Brady United

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Learning From The Gun Prohibitionists

September 19, 2024 by 6 Comments

Lee Williams aka The Gun Writer has a post up today about a new anti-gun group called “Legislators for Safer Communities.” It is about gun prohibitionist legislators in 43 states coming together to form a coalition to work for gun control. What struck me about this story was not yet another astroturf gun control organization being formed. Rather that it was being supported by all the major gun prohibitionist groups.

From their press release:

Legislators for Safer Communities will serve as a hub for collaboration, partnership, shared resources, strategy, research, and peer networking. The coalition will work in partnership with Brady, Community Justice, Everytown, GIFFORDS, and March For Our Lives.

You have Brady, you have Everytown (and presumably their subgroups), and you have the Cult of Personality known as Giffords. While they take different approaches, they are all on the same page in fighting firearms rights, promoting the monopoly of violence by the state, and seeking more control over our lives.

Unfortunately, too many in the pro-rights community don’t play well together whether through philosophical differences or mere jealousy. One need not look too hard to find examples of that.

Here in North Carolina, a bill to allow permitless concealed carry which came from Grass Roots North Carolina and Gun Owners of America was killed when the NRA objected to it due to a provision that required a class on the use of deadly force. The bill was certainly not perfect and that provision was a requirement from House Speaker Tim Moore to move the bill. The thinking by its backers was that moving the bill was more important than the objectionable provision which might well be removed later.

The actual question was whether the NRA objected to the bill because of the provision or because it had not originated with them. This mindset has driven me up the wall for years. Unlike the Second Amendment Foundation and the Firearms Policy Coalition, I rarely see the NRA join with other groups as co-plaintiffs in cases. This needs to change! Resources are finite and are even more so now that the NRA has spent almost $200 million on Bill Brewer’s legal “services”.

If I am elected to the NRA Board of Directors, I plan to be a voice for working with other groups. It should not matter if the group is NRA affiliated or not. Coalitions need to be formed with groups like GRNC, Virginia Citizens Defense League, AzCDL, Commonwealth 2A, and the list goes on. The NRA should work with these groups on the state and local level just as much as they do with their affiliates so that NRA-ILA can do more within the halls of Congress with the resources they have. Sad to say but the non-NRA state affiliates are often more effective and more resolute in their push for gun rights.

Litigation needs to be coordinated where possible with SAF, FPC, NSSF, and the various foundations like the Mountain States Legal Foundation. You see it somewhat on amicus briefs but it needs to go beyond that. I remember reading about then NRA President Charles Cotton complaining about all the 2A cases brought by other plaintiffs after the NRA’s win in Bruen. The complaint should not have been that these groups were bringing cases based upon the Bruen decision but rather that the NRA had failed to follow up on its own win. Smaller organizations like SAF and FPC are always nimbler and inertia is always a problem with a larger, more bureaucratic, organization like the NRA. The smart thing would have been to give support to the nimbler organizations by either being co-plaintiffs or even funders of their efforts instead of just whining about it.

Everyone and every organization wants to get the credit for a win. That is understandable. However, is it more important to get the credit or get the win for firearm rights and freedom?

I know where I stand.

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No Comment

June 21, 2023 by 2 Comments

The gun control industry is always pushing for new laws and regulations. You would think that they would also be interested in seeing existing laws being enforced as well as seeing equal justice under the law for “gun crimes”.

Given the release yesterday of news about Hunter Biden’s plea deal regarding his lying on the Form 4473 about his drug use, you would think that the major players such as Everytown, Giffords, and Brady would have something to say about it. Biden and prosecutors agreed to a Pretrial Diversion Agreement whereby the felony charge is dismissed if he complies with the agreement.

It seems that the gun control industry did have stuff to say yesterday but none of it involving the President’s wayward son.

Everytown said the shootings on Juneteenth highlighted the need “for action on gun violence (sic)”. On Twitter, they talked about stuff like so-called safe storage laws, urged the Senate to not to vote against Biden’s pistol brace ban, and touted the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. Nothing was said about Hunter Biden nor was anything said about how an African-American mom was facing a probable 2-year sentence for the same crime as Biden.

Moving on to the Cult of Personality known as Giffords, what did they have to say about Biden. Nothing. Rather they lauded the Oregon legislature for passing legislation against DIY firearms which they call “ghost guns” (sic). On Twitter, the only mention of Biden by them was to say they knew the President would make good on his promise to work against “gun violence” (sic).

Finally, there is Brady United. Their only press releases were to say they are suing a gun store in Michigan regarding a straw purchase and that they have a new initiative to “harness ad agency and media company talent” to change America’s “gun culture narrative.” Herr Goebbels was not available for comment on the new initiative. Their Twitter feed had nothing about either Biden but a few posts on “Ask Day” which demands that parents ask other parents if they have firearms. Personally, I think they should be pushing for 100% tax credits for gun safes with no dollar limit but that’s just me.

I should note here that both the National Shooting Sports Foundation and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms issued strongly worded statements denouncing the plea deal. Both pointed out the failure of the Biden Justice Department to uphold the law when it involved the President’s son.

