Archive for the ‘NRA’ Category

Saying that picking Erin Maye Quade is Erin Murphy’s first unforced mistake isn’t controversial outside the DFL. Since I’m not in the DFL, I’m not that worried what the DFL thinks. Frankly, I’m confident that I’ve got lots of company in thinking that.

Filling out Erin Maye Quade’s identity isn’t difficult. She’s admitted to organizing with Barack Obama in 2007-08. She’s led this year’s anti-gun protest at the Capitol. She’s from Apple Valley. Combining with Erin Murphy is natural since the DFL is the Metrocrat Party. Increasingly, to the DFL, life outside the Twin Cities Metro doesn’t exist. Increasingly, to the Metro DFL, people who want to protect their families are considered weird. If you don’t believe me, ask Lori Swanson how welcoming the DFL is to NRA members. Swanson led Matt Pelikan by 5 points after the first ballot. Shortly thereafter, the DFL endorsed Pelikan. After the first ballot, Pelikan dropped a neutron bomb in the convention center, telling everyone that — gasp! — the NRA had given Swanson an A rating. Within 15 minutes, Swanson withdrew.

Why would we think that an anti-mining, gun-grabbing, pro-single-payer health care ticket from the Twin Cities would attempt to represent rural Minnesota? That being said, I’m praying that this is the DFL ticket this November. Check out the last half of this video:

Quade first admits that she’s a first-term legislator. Next, she virtually admits that parents can’t afford child care. Perhaps, she should’ve told Gov. Dayton not to let several hundred million dollars leave the program as a result of fraud.

Nothing in Ms. Quade’s legislative history suggests that she’s prepared to be governor if, God forbid, Murphy is incapacitated. Then again, I question whether either of these women are interested in representing the people of rural Minnesota. I’m betting they won’t.

This ticket screams identity politics. This ticket doesn’t seem interested in representing all of Minnesota’s 87 counties. In the end, that’s why I think Murphy-Quade will get beat by Walz-Flanagan.

If stupidity were money, the writer of this LTE would be wealthy. Early in the LTE, the writer poses a hypothetical situation, saying “Say Matt, 23, dies from an IED in Afghanistan. His rising life is cut short. The anguish is felt by his grandparents, parents, brothers, sisters, in-laws, nephews, nieces — and all their friends and relatives, and Matt’s uncles, aunts, cousins, acquaintances, friends, HS classmates, their parents, college classmates, friends, girlfriends, athletic mates, armed service mates, acquaintances — pain multiplied exponentially compared to an abortion. Pain that goes on forever.”

A few paragraphs later, the writer employs a guilt-trip strategy, writing “Then the same goes for the loved ones and friends of the wounded — physically, emotionally, psychologically. Not to mention the loss of productivity to society. Add massive costs for decades more that you and I foot to aid the wounded warriors. And the conservative reaction to all this carnage? Threats of more wars. And big yawns; hiding behind the skirts of the NRA and a lack of common sense about the second amendment. (Bazookas, grenades and howitzers have been outlawed without ‘taking all our guns.’) If conservatives truly cared about gun deaths, their abortion signs would add, ‘Save our young adults. Outlaw AR-15s.'”

The writer must be physically fit because that’s a hell of a leap. Seriously, outlawing AR-15s won’t come close to putting a dent in mass shooting deaths. Eliminating AR-15s wouldn’t even eliminate 1% of shooting deaths.

Let’s talk about the forever popular with progressives assault weapons ban while we’re at it. The progressives’ definition of an assault weapon is nothing more than a scary-looking semi-automatic rifle. If people want to be consistent, people that want to ban ‘assault weapons’ would have to eliminate all semi-automatic weapons.

Here’s a question that hasn’t been discussed. If these gun grabbers truly wanted to put a significant dent in gun deaths, why aren’t they calling for the elimination of handguns?

Instead of going the gun-grabbing route, we’d be better off if we implemented programs that already have a history of success. Sen. Marco Rubio, the politician accused of having blood on his hands because he’s accepted campaign contributions from the NRA, wrote this op-ed to highlight what Congress has already done:

Just five weeks after the tragedy in Parkland, Congress passed a spending bill that authorizes $1 billion over the next decade to improve the safety of our schools. The STOP School Violence Act is set to immediately provide resources to schools and their communities to prevent violence before it ever begins.

Being proactive is better than efficiently reacting.

The new money would be available to local governments and schools to implement programs like Los Angeles County’s successful School Threat Assessment Response Team, which coordinates the efforts of law enforcement, schools and mental health professionals to make sure nobody slips through the cracks. It will fund anonymous reporting systems like the Safe UT app, and help school districts create and train intervention teams to seek out the troubled students most likely to pose risks like what happened in Parkland.

