The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State …
This is becoming a weekend pasttime, it seems. This time a cabbie interveined with a tire iron and the miscreants fled. They were caught, and are being charged as juveniles. I’m calling BS on that. If they are old enough to beat people, they are old enough to be tried as adults.
But yeah, what kind of paranoid freak would carry a gun in that city?
This year, NRA board candidate Scott Bach also decided to put together a video highlighting some of his work on behalf of gun owners in the last few years. Take a look at it, and I think you’ll see why we consider him worth your support.
If you’re an NRA voting member, you should have received your ballot magazine in the mail by now. If you did, then you can go right back to our endorsement post and fill out the little circles next to the names of all of those fine gentlemen.
However, I be a good number of you are about to start commenting and emailing that you never got your ballot this year! Type and rant away…please. Unless you belong to one of the following groups:
This isn’t the full list of exemptions, but it’s the overwhelming majority. I’m in this category because of the digital subscription.
Anyway, we all get our ballots by first class mail, and the first mailing is going out on February 1. So, provided Congress doesn’t say to hell with it and shut down the USPS, your ballot should arrive sometime shortly after this date. I presume that members in Hawaii get their ballots by first class mail because of the snail’s pace mail at other classes can take to get out there.
For anyone who has recently become eligible to vote or will become so before the “deadline” in mid-February, there will be another first class mailing towards the end of February.
If you are not in any of those categories and your February magazine has not yet arrived, give it a little extra time. It’s not impossible that mail is moving a little slower right now, as it has been for us for the last couple of months. I would say that if you still haven’t received it by February 4, give NRA a call and inquire. You will probably need to ask to speak with the Secretary’s Office about a missing ballot, but they may have procedures for their standard member number phone folks to handle it with so many different kinds of ballots now going out thanks to the digital subscriptions.
If you were having trouble accessing the blog earlier this evening it’s because I was installing a new firewall. Previously I had the machine serving the blog connected directly to the outside, and used firewall rules on the server to filter out the undesirable traffic. I decided to buy a little Linux-based appliance with a MIPS CPU that can handle my WiFi, VPN, and firewalling all in one unit. Previously I was using the ActionTek box that came with the FiOS, but I was becoming displeased with its capabilities.
The only question now is whether this little box can stand up to the torrent of traffic you get from an Instalanche.
I am almost always happy to see it when candidates for the NRA Board of Directors try new ways to engage with NRA members. There are certainly enough empty seats on the Board, and there are many who you simply won’t ever have the chance to engage with if you don’t live in their state.
Anyway, David Coy put this together for his 2011 run, but I think it’s an introduction worth sharing this year.
Looks like the legislature is considering giving the attorney general carte blanche to ban whatever ammo he or she wants. Also on the table is a proposal that would criminalize using a “defaced” firearm. But as is noted, the definition of that is so vague it could apply to a firearm that was refinished or subjected to ordinary wear or rusting.
Funny how other state legislatures seem to be able to define scratching off a serial number unambiguously, but Jersey can’t. They’ve been listening to the likes of Bryan Miller, who seems to have a goal to get more gun owners behind bars, for far too long.
TTAG has been promoting the Starbucks Buycott, which is greatly appreciated in terms of helping get the word out to a wide audience. One minor note, however: I’m not really on board with the paying with $2 bills. I’m not going to say it’s a bad idea, but nor do I think it’ll accomplish much in terms of influencing Starbucks. Corporate is the one that will make the decision about guns, and I can promise you what denominations people pay in isn’t among the things reported up through the chain of command. All paying in $2 bills is going to accomplish is making the person handling the money ask you for something else, or be annoyed they have to deal with an uncommon denomination. It’s not likely to percolate up to the decision makers. But Barron Barnett came up with a great variation on the two dollar bill idea that I think works:
Shove the 2 dollar bill in the tip jar. There will be 0 complaint for that. I can understand being annoyed if you were needing change. Taking their few remaining 1′s and giving them 2 dollar bills would be a PITFA.
Putting a 2 dollar bill in the tip jar and telling the Barista why would go a LONG way in putting a smile on their face.
I think that’s a pretty good idea, and I’ve actually done that to get rid of two dollar bills in the past. Everyone appreciates a tip, even if its in an oddball denomination. One thing I would encourage folks to do is take pictures of their receipts, post them online, and send a note to corporate along with a link to the receipt, telling them that you’re a gun owner, and you appreciate then staying out of the gun control debate. Don’t say you appreciate them being pro-gun or supporting the Second Amendment. The corporate guys at Starbucks don’t want to be pro-gun or anti-gun, and aren’t going to be comfortable being seen as either. What they want to do is sell more coffee, and a good way to do that is staying out of contentious political debates. What the Brady and NGVAC folks want them to do is take a stand, which is exactly what we don’t want them doing.
This is made of utter fail for our opponents Boycott:
Congratulations to the folks at NGVAC, you’ve likely succeeded in being salespeople of the year for Starbucks Coffee. If this number keeps going up, Starbucks isn’t just going to ignore you’ll, they’ll tell you to protest them again so they can see another boost in sales that day.
Yes, that’s 6600+ people, and the number just keeps going up. Last night it was at 5900.
We all probably recall the essay which outlined the distinction between the Wolves, the Sheep and the Sheepdogs, but every once in a while you run across someone that epitomizes that, and is able to articulate it in an interesting an engaging way.
This Dutch General is pretty obviously a sheepdog, and this kind of idea is certainly good to get in front of a TED audience. TED might be stuff that white people like, but that Video has 143,000 views. I watched this wondering what people like @CSGV and the “peace” movement generally think about statements like this?
Meanwhile, Oklahoma is becoming a vanguard state in the struggle to ban the use of aborted human fetuses in food products to be consumed by humans, a problem heretofore unknown by anyone, save that narrow demographic consisting of insomniacs who own shortwave radios.
My god, it’s like the Age of Reason never even happened.
I’ve been pondering if our elected leaders have never really been all that bright, but we could count on dead tree media to politely hide the worst of the idiocy from us, or whether we’re really on our way to electing potted plants.