So to sum it up, when the gun control industry had a chance to speak out about the failure to keep a firearm out of the hands of a person under the influence of drugs, they punted. They did not want to upset their cozy relationship with the Biden Administration by casting any aspersions upon either Biden father or Biden son.

Hypocrisy today, hypocrisy tomorrow, hypocrisy forever is their motto.

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Follow-up On Brady-Lowy Split

October 17, 2022 by 1 Comment

This is a follow-up on the departure of Jonathan Lowy from Brady United for Global Action on Gun Violence which I wrote about last week. As many have speculated, Brady United did not want to be viewed as a foreign agent according to a story in Politico. While I had asked Lowy himself many of these questions in an email, I never got a response.

Brady United COO Susan Lavington said they were reluctant to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

From Politico:

Brady, for its part, was hesitant to dive into work that would fall under the foreign influence law, its Chief Operating Officer Susan Lavington said. Lavington added that the group would remain “laser focused on America’s gun violence,” and did not plan to collaborate with or provide any funding for Lowy’s group.

Lowy, by contrast, wanted to go international in the fight for more gun control including lobbying for new laws.

In an interview, Lowy emphasized that he departed from the legacy nonprofit “amicably.” He said he views gun control as a means to address issues with cross-border drug trafficking and migration and plans to work with countries or others “affected by U.S. gun industry practices.”

“The guns that are trafficked across the border, is like the venom in the cartel,” he said. “That is the venom that makes them dangerous.”…

Lowy explained that the goal was to go beyond litigation, suggesting that the group would lobby around legislation and regulation of gun companies on behalf of foreign governments or people outside the U.S.

He declined to provide details about the group’s funding or its advisory committee at this point. But according to a filing with the Department of Justice, its board will include Dennis Henigan, another lawyer and Brady alum, and Malcolm Ruby, a lawyer who has worked with Brady on a lawsuit against the firearm manufacturer Smith & Wesson on behalf of victims of a Toronto shooting.

Forgive me for being skeptical about Lowy’s contention that more gun control, whether in the US or other places in the world, will stop either drug trafficking or illegal border crossing. It will not.

As for his latest lawsuit on behalf of the Mexican government against Arizona gun dealers, I seem to remember a little episode in the not too distant past. You may remember it. It was run by BATFE and DOJ during the Obama Administration. It was called Operation Fast and Furious. Or, as David Codrea and others have called it, Project Gunwalker where the BATFE “encouraged” Arizona dealers to sell to known straw purchasers so that the weapons would cross the border. Their goal was use that as the pretext for more gun control when traced back to the US from crime scenes. So sorry about the two Federal law enforcement officers killed along with untold numbers of innocent Mexican nationals.

If Lowy is interested in suing anyone on behalf of Mexico, perhaps he should start with former BATFE officials and former Attorney General Eric Holder. Since we don’t know who is funding Lowy’s new organization – though we can make some educated guesses – it is impossible to say how his financial backers might respond to that. More than likely, very negatively.

H/T: Rob R.

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Brady United And Jonathan Lowy Parts Ways

October 11, 2022 by 1 Comment

Jonathan Lowy and Brady United have parted ways. Lowy was formerly the Chief Counsel and VP Legal for Brady United. He headed their Legal Action Project and had been an attorney with them in various capacities for 25 years. Lowy’s biography has been removed from the Brady Legal section and no mention is made of him in their history section.

Lowy is now the President and Founder of Global Action on Gun Violence. They are a 501(c)(3) non-profit located in the District of Columbia. According to Lowy’s LinkedIn profile, this parting of ways took place in September.

The lawsuit filed Monday by the Government of Mexico against five Arizona gun stores was what tipped me to the change. Lowy was listed under that attorneys representing Mexico in this lawsuit along with a firm from Arizona and another firm from Austin, Texas. Unlike past lawsuits in which he was listed as being part of Brady, this lawsuit has his affiliation listed as the new Global Action on Gun Violence.

Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, Lowy and his new organization had to register with the US Department of Justice as foreign agents representing Mexico. As his organization doesn’t yet have a website, the registration filing (see below) provides the best clues about it.

The first name that pops out is Dennis Henigan who was the former Chief Counsel and one-time Acting President at Brady. He is now the VP for Legal and Regulatory Affairs at Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. Henigan is a member of the Board of Directors for Global Action on Gun Violence. He is joined on the board by a Josh Levy (chair) and Malcolm Ruby who is a Canadian attorney with a background on trans-border disputes.

Rounding out the team is Elizabeth Burke, COO, who was an attorney with Brady, and Lisa Proctor, CFO. Burke often served as co-counsel with Lowy on lawsuits brought by Brady.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out and what triggered the split. Was it because Lowy wanted to represent foreign governments in their lawsuits against the firearms industry? Or was Lowy being pushed out by Kris Brown as she did to former co-president Avery Gardiner?

Regardless, Global Action on Gun Violence now goes on the watch list. Since the fight for protecting the Second Amendment doesn’t have NFL refs ready to throw the penalty flag, we are on our own to prevent getting blindsided.