Rather than listen to the mindless yapping of young activists like David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez, Congress has funded an effective program that seeks to expand from Los Angeles to the entire nation. Here’s why that’s important:

School safety programs that had previously been subject to budget cuts or staff turnover will have additional resources for operations and for investments in improvements. Local government officials, and the parents and families they represent, will be able to use the money for solutions that work best for their communities based on tried and true approaches.

It’s time for the activists to get off the stage. They’ve been discredited because improving school safety doesn’t require trampling people’s civil rights. Cameron Kasky, David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez are poorly-trained actors with a loser’s script:

For the past 6 weeks, I’ve been inundated with moral-sounding drivel from high school students. While the left-leaning media swooned over these ill-informed activists’ activism, I kept wondering when a true journalist would ask them pertinent questions. After awhile, I stopped expecting the MSM to do something they clearly didn’t want to do. After awhile, I stopped expecting these children to stop acting like ill-informed spoiled brats.

While the MSM praises their activism, people in America’s heartland have moved on. Voters in America’s heartland have tuned these children out, knowing that they’re mostly a creation of the MSM and that the emotions are real. If the MSM won’t ask these children some tough questions, I will.

1. Are you committed to making schools safer? If you are, why are you pushing the thing that doesn’t work?
2. Why is your focus solely on the NRA? Sheriff Israel, Deputy Peterson, the Broward Cowards and the FBI were more to blame than the NRA.
3. To David Hogg and Emma Gonzalez: did you know that an ‘assault weapon’ (as you define it) is nothing more than a scary-looking semi-automatic rifle?
4. Why haven’t you advocated for banning handguns? They kill far more people than so-called assault weapons?
5. Why haven’t you advocated for banning all semi-automatic rifles? They’re just as lethal as assault weapons as defined by you.
6. Isn’t it time for you to admit that you’re just tools of the gun control lobby?
7. Isn’t it time to admit that your ‘solutions’ haven’t worked and can’t work?
8. Finally, isn’t it time you apologized for your ill-informed activism? Yes, you have the right to protest. It’s just that you’d have a better chance of being effective if you knew what you were talking about, which you clearly don’t, and if you were truly interested in solving problems rather than just checking another item off the gun grabbers’ ideological checklist?

Let’s see if anyone responds before the next march:

Student leaders who have organized, marched and pressed for government action to halt gun violence sound as if they’re just getting warmed up. Plans are taking shape for April 20 school walkouts tied to the anniversary of the Columbine High shootings, along with a rally that afternoon at the State Capitol. Next weekend, students in the south metro have called for a town hall meeting, with invites sent to elected officials, hitting again on themes that propelled them to rally and protest: the senselessness of gun violence and the hesitance of some lawmakers to take corrective action. “I think legislators who do nothing on this subject do so at their own peril,” said Joe Campbell, a communications consultant whose GoFundMe campaign sent dozens of Henry Sibley High School students to Washington, D.C., for last weekend’s March for Our Lives. He attended the event, too, and came away thinking, “If I were a politician, and I saw this, I’d be shaking in my boots.”

First, if I was the media director for gun rights advocates, I’d talk about how government failed to protect those students and teachers. I’d highlight that this wasn’t the first time that government failed in protecting its citizens. This article would be highlighted:

A federal database with the names of mentally ill people barred from buying guns still lacks millions of records it needs to be effective. A new report from Mayors Against Illegal Guns points to gaps in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). The problem is that 14 years after NICS was put in place, states still aren’t submitting all the required mental health records.

“I think that those states are doing a disservice to their citizens,” says Lori Haas, whose daughter Emily was injured in the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting. “They’re not doing what they can to protect public safety and to keep firearms out of the hands of potentially dangerous people.”

That article was published in August, 2012. Democrats had a significant majority in the Senate and a Democrat was president. Shouldn’t Democrats take the blame for not fixing NICS?

Since the shooting, Virginia has become a model, submitting more than 170,000 records of people with mental illnesses. But the Mayors Against Illegal Guns report shows 21 other states have reported fewer than 100 records. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) examined why states aren’t submitting records in a July report. Some cited bureaucratic barriers, others technical ones, like switching from paper-based to computer systems. And some states contend it violates their laws to forward mental health records to the federal database. A few states are changing their laws.

“Texas enacted a law in 2009 and was then able to increase the number of records by about 190,000,” says Carol R. Cha, acting director in GAO’s Homeland Security and Justice division. But recent shootings, like the ones in Colorado and Texas, demonstrate that people with mental illnesses are still able to buy guns.

The last I checked, the NRA wasn’t responsible for submitting those records. Government was. Government failed to protect people.
Thank God for people like Ben Shapiro. In this video, Shapiro levels a devastating critique of David Hogg:

To David Hogg, Emma Gonzalez and Cameron Kasky: if you’re truly interested in protecting people from gun violence, which I question at this point, it’s time to get government to do its job. That includes insisting that deputies actually run towards danger instead of hiding behind their vehicles. That includes requiring states to update the NICS system in a timely fashion. That includes pointing the finger of blame at the people who are actually at fault.

