Minnesota – Page 12 – A Geek With Guns

The Next Front in the State’s War Against the Homeless

That state has been waging an ongoing war against the homeless for decades. The reasons for this are obvious, the homeless don’t have anything for the state to steal so the state would rather the homeless be wiped out. Fortunately for the homeless genocide is frowned upon but that doesn’t mean they’re safe. Most major cities have made the acts of being homeless and aiding the homeless crimes. The next front in the state’s war is criminalizing sleeping in vehicles:

The ban on sleeping in your car or truck is a downright trend with the number of laws criminalizing the action exploding by 119 percent since 2011 — a growth rate higher than any other anti-homeless law.

Sleeping in your car is illegal even in progressive cities such as Minneapolis. In Palo Alto, where rent is two and half times the national average and there are only 15 shelter beds to accommodate a homeless population estimated at 150 people, the city has made sleeping in “one’s own private vehicle a crime punishable by a $1,000 fine or up to six months in jail,” the report’s authors wrote.

What I took away from this article is that being homeless is a crime and you don’t own your car. Of course nobody is allowed to own any property in this country. We are only allowed to possess certain items for limited periods of time. The second you fail to pay property taxes on your home you lose it. If a cop has decided that there may have been unpatentable drugs in your car they get to take it under civil forfeiture laws. Owning a firearm is a privilege that will be taken from you the second you commit a felony, which almost all of us commit daily. And now many cities won’t let you sleep in your car without threatening to take your money (and probably your car) and tossing you in a cage because some people who sleep in their car are homeless and the state wants to make the lives of the homeless miserable.

2nd Annual Twin Cities Gun Owners and Carry Forum Family Picnic

I received an e-mail alerting me that the Twin Cities Gun Owners and Carry Forum is hosting its 2_nd annual family picnic on August 9_th at Boom Island Park in Minneapolis. It’s scheduled to go from 11:00 until 15:00. The website for the event is located here and the Facebook event can be found here.

I will be at Defcon during this event so I won’t be able to attend. But it’ll probably be a good time for you if you’re into guns (which I’m assuming you are since you’re reading this blog).

Minnesota is a Weird Place

Living in Minnesota can best be surmised by extended lengths of time with nothing of great interested happening peppered with HOLY FUCK WHAT’S GOING ON?! Yesterday a police officer from Mendota Heights was shot dead during a traffic stop:

A Mendota Heights police officer died Wednesday afternoon after being shot in West St. Paul by a wanted fugitive, police sources said.

The shooting happened not long after 2 p.m. near the area of Dodd Road and Smith Avenue while the officer was performing a traffic stop, the Dakota County Sheriff’s Office said.

According to a Mendota Heights City Councilmember, the officer who was killed was Scott Patrick.

But that wasn’t all:

Later in the afternoon, at about 3:20 p.m., police were engaged in a high-speed chase on Interstate 494. The chase ended with a pit maneuver that caused the suspect’s vehicle, a green Saturn sedan, to spin out on the Lake Road exit. More than a dozen officers with guns drawn arrested the suspect shortly after.

If you’re thinking the second incident is related to the first you’re incorrect. They were two separate and apparently unrelated incidents. The person suspected of murdering Mr. Patrick was apprehended last night but not much additional information is currently available. I’m curious to find out why the man shot Mr. Patrick. My only guess is that there was a warrant out for his arrest.

Ventura Wins Lawsuit; I’m Still Unsure What the Point Was

My fine state is in the news again and, as usual, it’s not for good reasons. Jesse Ventura, one of the primary reasons my state gets in the news from time to time, filed a lawsuit against the estate of Chris Kyle for defamation. Yesterday the suit ended in Ventura’s favor and this has sparked some angry responses. Images like this one have been popping up on my various social media feeds:

The whole fallen heroes angle isn’t my thing and I’m not angry about the lawsuit. I’m mostly asking myself what the point of the suit was. While I understand that Ventura felt his reputation was harmed by Kyle’s claims the fact of the matter is the man is dead. That meant Ventura had to go after Kyle’s estate, which is headed by his widow.

Perhaps I’m just getting soft in my old age but if I believed somebody defamed me and they died I wouldn’t pursue any lawsuit against their estate. Why make family members who already suffered through a grieving period go through more suffering? They didn’t do anything. Arguments could be made that they profited off of their family member’s act of defamation but common decency would still prevent me from seeking a lawsuit against them for something a dead man said.

