Dianne Feinstein

Helytimes isn’t usually the place for politics.  But we’re easing back in here after a long hiatus, and something this morning got my engines a li’l fired.

A perfectly nice person who’s my friend on Facebook posted this:

Now I’m a sane person who values his time.  Not gonna comment on some guy’s Facebook post certainly.

But this one did get me steamed.

I don’t know what specific quote this is referring to, if any, where Dianne Feinstein maybe claimed she’s a gun expert because she looked at lots of pictures of guns.  No source is cited except a link to the “Cold Dead Hands Guitars, Guns And Posters Giveaway Contest.”

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen Dianne Feinstein specifically mentioned as a villain to anti-gun control folks.

What got me steamed is that Dianne Feinstein is a terrible, terrible target to pick – pardon the metaphor – in an anti-gun control crusade.

I know hardly anything about Dianne Feinstein.

Except, one of the few things I know about her is that SHE SURVIVED A WORKPLACE GUN MASSACRE.

On November 27, 1978, disgruntled* ex-City Board of Supervisors member Dan White went to San Francisco City Hall and shot the Mayor, George Moscone twice in the chest and then twice in the head.  Then he went over and shot Supervisor Harvey Milk.

From a San Francisco Gate article on the anniversary of the shootings:

[Feinstein’s] office was on the other side of City Hall. She heard a door slam in Milk’s office, heard shots, saw the killer run out, went in herself and found Harvey Milk’s body. “I put my finger to see if there was any pulse, and it went in a bullet hole in his chest,” she said the other day. “I think of it as if it were yesterday. I remember Harvey’s body, his blood on me. I see it all.”**

With the Mayor now dead, Dianne Feinstein, president of the Board of Supervisors, became the acting mayor.

Here she is that day, around 2:30:

That’s how she became mayor.  You might say it was the major event in her political life.  In fact, if you truly hated Dianne Feinstein, then maybe you should become a gun control advocate, maybe if there’d been more gun control she would’ve just stayed as a San Francisco local politician.

Oh, also, separate incidents: some people once shot out the windows of Dianne Feinstein’s beach house (she’s super rich) and one time somebody put a bomb outside Dianne Feinstein’s window.  San Francisco was pretty weird in the 1970s.   With all that weirdness in the air, you know what Dianne Feinstein did?  Dianne Feinstein used to carry a pistol in her purse for safety.***

What makes you an expert on guns?  Shooting a lot of guns?  Knowing a lot about the mechanics, makes, models and varieties of guns?  Yes, that’s a kind of expertise.

But I dunno, in my opinion if you survive a gun massacre you get a little bit of cred on the issue of gun massacres.

My point is I wish there were some easily digestible and sharable video in which Dianne Feinstein herself made this point in such a clear, pointed manner, shutting down some chump for reals, slamming somebody who is obviously ignorant of her history with guns and gun massacres.  But I can’t find it.

Maybe my point is I wish The West Wing was still on, so Toby or Josh or best yet Leo could sum this up in a much punchier, pithier way than I ever could.

Anyway.

Helytimes will return to regular broadcasting as soon as possible!  Here’s a picture of a church in the Atacama desert of Chile, no filtah.

* “You always hear about ‘disgruntled.’  Is anyone ever ‘gruntled’?” – Seinfeld maybe?  Or did I make this one up?

** the account of this event on this wikipedia page seems to be slightly inconsistent with the cited source, Randy Shilts’ book The Mayor Of Castro Street.

*** Mayor of Castro Street p. 207