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Minnesota State Rep. Kim Norton (D-Rochester) isn’t planning on running for re-election, so has decided to spend her last days in public service pushing for expensive, idiotic, nanny-state, feel-good measures which she knows won’t pass. As stated in the Rochester Post-Bulletin piece Norton to push for stricter gun laws in final term: “Fed up with gun violence, retiring Rep. Kim Norton said she plans to introduce a package of ‘common sense’ gun law changes during her final legislative session.” . . .

“I just can’t take it anymore. This will be a bill that hopefully will be common sense, smart things that we could do that would help us get a little bit of a grip of who has guns, where they are,” Norton said.

As you might gather from her statement, one idea that animates her is that dearly held, evergreen hope of civilian disarmers everywhere; total gun registration. To her credit, she doesn’t spout the usual plaints like, “We register cars, why not guns?” No she has actually come up with a different, even more specious line of reasoning:

Norton … noted that if she sells her kayak to someone, she has to register who she gave it to and questions why the same laws don’t always apply in the case of firearms.

First of all, Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources doesn’t give a hoot in Niflheim about who owns what watercraft. They just want their filthy lucre — $8.50 permit issuance fee plus $5.00 invasive species surcharge plus registration; Hey, those fees add up.

Second, I actually strongly support the idea of licensing and registering guns just like cars (as I outline here), but perhaps not for the same reasons as Rep. Norton. Although the article is woefully short of details, aside from mentioning that she “is still working on crafting the bill” it’s obvious that she believes that registration will somehow magically keep criminals from getting guns. Or something.

It would be so nice if those who would craft the laws under which we all have to live actually had some inkling of the things they try to legislate (“shoulder thing that goes up” anyone?). Because ever since the 8-1 Supreme Court ruling in U.S. v. Haynes — a ruling handed down almost fifty years ago — criminals have not been required to register their guns since that would violate their Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination.

The good thing about Norton’s quixotic quest: it jus may improve our chances of getting a strongly pro-2A legislator in her seat in 2016. Thanks, Kim.

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52 COMMENTS

  1. Damn, she looks like Elizabeth Warren, right down to the goofball facial expression and the wildly fugly haircut that looks like it hasn’t been shampooed since the Clinton administration. Funny, I thought that American Indians were better groomed than that. They certainly were on my last trip to the casino.

  3. “This will be a bill that hopefully will be common sense”

    How can anyone criticize little Kimmy? She “hopes” her bill will be “commonsense”. I guess she will find out what is in her bill after it is passed.

    If annual sales of firearms remains over 10 million per year, we will have 400 million firearms in circulation by the end of 2016. These anti gun/anti civil rights bigots from the Wile E. Coyote school of government and social policy propose changes to the rules governing sales of new firearms as if that will have any effect on availability for anyone. If universal registration were imposed, the system would take so long to develop and implement we will have added another 100 million guns to the inventory. The numbers are merciless, the financial and political/social costs of requiring and enforcing universal registration make these schemes pointless.

    • Another stupid comment from stoopid. Hope you got a good screen cap for MDA’s derpbook page, but nobody is buying your bullshit.

      • If someone like him actually does it, then he would certainly qualify as a ‘Useful Idiot’…

        Knock yourself out, ‘Stoopid’.

        I’ll applaud and laugh at you at the same time.

        • you and NYC2AZ need to lay off stoopid even though his comment is rough around the edges a lot of us understand his frustration with these liberals…he does have the 1st amendment on his side

          • “he does have the 1st amendment on his side”

            Reading compression. Try re-reading my comment. You’re deflecting. Keep up the white knight routine mr. sock puppet.

        • As far as First Amendment goes Stoopid can stand on the street corner and spew his crap, but this is a private space that we are allowed to use by the owner of the site (for which he pays money and invests time to provide). Ergo, his First Amendment stops when someone else has to pay for it. See also the concept of your right to swing your fist stops where my nose starts.

        • wrong rusty…if the moderator (RF) doesn’t erase it then it’s free speech on this site so ergo your ergo …..short for Leggo my Eggo…..

      • you’d think they’d at least try a little harder to seem realistic. and what a horrible thing to joke about. all of us here probably decry her politics, but all of us would probably help her out if she faced any danger, firearm-related or otherwise, since we’re human beings

        • True, why if she was on fire I would be happy to yell for someone to call the fire department. Happy to do my civic duty!

    • An awful lot of this person’s posts are about killing politicians and anti-gun activists:
      http://bfy.tw/1tMD

      I’d gamble that he/she is either an anti-gun troll, or a dangerous person that shouldn’t walk freely among us. There is no 1st Amendment right to incite violence against public officials or anyone else. Why their threatening posts remain, I don’t know. But I’m hoping it has something to do with an ongoing investigation that will soon remedy the situation.

    • @ Stoopid
      That would run counter productive to the betterment of lawful gun ownership. You simply don’t want someone who advocates additional gun laws to be a victim of gun violence. Besides, it just isn’t nice.

