Our Saturday breakfast with the Sportsmen for McCain director didn’t turn out as well as we had hoped. We wanted to keep the group small, so we sent out our invitations to key people in the shooting sports and club culture in Southeastern Pennsylvania. I had more than 10 RSVPs, but only one person showed up. There’s one thing about grassroots involvement you should take to heart: keep expectations low. Sometimes you will have failures. In fact, most of the times I think you will have failures if you set your expectations too high.
Later that night was the ANRPC Annual Banquet. Stephen Halbrook was the keynote speaker. I got an autographed copy of his book, The Founders Second Amendment (if you don’t have a copy, get yourself one). I heard his next book will be on Nazi Gun Control. I am very anxious to read that, since there’s a lot of good and bad information out there regarding that topic, and it would be good to have a definitive scholarly work on it. I also ran into CemeteryCAS at the dinner, and reader and activist Paul Raynolds. Bitter, Bitchy Mom and I were seated with Scott Bach, who is president of ANJRPC, Matt Carmel, developer of the Palm Pistol, and very nice guy, BTW, and New Jersey Assemblyman Richard Merkt, who hopefully will run for governor, since I think he’s probably one of the few politicians left in the Garden State who understands the problems, and wants to do something about them. Oh yeah, I also won a safe in a raffle! I seem to be on a roll with Friends’ dinners. Not a big safe, just a little pistol safe. But hey, I never win anything, except at Friends dinners it seems. Interestingly, no guns can be raffled at the New Jersey Friends of the NRA dinners because raffling a firearm is illegal in New Jersey. “Firearms” and “Illegal” are often two words that go together in New Jersey, like Ebony and Ivory.
Today was the Sportsmen for McCain Rally in Oley. I’ll have more from that later, but I got to meet Sam Rohrer (Pennsylvania State Representative – very pro-gun and NRA endorsed), Tom Corbett (PA Attorney General, also very pro-gun and NRA endorsed), Chet Beiler (GOP candidate for Auditor General), and Dave Batagllia one of the other active EVCs in the state out west. Turnout was a bit less than I had hoped for, but not low enough to be a disaster. You can’t expect too much when you don’t have the candidates there. I estimate about 250 people showed up. One woman there was the spitting image of Sarah Palin. I kid you not. I would have been fooled any more than 10 feet away. The Berks County GOP seems to have their act together, which is good. One of the speakers also indicated the campaigns internal polling for Pennsylvania has the race much closer than the polling organizations. I would imagine that’s the case, otherwise McCain and Obama wouldn’t both be dumping so much money into Pennsylvania. I’ll have some pictures and some video later.