Brady Campaign

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Trouble In Paradise?

February 5, 2013 by 1 Comment

An observant reader sent me a link to a new job posting for the Brady Campaign. The posting which appeared on Saturday says that they are seeking a “Chief Campaigns Officer”. He wondered if they were dissatisfied with Dan Gross and cutting him loose after less than a year on the job.

The ad says they are seeking someone with 10 plus years of “senior-level experience” in ” politics, community organizing, political advocacy, nonprofit management, and/or communications.” They want the same amount of experience in staff management along with the usual strong interpersonal skills, organizational skills, etc. Of course, they want a commitment to the mission of the Brady Campaign.

From the position summary and responsibilities:

Position Summary



Senior level decision maker within the organization responsible for
overseeing the organization’s member and constituent engagement, policy
and public health and safety programs. This position works closely with
senior staff and consultants.




Responsibilities



Member/Constituent Engagement

  • Set and direct objectives for the director of legislation and mobilization to engage the American public.
  • Grow the membership of the organization and ensure high level of member activity in advocacy and fundraising activities.
  • Coordinate member engagement with the development department.





Policy Program

  • Set and direct objectives for the director of legislation and
    mobilization and the director of the legal action project related to
    passing and protecting policy.
  • Effectively represent the perspective of the American public in policy conversations at the federal level.
  • Provide resources to state level chapters regarding policy at the state level.


Public Health and Safety Education Program

  • Design and guide public education campaigns and the promotion of those campaigns federally and at the state level.
  • Effectively operate the legal action project.

I’ll be honest in that I can’t quite figure out if they are replacing Dan Gross or adding the equivalent of an ILA’s Chris Cox to the overall NRA’s Wayne LaPierre.

Some of the duties such as setting objectives and directing both the director of legislation and the director of the legal action project belong, in my opinion, to Dan Gross as president of the Brady Campaign. Or, it could be that flush with a reported $5 million in donations, they are seeking to expand their lobbying efforts.

Regardless of whether this is a Dan Gross replacement or an addition to their lobbying efforts, it still will not be enough to allow them to regain their place at the head of the gun prohibitionist table as it is increasingly obvious that Mayor Bloomberg and his Illegal Mayors have pushed them aside.

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If You Are “Better Than This”, Why Lie?

December 21, 2012 by 10 Comments

The Brady Campaign has just released a new public service announcement featuring celebrities including Mark Ruffalo, Mariska Hargitay, Rosanne Cash, Liev Schrieber, and Anthony LaPaglia. It features their “We Are Better Than This” slogan.

What this PSA doesn’t feature is the truth. When Liev Schrieber says that anyone can go on the Internet and buy as many guns as they want without background checks, that is not only misleading but a lie. When Anthony LaPaglia says convicted felons and the mentally ill can go to a gun show and buy guns, it is misleading. Dealers who operate at gun shows do NICS checks just like dealers in storefronts. Why would a felon risk going to a gun show where there is always a police presence (and probably undercover agents as well) when he or she could get a stolen gun from one of their criminal associates.

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CCRKBA Says Justice Steven’s Comments Illustrate Importance Of This Election

October 16, 2012 by 2 Comments

Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens was the speaker at a luncheon sponsored by the Brady Campaign on Monday. In his speech, he said he was astounded that Congress hadn’t taken steps to address “gun violence” (sic).

In reaction and to illustrate the importance of this election for both the Second Amendment and the future direction of the Supreme Court, Alan Gottlieb of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms released this statement:

BELLEVUE, WA – Monday’s high-profile prodding by retired Supreme
Court Justice John Paul Stevens for Congress to do something, and for
presidential candidates to say something, about gun control proves the
importance of who is in the White House and the U.S. Senate to make and
confirm high court nominations, the Citizens Committee for the Right to
Keep and Bear Arms said today.

Reuters reported that the retired justice was the speaker at Monday’s
luncheon hosted by the anti-gun Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
Stevens wrote dissenting opinions on both the 2008 Heller ruling and
the 2010 McDonald decision, both of which affirmed that the Second
Amendment protects an individual civil right to keep and bear arms.

“In both of his dissents,” noted CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb,
“Justice Stevens contended that the right to keep and bear arms was
limited to state militia service. It was, and remains, an astonishing
position on a fundamental civil right.

“What Justice Stevens’ speech clearly underscores,” he continued, “is
the critical importance of who is president, not just for the next four
years, but whenever a vacancy occurs on the high court. Imagine if
Justice Stevens’ opinion had prevailed.”

