St. Paul, MN–Gun owners behind Minnesota’s largest pro-gun organization are patting themselves on the back today after a well-earned victory. At a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting, two nasty anti-gun amendments were struck down today.
Democrat Senator Ron Latz had proposed two amendments: Amendment A4 took the language of Red Flag gun seizures from House File 9, which had already passed the House. Amendment A2 created a de facto Universal Gun Registration.
Now, Senator Latz was very vocal that this was NOT a universal gun registration, but only required a background check for gun transfers. Of course, this is just semantics. If you’re making every gun purchase go through a background check–which is stored in a government database–then you’ve made a registry of all gun owners. It’s not that hard to understand.
But Minnesota’s biggest gun rights organization, Minnesota Gun Rights, was on the scene. They had their members primed and ready; when the call went out, the members poured heat onto the nine members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Ben Dorr, Executive Director of Minnesota Gun Rights, shot a live video from outside the Capital. In the video, he reported that more than 550 emails had been sent to each member of the committee in only eighteen hours. That’s more than 5,000 emails that angry gun owners sent to their legislators with only few hours notice!
Nobody could withstand that kind of pressure and both Amendments failed. Sorry, Leftists! No Red Flags or Universal Background checks made it out of the Senate Judiciary Committee today!
Of course, there are dozens more bills they could amend or they could file new gun control bills during the rest of the session, so gun owners aren’t out of the woods, yet. But grassroots gun owners made their point loud and clear: we’re not having any of your leftist gun control.
Gun Control 101: Playing The Game
Mr. Dorr also made an observation about the left’s thought process. He reminded his viewers that Dem. Senator Ron Latz had filed both of these amendments as their own bills last year. In fact, the Red Flag amendment was verbatim from last year’s attempt. But the ‘Universal Background Check bill’ had some noticeable changes.
Last year, Democrat Latz had been arrogant. He thought that passing a universal background check was foregone conclusion. His 2019 bill was radically anti-gun, with no exemptions to the background check. If you wanted to give your shotgun to your son, buy a gun for your wife, etc…all of those sales had to be done with a dealer and a federal background check.
But Latz’s 2020 version had all the ‘regular’ exemptions for those common scenarios. Latz realized that he couldn’t try to pass the same nasty bill he’d tried to pass last year, so he made it look like he was willing to be moderate and reasonable.
But as Ben Dorr pointed out, the minute his bill passed the Senate Judiciary Committee and reached the actual Senate floor for a Senate vote, Latz could–and likely would–remove those exemptions! He wasn’t giving gun owners one inch!
He is just as committed to his nasty gun control in 2020 as he was in 2019…he was just hiding it. As Dorr said, “That’s how the game is played, folks!”
So this Democrat is crafty. He’s also 100% committed to getting his gun control passed and was visibly upset at being stopped by the members of Minnesota Gun Rights.
But where were Minnesota’s stalwart Republicans? They didn’t do a darn thing. In fact, Republican Senator–and Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee–Warren Limmer said during the meeting that they would not be willing to hear any bills on Constitutional Carry or Stand Your Ground this year as they were ‘fringe’ bills.
Fringe bills? THIRTY-SIX STATES have Stand Your Ground law! Fifteen states already have Constitutional Carry!
And this isn’t the first time we’ve come across Limmer being willing to mock and insult gun owners. If these Republicans think that these basic Constitutional rights are “fringe bills” then it’s no wonder the Democrats think they can crap all over gun owners.
Check out Ben Dorr’s video below. We love this confrontational style of politics!