[Note: There are 4 suggestions for adding to the Write-In section of your ballot:
Phil Journey, Haysville, KS
Frank Tait, Wayne, PA
Rocky Marshall, Boerne, TX
and Fire Wayne, Fairfax, VA]
Tombstone, Arizona –-(Ammoland.com)- This could be our last chance to vote in an NRA Board of Directors election. Unfortunately, there’s not really anyone to vote for or anything they could do to save the organization. While there are a lot of relatively good to simply benign candidates on the ballot, there are none that I would expect to challenge the status quo, and there are several who are strong supporters of Wayne LaPierre, chief among them being current NRA President Charles Cotton. Continue reading NRA Elections 2023: LaPierre Wins – NRA Members Lose→
We found the text of a Resolution put forward by the NRA Finance Committee recently, and we believe, passed by the Board. We believe this to be an accurate copy of the resolution, but have not been able to verify it or other details with NRA HQ yet. Since almost everything done at NRA Board meetings these days is done in closed-door, Executive Session — binding Directors to secrecy — it’s difficult to keep up with their actions.
It seems, based on some of the language of this resolution, that it is, to a large degree, a CYA action, authorizing Wayne to do exactly what he’s been doing for years in direct violation of Board policy. Continue reading NRA Gift of Firearms Policy Resolution→
IRS Form 990 is required to be filed and publicly disclosed by nonprofits. It provides a useful look into an organization’s finances. The form changes some from year to year, so it can be confusing when making comparisons, but most of the same information is included each year, you just have to find it.
A couple of the files are split into two parts due to excessive size.
Brownells Polymer80 Frames For Glock-Style Pistols
U.S.A. –-(AmmoLand.com)- The BATFE has released a letter to FFLs and the public, “clarifying” their new rules regarding so-called “80% receivers,” which were adopted earlier this year. The general understanding within the industry has been that the new regulation had the impact of requiring “unfinished receivers” to be treated as “firearms” if they were sold together with the parts and tools needed to turn them into functional firearms. Continue reading ATF Shifting Goalposts Again on Firearm Receivers→
Tombstone, Arizona –-(Ammoland.com)- Mass murder is often a suicide by cowards who are afraid to go alone.
Such appears to be the case in the tragedy which unfolded on Tuesday, November 22, 2022, two days before Thanksgiving, when a Walmart night supervisor in Chesapeake, Virginia, walked into the store’s break room with a pistol and opened fire. Witnesses say he said nothing, just started shooting people. One employee who had just started working at the store said he pointed the gun at her and just told her to go home. He killed six others and wounded several more before turning the gun on himself and ending his own life. Continue reading Wait… He’s Not Allowed to Have a Gun in Walmart!→
[UPDATE 12/01/2022: The Second Amendment Foundation, along with The Firearms Policy Coalition, and several businesses and individuals, has filed suit in Federal Court against the magazine ban section of Ballot Measure 114, which is scheduled to go into effect on December 8. The suit calls for a declaratory judgment and injunctive relief to keep the ban from being enforced.
More information about the suit can be found in articles here on Ammoland.com, here and here.
The NSSF has now filed a suit as well.]
Tombstone, Arizona –-(Ammoland.com)- A popular Colorado Springs nightclub was the scene of another arrogant display of toxic masculinity this week, as a cisgender, straight, male Army veteran tackled, disarmed, and pistol-whipped a non-binary person half his age. When police arrived, they didn’t shoot the man, who was covered in blood, holding a gun, and sitting on the chest of his victim, instead, they tackled him, put him in handcuffs, and sequestered him in the back of a patrol car for over an hour as they sorted out the situation.
Then they just let him go!
Of course, the man I’m talking about is Richard Fierro who saved countless lives when he ran toward the gunfire and stopped a deranged attacker who had entered the club with a rifle and handgun, firing wildly, killing 5 and wounding some 19 others. Fierro is a former Army officer who served multiple tours in Afghanistan before leaving the service as a Major. He and his wife were enjoying a night out with their adult daughter and her boyfriend at the club, where a high-school friend of his daughter was performing in a drag show.
