acknowledged that many of the shootings listed by Everytown did not fit the profile of a Sandy Hook-type shooting, in which the attacks are seemingly random.

Instead, CNN said, “some of the other incidents on Everytown’s list included personal arguments, accidents and alleged gang activities and drug deals.” (RELATED: School Shooting Claims Debunked)

“CNN determined that 15 of the incidents Everytown included were situations similar to the violence in Oregon – a minor or adult actively shooting inside or near a school,” said CNN.

The number and severity of school shootings has actually dropped, along with the overall murder rate, over the past 20 years.  And kids are vastly less likely to be shot in school than in, say, a Chicago neighborhood.

June 9, 2014

To: Target Corporation
From: Mitch Berg, Law-abiding Customer
Re:  Billionaire Trouble

Dear Target,

I’ve been a customer of yours for decades, like most Minnesotans.  I estimate I likely spend well north of $2,000 a year at your stores, counting groceries and clothing.

And like about 180,000 Minnesotans, I have a permit to carry a firearm.

Minnesotans with carry permits are nearly three orders of magnitude less likely to commit a firearm crime than the general public; we are literally better safety risks, per capita, than your employees are.

Now, a group called “Moms Demand Action”, which is an astroturf pressure group owned and operated by billionaire ex-mayor Michael Bloomberg, is putting a lot of media pressure on Target to bar all firearm carry at your stores, nationwide, after the intemperate actions of a few “open carry” activists in Texas.

While your stores are indeed your property, please be advised that if you bar all firearms – including tactfully-concealed weapons that many of us carry for our and our fellow citizens’ protection, I will…:

• Take my money elsewhere, and keep it there
• Do my best, via this blog and my talk show, to make sure everyone I can  possibly influence does the same.

There are twenty times as many carry permittees in Minnesota alone as there are members of all “gun safety” groups.  And while we respect your property rights, given a choice, we will protect our rights first.

It is that important to us.

Yours,

Mitch Berg

———-

I urge you to send a polite email, or phone call, to Target.

In your own words, tell Target that

• Michael Bloomberg’s money – not a bunch of plucky moms – is behind this astroturf effort.
• The “Moms” group — actually Michael Bloomberg’s billions — is trying to rope Target into their extreme agenda
• Permit holders are overwhelmingly more law abiding than the general population
• I am a law-abiding gun owner/carry permit holder
• I am a frequent Target shopper
• I spend my money where my rights are respected

Contact Target as follows:

• Email:  Guest.Relations@Target.com
• Phone:  1-800-440-0680

Remember – calm and polite wins the day.  We win battles by being smarter than the Orcs.  This can be no exception.  We are held to a higher standard than they are – and we almost always hit that standard.

We can change Target’s mind, the same way we humiliated Michael Bloomberg in the past two legislatures; by being better, smarter, and much more dedicated than they are.

This post will remain stuck to the top of this blog until late Tuesday morning.

I get why people open-carry.

Logistically, it’s less of a hassle; wearing a holster on the outside is more comfortable, and quicker to get to if, heaven forfend, you need to use your gun in a hurry. And I get the political motivation behind the “Open Carry” movement as well; “If you don’t use your rights, you lose them”, say its proponents, and I don’t disagree.

But if I (hypothetically) did own a firearm, and did want to carry (again, hypothetically), I imagine I’d still carry concealed.  Partly it’s because I see no reason to let any neer-do-wells know that I’m the guy they have to worry about first.  And partly because the urban culture among which I live has so painstakingly trained the law-abiding citizen to be such ninnies around guns.

As we see in this story from Fort Worth, in which the news reports claimed fast food workers ran for the freezer at the sight of guys with guns:

It turned out the men, some of them from the group Open Carry Texas, were just staging a demonstration of their right to bear arms, Fort Worth, Texas, Police Sgt. Raymond Bush told ABCNews.com.

“When police showed up, there were four to six men carrying rifles,” he said. “The employees were in fear for their lives.”

No arrests were made and the gun owners went home after their demonstration.

Of course, the media are among those that’ve been training urban society to be ninnies, so you can usually count on them getting the story wrong:

[Demonstration organizer CJ] Grisham denied reports employees hid in the freezer, claiming they were the result of a customer’s false 911 call.

“There are a lot of people in that area who completely disagree with gun rights,” he said. “They have been doing this to us for months now – call the police with false reports of us waving around guns, scaring people.”

It’s worth noting that here in the Twin Cities, a pro-carry group has been staging such demonstrations for months, now . And even in ninny-run Saint Paul, their “demonstration” – which involved eating at a Culver’s on University Avenue – went smoothly, with neither gunfire nor police response.

Still – I figure that if I owned and carried firearms (hypothetically), I’m one ninny away from having a very complicated day.  And I have enough complications – and that’s not hypothetical.