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Neal Knox – The Gun Rights War: Dispatches From The Front Lines 1966-2000

August 13, 2020 by

Philosopher and historian George Santayana wrote in 1905 that “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” In that spirit, I thought it would be useful to readers to revisit some of the history of the National Rifle Association starting with the Cincinnati Revolt and going up through the late 1990s. It was in the late 1990s that Wayne LaPierre cemented his role as Executive Vice President of the NRA and effectively stifled any future efforts to remove him.

This history is not unbiased as it comes from the writings of the late Neal Knox. He was one of the architects of the Cincinnati Revolt, served as head of NRA-ILA, was a NRA Board member, was its 1st Vice President, was the man who first hired Wayne LaPierre as a lobbyist, and later became his chief antagonist. Neal was also a gun writer and publisher. He was the founding editor of Gun Week (now The GunMag), was the editor of Wolfe Publishing’s Handloader and Rifle magazines, and later had a column in Shotgun News (now Firearm News). This archived post from Gun Week gives more of Neal’s life and work.

Neal’s son Chris compiled a number of his articles and other written work into a book entitled Neal Knox – The Gun Rights War: Dispatches from the Front Lines 1966-2000. The book was first published in 2009 and then re-released with some updates in a Kindle format in 2019. Chris edited the book and also provided some necessary annotations to put stuff in context.

Through the gracious permission of Chris and Jeff Knox, I will be reprinting selected chapters from the book as it relates to the NRA. I’ll be doing this on an occasional basis so as to spread it out.

It is my belief that knowing some of this history will allow readers to better understand the current NRA, its problems, and what has led to it being sued by New York Attorney General Letitia James. The problems that she points out in her lawsuit didn’t just happen and it is important to realize that.

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New Location For 2020 NRA Annual Meeting

August 12, 2020 by 6 Comments

Springfield is out and Tucson is in. The new location for the mandatory 2020 NRA Annual Meeting of Member is Tucson, Arizona on October 24th. The meeting is mandatory due to the bylaws.

An email was sent out today to the candidates for the 76th Director from John Frazer, Secretary and General Counsel of the NRA.

“Dear NRA Board candidate:

The Meeting Site Selection Committee met on Tuesday, August 11, 2020, for the purpose of deciding upon the date and location of the rescheduled 2020 Annual Meeting of Members. The Committee unanimously voted to hold the 2020 Annual Meeting of Members on Saturday, October 24, 2020, starting at 9:00 a.m. local time, in the Kiva Ballroom of the Loews Ventana Canyon Hotel in Tucson, Arizona.

Official notice of the meeting will be published in the NRA magazines and on NRA websites.

Balloting for the 76th Director seat will be held in conjunction with the meeting. Further information about the voting location and hours will follow separately in the near future.

We appreciate your patience throughout this challenging process.

Sincerely,

John”

Of course there is a conflict on that date. The 2nd Annual Rally for your 2A Rights is also scheduled for Saturday, October 24th in Washington, DC. The NRA has a “not invented here” mindset, for the most part, when it comes to other 2A activism. This was seen in Richmond back in January. The NRA held a “Lobby Day” in the State Capitol a week ahead of the long scheduled VCDL Lobby Day

Looking over the Loews Ventana Canyon Hotel website, the Kiva Ballroom can hold at most 1,000 people in normal times. What becomes interesting here is that there is a currently in-force Executive Order from Gov. Doug Ducey (R-AZ) that limits public gatherings to 50 people.

The hotel itself seems very nice. For almost $200 a night it should be nice.

The downside is that it is 18-20 miles away from the airport and a half hour plus drive depending on traffic.

I have fully planned to go to the meeting in Springfield. I had my ticket and my room. Now I am going to have to do some recalculating.

One things for sure – it’s a heckuva lot easier to get to Tucson if you are part of the California NRA Members’ Councils than it is for us folks on the East Coast. It is not named the “Sinister Coast” for no reason.

UPDATE: I have been told by Todd Rathner, who is a Board member and Tucson resident, that the Board of Directors meeting will be on Saturday afternoon. When the meeting was scheduled for Springfield, MO, the Meeting of Members was on Saturday and the Board of Directors meeting was on Monday.

Any committee meetings will be held by phone or Zoom later. Participation in those by non-committee members will be at the discretion of the chairs.

Committee meetings will be held before the Board of Directors meeting on Saturday afternoon. I was just given a correction on that.

