Doooooooo Something

SCENE:  Mitch BERG is at the Mississippi Market co-op buying catnip.  His head on a swivel to try to avoid progressive crazies, he’s trying so hard to be careful.  But despite his best efforts, he walks around a corner and practically runs into Avery LIBRELLE.

LIBRELLE:  Merg!

BERG:  Oh, for fuuuuuu…ll disclosure, Hi, Avery…

LIBRELLE:  Yet another mass shooting.   It’s time for a conversation about guns.

BERG:  Uh, you mean “monologue”, right?

LIBRELLE:  Ha ha.  The problem is, the right never offers any alternatives.  That’s our big frustration.

BERG:  I see your “frustration”, and raise you one; the frustration on the right is that the left keeps saying “the right offers no alternatives”.   Fact is, we offer them constantly. The left refuses to discuss them honestly.

LIBRELLE: Prove it.

BERG: You asked. Here we go.

For starters: enforce existing laws – especially the ones that are objectively proven to work. Putting gun criminals in jail deters more gun crime. Yet here in the Twin Cities, the two big-county prosecutors have *never*, not once, used the sentencing enhancements that statute allows for gun crimes. *Not once*.

Second: Intervene with youth at risk of getting sucked into gangs.

Third: Fire the US Attorneys that refuse to prosecute straw purchasers. There are *many* of them. Chicago’s already bad violence became much worse after the USA for Northern IL publicly announced he didn’t care to prosecute straw buyers. “Entrepreneurs” shortly started making a pile of money buying guns in Wisconsin and Indiana and selling them to bangers. These USAs need to be fired (that’ll take a GOP president, of course).

Fourth: Start talking honestly about empirical evidence. For example – in 1,000 school districts nationwide that *allow* teachers and staff to bring their own firearms to school, strictly concealed, there has never been a shooting on school property during school hours. This responds to the *fact*, determined by the Secret Service after Columbine, that spree killers very intentionally avoid targets where people unknown to them (i.e. not security guards or cops) can resist them; there’s no way to plan around them. The left reacts with horror – “teachers are about *teaching*, not KILLING”, but they miss the point; not a single teacher or principal or janitor needs to carry single gun; the threat alone is the deterrent. The only response is pure emotion – as if living in an oppressive state of panic about potential spree killers is better than the notion that somewhere on campus, someone with a clean criminal record and decades of incident-free carry might have a gun on ’em. That’s just one of many.

Another thing we learned at Columbine – the best thing to do with a spree shooter is to resist, as lethally as possible, immediately. (It doesn’t in fact matter if that resistance comes from a cop, a guard or a good guy with a gun – but SOMEONE has to put a threat of death in the shooter’s face asap). As we saw in Uvalde (and at Parkland before it), not all cops got the word. Waiting around for a spree killer to negotiate doesn’t work. (Salutory fact; when a spree killer has 20 minutes as at Parkland, or an hour as at Uvalde, the AR15 doesn’t matter; someone could kill 20 people in an hour with grandpa’s break-open shotgun, a cowboy six-gun, or a muzzle-loading musket). Anyway – push policies that favor aggressive self-defense and police response.

Fifth: You want a “red flag law”? Do one in good faith, one that involves more than an easily abused ex parte hearing that serves mostly as a medium for ex-spouses’s revenge, one that allows the subject to defend themselves, with results more useful than taking a suicidal or dissociative person’s guns and leaving ’em alone,

Those are things that people on the right *constantlty* reiterate, and have for decades. I’ve been an activist on this issue for almost 30 years, and our line *has not changed*.

And yet people on the left keep repeating “if only the right had any alternatives”.

All due respect, it’s not true, and it’s getting old.

LIBRELLE: (Mock sleeping, Librelle makes an elaborate show of waking up). Like I said, no alternatives.

BERG: Exactly.

And SCENE

19 thoughts on “Doooooooo Something

  1. The Left seems to want to go for the expensive, difficult-to-enforce solution first: Ban guns. Doesn’t matter if a fraction of a percent of all legally-purchased firearms are used in mass shootings. They don’t care. They routinely manage to the exception.

    Because it’s not about justice, or even safety. It’s about power.

  2. Is there someone remotely like this in your life? I would not have been able to resist bopping it in the head with a can.

