Category: Gun Rights

Governor Dayton Vetoed HR 1467

I’m in no way surprised about this but Governor Dayton vetoed HR 1467:

Gov. Mark Dayton vetoed the so-called “castle doctrine” self-defense bill on Monday.
The proposal, supported by the gun-rights groups and opposed by Minnesota’s law-enforcement organizations, would have expanded the legal justification for citizens who use deadly force in threatening situations.

His reasoning? Well he took the advice of liars:

Dayton made his veto by letter without commenting publicly.

In his veto letter, Dayton said, he had to honor the opposition of law enforcement.

“The MN Police and Peace Officers Association, the MN Chiefs of Police and the MN Sheriffs Association represent the men and woman who risk their lives every day and night to protect the rest of us. When they strongly oppose a measure, because they believe it will increase the dangers to them in the performance of their duties, I cannot support it,” Dayton wrote.

No, they strong oppose the bill because it removes their feeling of superiority, that smug feeling they get by knowing they’re the only ones legally able to defend themselves wherever they roam. I will also add that no state that has passed these measures has noticed any additional danger to officers on the street, but facts are irrelevant to those in power.

Either way this is the outcome I expected. Any battle to win back powers taken by the state is long are arduous. We’ve seen where Mark Dayton stands on the right of self-defense and with this veto he’s flat out stated that he supports criminals over you and me. This battle certainly isn’t over, we’re not going to stop pushing this until it’s through and if that means ousting the governor and electing somebody less willing to side with criminals then that is what will be done.

The Final Day for HR 1467

Andrew Rothman of the Minnesota Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance (MNGOCRA) let me know that today is the final day for Dayton to make a decision on HR 1467, the omnibus gun rights bill. According to Article 4, section 23, of the Minnesota Constitution, “Any bill not returned by the governor within three days (Sundays excepted) after it is presented to him becomes a law as if he had signed it, unless the legislature by adjournment within that time prevents its return.” That means Dayton has three choices available to him: sign the bill, veto the bill, or do nothing and let the bill become law as if he signed it. Whether he signs the bill or ignores it is really irrelevant to use, the only issue we’ll have is if he vetos.

We have until midnight so let’s make the best use of that time. As I’ve been urging you please take a few minutes to call Dayton’s office at either 651-201-3400 or 800-657-3717. You can also send a free fax via FaxZero to the Governor’s office at 651-797-1850 and send an e-mail via the contact form on the Governor’s website.

HF 1467 has been Sent to Dayton’s Office, Start Calling Him Now

I’ve gotten word that HF 1467, the Minnesota omnibus gun rights bill, has been delivered to Dayton’s office. You know what this means, right? It’s all or nothing, we need to start hounding Dayton’s office even more than we already have.

Take a few minutes to call Dayton’s office at either 651-201-3400 or 800-657-3717. After you’re done with the call it would be a good idea to pen a real physical dead tree letter to his office. Letters can be sent to:

Governor Mark Dayton
130 State Capitol
75 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
St. Paul, MN 55155

Why stop there? You can then send a free fax via FaxZero to the Governor’s office at 651-797-1850. Finally navigate your browser to the contact form on the Governor’s website and hit his inbox up with a letter urging him to sign HF 1467.

We need to be heard so Dayton realizes that his veto of the bill will mean Minnesota gun owner’s veto of his job come election time.

Why are you still here? GO GO GO!

All is Peaceful at the Minnesota State Capitol

Everything is peaceful at the Minnesota State Capitol, which means Dayton’s office isn’t getting hammered with enough phone calls. It would be great to get those phone ringing off the hook with statements from people who want the Governor to sign HR 1467. Make a quick call to 651-201-3400 or 800-657-3717 when you have five minutes. If you’re an old school kind of person you can also send a fax to 651-797-1850. For those who are kind of old school and kind of new school you can use FaxZero to send a free fax from the Interwebitubes.

To those of you who have called Dayton’s office I thank you, now call it again. There’s no reason not to raise the urgency of this by calling his office every day until he signs the bill.

Have You Bugged Mark Dayton’s Office Yet

HR 1467, the bill that will bring stand your ground law to Minnesota, has passed both bodies of the legislature and is now awaiting Governor Dayton’s signature. This means we need to make ourselves nuisances so that he’ll sign the bill to shut us up. Contacting his office is easy, all you need to do is pick up a phone and dial 651-201-3400 or 800-657-3717. If you have a fax machine you can always fax your statement to 651-797-1850. In fact doing both would be even more enjoyable.