I’m not going to invest any time in bad mouthing Ventura. While I do understand that Kyle was very good at what he did I don’t know enough about his actions to know whether I should label him a hero or not. I reserve the status of hero for people who have done exceptionally great things such as saving thousands of lives or displaying incredible acts of mercy and I’m not sure if Kyle falls into those categories. But whether he was a hero of just a man who was very good at his job doesn’t matter to me in this regard. You should be free to seek restitution for any wrongs that even a hero may have done to you. But the lawsuit, in my opinion, was in bad taste.

Federal Government Gave Local Gangs Military Equipment

Fellow denizens of Minnesota, and me neighbors in North Dakota, we are facing a major problem. The federal government has been caught providing military equipment to local gangs:

The department got the 3-ton Humvee about three years ago through a federal program that provides local police departments and state agencies with military weapons and equipment no longer needed or used in the global war on terror.

A total of 1,549 weapons or other equipment — with an estimated value of about $3 million — has been distributed in North Dakota over the past decade by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Logistics Agency. More than 8,500 items have gone to law enforcement agencies in Minnesota.

The equipment ranges from night vision goggles and gun silencers to mine-resistant ambush-protected armored vehicles, better known as MRAPs.

I’m not sure what the federal government’s thinking here. Arming violent gangs who are eight times more likely to kill you than terrorists is not an effective method to fight terror. It is however a good way of perpetuating terror. Having a bunch of thugs roll up to your house in a Humvee at two in the morning, kick in your door, shoot your dog, and kidnap you is certainly a terrorizing situation and one that happens far more frequently than attacks by foreign terrorists.

Also, as a side note, when the fuck will I legally be allowed to buy a suppressor in this forsaken state? If people with a history of performing violent acts can have them then why can’t nonviolent people like me have them?

Minneapolis Police Department Created More Aggregate Demand for Dog Breeders

From my understanding there is a bit of a rivalry between the Minneapolis and St. Paul police departments. Not wanting his department to be outdone by the St. Paul department in creating aggregate demand for dog breeders a brave soldier of the Minneapolis department stepped up to the plate and executed a family pet:

In the alley, Tito — a nearly two-year-old, 120-pound Cane Corso — approached an officer who was still hunting for the car theft suspect. The officer ended up opening fire and killing Trott and Lyczkowski’s beloved dog.

“I ran out the door and was hollering for him,” Trott tells us. “I didn’t get halfway to the gate when you could hear the officer yell, ‘Stop!’ He just yelled ‘Stop!’ and shot him and that was it.”

St. Paul is still in the lead but I’m sure another fine soldier of the Minneapolis Police Department will find a litter of puppies to execute, which would put his department ahead of St. Paul’s.

Not surprisingly the officer was quick to jump on the “You weren’t here, man. You don’t know what went down!” justification:

“The only thing [cops] kept saying is, ‘You weren’t here, you don’t know what’s going on, you don’t have time to discern pet from animal and in our mind they’re just animals,'” Trott says. “It was, shoot first, think later. You know, I understand where they’re at — I worked four years for the Illinois Department of Corrections as a correctional officer. But [Tito] had a collar, tags, and he’s clearly not a stray.”

This has become the police officers’ equivalent to the Obama supporters’ race card. And like that race card this “You weren’t there, man!” card has worn thin. The officer apparently said that he didn’t have time to discern pet from animal but if you’re using a firearm you better be 100 percent sure of your fucking target. Shooting a dog or person because you didn’t have time to discern the situation is not an acceptable excuse. If needing to identify targets before deploying lethal force is too rigorous for you then you shouldn’t be a police officer.

Whenever I mention these strange views I hold somebody invariably falls back to the polices’ other favorite excuse, officer safety. They claim that officers have to be given considerably leeway in these matters because “They’re putting their life on the line to save ours!” I’m sorry but that’s a bullshit excuse as well. Most of an officer’s time is spent extorting the citizenry by issuing speeding tickets and parking violations, arresting people participating an mutually agreed to transactions that the state has declared prohibited, and kidnapping people who have failed to give the state a cut of the action. The lives saved by police officers seems to more and more be a happy accident than purposeful action, which makes sense since saving lives seldom results in more funding for a department. Maybe if today’s police spent most of their time saving lives I’d be willing to cut them a bit of slack but they don’t so I’m not.

Hopefully our society will eventually stop shielding police officers from the consequences of bad actions. Until then aggregate demand for dog breeders will continue to increase.

GOP Stupid Train Stops in Minnesota

I’ve been documenting a major problem for the Republican Party (GOP), the mouths of its candidates, under the headline the GOP stupid train. Admittedly it’s not a particularly clever name and when I chose it I mean to use it as a one off. But Republican candidates keep saying absurdly stupid things so I’ve been forced to continue running with the theme.

