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Ah, The Power Of Art

September 25, 2023 by 4 Comments

New Mexico has been in the news lately with regard to criminal violence. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s response was an unconstitutional ban on carry in Albuquerque and Bernalillo County. The US District Court said nope to that when it issued a temporary restraining order.

Given there are a number of effective prosecutorial and law enforcement strategies to deal with the criminal misuse of a firearm, I’m not sure what to make of this project of New Mexicans To Prevent Gun Violence (sic). They are the New Mexico affiliate of States United to Prevent Gun Violence.

I know art has some power. Without it, we would never have had propaganda posters or Stalinist art as in the former Soviet Union. That said, I am skeptical a mural is going to stop a gang banger from doing what a gang banger does. I think the allure of power, status, money, and protecting their so-called territory is a much stronger incentive.

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NY AG Seeks Supplemental Deposition From Willes Lee

September 21, 2023 by 3 Comments

By tradition, Willes Lee should have been the next President of the NRA. Instead, Charles Cotton was given a third term and Willes was replaced as 1st Vice President by Bob Barr. As one might imagine, this did not sit well with Willes. He had been a loyal supporter of the existing regime within the NRA for four years as 1st and 2nd Vice President, had served as the attack dog for the powers that be, had supported the abortive bankruptcy filing as a member of the Special Litigation Committee, and the list goes on. Not only had he been blindsided by the move to keep Cotton as President for a third term but he only found out he was being ousted as an officer when the Nominating Committee report was slipped under his door.

Since his ouster, Willes has take to social media to give his side of the story as well as make teasing remarks about what really was going on. His posts have appeared on Facebook, X as Twitter is now called, and Instagram. I, like others such as NRA In Danger, have been following his posts on an almost daily basis. It was like watching a train wreck and you can’t look away.

You know who else was following his posts on Facebook? The New York Attorney General’s Office and now they want to know more. Yesterday, they filed a motion to compel the “post-note of issue supplemental deposition” of him. The motion makes note of his Facebook postings and how they seem to be at odds with his prior testimony before the US Bankruptcy Court and in his deposition in the New York case. Alexander Mendelson, Assistant Attorney General (of New York), argues that “unusual and unanticipated circumstances” allow a supplemental deposition even though the time for deposition of witnesses has nominally closed. The circumstances that Mendelson refers to are Willes’ Facebook posts and his ouster as an officer. It is argued that this supplemental deposition can be done before the beginning of the trial and this would be better than wasting time on an exhaustive cross-examination during the trial itself.

Mendelson supports this motion with 20 exhibits including past testimony and the deposition by Willes, a compilation of his Facebook posts, an affidavit by the Attorney General’s IT professional who downloaded the posts, and a series of emails between the attorneys. It appears that from reading these emails that the only objections come from the attorneys for John Frazer and Woody Phillips. Interestingly, the NRA’s lawyers from Brewer, Attorneys and Counselors, have not objected. Moreover, given Willes is still a board member they will accept the subpoena on his behalf as well as represent him.

If Judge Cohen approves this motion and I have no reason to believe he won’t, it is going to get interesting. For example, you have Willes complaining about being left off of committees while at the same testifying in his deposition that it was OK for Tim Knight, Esther Schneider, and Sean Maloney to be excluded. Moreover, given the numerous posts complaining about Charles Cotton and David Coy and their roles as heads of the Audit and Finance Committees, you can be sure that his questioners are going to be digging deeper. I just wonder how much that the NRA’s attorneys will be able to prevent from being on the record.

There is a great lesson here for all of us. Don’t put stuff out on social media and expect it to stay private. What you say there lives forever and it will come back to bite you at the worst possible time. As for Willes who normally has multiple daily posts on Facebook, Instagram, and X, he has gone silent since yesterday. Frankly, I’m glad he hasn’t been silent in the past as his comments will force the truth to come to light.

