According to THIS FR article, Minnesota went Shall Issue about 10 years ago. While my Letters are brilliant and incisive (cough), I don't archive them and the reporter's name is long gone, but yeah, it would be nice to ask her.
An interesting insight to the prevailing mindset there is a quote from the above article:
Some 217 Washington County residents are getting an extra message with their new permit to carry a handgun in public.
Beneath the stamped name of Sheriff James J. Frank are the words "sub recuso," Latin for "under protest."
He's not sheriff now. Hope it's because of his attitude.
Amazing the difference in attitudes between sheriffs and police chiefs. Both are politicians, but sheriffs generally have far more territory to patrol with far fewer resources.
The engineer geek in me believes there’s a pretty clear inflection point at which the decline in an agency’s ability to patrol a region and their change in this policy sort of happen.
You are seeing this in Michigan, big time, but its happening in other places. Crime rate is an election issue, and as sheriffs come up for election, they do what they have to in order to keep the rate down.
My daughter asked why you never hear about crime in rural communities, and was it a lack of press. I told her it was because every building you can see has AT LEAST one gun in it, and probably more than that.
Made more sense to her. She’s a shooter. Asked my liberal wife if she could buy a ruger 9mm. My wife flipped out on me about it. Completely indoctrinated by her parents (dad’s a former ed union president). Lately, burglars are treating our neighborhood like an ATM machine.
She hasn’t told me to unload the shotgun yet. I wish I had a pistol though.