After making a tour around a good chunk of the country the GOP stupid train has finally stopped here in Minnesota. I give you Bob Frey who has this to say:

Frey then explained his view: “When you have egg and sperm that meet in conception, there’s an enzyme in the front that burns through the egg. The enzyme burns through so the DNA can enter the egg. If the sperm is deposited anally, it’s the enzyme that causes the immune system to fail. That’s why the term is AIDS – acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.”

There you have it. According to Mr. Frey anal sex causes AIDs. This man better be trolling us because if he managed to get through our school system and still believe this shit then all hope is lost.

Minnesota Gun Rights Continues to Look Like a Scam

Minnesota Gun Rights (MGR) is a local affiliate organization of the National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR). If you’re never heard of NAGR, and I wouldn’t blame you if you haven’t, it’s an organization that labels itself as a “no compromise” gun rights advocacy group. In reality it is an organization that appears to exist solely to separate gullible gun owners from their money. Likewise, I wouldn’t blame you if you’ve never heard of MGR. It’s a fairly new organization in Minnesota that mirrors its national affiliate organization in providing gun owners no tangible benefit whatsoever but constantly begging them for money.

One may wonder how I came to my conclusion regarding MGR. It’s simple really, I hang out with a lot of the people it targets. By calling itself a “no compromise” gun rights organization it targets people who believe the Minnesota Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance (GOCRA) has compromised too often in the battle for gun rights. Many of these people are members of the local liberty-lite (my name for people who call themselves liberty advocates but continue believing that there should be a government) and liberty (anarchists) movements. Whenever one of these people posts about their dissatisfaction with GOCRA somebody jumps in to promote MGR. On July 4^th one of my friends posted about his dissatisfaction with GOCRA. Within hours a person who I know to be one of the kingpins in MGR swooped in (please note that I have anonymized all comments except my own because it may be possible to determine the identity of my friend by using me and the commenters as connections):

This is always the tag line they use. If I didn’t know otherwise I would believe this commenter to be an automated bot written by some stooge at MGR. Either way I don’t take scammers targeting my friends lightly so I decided to jump into the fray:

My attempt at both trolling MGR and preventing a friend from giving money to a, as far as I know, scam organization elicited a response from a second MGR shill:

In all honesty this is the most information I’ve ever gotten out of an MGR shill. Apparently the only way you can find out what the organization does is by attending its super secret (since they’re not posted anywhere on MGR’s website) weekend classes (which MGR probably charges for). The last time I heard about an organization that required people to attend super secret meetings just to find out what it does there were tests for thetan levels involved.

Since antagonization seemed to be working (at least better than any other tactic I’ve used to get information out of MGR shills) I decided to try some more:

I guess he must have been in contact with the mothership because after divulging information about MGR’s super secret weekend meetings (which, I’m now convinced, may actually involve thetan level testing) he resorted to the usual MGR shill tactic when pressed for information: deflection:

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is where I decided to go for the jugular. Now that I know MGR hosts biannual super secret weekend meetings that supposedly explain what the organization does I decided to ask why that information wasn’t posted on its website. After all, you would think any organization that held regular events would have a schedule posted on its website letting people know when and where they are:

I even performed a courtesy check of MGR’s website just in case some evidence of its super secret weekend meetings was posted since the start of the conversation (after all, it’s possible that nobody from MGR had thought to post information about its meetings to its website). Nothing was. Instead the shill simply said he would keep me in mind the next time one of these super secret weekend meetings occurred:

How he planned to inform me of the next meeting when he doesn’t know me and we’re not friends on Facebook is beyond me. He didn’t send a friend request or anything. But I digress. If MGR has actually held any of these super secret weekend meetings in the past I would think some information about them would have been posted on its website (you know, so its shills could point to said information when somebody like me accuses it of not doing anything):

What followed was a misunderstanding on my behalf:

I believe my misunderstanding was honest. After all, if somebody said evidence that your organization has done something is entirely absent from your website and you said “Actually there is.” you should assume that that person will assume that you are referring to evidence existing on your website. But that wasn’t the case here:

MGR must have been founded by the most operator of operators that has ever operated in areas of operations because it practices some extraordinary operational security. Its super secret weekend classes are, in fact, super secret. If you want to learn what the organization does you will have to wait for it to contact you, probably through a ninja courier, so you can get a personal invitation with the time and location of the next meeting. And you will probably have to memorize the information on your invitation because it will almost certain self-destruct five seconds after you receive it.