Right now we’re not sure where Dayton stands on this and he’s made no commitment regarding this bill. One Chief of Police has gone so far as to lie about the bill in an attempt to get the governor’s veto. Let’s make Dayton well aware of the fact that his veto on this bill means our veto of his job.

EDIT: 2012-02-27 12:18: A good point was brought to my attention by Andrew, the title Have You Harassed Mark Dayton’s Office Yet was probably not the greatest pick in the universe because the anti-gunners could construe the word harass as meaning more than I actually intended. I’m not a man who generally cares what others think of me, my site, or my sometimes (often?) offensive writing style but I’m also willing to take valid criticism and act on it. Needless to say the title has been changed to Have You Bugged Mark Dayton’s Office Yet.

This is why it’s not safe to unleash me with a keyboard, a medium that people can read, and no copy editor.

Oh, I also corrected a few grammar mistakes, but you guys should be used to seeing those by now.

Champlin Police Chief Lies About Minnesota HF 1467

As the Senate debated HF 1467 the anti-gunners brought up the usual nonsensical arguments. One of these arguments, as I’ll demonstrate, was entirely false:

“This bill provides a loophole for a defense of what I would call cold-blooded murder,” said Champlin Police Chief David Kolb of the Minnesota Chiefs of Police Association.

Kolb recounted being 10 years old and sneaking onto a neighbor’s south Minneapolis property to steal apples from a tree.

Based on the proposal, “now the property owner can use force, and even deadly force, against that 10-year-old apple thief,” Kolb said. “You can see the disconnect here with reality.”

Let me say this as nicely as I possibly can, Police Chief David Kolb is a lying sack of shit. I say this with confidence because unlike him I actually read the bill and the scenario he describes, even with the passage of this bill, is clearly illegal. Let’s look at the language:

Subd. 3. Degree of force; retreat. An individual taking defensive action pursuant to subdivision 2 may use all force and means, including deadly force, that the individual in good faith believes is required to succeed in defense. The individual may meet force with superior force when the individual’s objective is defensive; the individual is not required to retreat; and the individual may continue defensive actions against an assailant until the danger has ended.

In order to legally employ the use of deadly force one must first in good faith believe it is required in defense. One does not have good faith that deadly force is needed to prevent a child from stealing an apple. While the bill gives a person using deadly force the presumption that such force was necessary the following must be remembered:

Subd. 6. Justifiable use of force; burden of proof. In a criminal trial, when there is any evidence of justifiable use of force under this section or section 609.06, the state has the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant’s actions were not justifiable.

Section 609.06 describes the legitimate scenarios in which a person can use deadly force in Minnesota, a kid stealing an apple isn’t one of them. Ignoring 609.06 we still have the fact that even the dumbest of lawyers could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a person who shot an apple stealing child had no reasonable expectation that such force was necessary.

The fact that an anti-gunner said this statement doesn’t surprise me, the fact that a police chief said this statement demonstrates how unqualified he is. If he can’t even read the law how does anybody expect him to enforce it?

Minnesota HF 1467 Passes Senate

Good news has come down from the Minnesota Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance (MNGOCRA), HF 1467, the Defense of Dwelling and Person Act of 2011, has passed the Senate:

Your calls and emails made a difference. Tonight, the Minnesota Senate passed the Stand Your Ground bill with a vote of 40-23.

The bill will go to a conference committee on Monday, and should be back in front of the House and Senate soon. Following that, the next challenge will be convincing Governor Dayton to sign the bill. We’ll have more on that soon.

Now we need to get the governor’s signature, something that may or may not be easy depending on how inebriated he is when we put the bill on his desk.

Death of the Pointless Canadian Long Gun Registry

Canada’s fear of firearms lead them to implementing a $2.7 billion long gun registry that accomplished nothing of value. Thankfully their parliament finally admitted their mistake and dismantled the atrociously expensive registry:

Despite spending a whopping $2.7 billion on creating and running a long-gun registry, Canadians never reaped any benefits from the project. The legislation to end the program finally passed the Parliament on Wednesday. Even though the country started registering long guns in 1998, the registry never solved a single murder. Instead it has been an enormous waste of police officers’ time, diverting their efforts from patrolling Canadian streets and doing traditional policing activities.

