I don’t know. There hasn’t been anything said publicly or posted directly indicating that Lincoln, NE’s Mayor Chris Beutler is looking at restricting Second Amendment rights in the city.
On the other hand, there’s this. The city’s public safety director writes that Mayor Buetler asked him to conduct some research on school shootings.
Yesterday, the Mayor asked me to do a little research for him. We have been talking about school safety lately, and he was interested in the relative frequency of school shootings at high schools compared to middle schools and elementary schools. I thought that would be a 10 minute job, but it proved to be a little more complicated than I imagined.
So Lincoln, NE Public Safety Director Tom Casady conducted the research, and posted a graphic representing his results in that post. It turns out that shootings occur predominantly at high schools.
But why did Mayor Beutler request the research in the first place? There have been no school shootings in Lincoln, NE.
Lincoln’s city council elections are officially non-partisan, but Beutler and a majority of the council are Democrats.
ALSO READ:
Maybe we should outlaw high schools.
It would save a whole lot more children than outlawing guns.
How about we cut to the chase and outlaw Democrats and other Leftists? (I’d really like to outlaw stupidity – “Democrats and other Leftists” just seems to be an effective proxy for low IQ.)
Though the above remark was probably said, in part, in jest, there’s a thread of sense in it. We’ve seen an increase in non-traditional elementary schooling. But this addresses the most “elementary” learning like the three “R’s”. But it is at the secondary level that political, economic and cultural beliefs begin to be developed. These are being entrusted in our public schools to teachers who have biases which seem too uniform. When did you hear of a high school teacher who opposed big government, gun control, unions, affirmative action, gay marriage or abortion? Whatever your opinion on any of these issues, don’t you believe that both sides of any or all of these issues ought be given a hearing for those at such an impressional age by authority figures?
GMTA!
I dunno. Maybe he’s working with the school board on trying to figure out where to beef up security. Eventually, they’d want to get around to involving the PD. I don’t really see any harm in this- at least the guy’s actually trying to get some facts.
The last time I was in Lincoln, the town was a basket case with boarded up retail outlets all over the place. I would think the Mayor has more important things to do then waste oxygen over this pig in the poke.
A basket case with boarded up retail outlets? When was the last time you were in Lincoln?
Doubt we’ll see much action on this front as far as gun control. Will have to see what, if anything, will come from this. Maybe just some further investigation on school safety and plans on that front which seems like a decent idea.
Maybe you’re thinking of Lincoln, Michigan.
Lincoln, Nebraska is a sparkling clean college town with a thriving economy and among the lowest unemployment rates in the country. There’s probably more boarded up windows in Beverly Hills than in Lincoln.
BOB hasn’t been in Lincoln for a while. The unemployment rate in Lincoln is nearly the lowest in the country at about 3.4% New development and new stores being built.
Regarding the Mayor and the Public Safety director, they are both democrats and no friend of the 2nd ammendment. Cassidy, the PSD was the chief of police prior, and the sheriff prior to that. Cassidy is an idiot that got run out of the Sheriff’s office and got handed the Police Chief job by a democrat mayor. The current mayor may be looking at fake data to send proposals to the legistlature.
Nebraska has state preemption for firearm laws. The city can’t do anything the state doesn’t allow, and the state is conservative enough to hold onto our rights.
The nice thing is the state legistlature is only active for either 90 days or 60 days depending on the year so time spent to pass laws is limited. Hard to cram anything through in limited time without wide spread support.
“The nice thing is the state legistlature is only active for either 90 days or 60 days depending on the year so time spent to pass laws is limited. Hard to cram anything through in limited time without wide spread support.”
I’ve long thought that Texas’s legislature meeting only for 140 days every two years is a significant reason that Texas does as well as it does. Of course, I am with those who think we’d be even better off if it met for two days every 140 years.
Well, Nebraska has State pre-emption, but it’s not total pre-emption. When the legislature enacted that pre-emption bill, the usual nancies from Lincoln and Omaha got the bill amended to grandfather in a few existing, older local gun laws.