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Roy Cooper, Brady PAC, And Systematic Racism

August 11, 2020 by 3 Comments

I just listened in on a public Zoom webinar with Gov. Roy Cooper (D-NC) hosted by the Brady PAC and the Democratic Governors Association. It featured Cooper, Wendi Wallace of the DGA, Brian Lemak of Brady PAC, and Kris Brown, president of Brady United.

I should note off the bat that the chat function and any way to ask questions was disabled. I imagine that was to prevent any awkward questions from being raised by the audience.

It started with Wendi Wallace who is the Deputy Executive Director of the DGA. She came to them from the Planned Parenthood Action Fund last year. She was praising the efforts of the governors of Nevada and New Mexico to bring more gun control to those states.

The conversation then switched to Brian Lemak and Kris Brown. Among the things they said is they are hoping that with Roy Cooper that they can make North Carolina into the next Virginia. In other words, to impose gun control from on high upon the people of North Carolina. They said they are making North Carolina one of their highest priorities at all levels – Federal, state, and even county commissions.

Finally they allowed Cooper to speak. He welcomed this opportunity to talk about “gun safety”. Cooper then started out by saying the usual boilerplate of I grew up on a farm, I am a gun owner, and I support the Second Amendment. He then segued into his support for “responsible gun laws” and talked about the campus shooting at UNC-Charlotte.

Cooper then went to talk about how Obama carried North Carolina in 2008 but that there was a Republican “backlash” in 2010 which allowed them to take both houses of the General Assembly. Not only that but those Republicans had the temerity to gerrymander the state to keep their seats. This led to the state “going backwards on gun laws”.

He said when he was elected in 2016 that the Republicans still held a super-majority in the General Assembly. Cooper said he had three tools with which to stop “bad legislation”: the bully pulpit, the veto, and executive orders. This is where he noted his veto of HB 652 saying guns didn’t belong in schools. I’m not going into that here with the exception of noting that the bill only applied to schools attached to churches and that no firearm were allowed during school hours including during extracurricular events.

As to executive orders, Cooper said he ordered the State Bureau of Investigation to send over 200,000 more names to the NICS system after it was discovered a number of convictions had not been reported. What he didn’t say and didn’t want the listeners to know is that for most of his tenure as Attorney General of North Carolina (2000-2016), the SBI was under his control. It was only moved from the Department of Justice to the Department of Public Safety in 2014.

Cooper moved on to existing laws including the Jim Crow-era pistol purchase permit law. He said he wanted to expand that law to include “assault weapons”. He thought honest and responsible gun owners would go along with that. Cooper also mentioned his support for red flag laws.

The discussion then moved into more political matters such as mail-in ballots, how the Brady PAC planned to focus on not only Cooper’s race but the race for Lt. Governor, the pandemic, etc. Then Cooper said how he said the fight against “systemic racism” need to be a priority.

This is where I exploded.

What more obvious an example of systematic racism exists than a law specifically passed to prevent African-Americans from having access to handguns, other concealable weapons, and pump shotguns! Historian Clayton Cramer found in his research that the impact of the law was “to grant discretion to local white officials to use their discretion to disarm nearly all blacks and some disreputable whites of deadly weapons.”

All four on the webinar today would have denied that gun control had its origins in keeping African-Americans disarmed. However, the record is what it is and it’s legacy is systematic racism that progressives say they abhor.

As to the rest of the webinar, I couldn’t take any more and turned it off.

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Video Tour Of AIM Surplus

August 10, 2020 by

When I got started collecting curios and relics in the 1990s, there were a few places that you always checked out. These included Century International, Southern Ohio Guns (SOG), Samco Global Arms, and AIM Surplus. There were other places, of course, but these are the ones I remember the most. The golden days of Conex boxes full of WW2 surplus arms and ammo arriving on our shores constantly have come to an end. Samco and SOG are now gone. Century International is more Caniks and AKs than anything else. That leaves AIM Surplus which, while it still sells some curios and relics, seems to have made the transition to more modern arms and parts earlier than the others.

I came across this video tour of AIM Surplus while cruising Arfcom this afternoon. Having purchased everything from Schmidt-Rubin K31s to PMags from them over the years, I found this guided tour of their operations very interesting.

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Wolverines!

August 10, 2020 by 1 Comment

On this day 36 years ago, the very first PG-13 movie was released. It was Red Dawn.

I still remember hearing from a friend that he was told the premise was all wrong. The Red Army and the Cubans would have flown into Atlanta on Boeing 747s with Delta markings. The guy who told him this was a survivalist gun store owner who thought they’d make good headway until they hit the mountains of North Georgia and Western NC where, in his mind, there were a ton of survivalists. It still makes a good story.

