We finally have official confirmation that the Meeting of Members and the NRA Board of Directors Meeting will be held in Springfield, Missouri over Labor Day Weekend.
Fairfax, Va. – The National Rifle Association is pleased to announce that the 149th Annual Meeting of Members, previously schedule for Saturday, April 18, 2020 in Nashville, TN, has been rescheduled for Saturday, September 5, at the Springfield Expo Center located at 635 E. Saint Louis Street, Springfield, Missouri.
The Meeting with take place in Halls A/B/C of the Expo Center and commence at 9:00am Central Time. All members are invited to attend.
The news had leaked out a week ago thanks to a posting by the NRA Whittington Center.
Now that it is official, it is time to start planning your trip to beautiful southwest Missouri. Airfare is still relatively cheap, hotel rooms are quite reasonable, and Interstate 44 goes right through Springfield. The city is about a three hour drive from both Tulsa, Oklahoma and Kansas City and about 3 1/2 hours from Saint Louis.
Embarking upon a great crusade is how Ike described what the soldiers, sailors, and airmen were about to do on June 5-6, 1944.
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Ike released this statement at 9am British Double Summer Time which would make it 3am in New York and Washington, DC.
At noon, Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced to the House of Commons that the invasion of Normandy was well underway and that the Allied Forces had captured Rome on June 4th.
I have also to announce to the House that during the night and the early hours of this morning the first of the series of landings in force upon the European Continent has taken place. In this case the liberating assault fell upon the coast of France. An immense armada of upwards of 4,000 ships, together with several thousand smaller craft, crossed the Channel. Massed airborne landings have been successfully effected behind the enemy lines, and landings on the beaches are proceeding at various points at the present time. The fire of the shore batteries has been largely quelled. The obstacles that were constructed in the sea have not proved so difficult as was apprehended. The Anglo-American Allies are sustained by about 11,000 firstline aircraft, which can be drawn upon as may be needed for the purposes of the battle. I cannot, of course, commit myself to any particular details. Reports are coming in in rapid succession. So far the Commanders who are engaged report that everything is proceeding according to plan. And what a plan! This vast operation is undoubtedly the most complicated and difficult that has ever taken place. It involves tides, wind, waves, visibility, both from the air and the sea standpoint, and the combined employment of land, air and sea forces in the highest degree of intimacy and in contact with conditions which could not and cannot be fully foreseen.
By 6pm local time, all five invasion beaches – Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword – had beachheads established and troops were starting to move inland.
By 9pm local time, ground troops were starting to link up with paratroopers and glider troops from the US 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, the British 6th Airborne Division, the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion, and other smaller units. At the same time, the first reinforcements are starting to arrive from England.
The invasion of France was not without cost. The number of first day casualties is estimated at around 10,000. It has been a challenge to get a precise figure. Many units didn’t file their “morning reports” until days later. Fighting to get off the beach and move inland was of greater importance as one might imagine.
The number of killed in action had previously been put at about 2,500. However, research by the US National D-Day Historical Foundation has provided a much higher and more accurate total.
The number of people killed in the fighting is not known exactly. Accurate record keeping was very difficult under the circumstances. Books often give a figure of 2,500 Allied dead for D-Day. However, research by the US National D-Day Memorial Foundation has uncovered a more accurate figure of 4,414 Allied personnel killed on D-Day. These include 2,501 from the USA, 1,449 British dead, 391 Canadians and 73 from other Allied countries. Total German losses on D-Day (not just deaths, but also wounded and prisoners of war) are estimated as being between 4,000 and 9,000. Over 100,000 Allied and German troops were killed during the whole of the Battle of Normandy, as well as around 20,000 French civilians, many as a result of Allied bombing.
I look back on D-Day 76 years after the fact and am still amazed how such an operation could not only be organized but succeed. There was no computers, there was no Internet, and operations research was done using slide rules. My graduate degree is in project management and this was the project of all projects.
BAWN, who characterized themselves as a “bipartisan, grassroots movement”, was spawned after the murders at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Their leadership includes such luminaries as Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL), David “Camera” Hogg, and Fred Guttenberg. It is considered “bipartisan” because it has a couple of former Republican office holders on its committee. Partner organizations include Brady Campaign (now Brady United), the Newtown Alliance, and March for our Lives.
Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody (R-FL)sought an advisory opinion from the Supreme Court as to the validity of the constitutional initiative. Today the Florida Supreme Court issued their advisory opinion.
They concluded that the proposed initiative should not be placed on the ballot in a Per Curiam decision. It was a four to one decision with one justice not participating.
The court’s review was limited to two issues: did the proposed amendement satisfy the single-subject requirement and whether the ballot title and summary satisfy the requirements of the Florida statutes. They don’t address the merit or wisdom of the proposed initiative.