For example, in Lincoln, all sales of firearms must be registered with LPD by the seller. It’s effectively gun registration by another name. LPD officers regularly refer (in police radio traffic) to this person or that person having or not having whatever guns registered to them. Lincoln also has a law that lays out a whole litany of minor, mostly non-violent misdemeanors (such as disturbing the peace) that render a person so convicted ineligible to possess firearms in the city, and they use that registration list to confiscate registered guns from persons so deemed ineligible to have them in Lincoln, even if they are still eligible to possess them in the rest of the state.
It’s not total statewide pre-emption, not by any means.
Sounds like Democrat statist nirvana already… why do they need more?
The registration is only for handguns, and does not apply to CCW holders that do not live in Omaha or Lincoln.
Chris Beutler should be ashamed of himself for this outright exploitation. He has blood on his hands. Let me explain…
Two years ago (this week, if I recall correctly), a young man who was a student at Omaha’s Millard South High School walked in with a gun and shot several people, killing the assistant principle (who was a good friend of my mom’s). I know many of the teachers and students there. But what is even more notable are the facts behind this incident that Chris Beutler also knows and is concealing, since he assumes the media won’t do their job and he’ll get away with exploiting people’s death for his political gain.
1. The young man who did the shooting was a former Lincoln High School student (from Chris’s city) that had been essentially neglected and finally rejected by that school district. Whether or not he should have been abandoned is someone else’s call, but Chris’s hands are not clean here.
2. The young man’s father was a police officer. He stole his dad’s service gun, after being suspended at school for behavior problems, going hom, getting the gun, and coming back and going wild shooting at people.
Unless Chris intends to confiscate all guns from the police, nothing would have stopped this young man from doing what he did. He did not use a weapon belonging to a mere citizen, nor did he use an “assault rifle.” He used a police handgun.
Chris knows of this incident. Perhaps the media would like to ask him why he’s concealing it, and why he’s trying to push laws that not only won’t do a damn thing based on our first-hand experience in Nebraska, but leaves our schools and law-abiding citizens completely vulnerable to killers like this.
What’s in it for Chris to have lied in this manner? Does he think the media is that incompetent and ignorant?
Here’s the Omaha World Herald on the Millard South (Nebraska) shooting by the young man who used his dad’s police Glock handgun:
http://www.omaha.com/article/20110105/NEWS97/110109863
Is Chris Beutler’s going to confiscate law enforcement’s guns? I’m sure the FBI will be happy being told that they’ll have to check their guns in at the border of Lincoln Nebraska because their mayor says so.
So he’s going to manage threats with the “whack-a-mole” strategy. This should turn out well.
JJ,
I’ m a Republican, and I was appointed chief of police by a Republican Mayor, Mike Johanns, who offered me the job while I was serving as the Lancaster County Sheriff.
Lincoln Log,
Disturbing the Peace? Uh, no. It is a group of high-grade misdemeanors, and the disability is for a conviction within the past 10 years. After 10 years, convicted stalkers, violators of protection orders, debauchers of children, and so forth are back in good graces when it comes to gun ownership. The list of “minor misdemeanors” is in the ordinance, 9.36.100.
http://www.lincoln.ne.gov/city/attorn/lmc/ti09/ch936.pdf
West Omaha,
How on Earth the Mayor of Lincoln had anything whatsoever to do with Robert Butler Jr.’s shootings at Millard South High School is beyond me. And insinuating that he is somehow trying to cover that up? That’s some mighty twisted logic.
Dana, Coldstream,
Seems pretty reasonable to me, too.
Thanks for the list of mostly non-violent misdemeanors that somehow trump state law and end-run pre-emption. Public indecency? So, for example, a drunk college kid moons somebody out the window after finals week, pleads guilty, and all of the sudden the hunting shotgun his grandfather gave him goes bye bye. Yeah, great law.
If you’re so concerned about stalking, then why didn’t the city attorney pen a bill to felonize that, instead of using those resources to pen a bill allowing cash-cow red light cameras that would bring in fees the city could grab (instead of fines that they couldn’t)? That just shows the city’s real priorities. It crashed and burned in committee, of course, after termed-out Ernie cowed them all.