      Getting hit by an out of control taxi driven by Abu Al Achnad has much more flair!

  5. Once again, anytime an adjective(s) is use in a name, it’ a lie:

    – common sense gun laws
    – affordable healthcare
    – Intelligent design

    • Yeah, if only we do this gun control/confiscation thing smarter using common sense and more intelligent design, it could work. Right?

      Pay no attention to the hundreds of other ‘common sense’ gun laws we already live with. And pay no attention to those gang bangers on the corner there. We need more ‘common sense’ infringement on the law abiding among us, after all they are the scary ones.

      Idiot! Congratulations MN on getting rid of this waste of space.

  6. Ughhhhhh. Again again and again when does it end. Ink on paper, that will fix the problem of a criminal aquiring a gun. So much easier screwing with the law abiders than actually enforcing current laws and plea bargaining prison terms.

  7. That whole thing about registering kayaks just floors me. I bet you if somebody passed a law requiring every male to safety pin their prick to their underwear, there would be SOMEBODY whose first thought would be “why don’t we have to stick safety pins through our nut sacks, too?” rather than “why do we have this stupid law in the first place? “

    • I thought the same thing. (Except for the safety pin thing WTF?)
      Registering a kayak? What kind of BS is that?
      They must have a boat load of them up there…

      • Boat load… IC what u did there… And actually yes, we have a lot of kayaks in Minnesota. 10,000 lakes and all that…

  8. Well, with her vast professional experience as a substitute teacher degreed in “Human Development” (whatever that is) and as counter help at the local Borders bookstore, before becoming state legislator, why should we challenge her command of the intricacies and constitutionality of public policy?

  10. We can’t keep illegals from crossing our borders.

    We can’t keep drugs out of a supermax prison.

    Even if we could register and track every legal gun in the US, there would be an endless flood of illegal ones to feed the criminal market.

    Anyone with a functioning brain knows this.

  13. Bruce – please give us a warning before linking a pic to Feinstein, ok? Dude, I just had a real nice and juicy steak and now I feel queasy.

  14. “This will not pass, and I know that, but I am going to put together a comprehensive package of gun legislation because I have had it with all the gun deaths and what is going on,”

    She’s feed up with having the lowest crime rates since 1966?

    http://www.minnpost.com/data/2015/07/minnesota-crime-drops-lowest-rate-beatles-were-bigger-jesus

    Plus their murder rate rivals most European countries. What would make a difference is to put the kibosh on the violence going on in the Twin Cities, then you’ll stop the problem.

      • Aggravated assaults are down nationwide in a similar trend to all other violent crime (including homicide). It is another oft repeated myth that modern medicine has been the factor in the reduction of homicide.

  16. We might just do well to consider that she’s prescient….just beating Obama to the punch. Or, testing the waters, so to speak.

    How many EO’s will we see during his last year in office…especially if it looks like the D’s are going to lose the White House?

  17. It’d never work here in Minnesota, there’d be too many simultaneous boating / kayak accidents; 10,000 (plus) lakes and all.

  18. Gun registration that criminals have long since been exempted from reminds me of the old joke about the guy looking for his car keys under a streetlamp. A passerby asks him if he lost them in that area to which he replies “no, I lost them over in those bushes, but this is where the light is.”

    It is criminals with guns (and it would be criminals without guns under successful gun control, but that’s another topic) that cause the problems. Cataloging the firearms of non criminals isn’t going to help anything. I just wish someone besides the choir would listen sometimes.

  19. Thanks for mentioning up the Supreme Court case — I think it’s not as well known as it should be. We should bring it up every time someone proposes gun registration, just to make sure that everyone hearing their argument understands that registration only applies to honest citizens and that criminals are exempt.

    But the case should be cited as Haynes v. United States. Haynes lost at the lower court level and then appealed (and won), and the appellant’s name is always listed first in case citations.

    • Good to see people out there are up on things like Haynes that handily refute & thereby deflate whatever “common sense” anti-2A scheme the anti-2A cult vomits as a “sensible way to reduce/end America’s rampant gun violence epidemic”. And to aid the pro-2A side in their efforts I offer the following.:

      Haynes v. United States
      http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/390/85.html

      This case is one of the best ways to gut the anti-2A cult’s licensing/registration=less ‘gun violence’ line of attack as it shocks those who first hear it &, after seeing the negative reaction of the anti-2A cultist to the info, makes them wonder about the motives/veracity of the anti-2A cultist in particular & the cult generally.

      Subversion is a wonderful thing, oui?
      :~D

  20. Yet another politician that somehow got the idea in their head that we elected them to take on the role of our parents, they they were elected to tell us what to do, when, and how.

    All the politicians need to go. Vote every single one of them out of office. The ‘other guy’ may be just as bad, and that’s fine because we’ll vote him out next time. After a couple of election cycles we can get some politicians that understand that they work for us, not the other way around.

  21. Common sense = delusional…..especially with this woman..

    Registration!! Please someone educate her – – – –

    REGISTRATION IS THE FIRST STEP TO CONFISCATION..

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