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Eye On The Target Radio

August 10, 2020 by 3 Comments

I was a guest yesterday on Eye on the Target Radio with my friends Amanda Suffecool and Rob Campbell. We discussed both the case brought by New York against the NRA and the case brought by DC against the NRA Foundation.

You can listen to them in the embedded player below:


powered by podcast garden

The last time I appeared on their show discussing the NRA and its issues I was followed by NRA 2nd VP Willes Lee. Sadly, if he and his cohorts had only instituted positive changes instead of labeling me a “hater”, I don’t think the NRA would be looking at a potential dissolution or government-imposed monitor for the Foundation.

UPDATE: My part of the radio show begins in the second half. I should have noted that in the beginning.

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Quote Of The Day

August 9, 2020 by 4 Comments

I read a most interesting article by Anthony DeWitt in Richochet. It concerned the suit brought by NY Attorney General Letitia James to dissolve the NRA. It is entitled “Wayne’s World is Crumbling”.

DeWitt, like many of us, is pretty angry the NRA’s future has been put in jeopardy thanks to Wayne LaPierre and his cronies. As he notes, nothing has been proved yet and it is still a list of allegations. Nonetheless, he is feeling used and abused by Wayne and his crowd of grifters and has no problem with James taking them to task.

The meat of the issue which DeWitt points out is just whom is the victim.

If the smoke proves to be from a fire, and the mirrors turn out to be a true reflection of the leadership of the NRA, then I have no quarrel with her taking on LaPierre and his alleged co-conspirators who have allegedly defrauded the membership. I have no quarrel with her investigation demonstrating that the NRA Board of Directors is little more than a bunch of chained and costumed characters in an S&M bondage flick. But let’s remember, they defrauded the membership, not the state of New York, and the membership is not perpetrator, they’re the victim. What the NY AG proposes is, in fact, just shooting everyone.

DeWitt is correct. The victim here are the 5 million members of the NRA whose dues and donations have provided a very nice lifestyle for a bunch of grifters and hanger’s on.

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May-Issue Carry Leads To Corruption

August 7, 2020 by 3 Comments

I wrote about an investigation into the Santa Clara County (CA) Sheriff’s Office and Sheriff Laurie Smith back in June. NBC News Bay Area had started checking into just who was issued a carry permit. While the average person had about a 5.5% chance of getting it approved, if you were a big donor to the Smith re-election campaign your success rate skyrocketed to 79%. I noted at the time that the issue was still under investigation by the Santa Clara DA’s Office.

The District Attorney’s Office reported today that a grand jury has handed down indictments for felony bribery and conspiracy against four men including a captain in the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office, two attorneys, and a local business owner. A $90,000 “donation” was to be made to an independent campaign committee in exchange for 10-12 carry permits for employees of a security company.

From the DA’s press release on the case:

Captain James Jensen, attorney Christopher Schumb, attorney Harpaul Nahal, and business owner Michael Nichols are accused of conspiring with the CEO and a middle manager of AS Solution, Inc., an international security company, to offer a $90,000 bribe to obtain concealed firearms permits (CCW licenses) for the company’s executive protection agents. This all took place in 2018, while Sheriff Laurie Smith — who had the authority to grant the CCW licenses — was in a hard-fought race for reelection, both in the primary and general elections.

The defendants are expected to be arraigned on the charges August 31, 2020 at the Hall of Justice in San Jose. If convicted, the defendants could receive prison time.

The DA’s Office is continuing to investigate more crimes and other individuals related to the issuance of CCW licenses. “Our concern is not whether the Sheriff grants many or few CCW licenses, but whether they are being granted or denied for the wrong reasons,” District Attorney Jeff Rosen said. “CCW licenses should not be given out in exchange for campaign donations. They should not be for sale.”

The DA’s investigation began shortly after the general election in 2018, sparked by an inquiry from the Metro Silicon Valley weekly about executive security licensing and an extremely large campaign donation, which was reported in public filings. The investigation found that weeks after the scheme was hatched, the conspirators settled on a $90,000 “donation” in exchange for 10 to 12 CCW licenses. After submitting 7 CCW license applications to Jensen at a meeting, AS Solution manager Martin Nielsen donated the first half of that amount to the Santa Clara County Public Safety Alliance (“PSA”), an independent expenditure committee supporting Sheriff Smith. The $45,000 personal check, which Nielsen handed to the PSA’s assistant treasurer, Schumb, represented more than half of the funds raised by the PSA before the election that year. The second installment was forestalled by the DA investigation.

