The AFL-CIO is doing a massive direct mailing to members to help cover up Obama’s atriocious record on gun control. They cite Obama’s endorsement by AHSA as proof that he supports our second amendment rights. One wonders whether they’ll tell their members about Obama’s endorsement by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Ownership. If the AFL-CIO would only expend this much energy on keeping anti-gun Democrats off their tickets, they might not find themselves in this situation where they have to lie to their members.
Category: Politics
Giving Us All a Bad Name
Police have picked up a man who critically injured another motorist in a shooting on the Schuylkill Expressway:
Squillaciotti does have a permit to carry a firearm and can legally own guns in his home, police said. Authorities are still investigating whether all the guns confiscated, including a Russian SKS rifle, are legal.
I hope they throw the book at him. This guy should not be walking the streets after what he’s done.
John Lott’s Op-Ed in the Inky
John Lott points out Obama’s real record on guns. I actually worry in the Philadelphia media market, that could help more than hurt. We need to get that message into Northeastern Pennsylvania, and out west.
Credit Card Fraudsters for Obama
Apparently there’s an incident of a fradulent donation being made to Obama’s campaign. So people are stealing Credit Card numbers for Obama now?
Snowmobiles in New Hampshire
Looks like Bruce attended a rally this weekend with Todd Palin. In other news, I had no idea that you could ride snowmobiles across water.
Sportsmen for McCain Rally Footage
The rally was, I would say, a success. It was attended by a few hundred people, which I think was pretty good for an event in a remote part of Berks County and which didn’t feature either of the candidates. This video is of Aaron Hobbs, the National Director of Sportsmen for McCain, who I had the pleasure of hosting for the weekend:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRSHj85sysc[/youtube]
The crowd Aaron was speaking to was certainly orders of magnitude larger than AHSA, which is alluded to in his speech. My basic message is: don’t believe the polls. Obama spent his weekend in Philadelphia while McCain was sending surrogates to the southeastern part of the state. That tells me that both McCain and Obama’s internal polling is showing the race as a dead heat, and that Obama’s polling is telling him his support in Philadelphia needs to be higher. Don’t give up — this is still winnable. Pennsylvania will be a key state in this election.
This won’t be our last event. We’re working on getting a table for yet another gun show up in Allentown. This is again, out of our district, but it’s bound to draw a lot of folks from this area. We also really need to bolster NRA endorsed candidates, now including John McCain, in the northeastern part of the state. Lehigh County is close enough that we can make a contribution, and still do the work we need to do for our own district. There will be no break until Barack Obama is a distant memory.
Hearing Tomorrow
Meleanie Hain will have her hearing tomorrow to appeal her revocation of her License to Carry by the Lebanon County Sheriff. My previous comments on the matter a few weeks ago don’t affect my desire to see Ms. Hain prevail in her case. Whether or not it’s the best public relations strategy I think is debatable, but the law is not, and she should get her LTC reinstated.
More Fighting with Allentown
But Pawlowski responded that the new state law would still leave police the difficult job of proving that a straw purchaser was lying about losing the gun. That’s no different from the current system, ”which obviously isn’t working,” he said.
The mayors have acknowledged that only the state may regulate legal guns, but ”this law is about illegal guns,” Easton Mayor Sal Panto Jr. said. The mayors’ argument is that the guns become illegal once they’re lost or stolen.
They are arguing over HB 1845, which was passed last week, and I believe signed by Ed Rendell. It makes penalties stiff for falsely claiming to police that a gun was lost or stolen, when it was really sold on the streets. The idea that this isn’t a law regulating the possession of firearms, which is preempted by state law, is absolutely abusrd. The gun might become an illegal gun, but the possession of it by the person that was victimized was not illegal, and regulation of that possession is strictly a matter of state, and not local law.
LA Times Not Liking Endorsement
The LA Times isn’t liking the NRA endorsement of McCain:
Even during the presidential campaign, he hasn’t ruled out “common-sense” efforts to lower the murder rate in big cities. That’s anathema to the NRA, which wants no one to abridge gang members’ right to slaughter one another.
Even if the NRA is right about Obama, he’s still not going to take Americans’ guns away. By striking down Washington’s handgun ban in June, the Supreme Court assured that it will be very difficult for the government to forbid gun ownership by law-abiding citizens in the future. It’s unclear whether the NRA cares; having won its 2nd Amendment battle, it’s now out to block any restriction on gun freedom, even the freedom of felons and the mentally ill to buy guns. There are dangers in such extremism, and they’ll become clearer as the body count rises.
Nothing to see here. Please move along. Pay no attention to what the gun loons think and get out there and vote for The Lightworker.
Grassroots Efforts
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.