It looks I will be doing some traveling in January in an effort to bring you interesting news and posts.
The Complementary Spouse and I both got our credentials for the SHOT Show today as well as for Industry Day at the Range. It did come with a lot of legal language and waivers of responsibility as you might well imagine. I had booked our hotel reservations back in June. I still need to book our flights.
Yesterday, I also applied to the Safari Club International on behalf of both of us for media credentials for the SCI Convention which will start a day later than the SHOT Show and go on to Saturday. Keep your fingers crossed that we get approved.
Finally, I booked my room and flight today for the Dallas Safari Club Convention which is being held January 6th through 9th. As soon as they open registration for media I will be applying. I did speak with the person who has coordinated it in the past yesterday and gave her my information.
I have a couple of goals in attending both the SCI and the DSC conventions. First, they are different and I want to be able to provide a comparison between the two. Second, as I am intending to take my first hunting safari to Africa in 2023, I want to be able to give the perspective of the first time attendee as he or she goes about planning that trip of a lifetime. As my friends David Cole and Michael Bane have said, once you’ve been to Africa it gets in your blood and you have to go back.
I don’t think Big Pharma nor Dr. Fauci have come up with a vaccination for that. Thank god!
The Safari Club was supposed to have their 50th annual convention in Las Vegas in January of this year. However, with Nevada shutting down and virtually every major convention canceled, it got postponed to 2022. As I noted back in February, both the SHOT Show and the SCI Convention will be held the same week in Las Vegas. So on one end of Las Vegas Boulevard you will have the SHOT Show in the Sands Expo Center and on the other end you will have the Safari Club Convention at the Mandalay Bay.
I have attended a number of SHOT Shows now as media but I have never attended a hunting convention like the Safari Club Convention. As my goal is to go to Africa on a hunting safari in 2023, I think it is way past time to do it. I applied today for media credentials for the Safari Club convention and, fingers crossed, it will be approved.
One of the things that makes hunting conventions like that of SCI different is that they hold banquets with entertainment and auctions every night of the convention. These are meant to raise money to support wildlife conservation here and abroad. As such, they are not exactly cheap to attend nor are they meant to be. The cost to attend all four banquets is $450. That said, they do have some big hitters from the entertainment, political, and hunting world.
From a release I received at the end of September on the banquets.
Blue Collar Comedy legend Larry the Cable Guy will kick things off at SCI’s grand opening dinner and auction on Wednesday night. The multi-platinum-selling and award-winning artist is one of the top comedians in the country. He’s starred in films like Delta Farce, the Cars franchise, and numerous stand-up specials. Laugh out loud with Larry the Cable Guy at the Mandalay Bay Ballroom on Wednesday, Jan. 19, 2022, from 6:15 pm – 9:30 pm.
Thursday evening is the Night of the Hunter Awards and will be hosted by professional hunter and TV host Jim Shockey and writer and outdoorsman J. Alain Smith. At the Night of the Hunter Awards, SCI honors the individuals and organizations dedicated to conservation. SCI will recognize its achievements during a banquet and auction at the Mandalay Bay Ballroom on Thursday, Jan. 20, 2022, from 6:15 pm – 9:00 pm.
Friday night’s dinner and auction will be packed full of some of the greatest defenders of American freedom. These include retired Navy SEAL and Medal of Honor recipient Master Chief Petty Officer Edward Byers and political leader, businessman and avid outdoorsman Donald Trump, Jr. The event will be held at the Mandalay Bay Ballroom on Friday, Jan. 21, 2022, from 6:15 pm – 10:00 pm.
Country music star Craig Morgan, with such hits as “Redneck Yacht Club” and “That’s What I Love About Sunday,” will start off Saturday evening’s entertainment. The grand finale event features television host and conservative political commentator Tucker Carlson, of Tucker Carlson Tonight and Crossfire. Tucker will close out the convention celebrating SCI’s 50 years of freedom at the Mandalay Bay Ballroom on Saturday, Jan. 22, 2022, from 6:15 pm – 9:30 pm.