The court addressed the latter issue and found that the ballot summary mislead voters as to the exemption contained in the ballot summary in the next to last sentence. That sentence read, “Exempts and requires registration of assault weapons lawfully possessed prior to this provision’s effective date.”
Here, the ballot summary fails to satisfy the requirements of section 101.161(1) and is affirmatively misleading because the meaning of the text of the ballot summary does not accurately describe the meaning of the Initiative’s text regarding the exemption.
Specifically, the next to last sentence of the ballot summary informs voters that the Initiative “[e]xempts and requires registration of assault weapons lawfully possessed prior to this provision’s effective date” (emphasis added), when in fact the Initiative does no such thing. Contrary to the ballot summary, the Initiative’s text exempts only “the person’s,” meaning the current owner’s, possession of that assault weapon.
They go on to add:
While the ballot summary purports to exempt registered assault weapons lawfully possessed prior to the Initiative’s effective date, the Initiative does not categorically exempt the assault weapon, only the current owner’s possession of that assault weapon. The ballot summary is therefore affirmatively misleading.
Since they found the ballot summary “affirmatively misleading”, it didn’t comply with Section 101.161(1) of the Florida Statutes and thus cannot be on the ballot.
Attorney General Moody had attacked the initiative from the very beginning. She continued her attack by calling it “deceitful and misleading”. Moody said the ban, if approved, would have banned “virtually every self-loading long gun.”
She was right. It would have banned everything from Glenfield tube-fed .22 rifles to every AR and AK. Moreover, it would have made possession by unregistered people a third-degree felony.
Congratulations to Attorney General Moody and to the NRA and NSSF who filed as “interested parties” on the win.
One must wonder how long it will take before BAWN and their partners are back seeking signatures on an amended petition. I would hope that all the new gun owners who might have supported this in the past have now come to their senses and will reject any new such petition.
Requires individual to remain at home with the exception of medical emergencies and acquiring goods or services that are necessary to sustain the well-being of themselves or their families;
Does not apply to medical professionals, public safety workers, medical or healthcare workers, military personnel, public transportation personnel, public utilities personnel, and media;
Restricts travel within the city limits of Asheville;
Violators will be charged with a Class 2 misdemeanor.
This comes after two evenings of protests that went from peaceful to not-peaceful.
The first night of demonstrations in Asheville May 31 caused the shutdown of interstate traffic, but were less violent and destructive than many other protests happening around the nation that have included the shooting of officers and at least one death.
On Monday night, Asheville protesters did not march but the intensity ramped up with guns brandished and fired and more property damage near the city center….
But after hours of peaceful protest, the night ended in a series of tear gas canisters and eventually gunfire.
You can see things start to deteriorate in this videofrom local TV station WLOS. We were watching parts of it live last night and I thought reporter Caitlyn Penter was going to suffer whiplash the way her head was swiveling back and forth.
You can see some of the damage to downtown Asheville in the next video taken a couple of hours ago. As the reporter notes, much of the damage was sustained by home-grown businesses just starting to get back on their feet after the stay-at-home orders were eased.
All I can say is that I’m glad I live miles away from downtown Asheville and live outside the city limits. And as always, we keep our doors locked as a matter of course.
Here’s a radical thought: What if the backers and antifa and #BlackLivesMatter want Trump to win? The insane wing couldn’t get Bernie Sanders the nomination, and they can’t control the Democratic Party if Biden wins and leaves the Clinton hacks in charge of the gravy train for the next 4-8 years. As in the 1960s, looting and rioting boost the chances of law and order candidates, which is clearly Donald Trump this year. They need Trump to win again to completely take over the Party for the radical left.
That is a radical thought that just could be correct. I have yet to come across anyone – right, left, or center – who thought kneeling on George Floyd’s neck was anything other than unconscionable.
What if the radical elements seeking control of the Democrat Party from the Clintonistas are creating their own “Reichstag fire” moment to destroy the Clinton wing of the party. I’m sure that they would be willing to endure another four years of Donald Trump if it meant control of the party.
The NRA Meeting of Members is an organizational requirement and was to have been held in Nashville in April. Like so many meeting during the pandemic, it had to be postponed. It appears that it is now scheduled for Saturday, September 5th, in Springfield, Missouri.
There has been no official announcement but an announcement from the NRA Whittington Center regarding their Board of Trustees Fall Meeting spilled the beans.
This is Labor Day Weekend so one might hope that it would drive attendance. The NRA Board Fall Meeting will be on Labor Day itself.
So if you want to get your kicks on Route 66, Springfield is the place to be this coming Labor Day weekend. As a bonus, the hotels appear to be quite reasonable.
This is a short guest post from ScotShot. In it, he theorizes about the true origins of the shortage of a consumer product with which we are all familiar.