$2.7 billion and not a single murder was solved? How do the anti-gunners consider these registries a good idea? Firearm registries are worthless systems designed solely to let the government know who has firearms for a time they decide to confiscate them. As the article points out, registries almost never solve crimes because guns used to commit crimes are seldom left by the perpetrator:

Crime guns are very rarely left at the crime scene, and when they are left at the scene, they have not been registered — criminals are not stupid enough to leave behind a gun that’s registered to them. Even in the few cases where registered crime guns are left at the scene, it is usually because the criminal has been seriously injured or killed, so these crimes would have been solved even without registration.

Why would a murder leave evidence at a crime scene? Especially when that evidence is a tool they wish to keep to perform future crimes? It’s not a logical assumption, which makes it not at all surprising that anti-gunners came up with it since they’re the masters of illogical assumptions. Either way the experiment has been performed and it has failed so anti-gunners can stop claiming that we should be registering firearm with the government.

Burying Gun Control Fallacies

The Brady Campaign, Violence Policy Center, and Mayors Against Illegal Guns must really be worried at the moment. As their fallacies are stomped into the ground their funding shrivels into nothingness. Forbes has a good writeup that details the fact that none of the doom and gloom scenarios perpetuated by gun control organizations have come to fruition even though the rate of gun ownership has been skyrocketing:

As much as gun control advocates might wish otherwise, their attacks are running out of ammo. With private firearm ownership at an all-time high and violent crime rates plunging, none of the scary scenarios they advanced have materialized.

With an opening like that you know the anti-gunners are going to be horribly upset with the story. The author goes through a few common myths parroted by anti-gunners and demonstrates their falsehood:

Caroline Brewer of the anti-gun Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence has reported that “The research we’ve seen indicates fewer and fewer people owning more and more guns.” Yet one can only wonder where they are getting that information. In reality, public support for personal gun ownership is growing. According to Steve Sanetti, president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade group that represents about 7,000 firearms manufacturers and related companies, in 1959 some 70% of the American public favored handgun bans, whereas today that number has flipped. This support is reflected in the marketplace. Sanetti observes that the $4.1 billion gun industry “has had nineteen months of growth in an otherwise anemic economy.”

Recognizing these positive trends, most states now issue permits allowing qualified law-abiding people to legally carry handguns outside their homes. Unprecedented numbers are becoming licensed to do so, now totaling an estimated 10 million Americans, contributing, in turn, to a dramatic growth in gun sales.

The anti-gunner bullshit about gun ownership rates going down has been one of my favorites to laugh at. Their argument that fewer people are simply buying more guns is shown to be entirely false by the sheer fact that carry permit rates are going up. When one gets a carry permit it’s pretty reasonable to assume that person also has a gun. In many cases people getting carry permits previously held no interest in guns and obtained their first firearm when they desired to get a permit.

As pointed out in a recent paper titled “Tough Targets” released by the Cato Institute, “The ostensible purpose of gun control legislation is to reduce firearm deaths and injuries. But authors Clayton E. Cramer and David Burnett believe these restrictions put law-abiding citizens at a distinct disadvantage to criminals who acquire guns from underground markets since it is simply not possible for police officers to get to every scene where intervention is urgently needed. They also document large numbers of crimes…murders, assaults, robberies…that are thwarted each year by ordinary persons with guns.

The paper, Tough Targets, can be found here. It’s a good read and very well researched. Basically it’s the exact opposite of the drivel put out by the likes of the Brady Campaign and Violence Policy Center. Instead of making baseless assumptions or using statistical voodoo, Cramer and Burnett comb through self-defense stories and present the raw numbers.

Whereas gun control proponents often argue that having a gun put people at risk because a criminal will take it away and use it against them, it seems the reality is more often to be the reverse situation. The Cato data contains only 11 stories out of 4,699 where a criminal took a gun away from a defender, but 277 where the intended victim disarmed the bad guy, although the authors acknowledge that these event reports may be printed more frequently due to newsworthiness.

Arguing that a criminal is simply going to take your gun is one of the dumbest arguments that the anti-gunners have brought up. If taking a gun from somebody is so easy who really cares if a criminal takes yours since you can just take it right back. Hell you can stand there for an hour taking the gun back from the criminal every time he takes it from you and eventually he’ll get bored and move on. On a serious note Tough Targets does a marvelous job of proving how false the anti-gunner’s claim really is.

