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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.

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Most Unusual Press Release I’ve Ever Received

May 9, 2023 by 2 Comments

I get lots of press releases. Some are interesting, most are irrelevant, and the last one received was just plain weird. It was from Gary Ramey who is the CEO of Liberty Ammunition located in Bradenton, Florida. It appears that Liberty Ammunition is the manufacturer of lead-free, self-defense ammunition. Their ammo is available in most standard handgun calibers plus .223 and .300 Blackout.

The headline of this press release read: “Liberty Ammunition offers free ammo for Idaho firing squad”.

Umm, OK. I guess this is a nice gesture to lower expenses for the the State of Idaho which has adopted the firing squad as an alternative method of execution when lethal injection is not available. It appears Mr. Ramey was motivated by the murder of the four students last year at the University of Idaho.

The press release also contained a number of phrases describing their ammo. They include “most lethal ammunition available”, “ruptures in soft tissue”, and “Hits Harder”.

My concern is with the first two phrases and how they will be used by prosecutors, plaintiffs’ attorneys, and the anti-rights lobby. It is like waving a red flag in front of a bull. You can just imagine an assistant DA trying to make his or her bones asking a homeowner in a self-defense case, “Your pistol was loaded with Liberty Civil Defense ammunition. Did you choose it because it was the “most lethal ammunition” and you wanted to kill the intruder?”

Likewise, you can imagine a plaintiff’s attorney in a civil case asking the defendant who just wanted to save his own life, “When you shot my client’s husband, did you use this ammo because it would rupture his soft tissue and kill him?”

I have nothing against Mr. Ramey, Liberty Ammunition, or their products. However, the use of these descriptive phrases would seem to me to put both the company and any potential user of that ammunition at possible legal risk. When you have so many other viable alternatives why would you risk it.

Rather than embed the full press release as a PDF, you can find it here.

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Savage Chambers Firearms In 400 Legend

May 8, 2023 by 2 Comments

Winchester Ammunition, a division of Olin Corporation, announced a new cartridge called 400 Legend at the recent NRA Annual Meeting. It is a straight walled cartridge aimed at hunters in those states, primarily in the Mid-West, that prohibit the use of necked cartridges for deer hunting.

The cartridge is reported to have double the energy of a 12 gauge slug at 100 yards, 55% less recoil than a 12 gauge slug, and 20% more energy than the venerable .30-30 Winchester. It is an upgrade over the 350 Legend. The representative that I spoke with at the NRA Annual Meeting denied that they were trying to one-up the Federal/Remington 360 Buckhammer and that they had been working on it long before the SHOT Show.

In today’s email, I received a press release from Savage Arms announcing their plans to chamber a number of their rifles in 400 Legend.

Savage Arms is proud to partner with Winchester® Ammunition to bring deer hunters several rifles chambered in 400 Legend in time for 2023 hunting seasons. The new hard-hitting, yet mildly recoiling, caliber means new opportunities for deer hunters across the country. Savage will launch the 400 Legend in the 110 Apex Hunter XP, 110 Hog Hunter and Axis II XP—but will also chamber it in another 11 models in 2023.   

Straight-walled cartridges, and especially the 400 Legend’s predecessor the 350 Legend, were born for states like Ohio and Michigan. The premise being bring modern projectiles and cartridge technologies to areas, states and hunters originally limited to shotgun slug or historically limited rifle caliber options. Due to the popularity of these cartridges that has been driven by performance—straight-wall options have gained traction outside of traditional shotgun slug areas as well. The 400 Legend will no doubt continue this legacy and Savage has responded by adding it to so many rifles in its lineup.

You are probably saying to yourself, “That’s nice but so what!”.

Federal and Remington, makers of the 360 Buckhammer ammo, are part of the Sporting Products Division of Vista Outdoor. Savage Arms was a division of Vista Outdoor from 2013 until 2018 when it was spun off in a leveraged-buyout to return to its roots as an independent company. If they still had been part of Vista Outdoor, I would think that they would have gone with the Federal/Remington 360 Buckhammer from sister companies over the 400 Legend.

I am neither pro-Legend nor anti-Buckhammer. I just found it interesting that a former division of Vista Outdoor went with a competitor’s new cartridge instead of one from their old sister companies.