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Democrat candidate for Minneapolis mayor: Let's take the guns away from the police



This is the logical next step for the left on this, isn't it? Well, let's slow down on it a little bit and look at their big-picture strategy, since the left often thinks it's won more people over to its point of view than it really has. Objective: Convince the public that the police are the enemy, more of a threat to them than the criminals. I think this is more of a political narrative than the pursuit of any particular policy. It plays into the everyone-is-racist theme that gives the left the moral upper hand in the national discourse (or so they want to think), and once you've successfully tarred someone as an evil threat to humanity, the next logical step is to take away their means of brutalizing us. It feeds into the gun control narrative too, to be sure. The left wants to take away everyone else's guns, but up to now none of them dared to include the police in that concept.
That's because the police are the good guys and they protect us. The left might not really believe that but it's a political bridge too far to convince the public the cops are dastardly pigs. Unless . . . their media servants have hyperventilated enough about certain incidents that the public is ready to accept this idea. I don't think they are, but liberals live in bubbles and often make the mistake of thinking they've convinced everyone of their narrative, when in fact they've only convinced everyone they know. Has Raymond Dehn fallen into that trap? Sure sounds like it:
State Representative and Minneapolis mayoral candidate Raymond Dehn is calling for major policing changes, proposing to take away guns from the majority of officers. Dehn is one of several candidates running to beat current Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges in the fall. He recently won the support of voters at the Democratic Farmer Labor convention and now his call to disarm police of their side guns is garnering major attention.

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"I'm not saying they don't have access to that, just like they have access to more lethal weapons in their cars, I would believe they would still have access to their guns in their cars," said Dehn. Dehn says there needs to be drastic changes in how officers are trained. He would be open to officers using other means to protect themselves like a night stick or pepper spray. "I think as we look at how to change policing and how we get officers to not react to use their gun in situations, but learning skills around de-escalation training I think are important," he said. Mayor Hodges disagrees with Dehn's proposal. "And if we are going to talk about changes in gun policy, we shouldn't start with police officer who are going to be operating in a world with people who have guns," said Hodges. Dehn says the details of his no gun proposal are still in the early stages and he wants to sit down with police officers and come up with a strategy that keeps both the community and law enforcement safe. But the head of the police union, Lt. Bob Kroll, says there's not a chance this idea would fly with any cop.

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This guy doesn't sound like he has any idea how policing actually works, and he clearly doesn't understand the threats that can present themselves to police officers on the street at any given moment. As for his suggestion that police be trained in de-escalation skills, duh, they already are. But they need their guns because not every suspect is responsive to an officer's attempt to de-escalate a situation. Some are hopped up on drugs. Some are just angry. Some are self-destructive. You can deploy all your de-escalation training, but you can't control what the bad guy is going to do and if the threat intensifies, you need your gun. Obviously this is an absurd idea and it's not going to become policy in Minneapolis any time soon. Raymond Dehn is probably not going to be elected mayor. But it says something about the state of left-wing politics that you now have a serious candidate for a serious office feeling it's safe to make such a proposal. He wouldn't be doing so if he didn't perceive that liberals would be willing to embrace the idea on a significant scale. The anti-cop narratives sweeping the pages of America's newspapers are a hit with the left, and Dehn now perceives that he can propose this without being uniformly laughed off the stage. As usual, the left has overestimated how much the general public agrees with its ideas. In this case, I don't think many people at all outside the radical left will embrace the idea that police officers should be banned from carrying guns - and I'd be surprised if many ever do. But I never thought so many people would embrace the idea that your gender is not determined by your biology, so who knows? Clearly Raymond Dehn thinks he sees an opening to push this narrative to the next level. America, you're not going to abandon the safety of police officers like you've abandoned other good things, are you?


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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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