Murder is rarely the first crime

Our favorite gun grabber japete has spent her later years pushing gun control because her sister was murdered in 1992 by Russell Lund Jr., “The only son of the founder of Lund’s Inc., the Minneapolis food, oil, and real estate empire.” Wanting to know more about this crime, I ran across a book, Greed, Rage, and Love Gone Wrong, Murder in Minnesota, by Bruce Rubenstein. There is even a Google Books review online with most of the pages of the relevant chapter.

I will take japete at her word that she simply wants to spare other people the horror of their family members getting murdered. She’s also maintained that her brother-in-law, the murderer, had “undiagnosed mental illness,” but was “he was not a criminal or had trouble with the police.” This part, however, is not true at all. He was twice arrested for shoplifting, and had been diagnosed as a kleptomaniac. He was also 3rd banana in an "airline" that turned out to be a total fraud.

"It was a paper facade that fabricated phantom revenues to lure real investors.

For a while it was a spectacular success. Shrewd bankers gave the company loans that were never paid, to buy airplanes that were never purchased. Reputable law firms papered transactions that never happened and got stiffed for their fees. Three stock offerings backed by phony revenues yielded more than $30 million.

...

Russell Lund Jr. was one of the few that emerged unscathed. Prosecutors and law enforcement officers agreed that Russ was a pawn and a dupe and such a dunce when it came to business that he couldn't possible have been culpable.

Nevertheless, for years after the trial Russ figured strongly in rumors that Flight Transportation Corp. flew cash to offshore banks for rich Twin Citians so they could evade taxes.

...

Russ left a packet of information about the Flight Transportation affair with a KSTP-TV reporter shortly before he murdered his wife and her lover. The killings short-circuited any plans the station might have had to follow up. The contents of the packet have never been made public."

Greed, Rage, and Love Gone Wrong, Murder in Minnesota, Bruce Rubenstein, 2004

The whole thrust of the chapter devoted to this murderer is that the author believes that Russell Lund Jr’s wealth and personal friendship with the Minnetonka Chief of Police insulated him from the consequences of his actions. It’s hard to say from this distance, using only Rubenstein’s book, if he is correct. The #1 and #2 people in the Flight Transportation fraud received 35 and 25 year sentences for their roles, and the company attorney and 5 employees were either convicted or plead guilty to charges relating to the Flight Transportation scam. Was Russell Lund Jr. involved? We may never know. It’s hard to see how he could be unaware that millions of dollars were being scammed right under his nose, but it is possible. One thing’s for sure. If he was let walk by a friend or someone who was influenced by his wealth, that person must be feeling pretty guilty. Had Lund been jailed, it’s unlikely that he’d have been available to murder his estranged wife.

The most important thing to know about this is, the person who murdered japete’s sister was not the slightly odd, but perfectly law abiding citizen that japete insists he was. This matches what I have maintained all along. Normal people do not suddenly snap and murder people. Even in domestic murder cases, where you’d expect the correlation between prior criminality and murder to be weakest,

A tabulation of homicide cases in Kansas city [sic] found that “... police had responded to disturbance calls at the address of homicide victims or suspects at least once in the two years before the homicide in 90 percent of the cases, and five or more times in the 2 years before the homicide in 50 percent of the cases.”

It is important to remember this. The gun grabbers want to paint gun owners as one short step from snapping and going on a murderous rampage. If they can convince non-gun owners that the nice guy next door who has a gun might someday kill them, they can get more votes for gun control. What happens when non-gun owners realize that it isn’t their law abiding neighbor with a gun that is the threat, but the known criminal who is the threat? The gun grabbers wish to keep us isolated from our neighbors by fear. They want to engender fear in the minds of our neighbors in order to turn that fear into power, power to take your gun.

I have no idea if japete knows better and is lying, or if she’s convinced that this lie is true. In the end it doesn’t matter much. The important thing is to keep telling the truth. Murder is mostly the province of the criminal class. Past behavior best predicts future results. A tiger does not change its spots. Possession of a gun, nor possession of a license to carry that gun concealed, indicates a possible future murderer. In fact, judging by the extremely low revocation rate of carry licenses, probably the best thing a woman could do to check up on a prospective boyfriend is to ask to see his Concealed Carry license. Let’s face it. Hiring a PI to do a background check is expensive. The Concealed Carry license tells you that the State has already done that check.