I found out this evening that Duane Liptak, Executive VP of Magpul, has resigned from the NRA Board of Directors effective January 19th. Other than knowing he resigned, I don’t know his reasons.
Liptak was one of the good guys on the NRA Board in my opinion. He was stripped of most of his committee assignments in 2019. I don’t know whether he ever got any of them back.
More NRA Board of Directors are announcing that they’ve received notification of being removed from their prior committees. The latest is Duane Liptak. In addition to being a board member, he is the Executive VP of Magpul Industries as well as a veteran of the US Marine Corps where he served as both an infantryman and as a F/A-18 pilot.
From his Facebook post:
I’ve been out of the office, but I’m back now. Last year, I was chairman of the education and training committee, I was on military and veterans affairs, and I was on sport shooting and action shooting. I’ve repeatedly requested finance and legislative policy since I started my involvement with the NRA, and I have attended those meetings whenever I could. I guess I’ll have less schedule conflicts to worry about when attending other meetings since I’ve been stripped of all my formal committee assignments except action shooting. I guess at least Julie A. Golob still likes me. 😁 Despite a lot of effort on my part to promote the importance of the organization and remind folks of the capabilities of the NRA that we must preserve as we move forward, I have landed on the “naughty list”. This needs to get sorted out, now.
Duane is correct about his role in promoting the importance of the NRA. A quick Google search shows open letters from him as well as an op-ed stressing the role of the NRA in promoting and preserving gun rights.
You can see his committee assignment below.
I guess since Duane is assigned to at least one committee, he is only on the slightly naughty list unlike Tim, Allen, and Esther who are on the really naughty list. I’m not sure what he said to run afoul of Wayne and his toadies but he must have said something.
UPDATE: It was confirmed to me today that Tiffany Johnson was removed from the Outreach Committee. Given she is an attorney, a trainer with Rangemaster, a woman, and not the least a person of color, removing her from that committee in retribution for her open letter to the Board of Directors was both stupid and vindictive. As she says in her blog post about her service on the committee, her suggestions and comments were well received until “the letter”. Just when the NRA needs to be broadening its base and have the ideal person to help in Tiffany, they do something like this. Stupid, stupid, stupid!
Cam Edwards of NRA News interviewed Duane Liptak of Magpul yesterday after Gov. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) signed HB 1224 into law. Mr. Liptak is the Director of Product Management and Marketing for Magpul.
Mr. Liptak had a number of interesting comments during the course of the interview. First, Magpul will be going with a multi-state, multi-location manufacturing approach. While they haven’t released just where they are going, certain sites have already been selected. They plan a phased move out of Colorado with the magazine manufacturing being the first part of their company to move for obvious reasons.
When asked about their current employees and the impact the move will have on them, Mr. Liptak said that many of the current employees had expressed a desire to move with the company to the new locations. He seemed rather gratified by this loyalty of the employees to Magpul.
Magpul met with a number of state legislators during the fight against HB 1224. While Magpul presented facts and legal opinions as well as stressing the economic repercussions of the bill, this didn’t seem to make any headway with a number of the Democrats. Mr. Liptak noted that every time they went to the state capitol, they always ran into lobbyists from Bloomberg and MAIG. He said they were everywhere. It is a sad day when a New York billionaire can buy a western state legislature so easily. It reminds one of the railroad barons in Frank Norris’ The Octopus so dominated California of the late 19th century.
by