In addition to bribery, the indictment charges Jensen with conspiring with AS Solution employees to put false information in their CCW license applications. Jensen advised Nielsen to instruct AS Solution employees who were not residents of Santa Clara County to use local corporate addresses as their residence addresses in their applications.

Captain Jensen is currently the head of the Training and Compliance Division of the Sheriff’s Office according to their website. Among the things he oversees is the Regional Firearms Training Facility.

Christopher Schumb is listed as a 2020 SuperLawyer and is a top-rate general litigation attorney in San Jose. He was admitted to the California Bar in 1984. Harpaul Nahal is also in private practice in San Jose and was admitted to the California Bar in 2010.

Mike Nichols is president of The Gun Company and is also VP Operations for Nichols Manufacturing which machines parts for the aerospace, defense, and firearms industries. The company holds a 07 FFL according to both their website and BATFE records.

If California had shall-issue carry by law, there would have been no need to bribe a sheriff’s office for issuance of a carry permit. As it is here and in many other locations that have may-issue carry, who you are and how much of a campaign contribution you make is more important than whether you are an honest, law-abiding citizen.

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NRA Foundation Accused Of Misuse Of Funds

August 6, 2020 by 6 Comments

On the same day that New York Attorney General Letitia James filed suit to dissolve the NRA, DC Attorney General Karl Racine filed suit against the NRA Foundation and the NRA accusing them of the misuse of funds. The suit is filed in Superior Court, Civil Division, for the District of Columbia.

According to the complaint, Racine is alleging that the Foundation allowed its funds to be used to support wasteful spending at the NRA itself. Further, he alleges that the Foundation put the NRA’s interests ahead of its own, did not operate independently of the NRA, and allowed itself to be exploited through multi-million dollar loans to the NRA which have never been repaid.

From Attorney General Racine’s press release:

“Charitable organizations function as public trusts—and District law requires them to use their funds to benefit the public, not to support political campaigns, lobbying, or private interests,” said AG Racine. “With this lawsuit, we aim to recover donated funds that the NRA Foundation wasted. District nonprofits should be on notice that the Office of the Attorney General will file suit if we find evidence of illegal behavior.” 

The suit makes the following claims.

  • The Foundation allowed charitable donations to be used for non-charitable purposes
  • The Board failed to uphold their fiduciary duty
  • Abandoning it charitable purpose through loans to the NRA
  • Placing the interests of the NRA above that of the Foundation

The suit asks that a constructive trust, for the benefit of the Foundation, be placed over the Foundation’s assets loaned to the NRA so as to protect them. It goes on to ask that the Foundation’s governance policies be modified to insure its independence from the NRA, that a court-ordered monitor be appointed to oversee and monitor all of the Foundation’s finances and transactions, and that the Board of Trustees and Officers be required to take nonprofit charitable governance training.

While no acknowledgement is made of it, I would be highly surprised if officials in both the New York and District of Columbia’s Attorneys General offices didn’t cooperate and share information back and forth from their respective investigations.

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James Seeks NRA Dissolution

August 6, 2020 by 3 Comments

While there was some speculation earlier today that NY Attorney General Letitia James’ “national announcement” would have to do with President Trump. That was wrong. The original speculation was that it had to do with the NRA was correct.

James has moved to dissolve the NRA in NY Supreme Court for New York County. She has an 18 point, 169 page complaint which includes claims that Wayne LaPierre, Josh Powell, Woody Phillips, and John Frazer have violated their fiduciary duty.

James in her press conference said that she will be forwarding information to the Internal Revenue Service regarding the NRA’s non-profit status. As to freezing assets of both the named individuals and the organization as a whole that is included in the complaint. When asked if she will be seeking criminal charges, James said the investigation is ongoing and any criminal charges will be referred to Manhattan DA Cy Vance Jr. if necessary. James also denied that bringing this dissolution action has anything to do with her personal views on “gun violence” and is only seeking to enforce New York charity law.

James, in her press release, says the resolution she seeks is:

As a result of all the allegations mentioned above, Attorney General James seeks to dissolve the NRA; asks the court to order LaPierre, Phillips, Powell, and Frazer to make full restitution for funds they unlawfully profited and salaries earned while employees; pay penalties; recover illegal and unauthorized payments to the four individuals; remove LaPierre and Frazer from the NRA’s leadership (Phillips and Powell are no longer employed by the NRA); and ensure none of the four individual defendants can ever again serve on the board of a charity in New York.

You can watch the full announcement below. I will be scanning through the court filing in an effort to provide a digest later today.