This, above everything else I have learned about the organization, reinforces my belief that the organization is a scam. It will gladly swoop in on vulnerable gun owners and ask them to give it money by whispering “no compromise” into their ears. But if its targets actually want to know what the organization does before giving it money that’s just tough shit. And, yes, I did let the shill know this:

It was obvious that I wasn’t going to get further information out of him so I gave up. However I do want to take a moment to point something out here. Political and business tactics are often kept secret. But if I want to know what a politician is claiming to fight for or what a business is selling I need only ask. Both are more than happy to provide me with such information. Likewise if I want to know what a politician or business has done I need only ask. Again both are more than happy to provide me with such information. They both know that you need to entice people. If you’re a politician you get people’s attention by telling them what you’re fighting for. If you’re a business you get people’s attention by telling them what you’re selling. Providing a track record of past successes helps assure people that you’re not just trying to scam them.

No politician or business, upon being asked what it has done, is going to tell you to attend a super secret weekend meeting at an undisclosed location and time.

My recommendation is to avoid MGR. I can’t find any evidence that indicates it is anything other than a sad attempt to separate Minnesota gun owners from their money. Red flags should go up when nobody involved with an organization is willing to tell you what, exactly, the organization has done. Even if you have misgivings about GOCRA its members are more than happy to provide you with a list of things it has done, and proof that verifies that list, so you can make an informed decision. MGR’s members are unwilling to even do that.

Not So Heavily Armed

My fellow denizens of the Twin Cities we may be having a guest from Wisconsin in the near future (heck, he could already be here). The dude, who goes by the name Eric “Buck” Hall, is a recently released felon who stole a truck with a couple of guns in it:

On Saturday in the same county, Hall allegedly stole two vehicles, with one of them containing a scoped rifle with hundreds of rounds of ammunition and a pump-action shotgun. The weapons have yet to be recovered.

On Sunday, Hall is suspected of stealing yet another vehicle in New Auburn, Wis., this one a tan 2000 Chevy Silverado pickup truck owned by a volunteer firefighter. That vehicle remains missing.

Hall is described as 5 feet 10 inches tall, 170 to 190 pounds, with blue eyes. He has numerous tattoos, wears glasses and has a goatee and beard.

The truck has Wisconsin license plate JE7691. It has several pink and hunting-themed stickers, as well as emergency lighting and siren.

Anyone with information about this case is urged to call the Chippewa County Sheriff’s Office at 1-715-726-7714.

OK, now that the public service announcement is out of the way I do want to point out the phrasing of the article. It states that Hall is heavily armed:

A scoped rifle and a pump-action shotgun aren’t things to laugh at but I don’t think possessing them really qualify as heavily armed either. In my book heavily armed implies the ability to lay down sustained fire for an extended period of time. Doing this generally relies more on the accessories than the weapon. Unless Hall has a good number of magazines and the scoped rifle is a magazine fed weapon I don’t think he’s that heavily armed. If he only has one or two magazines or the rifle is a bolt-action then he can’t really sustain firing for very long before he has to open a box of ammo and insert rounds into the gun’s magazine(s).

Again, neither weapon mentioned in the article are something I’d sneer at. But I think saying he’s armed would be more accurate than heavily armed. Anyways if you see this bloke steer clear of him, it sounds like he may have a few screws loose (oh, and if you’re anti-gun you might want to put one of those “guns banned here” signs around your neck so Hall can’t shoot you).

Hosting Major Gladiatorial Events is Expensive

Minneapolis will be hosting the Super Bowl in 2018. In order to do this the city had to agree to a long confidential list of demands from the National Football League (NFL):

Free police escorts for team owners, and 35,000 free parking spaces. Presidential suites at no cost in high-end hotels. Free billboards across the Twin Cities. Guarantees to receive all revenue from the game’s ticket sales — even a requirement for NFL-preferred ATMs at the stadium.

Those requirements and many others are detailed in 153 pages of NFL specifications for the game. An official on the host committee that successfully sought the game — Minneapolis beat out Indianapolis and New Orleans — said the panel had agreed to a majority of the conditions but would not elaborate.

The document, which the Star Tribune obtained through sources, has not been released publicly but shows how the NFL will control the event and many of its public aspects. The NFL declined to comment on the document and host committee officials are declining to make it public, citing state data privacy laws.

It doesn’t appear as though the Star Tribune posted the document so I can only assume that making the lives of the homeless miserable was also stipulated somewhere in that contract.

It’s amazing what a bunch of wealthy NFL officials demand from a city in order for it to be allowed the “privilege” of hosting one year’s major game. City officials will justify paying for all of this with tax money by claiming the game will bring major economic activity. Of course there is no way for them to know that before, during, or after the event because such things are unknowable (sorry Keynesians but you can’t accurately predict such things as the continued failure of you school to accurately predict economic matters has demonstrated). And we also know that hosting these games has nothing to do with economic activity. They’re just ways for city officials to make their dicks look bigger to other cities that wanted to host the game.