According to Mayor Jeremiah Healy, NRA is the sworn enemy of Jersey City. Now, I’ve been to more than a few NRA Board Meetings by this point. I can confidently report that at no time have I ever heard Wayne LaPierre, Chris Cox, or John Sigler get up and take an oath swearing that Jersey City is an enemy of the National Rifle Association. But these are the kind of hyperbolic tactics we’ve become accustomed to from the other side.
Year: 2009
How Suburban Townships Like to Waste Money
Lower Makefield Township, in my area, has a deer problem. Since the Township Supervisors were soliciting bids, a group of archers from my club put in a bid to reduce the deer numbers through bow hunting, rather than sharpshooters.  Last night, the Lower Makefield Board of Supervisors voted to stick it to the archers, and go with the “professional” sharpshooters:
Supervisors Pete Stainthorpe, Teri Appelson and Greg Caiola voted to award White Buffalo Inc. of Moodus, Conn., a $59,900 contract to conduct the sharp shoot. Board chairman Matt Maloney and Ron Smith voted no on the motion. They agreed a hunt was necessary, but favored a proposal from a local group called Big Oak Whitetail Management for an archery hunt that would have cost a maximum of $15,000.
Get that Lower Makefield residents? Your township supervisors just voted to spend 45 thousand dollars of taxpayer money to hire professional sharpshooters when bow hunters were willing to do it for a fraction of the price. Congratulations to supervisors Maloney and Smith for following the old adage about gift horses and mouths, and voting to save taxpayers some money. What made them go with the more expensive bid?
Stainthorpe, Appelson and Caiola all said they felt a sharp shoot would be the quickest, most effective and most humane way of reducing the township’s deer population. They feared the possibility of deer shot with arrows suffering for prolonged periods, or at least longer than they would if shot with a rifle.
I’ve seen our archers shoot. They won’t miss. An arrow will kill a deer just as surely as a bullet will. If the Pennsylvania Game Commission finds bow hunting sporting and humane enough to have a season for it, why isn’t it good enough for the Lower Makefield Board of Supervisors?
Update on NRA Board Elections
Yesterday Bitter got relatively steamed by her treatment by someone in the Secretary’s Office, and talked about an election related mistake on the ballot. It turns out that, while it is incorrect, it wasn’t a mistake. Someone at NRA explained it thusly:
The 30 BOD candidates with instruction to vote for not more than 25 is the Nominating Committee Report. It is Board Policy that the Nominating Committee Report be printed in the Ballot issue of the magazines. The Nominating Committee Report cannot be changed, no matter what happens between the time the Committee makes its report and the ballots are printed. The Nominating Committee gave its report before Jim Supica resigned from the Board. Jim’s resignation is the reason we are electing 26. The 26th highest vote getter will fill his unexpired, one-year term.
So basically, they were required by policy to print the wrong information. It was correct when it was written, but became incorrect through circumstance. I think this is something that the Board should reconsider. Either it needs to allow for changes that are matters of fact, or the Nominating Committee needs to take care not to include information in its report that might change between the time they make the report, and the time the ballots go out to membership. No doubt this confusion is depriving some members of a vote, and a concern of that nature deserves to be taken seriously.
Troll Problems
Looks like Tom King is having some issues with anti-gun trolls over on his blog: “The anti-gun posters to this blog are the rudest most ill mannered people I have ever encountered.” It happens to every blogger eventually. I used to believe in a relatively free and unfettered exchange, but no longer. I enjoy the exchange of ideas, but not so much the exchange of barbs.
Did You Receive Your NRA Ballot?
In my previous post about NRA’s Board Elections, at least two comments indicated that people who knew themselves to be verified voting members did not receive ballots at all this year. Now, two wouldn’t be a big deal. But this whole thing started when a friend of Sebastian’s didn’t get his ballot either. It’s completely anecdotal, but that does seem like an awful large percentage of confirmed voting members I know.
But then I started thinking back, and I never received my first ballot, either. I received credentials to vote on the floor at the Annual Meeting, but when I looked in the magazine back at home, I had no ballot. (I didn’t look for it before because I didn’t think I had been a member for 5 years yet.) My mother didn’t get her first ballot, either. We knew she had been a member longer than I had, yet they still weren’t sending her anything. This leads me to wonder about the scale of this problem.
If you absolutely know you were a fully paid life member before March 27, 2009 or had completed 5 years of membership with no lapses of more than 30 days by that date, could you please leave a comment in this post if you did not get your ballot either in the NRA magazine, or by first class mail if you joined after the magazine went out, but before the March deadline? If you know someone, send them this way to comment. I realize this isn’t a scientific survey, but I’m trying to get an idea of how large the problem.