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CBS News And Arms Smuggling To Mexico

September 19, 2023 by 2 Comments

CBS News is running a special investigation into the smuggling of firearms to Mexico. US government officials estimate that the cartels are smuggling 2,000 firearms a day across the Mexican border. The way it works is that the cartels alerts buyers in the US who are not prohibited persons of their needs, they transfer the guns to brokers, and then the guns go to smugglers who take the firearms across the border to the cartels. Buyers are reported to be spread across all 50 states.

To combat this, ATF established Project Thor which ran from 2018 until 2021 according to former Senior Special Agent Chris Demlein. Funding for the project ended with the 2022 budget.

Demlein led the first interagency intelligence project aimed at identifying and dismantling the cartels’ international weapons supply chains across the U.S. Within months of its launch on July 25, 2018, the initiative, known as Project Thor, connected the dots between hundreds of disparate law enforcement cases, uncovering vast networks that give these criminal groups on-demand access to American guns. They briefed hundreds of government officials on their discoveries, including the National Security Council and senior Justice Department leadership.

Below is an inforgraphic created by the DEA to show how the smuggling networks operated.

CBS Investigative Reporter Adam Yamaguchi was allowed by a gun smuggler to show how they hid the firearms in a car. The skeptic in me wonders why the cartels would allow this. The report below goes on to say the firearms are used by the drug cartels to protect their trade in drugs like fentanyl, meth, cocaine, and narcotics. It does make note that there is only one official firearms store in Mexico and it is on a military base. He also speaks of “military grade weapons” without acknowledging the role that diversion of firearms from the Mexican military has played.

His video as seen on the CBS Evening News is here.

The full 22 minute CBS Reports documentary can be viewed here.

The last time CBS News investigated arms smuggling to Mexico they did real journalism. That was back in 2011-2013 and the investigative reporter was Sharyl Attkisson who is long gone from CBS. She won an Emmy for her work exposing the role of ATF in Operation Fast and Furious aka Project Gunwalker. That was where ATF made FFLs sell guns to known gun runners so they could supposedly trace them to Mexico. The problem was that they quickly lost track of the firearms and they were used by cartel gunmen to kill two Federal LEOs plus over Mexican nationals.

Lest we forget, this sad episode was actually uncovered by the combined work of citizen journalists David Codrea and the late Mike Vanderboegh. Eventually Congressional hearings were held, DOJ stonewalled, and then AG Eric Holder was found in Contempt of Congress.

For those whom Operation Fast and Furious aka Project Gunwalker is something new, I suggest searching my blog using the term “Gunwalker”. I had quite a few pages devoted to it. Even better is to go to David Codrea’s “A Journalist’s Guide to Project Gunwalker” and follow his posts from the defunct Gun Rights Examiner. You can also go to Mike’s Sipsey Street Irregulars blog. While posting stopped soon after his death from cancer in 2016, the blog is still online and it can be searched.

It is important to remember that whatever the official justification for Operation Fast and Furious was, the real reason was that the Obama Administration wanted to build support for more gun control. Given the number of ex-Obama Administration officials in the Biden Administration, should we expect any less from them? The mainstream media acts even more like the propaganda arm of the administration now than they ever did in the Obama years.

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Bushmaster Reaches Out To Windham Weaponry Employees

September 15, 2023 by 1 Comment

After the Remington bankruptcy, Bushmaster Firearms was purchased by Franklin Armory (Crotalus Holdings LLC) and moved to Nevada. They are now located in Carson City.

Yesterday, I received an email from Lee Felch who is the Director of Marketing for Bushmaster. He said given the close history between Bushmaster and Windham Weaponry that the company was reaching out with condolences on the closure and possible job offers.

From the attached press release:

It is good to see other companies in the firearms industry reaching out to the Windham Weaponry employees. Furthermore, Bushmaster is not wasting any time in seeking those employees with critical skills to its own success. I’m not sure how many will trade the Sebago Lake region of Maine for the high desert of Carson City but a job is a job.

