In the previous piece about tomorrow’s “Gun Violence Prevention and Safe Communities summit “, I said “You’re invited”, sort of.
It’s not actually true. A number of members of the Twin Cities’ human rights community responded to the invitation on Facebook – because the meeting invitation noted that “We all have to step up”, and nobody, but nobody, wants to curb gun violence more than the law-abiding, responsible gun owner [1], and so a number of Second Amendment human rights activists did step up, and RSVPed to the invite.
And some of them have been getting responses:
“Dear [Redacted]
I am writing to inform y ou that the meeting on Friday, for which we received your RSVP, is not open to you. If you come, you will be asked to leave.
Regards,
Heather
Presumably that’s Heather Martens, “Executive Director” and sole member of “Protect Minnesota’.
So apparently when they say everyone needs to “step up” to prevent “gun violence”, they only mean “people who want to ban guns in the hands of the law-abiding citizen”.
I wonder if theMinnPost,or Minnesota Public Radio, both of whom are sponsored by Joyce Foundation, the group of liberals with deep pockets who are “ProtectMN’s” only real source of money, will note that in what will no doubt be their embarassingly effusive coverage of the “event?”
[1] As evidenced by the fact that it’s us law-abiding, responsible gun owners that actually point out that the bulk of the gun carnage is being carried out by criminals, and most of the innocent victims are black children in places like Chicago. The Twin Cities gun-grabber movement, being almost exclusively upper-middle-class white liberals (and, in terms of positions of power, white as the driven snow), seems only to concern itself with the deaths of children who look like their parents are NPR executives. I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.
Isolated incidents such as this in Nevada, do not significantly affect the statistics on gun deaths. If you’re going to change the gun laws, you should do so because too many young black men kill each other with guns, mostly in large cities. Primary school students and employees of large companies or agencies with security systems are at very low risk of death due to gunshot. If, in fact, no policy changes result from Sandy Hook or the Navy Yard, it will be that rare moment where policy making follows logic rather than emotion. The reason to enact more gun regulation is in the nightly police report in the poor urban areas of the country, not on the front page of the newspaper.
There is a large minority in the US, mostly living in the suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas, for whom shooting is an important recreational activity, or who feel a duty to have the means to protect themselves from violence without recourse to the state, or who have an infrequent but regular use for a gun (typically rural residents). They are not idiots or ideologues, merely practicing democrats. This problem is intractable because the group that wants more regulation is largely unaffected by the regulation (most don’t have guns), and the group that wants little regulation is largely unaffected by the violence (they don’t live in centers of gun violence). The US system protects minority rights very well; I don’t see gun laws changing soon, because I see little chance of a consensus.
If you’re going to change the gun laws, you should do so because too many young black men kill each other with guns, mostly in large cities.
Where gun laws are the most draconian.
Because disarming black men is and has always been a key driving motivator of gun control.
My point is that groups such as ‘Protect Minnesota’ are not focusing on the real problem. Urban (black on black) gun violence.
Mitch-
nice of them to invite ‘ all who want to create safe, peaceful communities free of gun violence’ but restrict that to people who actually own guns.
Also, I hadn’t noticed before that if you sign up for their newsletter, you are implicitly agreeing to lend your name to their Protect Minnesota Resolution (http://org2.democracyinaction.org/o/5610/c/237/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=4862)
How desperate for signatures do you have to be to make it a condition of getting more info from the group?
Because they don’t get their donations from young, urban blacks.
If you focus on urban, black-on-black gun violence, you will cause people to believe that gun violence is the fault of urban blacks instead of suburban, white NRA members. That is not acceptable.
What NW and PM said.
It’s not about saving lives. It’s about re-engineering society.
if you sign up for their newsletter, you are implicitly agreeing to lend your name to their Protect Minnesota Resolution
That’s why I signed up under the name “Heinrich Himmler”.
That’s why I signed up under the name “Heinrich Himmler”.
*golf clap*
It’s worth noting that Brady et al don’t, by and large, get personal donations at all, but rather depend on government and foundation grants.
And if we’re going to talk about black on black murder and the like, we probably need to broaden the topic to “bastard on bastard” murder, because by and large, the disparities in crime rates disappear when you control for whether the perp and his parents were born and grew up out of wedlock.
Yes, I’m saying there will be Hell to pay in the next couple of generations as caucasian bastards grow up and have little bastards of their own. Pardon my French, but that’s a….illegitimate child of a problem we’ve got going on here.
Latest from ProtectMN facebook:
We’re loonatics, and not grown-ups….