Right now, that isn’t happening.

Technorati: Gun Control, March for Our Lives, Emma Gonzalez, Cameron Kasky, David Hogg, National Instant Criminal Background Check System, Virginia Tech, Parkland, Scott Israel, Scot Peterson, Nikolas Cruz, FBI, NRA, Assault Weapons Ban, Activism

It’s time to figure out the things that went wrong with the Marjory Stoneman-Douglas HS shooting. Why didn’t the Broward County Sheriff’s Office detect the shooter? Why wasn’t he arrested? How big of a role did the PROMISE Program play in this tragedy? Did the Obama administration put in place the building blocks that all but insured this tragedy?

What we know

We know that the School Resource Officer stayed outside the school once the shooting started. We know that it’s his job to run towards danger when all hell breaks loose. He didn’t do that. He hid rather than protect students. Further, we know that 3 other deputies stayed outside rather than running in and saving kids’ lives.

Additionally, we know that Broward County enthusiastically implemented the PROMISE Program in 2013. PROMISE stands for “Preventing Recidivism through Opportunities, Mentoring, Interventions, Support & Education”. It provides counselling for misdemeanors like “assault, theft, vandalism, underage drinking and drug use”, which focuses on something known as restorative justice. What’s frightening about this is that these incidents don’t get reported to the police or sheriff’s department.

According to the District, “Rather than focusing on punishment, restorative justice seeks to repair the harm done.” In other words, these students are told to take touchy-feely classes rather than facing legitimate discipline. People like Nikolas Cruz don’t ‘slip through the cracks.’ They laugh their asses off at the idiots administering the PROMISE Program while they waltz through the cracks.

PROMISE

What we’re finding out about PROMISE is that it’s been pushed by former Attorney General Eric Holder and former Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Further, it’s known, thanks almost entirely because of Paul Sperry’s reporting, that Duncan and Holder recommended using “law enforcement measures and out-of-school suspensions as a last resort.”

This has led to anarchy at schools:

“Broward County adopted a lenient disciplinary policy similar to those adopted by many other districts under pressure from the Obama administration to reduce racial ‘disparities’ in suspensions and expulsions,” said Peter Kirsanow, a black conservative on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in Washington. “In many of these districts, the drive to ‘get our numbers right’ has produced disastrous results, with startling increases in both the number and severity of disciplinary offenses, including assaults and beatings of teachers and students.”

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Here’s worse:

Kirsanow said that in just the first year after the Obama administration issued its anti-discipline edict, public schools failed to expel more than 30,000 students who physically attacked teachers or staff across the country. Previously, “if you hit a teach, you’re gone,” he said, but that is no longer the case.

That’s terrible but it gets worse:

For example, in St. Paul, Minn., a high school science teacher was “beaten and choked out” by a 16-year-old student, who allegedly came up behind him, called him a “f-king white cracker,” and put him in a stranglehold, before bashing his head into a concrete wall and pavement. The student, Fon’Tae O’Bannon, got 90 days of electronic home monitoring and anger management counseling for the December 2015 attack.

If it isn’t obvious that violence is increasing at these schools as a result of leniency policies, then it’s apparent that people aren’t paying attention.

Sheriff Israel

Through this disaster, Sheriff Israel has been the poster-child for stupidity and arrogance. He should’ve been suspended before the CNN lynching, aka CNN town hall. Before he took the stage that night, he knew that his deputies had failed those students. Those deputies that stayed outside should’ve been fired immediately. Instead, Sheriff Israel praised them. If I was the father of one of those students that got murdered and I’d heard Sheriff Israel praise his deputies, there’s a better than 50-50% chance I wouldn’t take that well.

Student Activists?

Those innocent students who simply want to be safe in their schools aren’t that innocent. It’s interesting that we’ve learned that major anti-gun rights organizations are picking up the tab for these anti-gun rallies in Florida and across the nation:

Since then, major players and organizations, including Everytown, Giffords, Move On, and Women’s March LA, told BuzzFeed News they are helping with logistics, strategy, and planning for next month’s March for Our Lives rally and beyond. Much of the specific resources the groups are providing to the Parkland students remains unclear, as is the full list of supporting organizations, but there are broad outlines.

Giffords, an organization started by former US Rep. Gabrielle Giffords that fights gun violence, is working with Everytown and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America to plan the main march on Washington, as well as sister rallies across the country.

These organizations are disgusting. It’s one thing to advocate for misguided policies. That’s their right. It’s another to use children to advance those ill-informed policies. That’s manipulating young people who’ve just been through a traumatic experience. That’s cold-blooded. That’s unacceptable.

Technorati: Scott Israel, Eric Holder, Arne Duncan, PROMISE, Nikolas Cruz, Gabby Giffords, Moms Demand Answers, Everytown, Gun Control, Democrats