It was a dark and stormy night on K street sometime in early January. Adam Longneck had been pestering Lady P about some virus that was going to turn Orange Man Bad into Orange Man Gone, but no-one was paying attention to him since he blew out the impeachment. Nonetheless, Lady P was desperate. So she had grudgingly agreed to let some failing interns do what they could to come up with ideas that would turn a pending infection from China into a national panic.
It was after bed-time and the chilled Ketel One had run out ages ago. The button downs were unfastened and there wasn’t a Windsor knot to be seen. Karen was poking the eyes of the bunny on her sweater with a ballpoint and Tyler was using lip-balm for the tenth time that hour he rubbed his chin and was temporarily distracted by the lack of growth since that morning. Not that it was worrying him.
… “OK, OK, these are great ideas, but Lady P needs something to get it going. We need, we need a trigger..” “What do we HAVE, people?”
There was silence, then a Karen-in-the-Korner raised her hand. Tyler sighs. “OK, what?” KK says, “Toilet paper.. “ A hush settles in the room and then high fives all round.. The Android gets tapped.. “mm-hmm.. yup.. it’s us.. you can tell her we got it … tell her to call the people at http://protestjobs.com/“
The following editorial was written by my friend “ScotShot”. He is a resident of New Jersey and a firearms trainer. ScotShot is a NRA Training Counselor, a USCCA instructor, and a CCW instructor. He is also the co-founder with Klint Macro of National Train-A-Teacher Day. He has a greater appreciation for the US Constitution and especially the Second Amendment than many. That is because he grew up in a country which has no written constitutionand no such protections.
More to the point of this editorial, “ScotShot” has a PhD in immunology from the University of Strathclyde and served for a few years as the Director of Research at a university center on biodefense.
It seems like an interminable time since the first recognized case of COVID-19 hit places in Europe (Northern Italy) and the USA. At the time of writing it’s been five months. There are many timelines out there that you can find, and the question of whether it actually came earlier is real. However, there’s a great interactive published by the New York Times that is well worth a look:
In these five months, the United States and other Western countries have been transformed by this event. Your present correspondent, who writes from the aggressively confinement-orientated New Jersey, has been struck by how much and for how long we have allowed this to modify our behavior and change our lives.
I’m not going to discuss the various successes and errors nor whether the Orange Man did well or poorly. I also am not going to discuss whether it was correct or wrong for Western governments to fall over themselves to follow theapocalyptic modeling of a certain Dr F from Imperial College, London after it became clear that it was only older people who were generally at significant risk. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. We always, as they say, fight with the tools of the previous war, and this was fought with the tools built during the emergence of HIV. No foul, Drs F’n’B.
Let’s talk, Gentle Reader, about two Great Experiments.
EXPERIMENT ONE – “OK, we didn’t plan a biowarfare attack, but…”
Take another look at the NYT interactive linked above and remember that while this was taking place, China had essentially shut down, or was in the process of shutting down, internal travel. The Chinese Authorities very likely knew about how contagious this new virus was and the morbidity/mortality it carried. While we can’t know exactly what they were thinking, it’s interesting to speculate that some bright spark may have come up with the idea of letting a bunch of very likely infected people leave the epicenter of the outbreak to a whole bunch of countries just to see what would happen. That is, just to see how Europe, Australia, the USA would react at the levels of their governments and their citizens. I’d say that they are happy beyond their wildest dreams right now.
The whole Western economy disrupted, (multi?)-generational debt accrued, lockdown frustration amplifying civil unrest here in the USA (and whether the murder of Mr F was a deliberate trigger-act is for others to discuss). Oh, they learned a lot about us. Importantly, they learned that certain parts of our manufacturing capabilities were so dependent upon them that countries would order protective materials only to find that they were, for example, defective upon shipping or would buy back their own previously charitably-given supplies . They also learned that the political process here is so fractured that parties would use the pandemic to further their venal political ends. This brings us to…
EXPERIMENT TWO – “Wow, I never thought they’d do this…”
It is perhaps surprising (but only in retrospect) that only one or two countries, e.g., Sweden, didn’t follow the others in the mass-lemmingization of the West into the economic and social chaos of the pandemic lockdown. The UK, well England to be more precise, did make an attempt, but it was half-hearted at best and they basically caved at the first sign of trouble. Scotland, with its more socialist political environment, went for it whole-heartedly and are this week rejoicing that the affectionately-known “wee Nichola” has allowed them to once again go out and socialize but “at a distance.. over your garden fence, and not going into your neighbors’ homes..”. This is remarkably like it is in more blue-hued States here in the United States: NJ, NY, WA, OR, CA…. As we now begin to emerge armed with actual data about the effects of the pandemic and the entrepreneurial economy re-emerges in the red states, we see the true political agendas laid bare on the beach like little blue puddles as the tide of pandemic caution recedes.