However, what really interests me will be the exhibits and the chance to actually meet PHs from various African countries to discuss a possible trip. I understand there will be a number of seminars as well.
Being that we are gluttons for punishment, the Complementary Spouse and I are going to try and cover both the SHOT Show and the Safari Club International Convention. We have our room booked and need to book our flights. To top this off, I am probably going to go to Dallas little more than a week earlier to attend the Dallas Safari Club Convention. I understand that they are much different and I want to experience the difference.
You can accuse me of being a Fudd but really I am rediscovering some of my earlier interest in hunting from my late teens and early 20s. I really consider myself Gun Culture v1.5. Besides, I really did go a paper in college for Non-Western Civilization on Robert Ruark’s Something of Value.
We have all been there waiting and waiting for a file to download or upload. Some of us including me still (somewhat) remember the days before high speed internet where we had dial-up modems running at 1200 and 2400 baud. When I transitioned from a 56k baud modem to DSL at 3 Mbps I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Now if my cable modem isn’t running at close to 100 Mbps I begin to wonder what is wrong.
So at the junction of firearms and computers, we have this:
I am sure new NRA President Charles Cotton would be pissed off to see himself represented by a trio of monkeys. However, given his performance as Chair of the NRA Board of Directors Audit Committee, it is wholly warranted.
This has become even clearer thanks to a report in the blog NRA In Danger. Several good, honest, and forthright NRA staffers sent a memo to the Audit Committee outlining “top concerns”. I’ll let NRA In Danger tell the story of how Mr. Cotton decided to neither hear nor see the problems.
A major event in the beginning of the controversy over internal corruption came when NRA Treasurer “Woody” Phillips left suddenly in 2017, and the inexplicable decision was made to hire an honest Treasurer, Craig Spray. Several employees who were deeply concerned about what was going on wrote a “Top Concerns” memo for the Audit Committee, which was presented at an emergency meeting in July, 2018. Note this is nearly a year before the scandals burst into the open (April-May 2019). The Committee’s response? Its chair, Charles Cotton, left the room before the memo was presented. Its Vice Chair, who then served as chair, never gave Cotton the memo (obviously he knew Cotton didn’t want to hear of it).(emphasis mine) The committee (which is entrusted by the board with keeping everything honest) made no mention of the event to the board. Officially, nothing happened that day in July.
Read the “top concerns” memo yourself. It was an exhibit filed by the New York Attorney General in the NRA’s abortive attempt at bankruptcy. Given Mr. Cotton’s behavior that day and many others since, I am somewhat surprised that the complaint asking for dissolution has not been amended to make him a co-defendant.
Sen. Grassley has now sent letters demanding answers to Attorney General Merrick Garland and BATFE Acting Director Marvin Richardson. He has also sent a letter asking the Office of Personnel Management about their suspension of BATFE’s ability to classify certain law enforcement positions. All the letters were quite detailed and indicated his office had significant knowledge of the affair.
It should be remembered that Sen. Grassley was one of the very first politicians that demanded an investigation into Operation Fast and Furious aka Project Gunwalker. He worked closely with then-Chair of the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee Darrell Issa to get answers.
One of the cardinal rules of business is that it costs much less to keep a customer than it is to go out and get a new customer. Indeed, some studies show it costs five times as much to get a new customer than to keep an existing one. Moreover, just retaining 5% more customers can push profitability by anywhere from 25% to 95%. If your new car came with satellite radio, this explains why Sirius XM offers such incredible deals to keep you enrolled.
Now let’s apply this to the NRA. Reportedly officers of the NRA keep telling the board that they are gaining 100,000 new members monthly. This is a correct statement. However, what is not talked about much is membership retention.
Examine the chart below that was handed out in a recent NRA committee meeting. You had a million member spike in the year after the Newtown murders. However, in the next year total membership dropped by 500,000. You see and up-down pattern through 2018 when membership hit a peak of about 5.2 million members. Since 2019, the pattern has changed from the earlier up-down pattern to a continual decline. Membership currently stands at about 4.6 million as of the end of August. An earlier reported figure of 4.2 million was in error.
