Month: May 2023

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What They Think Of Us

May 24, 2023 by 2 Comments

Progress NC Action is one group that dumped on Rep. Tricia Cotham (R-Mecklenburg) for being in the hospital on the day the override vote on SB 41 was taken. It was so nasty and so virulent when combined with the grief she endured from other “progressives” that she switched parties and became a Republican. That gave the GOP the supermajority in the NC House of Representatives.

If you really want to know what they think of the gun culture and those who support an enumerated right, just look at this Tweet.

Richard Nascak, executive director of Florida Carry, had the perfect comeback.

As Massad Ayoob said years ago, gun free zones are nothing but hunting preserves for psychopathic murderers.

H/T Sean S.

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Blogoversaries

May 23, 2023 by 2 Comments

First, I want to wish a happy 11th blogoversary to Prof. David Yamane who started his great Gun Culture 2.0 blog 11 years ago today. It is one of those must read blogs in the gun culture.

The second blogoversary I wish to acknowledge is my own. I had forgotten about it until I saw David’s post. I started this blog on Blogger on May 20, 2010 making this blog 13 years old. I have since moved to WordPress thanks to a scare I got in 2019 when I suddenly got canceled by Google for a supposed violation of their terms of service. Fortunately, that was resolved in my favor, I was able to rescue my old posts, and I moved on.

Looking back at that first post, I can now say things that I couldn’t at the time. I spent a bit over 25 years working as a financial advisor for a firm that specialized in group retirement for the non-profit and governmental sectors. I did hold the Certified Financial Planner™ designation for 20 years until I voluntarily relinquished it at the end of April given I had retired. When I was told that I had to declare the blog as an “outside business activity” after many years of just muddling along, I had to go back and change some earlier posts due to demands from our compliance department. Go figure.

I sadly recognize that the golden age of blogging is probably over. Many of the great gun bloggers of that era such as Sebastian and Say Uncle have moved on with their lives. I owe a great debt to both of them as their links to me drove a ton of traffic my way. Others such as Weerd, Alan, Breda, and JayG have moved on to podcasting. JayG, like Tom McHale at American Handgunner, moved on to be an editor of an actual magazine. In Jay’s case, it was as Executive Editor of Shooting Illustrated. Fortunately, some of the great bloggers of the era such as Tam, Miggy, Old NFO, David Codrea, and Kevin Baker are still at it. Indeed, Kevin hit his 20th blogoversary less than 10 days ago!

While Instagram and YouTube “influencers” get the traffic now, I plan to stick with blogging as my primary activity with co-hosting on the Polite Society Podcast as the side gig. I don’t see any reason to change as I am still enjoying this. Besides, we need citizen journalists as it is called by David Codrea.

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Willes And The NRA Keeps Getting Better

May 21, 2023 by 2 Comments

As I said on Monday, the gloves have come off and the powers that be at the NRA have created an implacable enemy in former 1st VP Willes Lee. Now that he is free from the constraints of being both an officer and a member of the Special Litigation Committee, Lee is feeling no remorse about starting to air dirty laundry.

Yesterday, he posted this on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter:

1/2 Radio silence. Two years into NRA Relocation Committee, NO committee meeting. We are far down the road (no pun) of move/HQ sale without Committee, nor Board, nor even Executive Committee knowledge. We especially need input from staff who must carry out the move. This single issue has a devastating effect on staff, simply because we won’t talk with them. Our ‘staff’ lead, who doesn’t work for NRA & handles this as an extra duty to a full-time job, has repeatedly asked for an NRA staff lead contact. With no committee meeting & repeating the failed Bankruptcy secrecy fiasco, I resigned from this committee to focus on speaking/meeting/outreach/advancement which LaPierre increasingly asked me to conduct (well, now no one does it) while he is sidelined by legal and travel considerations. (2/2 soon)

The second part of it was posted today.

2/2 Scary? Not one NRA HQ building sale/relocation question during the Indy NRA Board meeting. For 2 years, no Board nor Relocation Committee member demanded even an initial meeting (staff does) . We need to get serious.

Wayne LaPierre announced to employees in late March the plan to explore the sale of the NRA headquarters building in Fairfax. As I said at the time, the real estate market is soft with interest rates rising and there are many newer alternatives in the northern Virginia area. While the NRA-ILA still does maintain offices within the District of Columbia, being near the seat of power does have its advantages.

I tend to agree with Lee that a move such as this requires staff input. Many of their most experienced and valued staff members will not want to move to presumably Texas. They have kids in school, family ties to NoVa, and houses. While some of the work could be done remotely, some cannot. That they have not reached out to staff is unforgiveable.

I am reading Lee’s posts as saying by inference that the whole move is being run by Bill Brewer who lives in Texas and Wayne is just along for the ride. Brewer must be really pissed about these posts by Lee.

Good.

These posts and the ones from Monday are just the tip of the iceberg. Lee has been posting other stuff that must be rattling cages in Fairfax, Dallas, and other locations. His Twitter is here, his Instagram is here, and his Facebook page is here. Read for yourself.

UPDATE: The blog NRA In Danger has even more of Lee’s posts arranged in chronological order with some commentary. It is worth a look.

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Disappointing

May 17, 2023 by 5 Comments

The US Supreme Court declined to issue an injunction against the new Illinois AWB and magazine ban while the cases make their way through the courts.

NAT. ASSN. FOR GUN RIGHTS, ET AL. V. NAPERVILLE, IL., ET AL.
The application for a writ of injunction pending appeal
presented to Justice Barrett and by her referred to the Court is
denied.