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Against Guns, Against Self-Defense, or Both?

July 19, 2022 by 6 Comments

There was a shooting at the Greenwood Park Mall in Indianapolis, Indiana area on Sunday. Reportedly, the killer had hidden in the bathroom adjacent to the food court with a number of firearms in his backpack. As the mall was preparing to close, he entered the food court and killed three individuals as well as wounding two others. He might have killed more but he was stopped by 22 y.o. Elisjsha Dicken who was legally armed. Mr. Dicken was legally carrying concealed without a permit as was his right under Indiana’s recently passed permitless carry bill.

While the mall was posted as a so-called gun free zone, they have no force of law in Indiana. It would only be an offense if the carrier was asked to leave and refused. In that case, the concealed carrier could be arrested for criminal trespass.

Even though the mall was posted against carry by its owners the Simon Property Group, they had this to say about Mr. Dicken.

We are grateful for the strong response of the first responders, including the heroic actions of the Good Samaritan who stopped the suspect.

Contrast this dignified response with that of two of the leaders of the gun prohibition industry: Shannon Watts and Kris Brown.

First, Mrs. Watts who resided in the Indy area for many years until she left for more progressive pastures in the People’s Republic of Boulder and thence to California. She later deleted it.

And now Kris Brown, president of Brady United, who referred to Mr. Dicken as a “vigilante”.

Many on the progressive Left believe that government should hold the monopoly on violence. In other words, self-defense on behalf of yourself or others would be against the law and that any defense of a person should come from agents of the state, i.e., the police. If you respond like Mr. Dicken, then you are just as culpable in the eyes of the law as the killer.

Michael Bane discussed this at length in his MBTV On The Radio podcast last week. His example was that of the bodega worker who was being charged with first degree murder for protecting himself against a felon out on parole. This episode is well worth a listen.

We know that Mrs. Watts and Ms. Brown are anti-gun. It also appears that they are against self-defense. I am of the belief that as elitists, they fear firearms in the hands of the great unwashed. In other words, thee and me. They want the monopoly of violence – and the tools with which to secure it – to be in the hands of the state. This fits in directly with what Chairman Mao’s speech to the Chinese Communist Party said in 1938.

Every Communist must grasp the truth, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party… All things grow out of the barrel of a gun.

The founders of the United States, by contrast, were greatly influenced by the works of English philosopher John Locke. He was a proponent of natural law. One tenet of natural law is that you have a natural right to life and you have a right to defend this life.

From Locke’s Second Treatise on Government, Chapter II, Section 16:

 it being reasonable and just, I should have a right to destroy that which threatens me with destruction: for, by the fundamental law of nature, man being to be preserved as much as possible, when all cannot be preserved, the safety of the innocent is to be preferred: and one may destroy a man who makes war upon him, or has discovered an enmity to his being, for the same reason that he may kill a wolf or a lion; because such men are not under the ties of the commonlaw of reason, have no other rule, but that of force and violence, and so may be treated as beasts of prey, those dangerous and noxious creatures, that will be sure to destroy him whenever he falls into their power.

Most countries of the world, whether they be communist, socialist, capitalist, authoritarian, democratic, or some other variant, do not recognize the individual’s right to self-defense. It doesn’t matter whether you are in China or Canada, the monopoly of violence remains in the hands of the state.

The United States, however, does recognize an individual’s right to self-defense. Whether by common law or codified law, it is a right recognized in all 50 states plus the District of Columbia. This is true even in the most progressive of states.

That Mrs. Watts and Ms. Brown reject the right of self-defense puts them, not us, outside the mainstream. It is a right that must be defended at all costs because without it we are slaves.

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Tweet Of The Day

August 20, 2021 by 2 Comments

It seems that Everytown Law and the Brady United are trying to get the Federal Trade Commission to come down on Smith & Wesson for false advertising. You can read their letter here.

However, as Rob Romano of the Firearms Policy Coalition points out, their argument might backfire on them elsewhere. That said, neither Everytown nor Brady have any problem with hypocrisy.

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It’s Called The Constitution

August 3, 2021 by 3 Comments

The Orange County Chapter of Brady United has their panties in a wad because Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC11) had a firearm in his carry-on when going through TSA security and wasn’t arrested. He asked them to hold the firearm for him until he returned and they did. If you read the whole story, you will see this happened to others and they were not arrested either.

One reason that Rep. Cawthorn was not arrested is called the US Constitution. Specifically, Article I, Sec. 6.

It states, part:

The Senators and Representatives shall receive a Compensation for their Services, to be ascertained by Law, and paid out of the Treasury of the United States. They shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.

I guess it is no surprise that a chapter of Brady United is ignorant about Article I of the Constitution given their intentional ignorance of the meaning of the Second Amendment to the Constitution.

In full disclosure, Madison Cawthorn is my representative and I have given him a campaign contribution. It wasn’t much but I did get a personal call from him thanking me for it.

H/T Sean S.

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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.