We’re used to seeing gun control advocates get a lot of details wrong in their push to restrict our right to keep and bear arms. Whether it’s maliciously so or just the result of incompetence is largely irrelevant. At a certain point, the two are indistinguishable.
But in Minnesota, there’s a full-court press going on with regard to pushing gun control.
And, frankly, they’re tripping over themselves to get things horrifically wrong.
Let’s start with Gov. Tim Walz trying to use a shooting to justify anti-gun rules.
Following a double homicide by a shooter, who then took his own life in Cloquet yesterday, Democrat Governor Tim Walz is hinting once again at more gun control. As you may know, Walz and the Democrat controlled legislature passed Universal Background Checks and Red Flag gun seizure last session. Those bills were tucked into an enormous omnibus bill that also gave pedophilia a protected sexual orientation classification.
According to MPR, Walz “cited a need for reducing gun violence” and stated, ““We cannot live in a world where we just accept that this is a normal occurrence. It is not. If there’s anything we can do or learn from this, we will.”
The shooting in question claimed two lives at a hotel. No one knows the motive for the shooting or whether there was one, but it was basically a double homicide. While they shouldn’t be accepted as normal, there’s also no reason to believe restricting guns would necessarily have prevented the Cloquet shooting in the first place.
Even if it could have prevented the shooting deaths–and I’m not saying it would have, so just bear with me–it wouldn’t necessarily have prevented the homicides themselves.
Frankly, unless Walz has some information the rest of the world isn’t privy to, he’s just spouting off.
Maybe he won’t push for gun control in the wake of the shooting. But Walz is very anti-gun, so don’t expect him not to push for something.
But this is normal. Wrong, but normal. After some horrific homicide, lawmakers claim they’ll do all they can to prevent it from happening again, even if they have no intentions of doing so.
The Star Tribune’s editorial board, however, went full-blown stupid in a recent editorial.
The new year started with news of the tragic shootings of two children in the Twin Cities when shots were fired into their homes. In Minneapolis, an 11-year-old girl was shot in the face while in her North Side bedroom. And in St. Paul, a 10-year-old boy was hit in the stomach by gunfire directed at his Frogtown-area home.
It’s impossible to know whether the red-flag law that went into effect Jan. 1 in Minnesota could have prevented that horror. But it might have made a difference in the Minneapolis case, where the suspect randomly fired an AR-15 rifle into the air to celebrate the new year. The accused is a Fridley man who is a convicted felon barred from having a firearm. The ban wasn’t enough, but had someone close to him who knew he had the rifle sought an order under the new law, the rifle might have been taken away from him.
Wait…what?
Seriously? That’s the case they’re making to defend the red flag law?
If someone close to him knew he had the rifle, they could have called the police and he’d have been arrested for being a felon in possession of a firearm.
A red flag law wasn’t remotely needed. Moreover, this is a felon who somehow got an AR-15. Had there been a red flag order in place, does anyone really believe he couldn’t have gotten another firearm?
And nothing presented here would have justified a red flag order in the first place. Merely having a rifle isn’t sufficient reason to take it away from someone. Sure, this guy was a felon in possession, which is a gun control law already on the books, but there’s nothing here suggesting a state of mind that would have been considered troubling.
It’s easy to look at an incident after the fact and say, “Well, if someone had done something, the shooting wouldn’t have happened,” but it’s also stupid to try and do so when you’re touting a gun control law that has no bearing on what happened.
Celebratory gunfire is a pet peeve of mine. I write about it every New Year’s Eve and warn people not to do it, urging them to find some other outlet or, if they just have to do it, go to a gun range and shoot at midnight in a safe manner.
So I’m not excusing what happened.
But a red flag law isn’t supposed to be about disarming people simply because there’s some outside chance they might do something, even if they’ve never expressed a desire to harm themselves or others.
The editorial board thinks the issue now is that people are unaware of red flag laws, but the problem is that they don’t seem to be all that aware of when they’re appropriate and when they aren’t.
For this gun control push in Minnesota, literally everyone seems to be getting everything wrong.
Par for the course with anti-gunners, isn’t it?
