Month: February 2009

NRA Members Vote – or Do They?

I’m doing this guest post because I know Sebastian is busy this morning, and he asked me to post.  Last spring, I did a couple of posts on my old blog about random facts on NRA voting.  It was timed to the Annual Meeting since that’s where such announcements are made.  However, I think these random facts and figures are far more relevant now than in May after all the ballots are cast.  In light of that, I’ve now made pretty charts that, in some cases, make it easier to visualize the trends – or lack thereof.

nravotescast06-08For a little bit of background on this data, the 2006-2007 sources are the annual meeting reports from the previous year that I managed to hold onto after recent NRA meetings.  The 2008 data was scribbled very quickly during the meeting in Louisville.

As you can see, during the last few years, voting member populations have remained quite stable.  Even though we know through anecdotal evidence that NRA membership was rising as the threat of a Democratic presidency rose, the number of voting members didn’t change substantially.  Based on this very limited data, we can reasonably assume that the biggest changes NRA sees in its membership are the folks who join for a year or two and then likely forget to renew or refuse to renew because their free hat didn’t arrive fast enough.  If you stay long enough to become a voting member, you’ll likely stay active for a long time.

nrapercentvotescast06-08When working with such large numbers, it’s hard to see in the charts what the trends are  in terms of voting.  But by doing the math and plugging the percentage of ballots cast into a chart, we can get a better idea.  I have no idea if the overall percentage of voting members is really on the rise.  By only looking at three years of data, it’s impossible to see a trend.  In 2006, there were few “celebrity” candidates, which may have lead to a depressed turnout.  But, 2007’s biggest “celebrity” name was Ollie North, and 2008 was Tom Selleck.  I would expect that Tom Selleck would generally be able to inspire more folks to return their ballots than Ollie.

While we wait for Sebastian to finish up his Board Member interviews, tomorrow I’ll do a post on how many people screw up their ballots – and the many bizarre ways they find to get it so very wrong.

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The Lion’s Den

Given the recent dominance of gun bloggers on the Examiner.com sites, it would probalby the last place I’d want to take an anti-gun stance.  Howard Nemerov gets to him first, it seems.  I would ask Mr. Mallowe to look at Pawlowski’s murder’s criminal record, and the various other high profile killers in Philadelphia which I’ve profiled, and seriously tell me the problem is with our gun laws.

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Pretzel Success!

Alton Brown’s pretzel recipe is not bad.  Compared to a genuine Philly soft pretzel, it is a bit different, but good in its own right.  Traditionally, pretzels are first boiled in lye.  This recipe uses baking soda.  It works, but makes a slightly different flavor, and doesn’t quite do as good a job with the hard outer shell.  But this looks good:

Home Made Soft Pretzels

They taste pretty good too.

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Some Impressive Guns

Head over to The Firearm Blog for a few, first the Gardiner Gun in .45-7o government.  It’s a beautiful looking replica that Special Interest Arms has created (more pictures here).  Interestingly enough, hand cranked firearms are not considered machine guns under the National Firearms Act, and so are regulated just like any other long gun.  I’ve always wondered a few things about crank guns legally.  For one, if you were to attach a drill motor to the shaft, you’d be guilty of possessing an illegal machine gun.  So do you have a constructive possession problem owning a drill and a crank gun?  Also, if you look at the federal definitions of rifles and handguns, a mounted firearm is neither designed to be fired with a single hand, nor fired from the shoulder.  How is a crank gun not an AOW?

Second we have more two and four bore guns.  These guns are huge:

When it was nearly finished and needed to be sighted in I got the pleasure of helping do that job. The 4 bore exerts 255 PSI at 32 FPS of felt recoil(if I remember the number correctly), and I can tell you that at 6′ 5″ and 240 pounds and being very experienced with big bore guns, it was still more than enough to push be back a quick two step. And after 2 shots left me black and blue for about 5″ around my shoulder area(part of that was because the rifle was built for a smaller statured person so it really didn’t fit me). But the owner of the 4 bore shot it once and sent it back to Steve to sell.

I get sore shooting my Mosin-Nagant over 60 or so rounds.  I can’t imagine what it feels like to shoot a gun that bruises you on the first shot.

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On Today’s Agenda

  • Bitter is baking some apple coffee cake
  • I have a strange desire to make home made soft pretzels.
  • I should really think about loading up some .44 Special for the IHMSA match next Sunday.  Field pistol with a .44 is tough.  The most I’ve been able to hit is 13 animals.  Most competitors in field pistol seem to prefer the .22 Hornet.
  • Next Saturday is also the next practical rifle match at Langhorne. Last time was murder on my knees having to drop from offhand standing to kneeling to prone repeatedly.  But I don’t know the course of fire.  I could use some .223 loaded up for that if I’m going to go.  If it’s 50 yards or under, the Wolf .223 I’ve been wanting to get rid of, which is crap for anything long range, is fine.
  • Finish watching Season 3 of The Office

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Poaching is Serious, But Not a Felony

There’s a proposal in Pennsylvania to make poaching a felony level offense under some circumstances.  I can’t agree with this:

House Bill 97, sponsored by House Game and Fisheries Committee chairman Edward Staback, proposes to do just that for a variety of wildlife violations. The 21-page bill would create felony-level offenses, with the possibility of imprisonment, for significant poaching activity. The bill, which was introduced and referred to the Game and Fisheries Committee on Jan. 28, has 23 co-sponsors, none of whom is a local elected official.