Don’t wear a mask… everyone wear a mask… you don’t need a test… everyone needs to be tested… two weeks to flatten the curve… could be six months till we get a vaccine… back to normal…. emerge into the New Normal…
The “New Normal?” What is this New Normal that Democrat Governors are talking about? I’d say that they too have had a very successful experiment going in enhanced social control over their citizens. Well, I guess when you force small business owners to close down while letting corporate giants (naming no names) stay open, you are garroting your opposing political base. Who really cares whether people wear masks properly so long as they cover their faces somehow and you get the bonus of a bunch of Karens hounding those who do not, live-streamed on Facebook. You issued an Executive Order and people rushed to squeeze through the Overton Window just so that they could get out of the house.
What can we conclude…
So, what can we conclude, Gentle Reader, about the outcome of these two experiments? To date, they have been very successful and those who conducted them have learned a lot about their experimental subjects. Personally, I think it’s more important to think about what we, those very subjects, have learned about the experimenters and our fellow subjects.
As the lockdown is eased in red states and not blue, we see a picture emerging that is disturbingly similar to the cover of Kurt Schlichter’s book, “People’s Republic”. Blue State Governors working with the DNC to maintain control and build a New Normal up through the Election, and they do not care that they are now in plain sight. It’s probably wishful thinking to hope that there will be a move away from China as the source of inexpensive essentials and towards more domestic manufacturing, too. Too many of us are like the bunnies in Watership Down… “Look! Free Carrots!” and never mind where Fred went.
So I leave you with a question. Will those of us who believe in self-reliance and paying our own way simply become a thing of the past, turned to dust and blown away on the breeze, or we once again turn and say that we are ‘we’, “WE, the People”?
Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown rolled out their first round of endorsements today. In an “exclusive” to The Hill, they listed 58 incumbents and challengers in districts across the country. Some are names you’ve heard of before and some are newcomers with a boatload of money behind them. It is expected that Everytown will spend at least $60 million of Bloomberg’s money to get them elected to promote gun control.
Not surprisingly, there is only one Republican (in name only) on the list along with 57 Democrats.
The group’s senior political adviser, Charlie Kelly, said Everytown’s priority is to defend a number of incumbents facing contested races in an effort to defend the pro-gun control majority in the House.
“Time and again, this gun sense majority in the House has made it absolutely clear, and made gun safety a priority,” Kelly said. “It’s important that we keep the leadership of the chamber and that gun sense majority.”
They say they plan to plan to spend big bucks in Texas as well as at least $5 million in Arizona to help elect Mr. Gabby Giffords (Mark Kelly).
The full list is below:
The full list of Everytown’s House endorsements is Rep. Tom O’Halleran (D-Ariz.); Hiral Tipirneni, who is running in Arizona’s 6th District; Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Calif.); Rep. Josh Harder (D-Calif.); Rep. TJ Cox (D-Calif.); Rep. Gil Cisneros (D-Calif.); Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.); Rep. Harley Rouda (D-Calif.); Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.); (Jason) Crow (D-CO); Rep. Jahana Hayes (D-Conn.); (Debbie) Mucarsel-Powell (D-FL); (Lucy) McBath (D-GA); Rep. Abby Finkenauer (D-Iowa); Rep. Cindy Axne (D-Iowa); Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.); Betsy Dirksen Londrigan, who is running in Illinois’s 13th District; Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-Ill.); Christina Hale, who is running in Indiana’s 5th District; (Sharice) Davids (D-KS); Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.); House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.); Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.); Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.); Dan Feehan, who is running in Minnesota’s 1st District; Rep. Angie Craig (D-Minn.); Jill Schupp, who is running in Missouri’s 2nd District; Kara Eastman, who is running in Nebraska’s 2nd District; Rep. Chris Pappas (D-N.H.); Rep. Andy Kim (D-N.J.); Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.); Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.); Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.); Rep. Susie Lee (D-Nev.); Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.); Jackie Gordon, who is running in New York’s 2nd District; Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.); Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.); Rep. Max Rose (D-N.Y.); Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.); Rep. Antonio Delgado (D-N.Y.); Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.); Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pa.); Rep. Matt Cartwright (D-Pa.); Eugene DePasquale, who is running in Pennsylvania’s 10th District; Rep. Conor Lamb (D-Pa.); Rep. Joe Cunningham (D-S.C.); House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.); Rep. Lizzie Fletcher (D-Texas); (Wendy) Davis (D-TX); Sri Kulkarni, who is running in Texas’s 22nd District; (Gina) Ortiz- Jones (D-TX); Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas); Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.); Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.); Rep. Kim Schrier (D-Wash.); and Carolyn Long, who is running in Washington’s 3rd District.
We should be thanking Everytown for providing this list of anti-freedom, anti-gun, and anti-self defense candidates. If you ever needed to know just whom should never get your vote, this is it.
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