The Board of Directors helps guide the overall priorities of the organization, so it is important. Not to mention, a good director can help NRA accomplish goals without the investment of staff time, freeing them up to work on other things. A quality director will ask tough questions when needed and voice concern or offier praise when appropriate. When you consider how few people vote in these elections, and the tight races at the bottom of the ballot, 5,000 ballots mishandled could result in a radically different tally. If it really is a problem, it should be solved.
Quote of the Day
That’s easy: Bush’s “Bailout†of $700 billion in TARP funds, followed by Obama’s “Bailout Expansion†of something on the order of an addition a trillion, with more to come. The demands that come along with this money, whether it goes to banks, auto manufacturers or state treasuries, looks like the Federal government essentially seizing control of anything and everything.
All this happened FAST.
And our normally somnolent population finally woke the hell up.
I sure hope he’s right, but suspect he is. For those of us who believed in smaller and less intrusive government, we suffered through an abusive relationship with the Bush Administration for eight years. Obama was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. This is not the change we were looking for.
Hello, My Name is Tom, and I’m Packing
A New Jersey man learns the hard way that robberies in South Carolina don’t go down the same way they do in New Jersey. This guy certainly isn’t the first.
Philadelphia Politicians At It Again
The state representatives that represent the City of Philadelphia are introducing three bills in Harrisburg:
The first bill would make it illegal for anyone charged with a felony, but not yet convicted, to buy, transfer, sell, or possess a firearm.
The second would prohibit anyone convicted of a felony drug offense as a juvenile from buying or owning a gun as an adult.
The third bill would require a mandatory one-year sentence for carrying a gun without a license. It was first introduced in 2007, but failed to move out of committee.
The first one is a non-starter. We don’t limit constitutional rights based on mere accusation of a crime. There is not enough due process here.
The second I’d be more amiable to, if I thought it would actually do anything to reduce crime for those intent on committing them. Just because a gun control law might be constitutional doesn’t mean it will work. And just because we pass something, doesn’t mean it will be enforced, which brings me to three.
Three is a no go because the city refuses to use the laws it already has. We’ve clearly documented on this blog the City’s utter failure to prosecute criminals who carry firearms illegally.
Enforce the laws you already have before you ask for more. I am not in favor of giving Philadelphia more laws it won’t use against criminals. If the problem is judges, city politicians need to campaign to get new ones. The answer is not to continually blame Harrisburg. Pennsylvania has expanded its gun control laws significantly in the past several decades, and the city has refused to use any of them to actually go after criminals. I think that’s a big deal, and it’s not being talked about, but it’s the the first conversation that should be had before new laws are discussed. Philly politicians keep saying the Commonwealth’s gun control laws are inadqueate. How would they know if they won’t use them?
UN Calling for Further Restrictions
From Antonio Maria Costa, Undersecretary of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime:
I know that the last thing many Americans want to hear is a senior U.N. official telling law-abiding citizens to curtail their Second Amendment right to bear arms. I’m not doing that. At the U.N. we fully understand the fundamental importance of constitutional rights and respect for the rule of law.
Emphasis mine.
We especially encourage the debate on the issue of reinstating the 1994 U.S. ban on assault rifles that expired in 2004. And we support further debate within the United States on whether to close the gun show and private sale loopholes in existing U.S. laws, which create boundless opportunities for criminals to acquire illicit weapons. These legislative changes do not affect law-abiding hunters and sport shooters in any way.
No, Signore Costa, you don’t understand it. I think I speak for a lot of American gun owners when I tell you “vaffanculo! vai in culo!” You don’t get to tell us what is and isn’t in our constitutional tradition, and what will and won’t affect hunters and sport shooter. We know that better than you. And furthermore, the Second Amendment has nothing to do with either of those things. Both hunting and shooting are an incidental side effects to the enjoyment of a right which you claim to understand, but clearly understanding nothing about.
That’s the end of the discussion. If you don’t like it, you can go back to Italy, and take the rest of your internationalist unaccountable bureaucrats, who are currently wasting some of the most valuable real estate in my country, with you.
UPDATE: Perhaps I should not have been so harsh. Antonio Maria Costa is clearly just trying to do his alma mater proud. Though, he got his Ph.D from here. Not much if a difference, really :)
I Never Listened to Him Anyway
I’m not really a big fan of Rush Limbaugh. I respect him for the success he’s had as the undisputed King of his medium, and generally think he’s been a positive influence on the conservative movement. But personally, I never really dug conservative talk radio.
Now I’m glad I don’t listen to him, if he’s going to make allies with radical anti-hunting groups that disguise themselves. I sincerely hope that Rush Limbaugh fell for it too, rather than that he actually supports their anti-hunting, anti-farming animal rights agenda.