Bitter – Page 41 – Shall Not Be Questioned

The Hunting, Shooting, Squirrel-Cooking, Military Beauty Queen

I don’t even know where to begin in the awesome description of Miss Kansas, Theresa Marie Vail. Her beauty pageant platform is “Empowering Women: Overcoming Stereotypes and Breaking Barriers.” How does she do it?

Well, let’s pull out the highlights of the pageant resume: She’s a double major in Chemistry and Chinese. She’s a Distinguished Honor Graduate from the Army School of Ordnance and Army School of Health Science. She’s working on getting her pilot’s license, and she wants to be a dentist for the military. She founded the Miss Outdoor Girl brand and website, and she’s a spokeswoman for the Suburban Woodsman hunting company. Not surprising, she’s an expert marksman who can take out squirrels with her gun and wants to take a bear with her bow. Oh, and she runs all-girl archery clinics. She can skin her own deer, and then make a mean stew with squirrel and sauerkraut.

She only got into pageants less than a year ago when her commanding officer suggested that she was a fantastic role model for women. When the pageant found out that her talent going to be archery, they notified her of a “projectile” ban only 2 days before the pageant. The options she was provided? Suddenly find a new talent or just drop out. Her decision? Pull up Nessun Dorma on YouTube and learn it on her own with her only serious prior singing experience was in the high school choir. She won the state talent competition.

She’s making headlines today because she’ll be the first contestant to not hide her tattoos – a prayer and a military insignia. But her resume says so much more about the stereotypes she hopes to break.

What Are You Doing With Your Newly Discovered Enthusiasm?

By the comments posted on this blog, I’m assuming most people are as thrilled as we are with the Colorado recall results. With the new enthusiasm, I’m curious to know how people are thinking they might turn that into action in their own backyards. If you have ideas for how you might step up your own local election activism in coming months, please post. It would be interesting to see what kinds of races you guys think are winnable.

For myself, I plan on contacting a local mayoral race after my mother & grandmother go home from their visit next week. Why the local mayoral race? Because it’s winnable with some extra energy and resources, and it’s in opposition to a MAIG mayor.

In fact, all Pennsylvania gun owners who have a little extra spring in their step today might want to look at the local races on the ballot this November to see if there’s a MAIG opposition candidate who could use a hand distributing literature or putting together yard signs.

Senator Says MAIG Should “Fold It Up”

I didn’t realize that one of last night’s losing lawmakers in Colorado actually argued that losing even one seat was sign enough that Mayors Against Illegal Guns should just wrap it up and go out of business. Alas, she did.

If you live in area with a tempting target for Mike Bloomberg, then this is a worthy quote to share with them from a lawmaker who was promised she would be taken care of by the billionaire. The billionaire didn’t deliver. Joe Biden called these lawmakers, and not even Obama could save them in blue districts in a blue state.

The original reporter who printed the bold remarks by Sen. Giron is already in spin mode. While he said in his original article that the Bloomberg was taking the issue as seriously as Giron framed it, today’s message is that gun control voters have better things to do, like attend back to school nights for their kids. The implication, I guess, is that gun owners don’t have kids who they love enough to be involved in their education.

Attention NRA…

This story needs to be told at next year’s annual meeting.

â€œIâ€™ve never been politically active before,â€ Victor Head, the man behind Pueblo Freedom and Rights, tells me. â€œIâ€™ve never done anything beyond voting. I never went to rallies, never went to protests, never wrote a letter to a senator or anything like that. But as soon as these gun-control laws started being talked about, my brother and I were like, â€˜we should do something.â€™â€

Make that happen. Please. (Actually, I’m not asking that nicely. I’m kind of demanding.)

In the meantime, everyone should go read the whole story of a guy who just got concerned that his local lawmaker wasn’t listening to him.

Oh, and in case anyone needs a reminder that when women come into the movement, we really get involved, there’s this little note:

The six- or seven-person phone bank is almost exclusively staffed by retired women, each working from a cell phone. Running methodically down the lists of recall signatories, the callers politely ensure that each and every one has voted â€” and, if not, that they know where to go.

High School Rifle Teams Targeted

An Emmaus High School sports team went undefeated last year, but there’s no mention of the record in the yearbook. In fact, the fact that there was a school rifle team at all was left out. The photographer for the yearbook provided a photo to the staff, but the yearbook advisor is so far not answering questions from parents about why their children were left out of the yearbook while other teams were featured. It’s great that the parents are taking this issue all the way to the top and demanding public accountability for why the yearbook staff appears to be picking on some kids by leaving them out of the yearbook even after being provided pictures and a story.

I actually came across this story by chance when I was looking up the school because they are in need of a new rifle coach – pronto. They aren’t the only school in the area in need, as Freedom High School nearby also needs a rifle coach. If you know anyone who would be interesting in coaching a high school rifle team in the Allentown region, please shoot me an email and I’ll connect you with the people looking to help these teams out.

It would be a shame if the yearbook staff who may have decided that competitive shooters aren’t even worth acknowledging as their fellow students won by not only successfully ignoring the team’s existence, but then also got to celebrate the fact that the team was forced to disband.

Waiting Periods are Back

It looks like Washington, DC wants to institute new waiting periods. The reason?