Stevens’ dissent in the Heller case was heavily criticized by the
majority opinion, written by Justice Antonin Scalia. The majority ruling
described Stevens’ arguments as “simply wrong,” and at one point – when
addressing Stevens’ history of the Second Amendment – said that he
“flatly misreads the historical record.”

“Stevens’ replacement on the Supreme Court was liberal Elena Kagan,”
Gottlieb noted. “A liberal, anti-gun majority could easily narrow,
rather than expand, the scope of our Second Amendment. That’s why it is,
and always will be, important for gun owners to have a pro-gun-rights
president and pro-gun majority in the Senate, especially on the
Judiciary Committee.”

To see more on Steven’s speech, Sebastian at Shall Not Be Questioned has video of the event.

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Why Is ATF Promoting Brady Campaign Numbers?

July 12, 2012 by 7 Comments

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has produced a series of public service announcements encouraging people to report “gun crime”. They appear to be aimed at reducing gangs and gang violence.

The first two videos produced feature former Green Bay Packer Antonio Freeman and actor Clifton Powell. The video with Freeman entitled “Game Over” is below.

The video starts with these statements:

“Gun Violence Killed 31,593 People in One Year”

“Gun Violence Killed 2,966 Children (Aged 19 and Under)”

“Gun Violence Kills 87 People Every Day in the U.S.”

And the source for these numbers? The Brady Campaign and this “report”.

These raw numbers come from the CDC’s WISQARS database for 2009. If you go deeper, you find that 59% of the deaths using a firearm are suicides. Only 36% are homicides or what the average person would call a result of violent crime.

Of the 87 people that “gun violence” kills per day, 56 are self-inflicted. Only an average of 31 per day nationwide (or a few weekends in Chicago) are the result of crime.

Looking at the “children” killed by “gun violence”, we find that 2,420 out of the 2,966 deaths are for those aged 16 or older. This would include self-inflicted deaths, gang violence, legal interventions by police, accidents, and murders. Given that a 16 year old can be tried as an adult in most states, I think that is a more appropriate age cut-off than those under age 20.

The data is out there and it is available from reputable government sources. Given that, why is the ATF using skewed statistics from the Brady Campaign? Moreover, why are they using the term “gun violence” when as the chief Federal agency charged with the regulation of firearms they should know better?

These videos are nothing but propaganda and the ATF should be ashamed of themselves. I think Congress should be asking just how much was spent to produce these pieces of propaganda. They should also be asking why they used the Brady Campaign talking points.

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Oh, Just Like A Sex Offender Registry

May 29, 2012 by 7 Comments

CBS ran a story this weekend on the growth in concealed carry permits in El Paso County, Colorado. Sheriff Terry Maketa says he believes in them and signs an average of 85 permits a week. El Paso County has the highest percentage of CCWs per capita in the state of Colorado.

Of course in the interest of providing balance, CBS’s Jeff Glor had to interview Dan Gross of the Brady Campaign. Gross’s comments were interesting.

Forty nine states, every one except Illinois, have some form of concealed carry but not all require permits, including Alaska, Arizona, Vermont and Wyoming. There is no national database on who has the weapons, something Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, thinks needs to change.

“I am willing to accept that the majority of concealed carry permit holders are law-abiding citizens,” said Gross. “That’s not where this debate or conversation needs to be. It needs to be on the percentage that are not.”

So Dan Gross believes that there should be a national database of concealed carry holders which is publicly accessible. Hmm, that sounds just like the databases of convicted sex offenders. Will CCW holders be required to notify their neighbors that they hold a permit? Will you be able to go online and pull up all CCW holders within a certain distance from your home? Will permit holders need to get the permission of authorities if they want to change their residences? Will permit holders by banned through zoning of residing in certain areas of a town because it is too close to a school?

I’m sure the Brady Campaign would deny that they want concealed carry permit holders to be treated just the same as convicted sex offenders. Nonetheless, a public, national registry would have a similar impact and that would make the gun prohibitionists very happy.

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Brady Campaign Shills For Eric Holder

May 19, 2012 by 2 Comments

In the latest missive from the Brady Campaign, their new president Dan Gross shows his true colors. It is obvious that he cares more about protecting Attorney General Eric Holder than in discovering the truth about Operation Fast and Furious. As I said yesterday, to these people a few dead Mexicans (or even hundreds) are worth it if they can get more gun control out of the operation.

“A strong whiff of hypocrisy rises from the letter sent today to Attorney General Holder by the House leadership. Speaker Boehner and his colleagues pretend to be concerned about the harm operation Fast & Furious has done to our relationship to Mexico, but they cannot explain why the House of Representatives, under their leadership, has done nothing to respond to the Mexican government’s desperate pleas for the Congress to strengthen American gun laws to stop gun trafficking from American gun shops to the Mexican drug cartels.