    This is why all the clapter monkeys on tv were mocking the idea of hardening schools, and pretending not to understand one way doors (they are probably surrounded by dozens of these in their studios). His fraudulency gropey joe, through the mouth of Sauron (too good not to steal) said he is not interested in hardening schools or arming teachers. Of course not, that would work and get in the way of their confiscation schemes.

  3. You want a “red flag law”? Do one in good faith, one that involves more than an easily abused ex parte hearing that serves mostly as a medium for ex-spouses’s revenge

    Red flag laws work if only there were guardrails:

    1) Brass-Knuckle mandatory consequences for malicious use.
    2) The gun owner pays no money to store a ceased weapon. Either those who trigger the red flag or the county pays the fees.
    3) The guns are returned after 90 days if the defendant is not charged with a crime or subject to civil commitment.

    As long as we are red-flagging guns, let’s do that to cars too. I personally knew someone who has more than a dozen DUI’s and still drives – cause, you know, they got to get to work to pay child support, dontchya know?

  4. People who point to “other developed countries don’t have these problems” seem to fail to understand how little tolerance those other countries have for certain behaviors. I don’t think jailing someone for a crime is even remotely considered racist. Removing homeless from public places isn’t considered a bad thing. Open illicit drug use is not tolerated.

  5. The great thing about red flag laws is that because there was no crime committed, they can never be shown to have not worked. The only metric is how many guns were seized under red flag laws.
    I have searched in vain for numbers about how many guns were returned, meaning the red flag law was improperly applied. Nobody wants to give out that number.

  6. “Nobody wants to give out that number.”

    Because it’s minuscule.

    Most involve standards of proof like the one Scott Jensen was involved in in 2018: to invoke a seizure, “clear and compelling” evidence of a problem is required. But to get ’em back, the subject needs to show “a proponderance of evidence – a much stricter standard. That’s why.

    Also – what Greg said.

  7. The only metric is how many guns were seized under red flag laws.

    Not to split hairs – but does a gun that is sold or given away as a result of a red-flag ruling still count?

    Or if the court seizes 50 guns from one individual and an antique rife missing a bolt from another, what is the count?

    And who tallies that anyway? The court? The cops? The county attorney?

    A better metric is how many rulings are there and how many expire?

    According to Wikipedia, there were 5,000 instances as of 2020.

  8. One thing about the refusal to prosecute gun laws is that for many years, I’ve noticed that prosecuting/investigating attorneys seem to have the habit of ignoring the easy open & shut cases (like straw buyers and such) in favor of the “bigger” cases they think can make their reputations. I wonder how much crime would drop if prosecutors would spend more time on the “easy” cases.

  9. We don’t have a gun problem. Everyone knows it. The daily body count in cities like Baltimore, St. Louis and Chicago would make a battalion commander in Vietnam drool.

    But not even you flag waving, 2nd amendment living ’Mericans can bring yourselves to say it.

    Can you?

  10. You could probably come up with a technique to determine whether or not red flag laws worked. It would be tricky, but it could be done.
    But first you would have to determine what the red flag law was supposed to do. Reduce gun crimes by professional criminals like gang members? Suicide by gun? Mass shootings?
    Then find a peer state where there is no red flag law, and compare your numbers.
    For some reason no one seems to be doing this.
    I think that the reason the Left loves red flag laws is exactly because it does allow a person’s weapons to be seized (and further gun ownership prohibited) without due process.
    I have a completely clean record. I can go into any gun shop in Wisconsin and buy whatever guns I want to buy. But if you have a red flag invoked against you the shoe is on the other foot. You then have to argue before a judge why it is illegal for the state to deny you your 2nd amendment rights.
    A great example of the failure of red flag laws is the Fedex mass shooting in Indiana earlier this year (nine fatalities including the shooter). Indiana has a red flag law. Shooter had a long history of mental . . . difficulties. He purchased a shotgun. Someone, his grandmother, I think, called the red flag down on him. The police came and took his shotgun. A few months later he bought a pair of assault rifles, and a few months after that he shot up a Fedex facility where he had once worked.
    How was the shooter able to legally purchase a pair of assault rifles after red flag had been invoked?
    The county prosecutor didn’t think he could get a judge to uphold the order in a hearing, and if that happened, he’d to give the shotgun back to the bad guy. So he never scheduled a hearing, so the bad guy was never actually on the red flag list.
    It is wrong to assume that there is a government solution to perceived social problems.