As Bitter has reported in a couple of posts, voting participation is down and increased secrecy about the organization’s affairs is harming it. Why would you want to be part of a group that forbids you from expressing your pride in being a part of it?
The answer is you wouldn’t. Add in that there are clubs ditching the 100% NRA membership requirement along with the willful ignorance of many Board members and you have a disaster in the making.
As proof that not everything I post has to do with the NRA, I present this discussion between Ken Hackathorn and Bill Wilson on Bill’s favorite hunting rifle. It is a Ruger Model 77 in 9.3×62 which he has taken to Africa a number of times.
Why I was really interested in it is because I am seriously thinking of having a Remington Sportsman 78 .30-06 aka a poor man’s Remington 700 ADL rebored to 9.3×62. I could replace the barrel but I think it would be just as cost effective to have it rebored. It is a wonderful caliber to use on tough African plains game and is potentially allowed to be used on dangerous game. The latter depends on the country. Some have the .375 H&H or Ruger as the minimum while others that were under German colonial control often allow its use.
The CBS Evening News ran an investigative report on Tuesday, October 5th, that featured a whistleblower accusing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives of waste and fraud. The whistleblower alleges that BATFE paid a large number of administrative people an extra 25% for supposedly being available on call for law enforcement operations. The problem is that this certification was false. When the whistleblower brought it to the attention of higher ups and management, he got lower performance evaluations that led to his termination. Given how hard it is to fire any one in Federal employment, it seems BATFE went out of their way to terminate this whistleblower.
I am somewhat surprised that CBS News ran any report that was critical of BATFE. However, the reporter, Catherine Herridge, did come over to CBS from Fox.
In normal years, a candidate for the NRA Board of Directors who wanted to be nominated by petition would have months to gather the needed signatures. This is not a normal year.
The window to gather signatures opened with the Annual Meeting on October 2nd and closes on November 16th. Thus, instead of almost six months, a candidate will have approximately six weeks to gather 477 signatures of NRA voting members. As a reminder, those eligible to both vote and sign such a petition are Life, Patron, Endowment, and Benefactor members and Annual members with 5 continuous years of membership. If you have had a break in your annual membership, the clock restarts.
Runners-up on the ballot including petition candidates are eligible to move up into board openings when sitting directors resign or die. As NRA Secretary and General Counsel affirmed to Frank Tait at the 2021 Meeting of Members, write-in candidates do not qualify.
Frank Tait is the only person I know who is attempting to run by petition this year. If you know of anyone else, please put their information in the comments.
I plan on signing Frank’s petition. I only wish there was an event in the next week or so where I could gather a full page or more of valid signatures.
If you would like a copy of his petition, it is available for download here.
Return the signed petition to Frank Tait at 425 W. Wayne Ave. Wayne PA 19087. He needs them in hand by November 11th. Mine will go out in the mail tomorrow.
Please do not sign a petition if you are not a voting member. You can find your membership number on the label of whatever NRA magazine you receive.
We need more people who represent the actual members of the Board and fewer who represent either their own interests or those of Wayne.
Take a look at the picture below. It was originally posted on the blog NRA In Danger.
I have labeled it to point out Frank and the security monitor that the powers that be assigned to follow Frank everywhere in the Meeting of Members and the Board Meeting.
How damn paranoid do you have to be to put a security guard on one dissident member when you’ve already stacked the meeting with the Board, their spouses, and staffers whose jobs depend on kowtowing to Wayne?
The worst part is that you and I paid for this travesty with our dues. Even the KGB and Guoanbu are more subtle than this bumbling Gang of Four.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives is celebrating National Disability Employment Awareness Month. They decided to put a post up on Facebook about it.
ATF is committed to building and sustaining a diverse and inclusive workforce. ATF welcomes and encourages applications from persons with disabilities and will reasonably accommodate the needs of those persons.
Given the snafus, incompetence, and general f’ed up nature of ATF, many immediately thought they were talking mental disabilities.
However, a much better comment brought up one of their recent rulemakings.
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