Guns – Page 797 – Shall Not Be Questioned

How Suburban Townships Like to Waste Money

Lower Makefield Township, in my area, has a deer problem.Â 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.Â Â 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?Â 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.Â Congratulations to supervisors Maloney and Smith for following the old adage about gift horses and mouths, and voting to save taxpayers some money.Â 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.Â They won’t miss.Â An arrow will kill a deer just as surely as a bullet will.Â 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.Â It turns out that, while it is incorrect, it wasn’t a mistake.Â 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. Jimâ€™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.Â It was correct when it was written, but became incorrect through circumstance.Â I think this is something that the Board should reconsider.Â 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.Â No doubt this confusion is depriving some members of a vote, and a concern of that nature deserves to be taken seriously.

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.Â 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.Â 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.

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. Iâ€™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.Â I think I speak for a lot of American gun owners when I tell you “vaffanculo! vai in culo!”Â 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.Â We know that better than you.Â And furthermore, the Second Amendment has nothing to do with either of those things.Â 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.Â 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.Â Antonio Maria Costa is clearly just trying to do his alma mater proud.Â Though, he got his Ph.D from here.Â Not much if a difference, really :)

I Never Listened to Him Anyway

I’m not really a big fan of Rush Limbaugh.Â 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.Â 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.Â I sincerely hope that Rush Limbaugh fell for it too, rather than that he actually supports their anti-hunting, anti-farming animal rights agenda.

Chinese AR-15 Knockoff

The Canadians are currently able to get their hands on these.Â It continues to amaze me that Canada has less stringent importation laws in regards to firearms than the United States.

Ten Reasons to Attend the Blog Bash

Here are ten reasons you should consider going to Phoenix to the NRA Annual Meeting and hang out with some of us bloggers.

Cowboy Fast Draw at GBR IV

Mr. Completely gives us an overview of what Cowboy Fast Draw is all about.Â He’s planning an event at GBR IV where folks will get to try out this kind of shooting, which involves wax bullets propelled by shotgun primers.Â Looks like a lot of fun.

NRA Ballots – Did You Get One?

You’ve heard us talking about NRA voting for months, but what if you didn’t get a ballot? Do you think you should have received one? Are you pretty confident you’ve kept your membership up for 5 years straight with no lapses or upgraded/purchased a life membership in advance of the ballot mailing?

We just got word that someone who we sponsored as a life member upgrade didn’t receive a ballot even though he qualifies for one. Not good. If you are in the same boat, today is the last day to request a replacement ballot.

You need to call 1-800-672-3888, choose option 6, and then dial extension 3700. They will promptly send you a new ballot. You will need to return it ASAP since they need it in hand by April 26. Call today – don’t delay!

UPDATE: Nevermind. Apparently someone in the Secretary’s office is giving out false information. Yesterday was the deadline, regardless of what I was just told less than an hour ago by the same office about how they would process requests submitted today.

Of course, the guy who is now answering that extension also tried to convince me that more than 550 people work in the Secretary’s office and “any one of them could have answered the phone.” Um, no. I do NOT appreciate being lied to. There are not that many staffers in the Secretary’s Office, and their phone systems don’t randomly transfer a call to the Secretary’s Office to say, Competitive Shooting. Apparently, the Jim Land’s staff thinks I’m dumb enough to believe that calling a specific extension could get any random staffer to pick up – even the Federal Affairs staff in the DC office!

So then he lectured me on how tight they must run clean, tight elections and they can’t have any room for error. Oh, really? How about misstating to the membership about how many votes they have?

Yes, something I purposely chose not to bring to light earlier is how the division that handles elections incorrectly told the membership about how many people they could vote for depending on which section of the voting information they read. The ballot itself says you can vote for 26 people (25 regular seats, plus filling the rest of a term emptied by a resignation). However, as an observant commenter here noticed, on the page facing the ballot, they warn members they are only allowed to vote for 25 candidates.

You could say it’s a typo and no big deal. However, you can also say that given the typo is on the official report of the nominating committee, it’s a means of denying members their 26th vote. I guess it depends on how much you hate NRA as to how you see it. Considering that their biggest problem for disqualified ballots are people who vote for the wrong number of candidates, it’s not exactly a minor issue. (Last year there were almost as many disqualified ballots for the wrong number of votes as the difference between the last winner and first loser. In other words, enough to potentially swing an election.)

So, those clean, tight elections? Yeah, so much for that. Giving out false deadlines, denying a 26th vote to members, and then lying about how many staff are in your division…not clean nor tight.

Total Bans on Juvenile Possession

Professor Volokh takes a look at the issue of under-21 possession on possessing any firearm in New York City.

Would the right to keep and bear arms not fully apply to under-21-year-olds, the way some constitutional rights today don’t fully apply to under-18-year-olds (consider the right to sexual autonomy, the right to marry, the right to abortion, which could be limited through certain kinds of parental consent laws, and likely the right to bear arms itself)? Or does the right apply to all adult citizens â€” unless otherwise disqualified by reason of felony conviction or the like â€” under today’s age of majority, regardless of what the age of majority was at the time? Or has the right always extended to everyone 18 and above, regardless of the age of majority for other purposes?

I’m going to guess, as with most rights, some restrictions will be permitted while others will not.Â At the very least, I would imagine it would be unconstitutional to ban all juvenile possession of arms, for any purposes.Â Â But it’s a good question to start asking.