Just remember that incumbent mayor Jacob Frey represents the thinking voters’ choice in the upcoming Minneapolis mayoral race. I am being sincere about that, too; the main alternative is Omar Fateh, a Marxist Mamdani clone, and the rest of the ballot belongs to the usual assortment of cranks and radicals that agglomerate in Minneapolis elections.
That is, of course, damning with faint praise in Frey’s case. As the riots of 2020 proved, Frey is a midwit who is in way over his head on practically any topic — and is usually intent on proving it, too. As we noted in more than one post in the past 24 hours, Frey used the mass shooting yesterday at a Catholic church to tell the grieving faith community how useless prayer is. Fresh off that stupidity, Frey appeared this morning to prog-splain firearms, with a far more hilarious outcome than Frey’s prog-splaining of prayer (via Twitchy):
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey wants to take your guns but evidently doesn’t understand the difference between a clip, a magazine, and ammunition:
“We have these assault rifles that can reel off 30 clips in conjunction with a magazine before the person needs to reload.” pic.twitter.com/PjqwzEj1I9
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 28, 2025
Good Lord. Where does one begin? First off, we do have an ongoing pedantic debate in firearm owner circles about the use of term “clip,” but … this ain’t it, pal. Strictly speaking, “clip” refers to a specific kind of military ammunition loading device, while “magazine” is the proper term for the most common civilian mechanisms.
In no world, however, are either of these terms synonymous with bullets or rounds. This isn’t nearly as esoteric as the clip/magazine debate, either. Literally no one would get confused on this point other than someone without any education at all on the topic. For Pete’s sake, one could do better than Frey on making a point about firearms if the only education they got on firearms was from binge-watching Law & Order. One has to work hard to be this obtuse about basic firearm function and terminology, or just be congenitally moronic.
Nor is this the only stupid claim Frey makes, although at least the other is somewhat more coherent. Frey claims that so-called “assault rifles” come into the Twin Cities in “trunks.” I suppose some do, particularly those bought illegally, but plenty of them get purchased in gun stores too. That’s because these are legal to purchase and sell, assuming one follows the proper process to do so and has not lost eligibility through felonious conduct or mental illness. The problem here isn’t the firearm, but that dangerous people with untreated mental illness are left unaddressed until they create damage to the lives of others.
In fact, as Peter Savodnik writes in today’s Free Press, even the illness is misidentified, or more accurately buried in the symptoms. There are patterns to be seen in mass shootings, he argues, but the strongest pattern is nihilism — into which our culture marinates its youth:
All that finger-pointing obscures a deeper point: Westman seems to have been driven by an all-consuming, destructive force, a nihilism—the conviction that life is meaningless; that words like truth, justice and God are empty slogans; that everything must be razed.
Nihilism is not some obscure academic notion. It stretches back to the 19th century—early Russian radicals were called nihilists—and it has waxed and waned across the past 150 years. Today, you can feel the nihilist impulse coursing through America, which has been mostly stripped of its faith and a shared national culture and has seen once-great institutions—universities, corporations, churches, nonprofit organizations, the media, the military—become engulfed in scandal and politicization.
It is an understatement to say America is struggling to infuse young Americans with a sense of purpose.
Earlier this year, the FBI introduced a new category of criminal: the Nihilistic Violent Extremist, or NVE.
If jihadis kill for Allah, and anti-government extremists like Timothy McVeigh killed in the name of some demented notion of freedom, then NVEs kill simply because they want to kill.
Even the emerging pattern of transgender mass shooters fits into this paradigm. The Queer Movement is entirely about nihilism — tearing down reality and “normal” to replace it with unreality and emotion-driven hallucination. Transgenders refuse to accept biology and demand to have their fantasy life validated by others. Socialists and Marxists claim that the brutal regimes that rose and fell on that ideology were utopias rather than impoverished hellholes. Anarchists want a world without any authority, when the historic results of such environments are that the most brutal subjugate those around them, and so on. (Heck, just take a look at the CHAZ experiment in Seattle, the George Floyd Square in Minneapolis, and the cities that tried to “defund the police” for evidence supporting that conclusion.)
We have always had firearms. What’s new is the nihilism, the despair, and the way we treat the maladjusted by catering to their fantasies rather than requiring them to adjust to reality. Not all of these will be violent, but as we have seen, they are more likely to become violent when they fail to escape the misery of their failed fantasies.
Frey isn’t smart enough to recognize this. But then again, he’s not smart enough to tell a bullet from a magazine, or to realize that a Catholic faith community values prayer, either. Unfortunately, in this election cycle, Frey is the best that Minneapolis has to offer — which explains much about that city and its future.
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