Options
Protect Minnesota- working to end gun violence · 1,991 like this
6 minutes ago near Duluth, MN ·
“It’s time to stop letting our critical national debates be handled by lunatics, and by corporate lobbyists. It’s time for us to take up the mantle of civics and citizenship again, beyond our narrow self-interest.
We need to have a real discussion about the civic duty of gun ownership sooner, rather than later. It’s time for the grownups to start talking, and more importantly, to take action.”
The MN Gun Violence Summit will consist of “grown-ups” talking about how to make our communities safer and reframe the debate about gun policy.
Daily Kos: It’s time to reframe the debate about gun ownership in the United States
http://www.dailykos.com
Leges sine moribus vanae | Laws without morals are in vain “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people
The US system protects minority rights very well; I don’t see gun laws changing soon.
As we all know, the ideas and proposals of “grown-ups” can never prevail against the withering words of “lunatics”. The logic of “gun control” is too delicate to withstand opposition.
The US Constitution protects minority rights very well; I don’t see gun laws changing soon.
Fixed it, dik.
My point is that groups such as ‘Protect Minnesota’ are not focusing on the real problem. Urban (black on black) gun violence.
No one is focusing on the real problem, because the minute anyone mentions it, the race hustlers like Jackson and Sharpton (and the rest of the left and the media PTR) start throwing the race cards around quicker than a well dealt hand of 52 Pick Up.
“Fixed it, dik.” Thank’s Tom!
I’ll fire off a check to Archbishop Niestadt’s defense fund for you.
Emery, I’m trying to figure out your point. I’m almost certain you have one. Here, see if this is it: “We should ban guns in all society because some Black men abuse them.”
As an intellectual position, that’s defensible – it’s the same logic that spawned Prohibition and The Drug War. But as a practical matter, I ask how you intend to implement the ban.
Do you plan to send policemen with explosive-sniffing dogs door-to-door searching for guns in the Black community? Do you propose to cordon off Black neighborhoods with checkpoints to stop-and-frisk everyone going in, to keep the area sterile of guns the same as we do at the airport?
If not, then how will putting words on paper work any better than the ban on heroin, cocaine, weed or meth, which is to say “not at all?” And if you’re knowingly enacting a society-wide ban fully intending it won’t work in the neighborhoods where it’s needed most, then what’s the point?
Aside from what Mitch said: social engineering.
You seem to be the only one that is confused.
/My point is that groups such as ‘Protect Minnesota’ are not focusing on the real problem. Urban (black on black) gun violence./
BTW: Good job on the avatar!
We all know that the real problem is ‘white Hispanics’ gunning down young black men in cold blood, preferably after they’ve just gone to the store to get iced tea and skittles.
I agree with Emery (I think) that there is an epidemic of crime within the Black community. I think that the problem with that theory is that once the anti-gun leftists name it, they will own it. Once they own it, they will have to solve it. The historical solution to a behaviorally based activity has been to put a strong consequence in place; laws will have to be made to further impact law breakers.
A consequential response to crime is to cause something bad to happen to those people who are committing crime. Since, in theory, more Black people commit crimes, more Black people will experience the bad things than will non-Black people. That would be hard for those in power to swallow, particularly when someone makes an argument involving disparat impact.
So, after all is said and done, let’s just deny the theory and proceed without looking at crime statistics. Especially with guns, since guns automatically make everyone just as bad anyway. Isn’t that why some say, “God made all men, Samuel Colt made them equal.”? Not just a gunmaker but a sociologist. Who knew?
Who has killed more people in the Twin Cities over the past 2 years. Legal firearms, or illegal aliens in cars?
The outcome of the gun debate is predictable and predictably ineffective. The short answer is that Americans are prepared to live with higher gun deaths so that they can have guns, just as Americans and many fine liberal Europeans and Canadians are prepared to live with highway deaths in exchange for higher speed limits. Fast cars and drunk drivers kill more people than guns, but we’re not going to lower speed limits to 30 mph (50 kph) and ban alcohol, are we? Enough Americans believe that guns are a fun hobby and/or a bulwark against tyranny that we aren’t going to do anything like what ‘Protect Minnesota’ suggests
A majority of Americans are prepared to live with gun deaths concentrated in poor, urban districts, and the relatively few that happen elsewhere. Most Americans are not at significant risk from firearms, other than from the one that may be in their own home, which, being a personal choice, does not impact their public policy views. Relative to the tepid response to the small danger of death from firearms, Americans would be completely up in arms if they faced Britain’s violent crime rate. The difference between 1% and 3% violent crime rates results in changes to how we all live our lives, where we feel safe, how we protect our property, how we raise our kids. The chance of a firearm death, relatively high but absolutely low, in contrast, is not high enough to change middle class lifestyles. We’re prepared to tolerate gun owners because gun ownership does not have a significant impact on the middle class.
