Mary Kiffmeyer’s family gun violence problem, and the Gun Industry money and influence in the MN Legislature
by Dog Gone on May 24, 2013 ·
photo from state lege site Last night the 17 year old grandson of Mary Kiffmeyer threatened to kill himself and his family, especially his mother, with a shotgun in the Kiffmeyer home in Big Lake. The teen’s mother, who did not live in the home, called law enforcement, who arrested the kid.
Mary Kiffmeyer has been a MN GOP career politician, having served as a state Representative in the legislature, as Secretary of State first under Jesse Ventura, then under ol’ T-Paw, and is now serving in the state Senate during the 2013-14 , with her term ending in 2016.
She has also been the ALEC chair for Minnesota, meaning she does the bidding of that shadow organization that drafts legislation for special interests that is then pushed through by pretty much exclusively conservative politicians. In exchange, the conservative politicians sell or barter their votes to act on behalf of those special interests in exchange for perks, campaign donations, and other benefits.
The graphic below is fairly illustrative of the relationships between conservative politicians and the special interests.
One of the biggest players in ALEC is the NRA and the gun manufacturers. The NRA within ALEC has been responsible for drafting the shoot first legislation, the expansion of both open and concealed carry, and of course it is the NRA that supports public spending to put armed guards in schools and which espouses the position that the only way to stop bad guys with guns – bad guys of any age, including children – is with a good guy with a gun who shoots them, vigilante-style.
ALEC and the NRA are hand in hand behind the conservative resistance to gun control of any kind, no matter what happens, no matter how many people are the victims of gun violence. Murder / suicides, like the one threatened in Mary Kiffemeyer’s own home, are among the most frequent kinds of gun violence, not only in Minnesota, but nationwide.
The right does not care. There is too much money, too much political influence in the gun industry, even if it means their own family members are sacrificed to the corporate greed.
Mary Kiffmeyer was lucky; she wasn’t home to be part of this gun violence threat. Mary Kiffemeyer was also very lucky that law enforcement, not some neighboring vigilante with a gun who fancied himself that NRA ‘good guy with a gun’ taking down ‘the bad guy with a gun’. Because if the NRA premise had been followed, Mary Kiffmeyer could have a dead grandson, and possibly other family members dead or wounded, instead of anonymously in jail.
This raises the question, if their grandson was living with his grandparents because of some family issues that caused him NOT to be living with his parents, and given the statistics of the problems with male teens in particular with firearms and violence, how did this kid get his hands on the shotgun in the first place?
We are reassured over and over and over about how we do not need gun laws to keep children safe; this was still a minor, and he wasn’t safe with or from this shot gun. We are told over and over how responsible Minnesota gun owners are with keeping their firearms secured, telling us that we don’t need to have laws mandating safe storage or liability or property insurance on firearms, even though firearms violence, both deliberate and accidental, sucks BILLIONS out of our economy every year, such that the non-gun owners, who comprise more than 60% of the population nationally end up subsidizing the costs of firearms ownership of the steadily declining numbers of gun owners. Who besides this teen is going to be held accountable here?
Because when a teen does something bad with a gun – and this WAS certainly something BAD – then the adult responsible should be held equally accountable for the incident. Someone made some bad decisions here, and it was not ONLY this teenage boy.
This incident only serves to underline WHY we need better gun regulation in Minnesota — and makes it all too important that we follow the money behind the resistance to such obviously necessary regulation.
I’m speculating that Mary Kiffmeyer will continue to do the bidding of out of state special interests in the next session of the lege, and continue to obstruct and to oppose clearly necessary improvements in gun regulation. The money is too good. And if it means that her grandson does time in jail — well, heck, what’s wrong with that? There is plenty of big money in the prison system that the right likes to tap into as well, including pipelines that send kids into the prison system. So — why not her grandson being grist for the same mill? If it is good enough for the family members of other Minnesotans, why not hers?
What Mary Kiffmeyer does regarding guns in the next legislative session will tell us a lot about what really matters to her – family and the safety and well being of Minnesotans, including her own family; or all that filthy ALEC special interest gun money.
After all, it’s not like Mary Kiffmeyer hasn’t had some other issues with money during her career as a right wing politician. She served on the board of the “Christian” Riverview Community Bank, of which she was a part owner, that was closed by the MN Commerce Department for fiscal mismanagement. The FDIC was part of the closure of the Riverview Bank, noting “had engaged in unsafe and unsound banking practices and violations of law and/or regulation”, and cost the FDIC insurance fund some $20 million dollars. During her term in office as Sec State, an audit turned up expenditures to the tune of nearly $200,000 that was improper, and she had exaggerated some of her claims for mileage as well. Right wing money, far right wing ideology, and right wing special interests almost always seem to go hand in hand with what Kiffmeyer says and does, not the interests of the people she is supposed to be protecting and serving. It will be fascinating to see how that plays out with this incident.
Kiffmeyer’s other legal troubles involved voter suppression suits, notably Minnesota Native Americans, and separately with University of Minnesota students, both of which she lost. Not surprisingly, those are both ALEC legislative positions, as is the Voter ID legislation that Kiffmeyer nominally drafted in the legislature that lost in the 2012 election as a constitutional amendment — a wedge issue that the broke and deeply in debt MN GOP relied on for voter turnout in 2012 that backfired.
Kiffmeyer has such deep connections to ALEC that it will be VERY surprising if this incident prompts any change in her positions. She has 13 other grandchildren, so maybe she will consider this grandson to be expendable, if her ALEC puppet masters pull her strings.
What we can expect NOT to see is any personal accountability for this incident from the adults involved. Personal accountability and responsibility is something to which the right gives the emptiest lip service, along with ‘family values’, fiscal responsibility, and of course, gun safety, security and responsibility.
It will be fascinating to see what matters most to Mary Kiffmeyer, her family or right-wing money; the safety of Minnesotans, or the NRA and ALEC. I know which one I’m expecting, but I’m hoping I might be wrong; but it’s not likely.