The House Republican leadership decries the failure of U.S. authorities to prevent illegal guns from crossing the border, yet the House recently voted to block an Obama Administration effort to give the authorities a vital (sic) additional tool to fight trafficking of assault rifles to Mexico.

Speaker Boehner pretends concern for gun violence victims, but on the recent fifth anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre, he could not find the time to meet with a group of victims, despite finding time, some weeks before, to travel to Florida to meet with the leaders of the gun industry.

Earth to Dan – the bulk of the guns that the narco-terrorists are getting are not from Ranger Bob’s Gun and Bait Shop in Laredo, Texas but from either deserters from the Mexican Army or are being smuggled across Mexico’s southern border. As to the ATF requiring the reporting of multiple sales of semi-automatic rifles, that is hardly a “vital” tool and is of dubious legality to boot.

The only hypocrisy that I see here is from the Brady Campaign who are showing themselves to be a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Obama Administration. I guess sending out missives like this is what it takes to get gun control under the radar.

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The Incestuous Relationship Between Media Matters And CSGV

May 15, 2012 by 2 Comments

Last week we saw another hit piece on gun rights issues by Media Matters for America. This one concerned Operation Fast and Furious. It accused former S.C. Governor Mark Sanford of being the latest to push the “paranoid conspiracy theory” that Project Gunwalker was an effort to build support for more gun control in the United States.

Or put more simply, Sanford is saying that “a lot of people” want to know if “Fast and Furious” was a plot hatched by Attorney General Eric Holder to curb gun rights in the United States. The answer to this question is a resounding no.

This conspiracy was recently laid out in the book Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and its Shameless Cover-up, authored by Townhall news editor Katie Pavlich. The theory is so far-fetched that even Fox News host Bill O’Reilly has expressed skepticism, calling it a “conspiracy thing.” Media Matters has previously debunked several other outrageous claims contained within the book.

Attacks on gun rights and on gun rights organizations like the NRA are not new for Media Matters. The NRA-ILA had a post a day later that noted for the month of April alone MMfA had run 32 hit pieces on the NRA. Attacks on the investigation into Operation Fast and Furious by the House Oversight Committee are also common as alluded to in the quote above regarding Katie Pavlich’s new book. They had one just yesterday accusing Rep. Darrell Issa and Fox News of trying to politicize the scandal.

What is new is the author of these last two pieces for MMfA’s County Fair blog – Timothy Johnson. If his Facebook page is to be believed, he now works for Media Matters.

Prior to joining Media Matters, he worked for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (sic) and ran the MeetTheNRA website for their 503(c)3 counterpart the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence (sic). He can be seen in his hoodie, second from the left, in this photo of CSGV staffers. The MeetTheNRA website is where they take quotes out of context so that they can accuse NRA leaders, past and present, of being “a group of individuals who promote racism, misogyny, homophobia, anti-immigrant animus, religious bigotry, anti-environmentalism, and insurrectionism.”

Attack pieces seem to be Mr. Johnson’s forte as evidenced by an article that he and Ladd Everitt published in the Neiman Watchdog entitled “‘Is the NRA paying mainstream reporters by the hour?'” Neiman gave the article this synopsis.

Two gun control advocates say that misstatements and fuzzy data coming from the National Rifle Association often are accepted by the press unchecked, and then disseminated, incorrectly, as trends and facts in American life. They point out, among other things, that gun sales are not perpetually rising; that neither are sales of guns to women, and that lax ‘carry laws’ have not been shown to lessen crime. There’s a lot of misinformation being spread, hardly examined at all by the press.

Prior to this stint with CSGV, Mr. Johnson was an intern with the Brady Campaign’s Legal Action Project in the Fall of 2010.

Legal Action Project Intern Tim Johnson, a current Georgetown Law student, joined the Brady Center for similar reasons. Tim explains, “Interning for the Legal Action project has shown me the importance of pro bono legal work as a way to assist victims injured by the negligence or intentional conduct of corrupt gun dealers.” In the wake of the McDonald and Heller Supreme Court decisions has allowed Tim to take part in the ongoing debate over the Second Amendment.

Johnson is listed in the Georgetown University directory but no info as to year or area of studies is given.

Nonetheless, Mr. Johnson does seem to have a long history of working with gun prohibitionists. Prior to his work for the Brady Campaign and CSGV, he worked the now-defunct Iowans for the Prevention of GunViolence in his home state of Iowa.