â€œThey canâ€™t be responsible for themselves, as well as the person doing the work on them,â€ [Council member Yvette M. Alexander] said. â€œWeâ€™re making sure when that decision is made that youâ€™re in the right frame of mind, and you donâ€™t wake up in the morning .â€‰.â€‰. saying, â€˜Oh my God, what happened?â€™â€

The new waiting periods are for tattoos and piercings. The people cannot be trusted to make decisions with their own bodies, so the government must restrict it.

I love how the tattoo artist interviewed notes that if the concern is regulating regret, then they could just restrict serving clearly intoxicated patrons. Instead, the new regulations will likely drive business underground where they won’t even honor basic regulations that actually have to do with public health concerns. Everyone will be more at risk to health problems because the DC City Council wants to institute a waiting period to stop even perfectly sober people from being pierced or inked on a whim.

For what it’s worth, I’ve had multiple piercings done on a whim. When I decided that I regretted one, I didn’t need a government bureaucrat to solve the problem for me. I managed to allow the hole to close completely on my own without an overbearing nanny state holding my hand. I’m sure that somewhere a bureaucrat is weeping to know that a citizen managed to make a decision without them.

Just One Man vs the Entire NRA

You know what’s always fun in politics? A little class warfare. Okay, it’s not really fun, but it does work for quite a few low information voters.

And while NRA could only afford to spend about $5.72 per member on lobbying, PAC spending & contributions, and direct campaign contributions during the last campaign cycle, Mike Bloomberg spent nearly $26 million himself. If you do much in the way of trying to motivate voters who aren’t the most active, that’s a great little fact to drop.

Colorado Recall Elections Under Way

If you’re in one of the Colorado districts, or you’re nearby and have been on the ground locally, then please let us know what you’re seeing. Those of us in other Bloomberg target states are watching to see how this plays out.

On one hand, high turnout of actual voters to the polls seems like a good sign for us since that indicates a particular motivation. So, yay!

On the other hand, there are already people asking questions about sketchy ballot drop-offs that they claim aren’t right.

I don’t know enough about the details that were actually decided on for this election since it seems like every little aspect has been litigated and often decided from the bench or on a whim to know whether the claims in the video are truly a concern or not. Hopefully, it’s nothing. But it does go to show that people from both sides will likely be all over this race to squeeze out every single vote.

Pennsylvania Politics Gets Worse for Gun Owners

If you’re a gun owner in Pennsylvania, you need to be worried about 2014. You need to be very, very worried. Gov. Tom Corbett was amazing about putting down all talk of getting Pennsylvania to pass more gun control back in December that would bring us closer to the nightmares of neighbors New York and New Jersey. But his poll numbers are in the toilet, and the Democrats smell lots of blood in the water.

That wouldn’t be the end of the world if we had a serious pro-gun Democratic candidate, but we don’t.

Today comes news that a Bloomberg ally currently serving with MAIG has taken the legal steps to announce a run for governor. So far, every MAIG mayor in Pennsylvania who has tried running for higher office has lost. However, that doesn’t mean that trend will continue. I mean it was the supposedly pro-gun middle of the state that really ran up the numbers for Attorney General Kathleen Kane who has been doing everything she can to screw with reciprocity agreements for concealed carry. She also refuses to back any pro-Second Amendment briefs on federal cases.

However, the other issue is that the alternatives aren’t looking good, either. The leading candidate is F-rated Rep. Allyson Schwartz. There is no gun control idea she hasn’t backed – banning many semi-autos, effectively closing down gun shows, magazine bans, mandating “smart guns” that don’t exist – you name it, she’s backed it. She has no apologies for these positions, and she thinks she can win Pennsylvania on such a platform. She might be right.

Some other names in the running include Katie McGinty who is reportedly running on a “tighter gun control” platform, and Tom Wolf who is a possible slight improvement running on only “some gun control.”

The sad part is seeing just how much the Pennsylvania media will do to try and cover up any extreme positions on this subject so that it can never be a controversy. In 2010, a major local political news site at the time reported that the Democratic gubernatorial candidate was on the “right flank” of the party on guns and supported gun rights. A look at his policy proposals actually showed he was more extreme than even many F-rated lawmakers out of Philly.

It’s up to gun owners to spread the word about these candidates. Unfortunately, I’m not sure they are that excited to do it over the course of the next 14 months. Too many times, we hear people who don’t take the threat seriously because the GOP holds the House and Senate, too. Unfortunately, when we are losing seats in these chambers, they tend to flip from A to F-rated. When the switch is finally flipped in Pennsylvania, there’s a very good chance that the transition to New York & New Jersey-style laws will not be gradual. It could happen very quickly.

Firearms Law & Second Amendment Symposium

NRA-ILA has announced their 2013 Firearms Law & Second Amendment Symposium registration, and I wanted to suggest it to those who are in the Denver area.

I’ve been to a few of these, and they are always very interesting. Last year’s event in Philadelphia got me ridiculously excited for Prof. Nicholas Johnson’s forthcoming book and tipped me off to a great resource for either research or general amusement in reading historic California papers.

The event is scheduled for Saturday, October 12, 2013 at the University of Denver from 9-4. Parking, food, beverages, and materials are all free. Yes, this entire event is free. And I promise that you’ll learn something of interest. Registration is required, so clear your calendar now.

And who knows, you might even be protested by people opposed to even allowing a conversation about firearms.