“This [bill] would elevate the punishment for those who willfully steal Pennsylvania’s wildlife resources to the same degree as any other major theft offenses,” said Carl Roe, Game Commission executive director. “Presently, such violations are classified as summary offenses, which are on par with a traffic ticket.”

The most it ought to be is a low misdemeanor.  One hangup the sponsor has is the fact that NRA would not back the bill with language in it to confiscate the firearms of poachers.  That has now been taken out.  I hope the NRA will not back this bill even without the language in it.  Anyone found guilty of felony poaching will have all their firearms confiscated for life, because they will become prohibited under federal law.

I don’t have a problem with certain, more serious poaching offenses being a low level misdemeanor, but not a felony.  Poaching is often something done by young people with poor judgement.  People shouldn’t have their lives ruined by it.

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Quote of the Day

From this Washington Times article:

Mr. Barnett’s dog barked at several of the women and he yelled at them in Spanish, “My dog is hungry and he’s hungry for buttocks.”

If the allegation is true, it is hilarious.  We’re happy Dave Hardy managed to get a mostly positive verdict for Mr. Barnett.  But regardless, I’ll be giggling over this quote for some time.

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Thinking About Conspiracies

Back to the Iowa National Guard issue for a bit.  My skepticism here of any broad plan to confiscate guns isn’t related to any general trust in government, or in Obama.  I think Obama would ban all firearms if he thought he could get away with it politically, and there are certainly a lot of folks in government who share that view.  But our government is not a secret cabal.  It’s made up of a lot of ordinary Americans who believe in a lot of the same things you’ll find among other ordinary Americans. In order to believe that the exercise in Iowa is intended as a test run for gun confiscation, you need to believe the following, all of which I find highly implausible:

  • The President and the Democrats have made plans for a widespread confiscation of firearms using the National Guard.  There are several problems with this.  For one, where’s the bill?  I can’t remember ever seeing a bill in Congress that goes this far.  So far the worst we have in this Congress is Congressman Rush’s licensing and registration bill. There’s lot of chatter about renewing assault weapons bans, gun show loophole, and various other stupid measures on The Hill, but no chatter about gun confiscations that I’ve heard of.  This must be a pretty tight conspiracy, considering all the staffers who would have to know, and who haven’t said anything about the Dems secret plans.
  • Why only the Iowa National Guard?  Where’s the training for the rest of the guard units that would need to be used for such a massive confiscation measure?   Where’s the bill authorizing the use of the guard in this manner?  Because under current law, it would be unlawful.
  • That the Adjudant General of the State of Iowa, and probably the NRA A-rated Governor that appointed him, is in on the conspiracy.  As best I can tell, this particular National Guard unit is not been activated into federal service.  If the unit has not been activated, they are under the command authority of the Governor of Iowa, through the Adjutant General’s office.  Now, the various state National Guards are administered through the National Guard Bureau at the Department of Defense, but they basically set standards, pay for the training and equipping of the various state National Guard units, and periodically review Guard units to assess their readiness to be called into federal service.
  • Obama has ordered the National Guard Bureau to start conducting exercises for weapons seizures.  In which case many people in that office would have to know.  The various people in that office would also have to apply pressure various state Adjudant General’s offices to conduct the training of their units for this measure.  All this without anyone leaking anything to the media.  I suppose it could be conducted under the guise of training for Iraq, but to be honest, if that’s the guise, that ends up being, in effect, what it will be for.  The military trains to do terrible things all the time, but mostly to people who deserve it.  I don’t doubt there are people who wish to turn the military to do terrible things to us, but would the military obey such orders?  The military made up of millions of individual ordinary Americans who take an oath to the constitution.

In order to really believe that this Guard Unit is training with the specific idea of confiscating arms from Americans, you’d essentially have to buy the notion that Obama is going to seize power and become a dictator.  Our system set up to distribute power among a large number of entities, thus making it harder for one person to demand control, or to secretly manipulate the system without someone talking.  If Obama wanted to confiscate guns through our current system of government, he’d have to put his cards on the table first, and so far, those cards haven’t appeared.

I find the prospect of Obama seizing dictatorial power highly improbable, and I doubt Obama would find enough willing to enforce his decrees.  I spent the past eight years listening to this from the left in regards to Bush becoming a dictator.  Well, Bush served out two terms and we had a peaceful transition of power as described by our Constitution.  Now it appears I’ll have to spend the next four to eight years (let’s hope four) listening to this crap from the right.  I have little faith in government as an entity, but I have strong faith that the system that defines our Federal Republic is one that makes it extraordinarily difficult for any one person to rule.

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