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What Hunter Gets For Lying On The Form 4473

September 14, 2023 by 3 Comments

Poor Hunter Biden. He thought he was going to get off with a plea deal for lying on the ATF Form 4473. The original agreement called for him to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and accept a pre-trial diversion agreement. That was until the judge asked prosecutors about the sweetheart deal and to protect themselves they threw poor old Hunter under the bus. The Biden legal team then said they wouldn’t accept the agreement. That deal had been brokered by the US Attorney for Delaware David Weiss and Biden’s legal team.

Judge Maryellen Noreika told the parties to go back to the drawing board and come back when they were ready to be serious. Or something like that.

In the meantime, US Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Weiss as Special Counsel for the case on August 11th. Congressional Republicans cried foul as they saw this appointment as an attempt to obstruct their own investigation into the activities of Hunter Biden. Whether this was the intention by Garland and the Biden Administration remains to be seen.

Fast forward to today.

Special Counsel David Weiss obtained a three-count felony indictment against Hunter Biden on firearms charges from a grand jury. The first count accuses Biden of lying on the Form 4473 that the sale of firearm was lawful despite his addiction to crack cocaine. It should be noted he admitted his use of the drug in his own book. The second count accuses him of lying about being a user of a controlled substance (crack cocaine). Finally, the third count accuses him of being in possession of a firearm when he knew he was addicted to crack cocaine.

Nothing has been said yet about the tax evasion charges or if Biden will be indicted for acting as a foreign agent without registering under the Foreign Agent Registration Act. As the media has been quick to point out, it is rather rare to see these kind of charges as stand-alone charges.

Most those cases are brought against people accused of some other crime as well, said Adam Winkler, a constitutional law professor and expert in gun policy at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. “It’s relatively rare to prosecute someone for being a substance abuser in possession of firearms, absent other criminal activity, or unusual circumstances,” he said.

It will be interesting to see if Biden and his legal team will try to use the Bruen decision to get around these charges. A 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in August threw out firearms charges against a Mississippi man who had admitted to marijuana use. I could see that being of use against the third count but it doesn’t absolve him of lying on the Form 4473.

It would be incredibly ironic to see the case against Hunter Biden leading to an expansion of Second Amendment rights given his father’s jihad against gun rights and gun owners.

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Giving Moms Demand Action A New Meaning

September 13, 2023 by 5 Comments

Susanna Gibson would seem, on the surface, to be the ideal candidate for Virginia Democrats in their attempts to regain control of the House of Delegates. Running in a suburban Richmond district, she is a nurse practitioner with degrees from U.Va. and Columbia University, an attractive mom with two young kids, a Virginia native married to a local attorney, and on the right side of all the issues that matter to young suburban professional liberals.

She has all the right endorsements. Politicians ranging from former Gov. Ralph Northam (D-VA) to US Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) to Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney have endorsed her. Gun control groups such as Giffords and Moms Demand Action support her as do organizations that are pro-abortion. She got the endorsement of the Sierra Club, the Climate Cabinet, and the Virginia League of Conservation Voters. In other words, her positions on the issues check all the correct boxes for Democrats.

As often with things that seem too good to be true, there is more to her story. Thanks to an article that first appeared in that cesspool of right-wing extremism, the Washington Post, we now know she had an “innovative” way of raising money for her campaign. You might even say she and her husband put themselves out there to raise money “for a good cause”.

From the Post:

Susanna Gibson, a nurse practitioner and mother of two young children running in a highly competitive suburban Richmond district, streamed sex acts on Chaturbate, a platform that says it takes its name from “the act of masturbating while chatting online.”

Chaturbate videos are streamed live on that site and are often archived on other publicly available sites. More than a dozen videos of the couple captured from the Chaturbate streamwere archived on one of those sites — Recurbate — in September 2022, after she entered the race. The most recent were two videos archived on Sept. 30, 2022. It is unclear when the live stream occurred….

