Among gun controllers, there’s been one pretty consistent strategy in effect for the past thirty years:

1. Pick a lie about guns and gun owners
2. Run with it for all it’s worth…
3. …until it gets debunked too roundly and widely to be tenable even among liberals
4. Find a new one.
5. Repeat.

How many have we been through in the past thirty years?

• “Saturday Night Specials”: In the sixties and seventies, these inexpensive, “low-quality” handguns were the shrieking point du jour.  Although they served largely as a means of self-defense for poor people, the restrictions on their manufacture and sale were supposed to clean up the inner city.  We know how that worked, right?
• “Gun-Free Zones”: In the seventies, the National Coalition to Ban Handguns circulated “Gun Free Home” stickers to members who wanted to put their principles in writing on their front doors.  These quickly fell out of circulation when it was realized that homes posted as “gun free” were about an order of magnitude more likely to get burgled, robbed or otherwise attacked.  The gun control movement then took that precise logic and moved it to schools, malls, colleges – with results that any sane person could have foreseen from the first go-’round. 
• “Assault Weapons”: This term – which is, by the way, an entirely political term, having no meaning in the world of firearms whatsoever – was originally a precaution against “white supremacist militias”.  Remember when they were the boogieman du jour?  Look for this one to make a comeback, with the Obama administration claiming that Mexican narcotraficantes would eschew real, fully-automatic military weapons (like the AK-series, the Uzi, or the magnicent Heckler and Koch G-3, built in Germany and the official assault rifle of the Mexican armed forces) available to them for a fraction of the price of the semi-automatic-only versions available to them from Americans at many times the price.
• “Unregulated Sales”: Another supposed source of (overpriced, under-powerful) weapons to Mexico…well, let’s see to his one below.

There’s a “Gun Show Loophole” bill making its inevitable way through the Minnesota Legislature, sponsored by Michael Paymar, a St. Paul legislator and one of the most incoherent anti-gun legislators in a metro-DFL contingent that beings new meaning to the term “scared into incontinence”.

I was going to write about it – but Kevin Ecker does it better anyway:

According to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms less than 1 in 50 guns acquired by criminals come from gun shows or private resales.  A January 2009 Star-Tribune article says that the Twin Cities’ homicide problem is largely one of uncontrolled gang/drug activity. Anyone who can sell or purchase illegal drugs can acquire a gun in that illegal transaction. This is a black market transaction, not a legitimate sale by law-abiding citizens.  Don’t be fooled, this bill does NOTHING to prevent the former, but everything to impede the latter.

As a Second Amendment advocate, I could almost set up a hot key that’d type “howzabout we enforce existing laws”? 

Because, it should surprise nobody, laws that already control the source of most guns to most real criminals have been on the books forever:

Minnesota statutes already contain FOUR (4) provisions to cut off “black market” transfers. They are: (1) 609.52 – Theft by the criminal himself, (2) 609; (2) 609.53 – Theft-once-removed by acquisition from a “fence;” (3) 609.66 sibd. 1c – Receipt from an accomplice/strawman; and (4) 624.7141 – Transfer to an ineligible person.

Ecker has the real motivation figured out:

Of course, proponents try to justify all this by claiming the bill will make it illegal to transfer handguns and “assault weapons” to criminals.  Of course what they don’t mention is this is already illegal (Minn. Stat. 609.66 subd. 1f)!  So really all this does is make life difficult for law-abiding citizens.  It does NOTHING to keep guns out of the hands of criminals.  Of course if they had paid attention to studies done on similiar California laws, they’d already know that!

True.  But being a gun controller is never about evidence, fact, ethics or law.

It’s about manipulating emotions to get ones’ way, and preying on ignorance.

As this past election showed in Minnesota as elsewhere, there’s no money in betting against rank, wishful ignorance these days.