by The Gun Rights Policy Conference starts this coming Friday evening in Salt Lake City with a reception. Co-hosted by the Second Amendment Foundation and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, the conference itself kicks off on Saturday morning.
Here is the final agenda for GRPC: https://saf.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/GRPC-2025-Agenda-FINAL.pdf
Reading over the agenda there are a lot of great speakers. I must say as a member of the NRA Board of Directors I am quite pleased to see that the NRA-ILA’s Director of Litigation Joe Greenlee and NRA EVP/CEO Doug Hamlin are on the agenda to speak. For too many years the 2A community was split into their own little camps and competition rather than cooperation was the rule. Over the last couple of years things have changed and cooperation is now the rule. This is as it should be.
When I went to my first Gun Rights Policy Conference in 2010, live streaming was non-existent. We did have Charles Heller of Liberty Watch Radio recording the conference and making audio available on thumb drives for later listening. Then the next year Mark Vanderberg and Doc Wesson of the old Gun Rights Radio Network provided a live feed using a webcam (if I remember correctly). It progressed from there to Paul Lathrop of the Polite Society Podcast doing the live stream for a few years.
According to this release from SAF, both days will be live streamed through the links below and on their social media channels.
For those who can’t make the event in-person, the Saturday and Sunday GRPC 2025 sessions will be livestreamed beginning at 8 a.m. (MST) on Saturday and 9 a.m. (MST) on Sunday. The links will also be sent via SAF’s email newsletter and posted to the organization’s social media channels.
This will be the 40th annual Gun Rights Policy Conference. I have both attended and spoken at a number of them. One change that I think is welcome is that they have reduced the number of speakers but have given them more time to speak. So instead of having 4-5 minutes for each speaker with only a chance at hitting the bullet points in that time, the scheduled speakers will be able to give a more fuller and richer presentation.
As you can tell, I am looking forward to this weekend. I hope to see many old friends there and make some new ones.
That is excellent news!
I think that Paul Lathrop did a great job with his recordings of a number of GRPCs. These gave me a chance to re-watch them.
I’ve been to the GRPC in Chicago 2018 and Dallas 2022. It is easy to talk with others at these meetings if you are talking about what they spoke about or just in general terms about the right to keep and bear arms.
I do not fit in very well. I have never viewed the Second Amendment the way that 99% of gun owners. Nobody to talk to about this. My best short conversation was at Chicago when I found out that David Sigale was one of the lawyers in McDonald. I have been a 14th Amendment “privileges or immunities’ clause person since 1984. So, the very first question I asked was why that clause came before the Supreme Court after 50 years? I had been thinking about Adamson v. California 1947 and Justice Black’s dissent. His response was, as I remember it, that Justice Thomas would not concur with the majority if it was not in the arguments. Alan Gura used that clause and Paul Clement used the the traditional due process clause to apply the 2nd to the states.
Nobody wants to talk about the 14th. No one. Attorneys that do bring it up over the years seem to be hesitant about mentioning that the 14th applies the 2nd to the states. Justice Thomas backed up his privileges or immunities McDonald concurring opinion with another in Timbs v. Indiana 2019 when he did not have to in the 9-0 decision. Three years later a miracle NYSRPA V. Bruen is written by Thomas. No mention of the due process clause or the privileges or immunities clause. But, there was also no balancing tests or scrutiny levels in Bruen which had gone on with many decades of due process decisions in applying any of the Bill of Rights to the states. That includes McDonald. In my sorry butt opinion Bruen will not survive for long after Thomas leaves because no one understands where he is coming from.
Before your flood I had sent you a copy of Joseph P. Tartaro’s REVOLT AT CINCINNATI. I do not know if you had gotten it or the 14th Amendment papers.
I will watch this years GRPC on YouTube. Hope you have a great time.
HI Roderic,
I did receive the copy of Joe Tartaro’s book. If I haven’t thanked you for it, I apologize for that oversight.
I hope the livestream gives you some good info. There are a number of legal panels.
Great that you got it.
The legal panels are always the most interesting.