Protect Minnesota cannot focus on Black-on-Black violence because it is a Liberal group playing by Liberal rules, particularly Rule 1: Black Trumps White.
A Black “youth” shooting girls in a park in mistaken retaliation for an earlier shooting is more authentic, more real, more savagely noble, than all the Dead White Men throughout history who dreamed up an America that included slavery. Because of that, White people lack the moral standing to object to anything any Black person ever does.
The only way Liberals can attack Black-on-Black crime is to pretend it’s a generalized societal problem, wherefore the urge to take plinking rifles from farmers in Thief River Falls as a way to protect Black children in North Minneapolis. Yes, it’s insane. But it’s an inevitable result of Rule 1.
Thanks for the clarification, Emery. It provides an excellent teachable moment: Liberals do not believe in Constitutional rights the way that Conservatives do.
“If you’re going to change the gun laws, you should do so because too many young black men kill each other with guns, mostly in large cities” shares the same premise as “If you’re going to ban Christianity nationwide, you should do it because some Catholic priests abuse children,” a willingness to discard fundamental human rights protected by the Constitution for political correctness.
You should go to Heather’s meeting and let us know what the two of you have decided to do to Protect Minnesota for us. We’d love to know.
Sorry Joe, High school sections are on the calender. .
Although if you were to attend the event, it might present an opportunity to ‘create’ a post for SiTD. It would be nice for a change to see you create several hundred words of “original” content instead of the usual clipping of a web-link…..
It would be nice for a change to…
Actually, I decide what’d be nice to see on this blog.
Thanks.
“It would be nice for a change to see you create several hundred words of “original” content instead of the usual clipping of a web-link”
Or better yet, just claim ownership of the clipped contents, right Dik? Or would that constitute a plagerization of your own, unique, debate skills?
“Fast cars and drunk drivers kill more people than guns, but we’re not going to lower speed limits to 30 mph (50 kph) and ban alcohol, are we?”
Man, Emery, you really have a problem with those imperfect humans who keep meddlin’ with your perfect systems, eh?
Question: Why you so bitter, Bro?
Last I checked, driving illegally fast, driving while having an illegal amount of stimulants in your blood, illegal possession of a firearm, illegal discharge of a firearm and illegally killing someone with a firearm were all… illegal.
Unlike our robot overlords, we humans are imperfect and some more than others are inclined to great imperfection. So, laws were written to protect the vast majority from those who might harm others with their own negligence. Problem is, laws that go unenforced get ignored by the people who have decided to be negligent.
We can debate if a law goes too far or not far enough – that’s why we have legislatures and elections. Problem is, we are not having debates anymore. We are having reality TV like legislative theater where the elected, their handlers and fellow travelers manipulate some victim and decide that anyone who disagrees with their proposal is no different than Hitler.
I look forward to seeing you while I’m driving the highways and byways, Emery. You’ll be the one with the crash helmet, full roll cage and bitter-scowl on his face monitoring the rear facing optic sensor for imperfect humans crashing behind you as they try to go the posted speed and wrecking into each other trying to avoid you going one-half that speed in your centrally controlled Smart car. I’ll be the non-bitter one.
PS: Guy who introduced himself here at SitD by cutting and pasting stuff then attempting to claim it as his own criticizes another who offers his own riffs on ‘attributed’ items published elsewhere. As Swiftee must have said a million times by now…”PFFFT’.
Seflores,
Whew. I thought I was long-winded, but you could reduce that to 1/4 of the words, and it would be more comprehensible as well. You might also conclude with one sentence summarizing whatever point it is you’re trying to make, which wasn’t at all clear to me. Try to be more concise in your sarcasm, it doesn’t improve with greater length.
“Brevity is the soul of wit” > William Shakespeare
Aw Emery. Why you so mad Bro?
Do this…since you are so good at cutting and pasting other peoples words, why don’t you cut and paste the 25% of my words you believe would make my comment more concise and respond to those. I mean I love the put downs and the condescension – but hey, that’s what I have teenage children for. Some original thoughts would be nice, but I don’t expect much. Nighty night.
Love you man!
“Brevity is the soul of wit” > William Shakespeare
“Physician, heal thyself” > Luke 4:23
seflores says: “I mean I love the put downs and the condescension…”
You’re entire comment @ 1:33 was a sarcastic response. If you’re going to take someone into the boards, it’s very likely you’ll receive a ‘little’ push-back in return….
Peace out.
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