To conclude, given the left-wing and rabid anti-gun biases of both Media Matters and CSGV, is it any wonder that Media Matters sought someone from CSGV to be their new, pun intended, hired gun? If anything, his hiring just serves to confirm the incestuous relationship between these groups.

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Why Does The Brady Campaign Want To Keep Gays Defenseless?

March 19, 2012 by 2 Comments

The oral arguments before the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in the case Peterson v. Garcia et al are being held this afternoon in Denver. The case involves the attempt by Gray Peterson to obtain a concealed carry permit in Colorado as that state does not recognize his Washington State permit. For those that are unaware of Mr. Peterson and this case, he is gay and is a strong advocate of Second Amendment rights.

While the primary oral arguments will be made by John Monroe, attorney for Mr. Peterson, and the Colorado Attorney General’s Office, the Court of Appeals has allowed extra time for oral arguments by certain amici (friends of the court) in this case. Alan Gura will be representing the Second Amendment Foundation and a whole host of groups which include among others Illinois Carry, ISRA, and CalGuns. The NRA Civil Rights Defense Fund will be represented by Matt Bower of the NRA and the Brady Campaign will be represented by Jonathan Lowy.

As might be expected from the gun prohibitionists, they are portraying this as a battle between the good Brady Campaign and the evil NRA to prevent “guns in the streets.” From their press release:

Attorneys for the Brady Center and the NRA (National Rifle Association) will face off in a first-in-the-nation case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit in Denver, Colorado Monday, March 19. The case, Peterson v. Garcia, will decide whether the Constitution allows Colorado to protect public safety by continuing its policy of regulating who can carry loaded and concealable guns in public.

Senior Judge Walker D. Miller of the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado dismissed the original case on March 8, 2011.The gun lobby then appealed to the 10th Circuit.

The Brady Center filed an amicus brief on July 19, 2011, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, urging dismissal of the appeal. The Brady Center’s brief highlights the severe danger posed by concealed weapons, with studies showing that the carrying of guns in public does not make one safer, but instead increases the risks of death and injury. Brady believes that communities should be able to decide who can carry loaded guns on their streets, and in their parks and playgrounds.

Dangerous legislation has been introduced in Congress to force states like Colorado to honor concealed weapon licenses granted by other states, even by states with virtually no standards for concealed carry, and that allow carrying by people with violent pasts.

Notice that there is no mention in this release – and I presume none in their brief – that this case is really about a gay man wishing to protect himself from predators. I’d like to think that at least some of the the Brady Campaign’s donors might be appalled – and rightfully so – if they knew this.

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Immoral To Repeal One Gun A Month In Virginia?

March 9, 2012 by

Not so says the Rev. Kenn Blanchard in response to Jim Winkler who called it immoral for Gov. Bob McDonnell to have signed the repeal of Virginia’s One Handgun A Month law. Winker is the general secretary of the General Board of Church and Society of the United Methodist Church and chair of Faiths United to Prevent Gun Violence. Faiths United is a project of the Brady Campaign.

Winkler says of Gov. McDonnell,

But our governor put the agenda of a lobby ahead of the people he was elected to represent. He put the gun lobby’s agenda ahead of protecting the residents of his state from the life-altering and life-ending horror of gun violence. Innocent lives will be lost as a result. It is not only shameful that the governor did this, it is immoral.

Pastor Kenn rightly says the repealed Virginia law was “worthless” and that it is “ethical for us to protect ourselves, it is ethical for us to protect our families, congregations, and country.” He goes on to say that using the word immoral is just wrong. I couldn’t agree more.

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Quote Of The Day No. 2

March 2, 2012 by

Bob Owens has a good point. You’d think that organizations who are ostensibly dedicated to ending “gun violence” would be leading the charge against Operation Fast and Furious. After all, it was a gun running scheme that has lead to hundreds of dead Mexicans and at least two Federal law enforcement officers. If that doesn’t meet the definition of “gun violence”, then what does.

I’ll let Bob continue from here.

Both CSGV and Brady claim to be organizations dedicated to stamping out gun violence, but a search of both of their web sites show that neither seems to have the slightest problem with Operation Fast and Furious. The gun-walking plot is the deadliest political scandal in American political and Presidential history, costing the lives of 300+ Mexican nationals and only came to light after three U.S. federal agents were gunned down using walked weapons from separate gun-walking operations in Arizona and Texas.

If the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence and the Brady Campaign really represented sincere efforts to end gun violence, then they should have been two of the organizations leading the charge for accountability here. Brady and CSGV should wage a public relations war, helping the House and Senate investigators, and demanding answers and accountability from the Obama Administration…

These organizations remain graveyard silent as the bodies continue to fall. Far from fighting gun violence, they use their silence to enable it.