Apparently reading isn’t your strong point, Tom. Either that or you’re another typical liberal who completely misinterprets a statement because you can’t refute it. Either way, it’s disgusting how you excuse the political exploitation of dead teachers and administrators in order to defend hacks like Beutler.
As I point out, Beutler knew of the incident first-hand, and was consulted by law enforcement given the issues with the student’s residency and former attendance at LHS. If you’re so well placed in law enforcement, you know this to be the case.
Beutler also knew it was a police handgun that was used in the crime, which invalidates his power grab for citizens’ guns. If he still wanted to blame guns and not people, perhaps he should have indicated that he will seize all guns assigned to law enforcement since that is what led to Nebraska’s most recent and significant school shooting. “Unless we keep cops from having guns, our school children will remain in peril” would be the exploitative liberal gun-grabbing line.
But since you and I both know Beutler knew all these facts, and proceeded to lie to the media (assuming they were probably too lazy to uncover the facts that Beutler was lying and his proposal wouldn’t do a damn thing to address the problem), that’s where we clearly have an amoral, unethical bastard of a politician that’s exploiting the death of innocent people for his own power gains.
West Omaha,
You’re still loosing me here. First of all, The fact that Robert Butler Jr. attended Lincoln Public Schools prior to moving to his Dad’s home in Omaha and enrollment in Millard South HS, and the fact that the gun he used was his Dad’s Omaha Police Department pistol were accurately reported in all the media, and Mayor Beutler had nothing to do with any of these events or the news coverage, to the best of my knowledge never made any public statements about this case, and was never interviewed by the media about it because it had nothing to do with him. “Consulted by law enforcement”? About what, for what purpose? I was the Lincoln police chief at the time, and this assertion is utterly untrue. Why in the world would law enforcement need or want to consult with the Mayor of Lincoln about a school shooting in Omaha, that was committed by a young man who had relocated from his mother’s home in lincoln to his Father’s home in Omaha earlier in the school year? None of this is news, none of it is a secret, and anyone who followed the events would be well aware of it. Why on earth do you believe the Mayor special knowledge of this case, and why would he conceal what was already widely reported and known? “Proceeded to lie to the media”? That’s just ridiculous. Good luck finding any media statement at all from the Mayor about this tragedy. Second, how on earth is the Mayor asking me to gather some information on the relative frequency of shootings by grade level a “power grab for citizens’ guns”? And your statement “…his proposal wouldn’t do a damn thing to address the problem…” eludes me: what proposal? There is no proposal. The guy just wanted to know where these school shootings around the country are taking place, for goodness sakes.
I would interject here that some of the news accounts of the Butler/Millard South incident did not specify that his father was a police officer, and for what the variably-reliable Wikipedia is worth) the Wikipedia entry on the Butler incident has been scrubbed of any mention that his father was a police officer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millard_South_High_School#2011_Shooting
They know you can dig deeper and discover he was a cop, but they also know that most people won’t. Gun control minions, like the Brady Bunch, probably did that edit, because it doesn’t fit their narrative to have an LEO’s gun stolen from their home and used in a shooting. After all, only those dumb civilians do stuff like that, right? If they were honest, they’d call for all LEO duty weapons to be checked in at the station and stored there until the start of their next shift, to prevent something like this from ever happening again. Good luck getting the FOP behind that one.
The change in tone of news story commenters before and after it was revealed that Butler’s father was a cop was marked and abrupt. The grabbers went from calling for a tar & feathers to being quiet as churchmice. Oh, he was a cop, well that’s different…
In any event, it wasn’t the dad’s fault, and it wasn’t the gun’s fault, it was the nutjob kid’s fault.
Mayors, police departments and school disctricts need to be thinking about and improving the safety of schools. Assessing the scope of the potential threats based on historical data is a perfectly valid approach.
Beutler is a liberal, but he seems to be of the rare variety that is also pretty pragmatic. I personally doubt he has a gun control agenda, but who knows.