In multiple videos, Gibson interrupts sex acts to type into a bedside computer. Speaking directly into the screen, she urges viewers to provide tips, which are paid through “tokens” purchased through the site. In at least two videos, she agrees to perform certain acts only in a “private room,” an arrangement that requires the viewer to pay more.

“I need, like, more tokens before I let him do that,” she responds to a request that they perform a certain act. “One token, no. More. Raising money for a good cause.”

Gibson is now characterizing the release of the videos of she and her husband having sex on a live webcam as “revenge porn”. Her attorney goes further saying it was a criminal act. He cited a 2021 Virginia Court of Appeals ruling which said it was unlawful to secretly record someone in a consensual sexual encounter. That is all good and dandy but there was nothing secret about this as it was streamed live for an audience with the intent to raise money. With a quick search, you can find some of the videos. What she did is no different than any other porn actress who engages in sex in front of a webcam for money. Gibson aka “HotWifeExperience” is reputed to have upwards of 6,000 followers on Chaturbate.

Screen Cap from one of her videos posted by the New York Post

Gibson has gone on the attack accusing the Republicans of trying to silence her because she is a woman. In other words, even though she recorded one or more of these videos after she declared for the House of Delegates, she is trying to play the victim card. While Politico is trying to play it off as “so what”, Democrats seem to be taking a wait and see approach. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) offered “no comment” after appearing with her at a campaign rally

What Susanna Gibson suffers from is a lack of good judgement. I would say this about her even if I agreed 100% with her on her political priorities. Everyone knows by now that the Internet is forever. If you and your husband are performing sex acts on a live feed and are asking for “tokens”, you should have no expectation that it will remain private.

Good judgement is the one thing we can hope for in a candidate. We don’t have to agree with them but we expect them to make decisions impacting our future with a sober, reasoned, and judicious approach to the issue at hand. I do not think the voters in Virginia’s 57th House District can have any expectation of that from Susanna Gibson.

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Windham Weaponry Closing Its Doors

September 12, 2023 by

Windham Weaponry, the Maine-based manufacturer of AR-15s, is going out of business. Founded in 2011 when Richard Dyke’s non-compete clause expired with the Freedom Group, it was in many ways the successor to the original Bushmaster. Windham was in the same facility and most of its workers were the original Bushmaster employees left behind when production was moved by the Freedom Group to the Remington factory in Ilion, New York.

Before Walmart went all PC and stopped selling AR-15s, if you saw an AR in their gun case, it was likely to be from Windham Weaponry. However, the last few years have been tough on the company.

From their website announcing closing:

It is with deep regret that we announce the closing of Windham Weaponry. Our website/online retail ordering system will remain active through Tuesday night, Sept 12. We will do our best to ship all orders this week and early next week. No credit card will be charged until the order is shipped.

Twelve years ago, when we started Windham Weaponry, our shareholders and longtime employees were excited to continue the traditions and spirit of Bushmaster Firearms, after the new owners decided to leave Maine.

We built WW into a company we could be proud of providing outstanding customer service, high quality products, as well as a great place for our dedicated employees to work.

The last few years have been a very challenging time for the firearms industry, and we have struggled to keep the WW dream alive for as long as possible. Unfortunately, we have not been able to meet our loan obligations with the bank after they worked with us as much as they could.

There was a glimmer of hope when we were negotiating with an investor to help keep WW alive and healthy, but that just fell through.

We have begun discussions with Keenan Auction Company to determine the best course of action for a full liquidation which should happen within the next month or so.

Our shareholders and employees truly appreciate your loyal support all of these years.

It is a sad day when any firearms company closes its doors. While I never owned a complete Windham Weaponry rifle, I have bought parts including a barrel from them.

I do hope that the employees can find new jobs with salaries commensurate with their old positions.

One last thing – if you still want to order from them, you can do it through tonight and your order will be processed.

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Brownells Gunsmithing Scholarships At MCC

September 12, 2023 by

Brownells just awarded scholarships to three 2nd-year gunsmithing students at Montgomery Community College in Troy, NC. The school has an excellent gunsmithing program and has been the recipient of a good deal of support from Brownells and other companies because of that. As I said after touring the department last year, it is a first-class gunsmithing program.