This is why gun rights activists win, we do actual research and show real numbers whereas the anti-gunners do hand waving an pull random numbers out of the air. If you make claims and fail to ever back them up people will eventually stop listening to you.

Then there is the argument that more private gun ownership will lead to more accidents because the average citizen isn’t sufficiently trained to use a weapon defensively. While gun accidents do occur, the Cato study indicates that they are the most overstated risks. There were 535 accidental firearms deaths in 2006 within a population of almost 300 million people. Although every lost life is tragic, the proportion is not particularly startling.

Another false claim is shot down in flames.

On the other hand, Newsweek has reported that law-abiding American citizens using guns in self-defense during 2003 shot and killed two and one-half times as many criminals as police did, and with fewer than one-fifth as many incidents as police where an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal (2% versus 11%).

I can only imagine that this short article has caused numerous gun control fanatics to breakdown into tears. It’s basically a bullet point summary of why anti-gunner claims are wrong. The above mentioned statistic makes a lot of sense when one realizes that police officer can’t magically materialize upon call. When you’re being attacked the police may take hours to arrive (or may not arrive at all) and during that time you’re on your own. If you have a means of self-defense on your person you greatly increase your chances of survival and can resolve the situation even if the police fail to respond.

Finally, on the subject of public safety, just how well have gun bans worked in other countries? Take the number of home break-ins while residents are present as an indication. In Canada and Britain, both with tough gun-control laws, nearly half of all burglaries occur when residents are present. But in the U.S. where many households are armed, only about 13% happen when someone is home.

Robbing a home in the United States while the person is home is a bad idea and criminals know it. This is a side-effect of a well-armed nation.

A Case for Stand Your Ground Law

With the imminent hearing on HR 1467, the bill that would bring “stand your ground” to Minnesota, tomorrow I think we need an example of how important such legislation is. For an example we need look no further than Iowa:

One couldn’t blame him. Lewis had just finished 112 days in jail because he didn’t have the cash to make bail. When jurors finally freed him on Feb. 9, Lewis walked out homeless, unemployed and minus most of his possessions.

[…]

Ludwick, a former soldier and convicted felon, was driving four people home from a Halloween party. Documents say Ludwick slowed; Lewis passed him. Ludwick sped up, and the cars raced down 11th Street until they came to Regency Woods. They collided when Lewis, in front and on the right, started to turn left.

Lewis said Ludwick and a passenger, Justin Lossner, got out of the Taurus and began punching the Mustang’s windows.

They backed off when Lewis pulled out his .380-caliber pistol. But they came back.

Lewis said he was outside his car, evaluating its damage, when he caught Ludwick and Lossner trying to sneak up on him from two different directions.

The recording of a 911 call made by Lewis begins with Lewis yelling at the two to “just stay where you are. Get back! Get back! I’m going to start shooting!”

There are exchanges of profanities while Lewis explains the situation to a police dispatcher. Then, “Get away from me. Get away from me!” And a bang.

You read that correctly, Mr. Lewis was found innocent of any crime was greeted with a loss of his property and months of his lives stolen as he rotted in prison awaiting his trial. What’s most egregious about this story is the fact that Mr. Lewis would have been legally protected from all of this if Iowa had a stand your ground law as it gives the defender the benefit of the doubt. Without such legislation the state gets to assume guilt until innocence is proven, and in such cases those forced into a self-defense situation may lose everything even if a jury acquits them.

As I stated yesterday the other problem when a stand your ground law isn’t on the books is the fact that any action taken in self-defense can be argued to be “unreasonable.” One person looking at Mr. Lewis’s situation may claim his use of a firearm wasn’t reasonable because his attackers were, apparently, unarmed. Another person would point out the fact that Mr. Lewis was outnumbered, a fact that makes a self-defense situation far more dangerous. Mr. Lewis had every right to be where he was and therefore should have the right to defend himself at that location. Stand your ground laws benefit those who find themselves having to defend themselves against initiators of violence.

I have further commentary about this story that I’ll post up tomorrow. Considering that the “stand your ground” bill is being debated tomorrow I wanted to get this out so people could read it and understand the importance that this law holds.