  11. Blaze is correct, when you remove young blacks, and young meso-Americans from the stats, the US is virtually as gun crime free as Sweden.
    OTOH, those guys mostly kill each other. That is why it is important to identify what gun crime problem you are trying to solve. Red flag laws use prosecutor resources so that extra-legal punishment can be inflicted on people who have committed no crime.

  12. Hey Blaze, I watch a Youtube series called “Itchyboots.” It’s about a young Dutch lady living her dream of motorcycling from central America to Alaska. Each episode is 20 – 30 minutes long. She went through Nicaragua, Guatemala, Belize, etc., with no problems other than one bad patch where she asked the local cops to escort her through a short stretch of road where there had been attacks by banditos.
    Until she got to southern Mexico. Then there were official warnings about tourists being robbed, beaten, abducted and held for ransom, etc. Roads were closed because of this activity. The plucky Dutch gal persevered, but was visibly shaken.
    I do not understand how Americans can insist on choosing green trade coffee or free range local poultry, but ignore the extremely nasty effects that their pakalolo or other drug habit has on the social life of Central American countries.

  13. Regarding the claim that murder correlates well with race, yes, but when you account for the rate of unwed parenting, the correlation of crime rates to race shrinks greatly, really almost disappearing. So we might infer that our major cause of criminal homicide is actually unwed parenting, and that driven by government disincentives to work, form nuclear families, and the like.

    The Uvalde killer never knew his dad. It’s not the only thing going on–grandpa was a felon, mom was a druggie–but I’m thinking it left a mark.

    And well said by MP regarding U.S. drug habits making a nasty impact on central and south America. I just told my kids “no way” for a short term mission trip to Ensenada, just south of San Diego, for that reason. Too dangerous, and worse yet, they were thinking it was no big deal. Bad combination.

  14. One simple question that the (wannabe) gun grabbers refuse to answer is … how on Earth would you even begin to start collecting firearms? Even of they had some magical way of finding and collecting all of the guns in the US, how do they propose stopping the huge influx coming in over our wildly unprotected borders? I made this point as a comment to a recent StarTrib editorial, suggesting as an alternative that we need to address the root problem … ie: teaching respect and moral values, starting at the family level. My comment was ridiculed, because “how do we possible go about changing behavior?”

    Here’s another genius retort…” No! it’s the individual armed with a killing machine!”

  15. Regarding the claim that murder correlates well with race, yes, but when you account for the rate of unwed parenting, the correlation of crime rates to race shrinks greatly, really almost disappearing.

    “We’re all the same under the skin!!!111!!!”
    ~ Ancient Boomer Wisdom

    https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/NCHS-Birth-Rates-for-Unmarried-Women-by-Age-Race-a/6tkz-y37d/data

    NCHS – Birth Rates for Unmarried Women by Age, Race, and Hispanic Origin: United States

    2000; 30-34 years old

    Black total 50.2
    Non-Hispanic white 24.8

    That’s percentage of total births. Lot more White total births than black. Lots of unmarried White women having White kids…and still no bloodbaths in White neighborhoods.

    Boomer Wisdom ™ BTFO again. #Sad

  16. One of the reasons “critical race theory” took off is because academics were looking for a reason to explain disparities between blacks and whites that could not otherwise be accounted for.
    American blacks do worse than whites when you take into account every imaginable social factor other than there race. Income, family status, education level, family size, “justice system involvement,” etc, etc, etc. So they invented a thing called structural racism (now called systemic racism) as a sort of secret sauce to explain the numbers.
    When some whites explain the difference as “cultural issues” they are really saying the same thing.
    It is a thorny issue. If you make the rules for, say, college admissions absolutely neutral with respect to race and its proxies, and nothing else, you will have colleges whose student bodies are dominated by whites and especially East Asians. Not good.
    Or you can achieve racial balance by explicitly discriminating by race and handicap whites and East Asians with respect to blacks. Also not good.

  17. Pingback: In The Mailbox: 06.02.22 (Evening Edition) : The Other McCain

  18. Mitch, you go all the way to 7th Street to buy your catnip?

    You can’t find it in the midway?

  19. Hey ,Fresch, at least Mitch is admitting he’s a crazy cat lady now. That’s brave.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.