To: Rep. John Lesch, HD66B and closet authoritarian
From: Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re:  “Local Control”

Rep. Lesch,

Last week, at the House Public Safety Finance Committee hearings on the DFL’s various gun grab bills – the one that’d funnel all carry permit applications through the local police chief, if applicable, rather than the county sheriff – you kept repeating “it’s about local control”, as if you were one of those old pull-string toys with the little tape recorder inside.

Little story for ya, here, Leftenant.

Perhaps you recall; back in the bad ol’ days before the Minnesota Citizens Personal Protection Act, when we had a discretionary-issue system where getting a permit depended entirely on ones’ connections, one of the metro-area police chiefs – I think it was Bloomington – said he’d never, ever, ever, ever give out a permit to a common peasant (although he issued one to his wife, as memory serves).

Now, if citizens wanted to voice their displeasure at the transparent unfairness of the system, they had to organize a battle to win the mayor’s office – at whose pleasure the chief served.  Not the citizens’ – the mayor’s.   Which means you need to go a couple of levels of government removed from the citizen in the street to voice any meaningful dissent from the system.

But then the MPPA got passed. And the Sheriffs’ offices got the job, statewide.

And perhaps you remember this, Rep. Lesch:  your old buddy Bob Fletcher got caught denying three times as many permits as any other sheriff in the state, including Hennepin County.  And a huge percentage of those denials, when contested, were coming back losers for the County, costing Ramco a ton of money.

And it was us shooters – of all races, genders and social levels or, put briefly, the people – who were part of the coalition that tossed Fletcher from his job at the polls.

That – a law enforcement official who answers directly to us, as opposed to the local machine and bureaucracy – is what “local control” is.

That is all.