"Moscow City Council tables gun ban debate indefinitely"

The lame duck period of Queen Nancy's reign has officially begun. She couldn't get her misbegotten gun ban proposal through the EXISTING liberal city council.

This quote from the Queen is one for the ages:

I'm just saying that the person loses their temper and they have something readily at hand, they may use it regardless of what it is, if it's a bag of popcorn or a firearm.

Only a barking moonbat from San Francisco could equate the spectrum of violence required from a tub of Orville Redenbacher's finest to a Glock 17 as being the same. From today's Moscow-Pullman Daily News:

Moscow resident David Klingenberg said he'd like a City Council resolution encouraging the Idaho Legislature to allow cities to restrict firearms in city-owned spaces to be "permanently shot down."

Still, the longtime opponent of firearms restrictions was pleased the City Council voted Monday to postpone the discussion indefinitely.

Councilman Aaron Ament proposed the postponement, and council members Linda Pall, John Weber and Bill Lambert voted in agreement.

Pall said she voted to postpone the discussion "because I think that if our legislators would like to bring it up, they can certainly bring it up. ... There was no special reason why we needed to do that."

Ament left the meeting early and was unavailable for comment.

Mayor Nancy Chaney said she was disappointed, but accepted the decision as part of the political process.

Chaney initiated the firearms discussion in August when she asked City Attorney Randy Fife to ask the Idaho Attorney General's office whether the city had authority to restrict firearms in public, city-owned places such as City Hall, city parks and the Hamilton Indoor Recreation Center.

Deputy Attorney General Stephen A. Bywater sent a reply in September stating the city cannot restrict people from legally carrying firearms. Chaney then wrote to local legislators asking them to consider introducing state-level legislation on the matter. Such legislation could give cities power to restrict firearms, or could add city halls and other areas to an existing list of places where guns are restricted, such as federal buildings and schools.

State Rep. Shirley Ringo agreed to help Chaney, but she cautioned that such legislation would be difficult to pass, even if it was well-supported.

Councilwoman Kit Craine and Councilman Tom Lamar spoke in favor of the resolution.

"I'm sure we can all imagine how far we'll get in the state Legislature with this, but I think this can be discussed in terms of whether it's appropriate to have firearms in certain areas, and we should deal with this now," Craine said.

Chaney said "the discussion is about whether it's time to ask this question."

She said other federal and state government buildings restrict firearms, so it's appropriate to consider city buildings as well.

Lambert suggested changing the resolution to allow people with concealed weapon permits to carry firearms in public buildings.

He said people who have concealed weapons permits have been scrutinized by law enforcement.

Chaney countered that the permit system is "not as fail-safe as you might anticipate."

She said she did not intend to question the responsibility of people with permits, but she believes there are circumstances where firearms are not appropriate.

The presence of a gun could keep someone from thinking as clearly as usual if they became angry, she said.

Weber asked if the mayor was suggesting "that because someone may or may not have a concealed weapons permit that they're less likely to control their temper in an argument."

Chaney said she was not, and that an angry person may use anything at hand - even a tub of buttered popcorn - as a weapon.

Nancy Chaney, Naively Cynical, or Cynically Naive

So, is Moscow Mayor Nancy Chaney's attempt to impose gun control on Moscow driven by cynical opportunism or naivete?


I did a little investigation and I can confidently report to you that it was illegal to commit murder in Moscow on that sad day last spring when Jason Hamilton went on his rampage. Before taking his own life, Hamilton had allegedly murdered his wife, a Moscow police officer and a church caretaker.
Moscow mayor Nancy Chaney responded as one would predict of a liberal – by advocating gun control. Specifically, she seemed to take note that some of the shots had been fired from the city hall parking lot and therefore concluded that a law forbidding firearms on city property would have mitigated the disaster. Presumably Jason Hamilton would have respected this law and attempted longer and more difficult shots from the street.
Mayor Chaney’s clichéd and insensitive San Francisco liberal-style reaction to this tragedy exposes her as either childishly naive, or cynically opportunistic. After all, addressing violent crime with gun control makes about as much sense as fighting obesity with spoon control. If Nancy Chaney is in fact clever enough to understand that, then she is in fact chillingly cynical. I suspect that she is both.
It takes a special sort of cynicism to exploit politically such a tragedy as was visited on Moscow last May. Surely Nancy Chaney cannot honestly believe that a law such as her proposed gun control ordinance would in any way have altered the events of that terrible night. But political opportunism is so deeply ingrained into the political leftwing that nothing is above politics. They will even turn a solemn memorial into a political rally, as Democrats did when they laid the late Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota to rest in 2002.
But if she is cynical, she is certainly naive as well. Rebuffed in her initial efforts to enact her silly law by an inconvenience known as “state law,” she has cooked up another scheme: Change the law.
Idaho representative Shirley Ringo has allied herself with Chaney and hopes to introduce the legislation when the legislature next convenes, where it will meet a predictable fate. Ringo’s bill will not be voted out of committee, it will be laughed out of committee.
If it were not already fated to fail, Nancy Chaney made matters worse with her new and improved explanation for why such a law is needed. She now argues that debate in city hall will be more free and open if participants can feel confident that they won’t get shot by someone holding an opposing viewpoint. That’s been a real problem in Idaho, hasn’t it?
Such nonsense reveals Chaney’s naive side.
Does Nancy Chaney really believe that one of those knuckle dragging Idaho rednecks with a gun rack in his high-rise four-wheel drive pickup is going to shoot her? If so, then that’s probably another manifestation of the same elitist cultural bigotry that informs her opposition to Wal-Mart, Lowe’s hardware stores, and churches that don’t preach a message consistent with her own belief system.
You can certainly see her point. The parking lots of places like that will fill up with just the sort of people that make a liberal’s skin crawl.
The truth is that if anybody on the Palouse needs to fear retaliation for expressing an unapproved opinion, it would be conservatives on college campuses.
One of the hallmarks of a totalitarian state is that everything is political. So it should surprise no one that the phrase, “the personal is political” would have arisen from the leftwing kookiest fringes. What is sad is that this thinking has made its way into mainstream liberal ideology.
Surely Nancy Chaney knows that her silly law would not have discouraged Jason Hamilton’s rampage. And she knows that nobody refrains from speaking up at city council meetings for fear of getting shot by some guy wearing a red plaid flannel shirt and suspenders. It’s just that gun control is a one of the sacraments in the religion of liberalism. In the Jason Hamilton tragedy, Mayor Chaney saw an opportunity to exploit the city’s sorrow and pass a pointless law that would earn her one of the more cherished merit badges handed out by the high priests of the left.
And as the mood of the voters as expressed in the last election portends ill for her re-election, she’s running out of time to get it done.