From their press release:

Grinnell, Iowa (September 11, 2023) –Brownells proudly announces the exceptional recipients of the Brownells Gunsmithing Scholarship awarded at Montgomery Community College.

Three outstanding recipients, Joseph Hampton, Dalton Miller and Alex Rosales are being recognized for their outstanding dedication to the gunsmithing trade. This scholarship highlights their exceptional skills and commitment to the gunsmithing craft.

All three of these students are beginning their 2nd year in gunsmithing at Montgomery Community College and will be entering the working world of gunsmithing in the summer of 2024.

Pete Brownells, CEO of Brownells, “Brownells is dedicated to improving gunsmithing skills and the success of gunsmiths. Congratulations to Joseph, Dalton, and Alex for their commitment and dedication to one of America’s most crucial trades.”

I would likewise congratulate these three for winning these scholarships along with thanking Brownells for their support of the MCC program.

As some may be aware, I am proud alumnus of MCC where I earned a degree in Hunting and Shooting Sports Management. It is how I spent my extra time during the pandemic as I wasn’t allowed to meet clients face to face. It was time well spent and I learned a great deal.

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I Haven’t Forgotten

September 11, 2023 by 1 Comment

There are certain events that are embedded in your memory and never forgotten. For me, these include the assassination of President Kennedy when I was in 1st Grade and the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

The first plane had already hit the North Tower when I arrived at Swain County Hospital in Bryson City, North Carolina. My company provided the retirement plan for the hospital and I was there on my bi-weekly service visit. I remember watching the events unfold on a small TV in an unused patient room along with the hospital CEO and his secretary. Suffice it to say, no work got done that morning.

I remember the sadness I felt for my friend Lisa whose brother worked for Aon on the 102nd Floor of the South Tower. She related how he had called her mother to tell her goodbye as he knew he wasn’t getting out.

I remember the relief I felt on hearing that my second cousin Kevin McEntrye, a fire fighter with the FDNY, had gone off duty earlier that morning and was home when the first tower was hit. He was a hazardous materials specialist and worked non-stop for days afterwards in the recovery efforts. He took an early medical retirement due to the respiratory issues caused by exposure to the toxic materials at Ground Zero.

I remember the bravery of the passengers on Flight 93 who fought back against the terrorists saving more lives.

I remember how we as a nation came together as one. Sadly, it didn’t last long enough.

I just remember.

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A Multitude Of Liberty Safe Memes

September 8, 2023 by 8 Comments

Unless you are still stuck in the Nevada desert without electricity trying to make your way out from Burning Man, you have heard about the controversy surrounding Liberty Safes and their cooperation with the FBI. I could go into all the details but since you can read about it many places I won’t.

Liberty Safe was purchased by Monomoy Capital Partners back in 2021 for an undisclosed sum. As the Open Secrets website makes clear, virtually all of their political contributions go to Democrats. Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA notes that some of the recent recipients of their largesse have been Senators Raphael Warnock (D-GA), John Fetterman (D-PA), and Mark Kelly (D-AZ). This is according to data from the Federal Elections Commission.

Suffice it to say but Liberty Safes has a PR nightmare on their hands. They are doing damage control. They say they have “revised their policies around cooperation with law enforcement” and that customers can request that their “access codes” be expunged from the Liberty Safe database. While this has been compared to the Bud Light fiasco, I think it is worse. It was an abuse of the customer’s personal privacy. People in the 2A community have long memories. They will forgive a firearm that is recalled for bugs but I don’t think they will forgive this so readily.

So on to the memes. I found some on forums and some with a Google search. If you have more, feel free to post them in the comments.

Note: The warrant was a search warrant of the person’s home and possession. It was not a subpoena or warrant issued directly to Liberty Safe.

I think the CEO of Liberty Safe probably feels the same way as the social media guy. His name, and I kid you not, is Joe Fail.