While Judge Stephen McGlynn of the Southern District of Illinois had issued a preliminary injunction, the state of Illinois immediately appealed to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals asking for a stay of his injunction. Normally, the judge who had issued the injunction is given the opportunity to study whether a stay is warranted when the losing party appeals. This was not done in this case as noted by attorneys for the plaintiffs in their responses opposing the motion to stay. Unfortunately, Judge Frank Easterbrook of the 7th Circuit did grant their stay meaning the law remains in effect. His order was then confirmed by a panel of three judges (including himself) from the 7th Circuit.

In the NAGR case filed in the Northern District of Illinois, Judge Virginia Kendall had denied their request for a preliminary motion and their request for a motion to stay while they appealed. Attorneys for NAGR had appealed and the plaintiffs in the other cases from the Southern District had filed amicus briefs in support of their appeal.

I am thinking that the Supreme Court did not want to intervene until such time as decisions were final in the lower courts and the cases had been fully briefed and argued. In the meantime, the plaintiffs in the cases from the Southern District where an injunction had been issued could request an en banc hearing of the stay. According to the Washington Post, hearings are scheduled for next month on these cases.

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Become A Social Media Ambassador For GRNC

May 16, 2023 by

Do you live on social media? Do you believe in the Second Amendment and gun rights? Do you want to help the growth of gun rights in North Carolina?

Then Grass Roots North Carolina has the volunteer job for you!

From their alert:

‘SOCIAL MEDIA AMBASSADORS’ NEEDED
Many of you have asked how you can help, even from home and on an as-available basis. Well, our Facebook crew has a suggestion. We need “Social Media Ambassadors” to help extend GRNC’s reach on Facebook. All that is required is that from time-to-time social you will be asked via email to 1). invite people to follow the GRNC page and to 2). like, comment and share targeted posts. In terms of how many people we need, the more the merrier.

If you are interested in being a GRNC Social Media Ambassador, please reply with full contact into to DirectorOfDevelopment@GRNC.org using the subject “Social Media Ambassador.”

While the alert speaks only to Facebook, I would go further and suggest posting the gun rights message to every other social media platform in which you participate.

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Quote Of The Day

May 16, 2023 by

Sometimes you can find what should be the quote of the day in the most unusual places. In this case, I found the quote in some modern romance novel that I picked up so as to having something to read and kill time.

Not a book in sight. If someone’s character can be explained by the books on their shelves, surely no books means no soul.

By this measure, I have a lot of soul. An eccentric, wide-ranging, omnivorous soul as I’m surrounded by books on everything from modern financial theory to outdoor conservation to history with everything in between including fiction.

However, I get it naturally as my Mom spent half her career as school librarian and the first half as an English and History teacher. My Dad was a big reader as well though his tastes ran more to the Robert Ruark, Jack O’Connor, and Ben East.

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The Gloves Have Come Off

May 15, 2023 by 5 Comments

It is time to break out the popcorn because this is getting good.

First, the powers that be at the NRA (Brewer, Old Guard, Friends of Wayne, fill in the blank) pushed a bylaw change to allow Charles Cotton to serve a third term as President. This has only been done in the past to allow Charlton Heston to serve more than two terms.

Then, the Nominations Committee did not re-nominate Willes Lee to his position as First Vice President and replaced him with former Congressman Bob Barr. This was done while retaining David Coy in his position as Second VP. According to Lee, he only found out about the Nominations Committee’s move when the agenda was slid under his hotel door the evening before the Board meeting.

There could be many reasons Lee was pushed out but one of the leading ones is that he had resigned his position on the Special Litigation Committee. We don’t know whether this resignation was done because he disagreed with one of Bill Brewer’s legal stratagems or something else. Either way, his loyalty to Wayne and Brewer was deemed suspect and he had to go.

It is fairly well known that I’m not a fan of Willes Lee. While I had supported him in the past, when I was deemed a “hater” by him for disagreeing with the direction that Wayne and his cronies were taking the NRA that was beyond the pale.

I can’t say that I didn’t feel a little bit of schadenfreude when I saw the Twitter post below. I also think that the powers that be may have just created an implacable enemy who knows more than they would like known. This is going to continue to get more and more interesting as time goes on.

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A Previously Unknown Source Of Firearm Expertise

May 12, 2023 by 3 Comments

There are many ways to gain expertise in firearms. You can attend a training class, you can read books or magazines on firearms, you can watch a video, you can study manuals, and the list could go on. However, I stumbled across a new and previously unknown source for gaining expertise in firearms.

Porn flicks.

Specifically those from the 1980s and early 1990s or what is sometimes called “the Golden Age of Porn“.

Say what?

I came across a tweet by former porn legend Hyapatia Lee who explained what was a “weapon of war” to some guy on the Internet.

Lee, who was inducted into the AVN Hall of Fame, gained her firearms expertise while starring in such firearm-specific movies as “Sweet Young Foxes”, “Ribald Tales of Canterbury”, and “Centerfold”. Well they must have contained some firearms content or where else could Ms. Lee have gained her expertise in order to define a “weapon of war”.

Of course, all of this makes about as much sense as her explanation of what constitutes a weapon of war.

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“Swoopers”

May 12, 2023 by

I love memes. They can convey a ton of information in a humorous or sarcastic way.

I found this meme today on Reddit. The only change I’d make to it is to add Grass Roots North Carolina or your own state-level gun rights group that is unaffiliated with the NRA.

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Agreeing With RFK Jr.

May 11, 2023 by 4 Comments

It is a weird world we live in. I saw a tweet by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. with which I actually agreed.

We watched the CBS Evening News tonight and even the barest of facts had an editorial attached to them. The script that Norah O’Donnell was reading might just as well have been written by Chat GPT – or Big Brother.