Even though there was no evidence to support it, the initial narrative being pushed by the legacy media and Democratic politicians who held that the attacker was a homophobic, transphobic, right-wing, ultra-MAGA Trump supporter, following through on all of the “hateful” rhetoric that they claim conservatives have been “spewing” about trans people and the LGBTQI+ community.
That narrative lasted for a couple of days until the alleged murderer’s lawyer announced that his client identifies as non-binary, with the pronouns “they, them” and the formal prefix of Mx., rather than Mr. or Ms. So the narrative quickly swung to the idea that the deeply disturbed assailant was bullied for their non-binary status, and was driven to shoot-up the nightclub by the relentless attacks on the LGBTQI+ community by heartless Republicans and right-wing fanatics, otherwise known as average Americans.
There’s also been a whole lot of talk on leftist and Democratic media and blogs, denouncing the “right” for disparaging and failing to embrace Richard Fierro as a hero. They claim that “right-wingers” are ignoring Fierro’s heroic actions because they disapprove of Fierro being in the club in the first place. The only supporting evidence I’ve seen offered for this bizarre claim, was one, an out-of-context tweet from a conservative asking why Fierro was at a drag show with his family, and a whole lot of tweets and comments from deranged wokesters asking suggestive questions about how the “right-wingers” feel about Fierro’s presence in the club, and their imagined disappointment that Fierro didn’t have a gun. Meanwhile, I’ve seen nothing but praise for Fierro and his actions from conservative media commentators and the conservative side of social media. The only “off-color” comments I’ve seen suggested that it was a lucky thing there happened to be a “real man” in the club that night.
The atrocity was immediately politicized, and the political polarization has continued unabated, with the two main points being to lay blame at the feet of Republicans and conservatives, and calls for swift action to enact stricter gun control laws.
What’s been thoroughly neglected by the mass media, is the fact that the murderer was a deeply disturbed young man from a deeply troubled and dysfunctional family. The same media that reported that he’d been involved in a standoff with police over threats to blow up his mother has lamented the fact that he was able to acquire the guns he used while skipping over the fact that he passed background checks to get those guns. Had he been tried and convicted of the felony charges that seemed to disappear, or if he had been involuntarily committed to mental treatment – and if those convictions/commitments had been reported to the National Instant Check System, he would have been flagged as a Prohibited Person. The media question why Colorado’s “red flag” law wasn’t employed to take the guns away from him, but fails to mention that “red flag” laws only take away guns and ammunition, with no provision for any sort of assistance with mental health treatment.
This young man needed help but didn’t get it. He clearly had been struggling to find his place in the world, but rather than find ways to get help to people like him, woke media and politicians prefer to criticize people like me for calling him a young man and referring to him as “him,” which they say is “hate speech” on my part.
That’s just the sort of idiotic intersectional BS that prevents real solutions from being found and implemented. We’ve had enough of the blame games and distractions. The problem isn’t guns, nor is it conservatives’ refusal to celebrate people’s sexual deviance from the typical (i.e., norm), and feed their delusions with made-up pronouns. The problem is society’s failure to provide the type of assistance that’s really needed, and one group’s constant insistence that political disagreements are tantamount to violence, which somehow excuses violence in response.
Richard Fierro is Unequivocally a Hero!
Everything we’ve learned about him indicates that he is an all-around great guy who cares about his family and his community and doesn’t draw BS lines and distinctions based on people’s political views or sexual preferences. When gunfire erupted, he hit the floor, then ran toward the threat and neutralized it. He has been incredibly humble about his actions and has continued to be strong and supportive in the face of significant personal loss, including injuries to his wife and daughter, and the murder of his daughter’s long-time boyfriend, a young man who had been a part of their family since middle school.
I don’t know or care what Richard Fierro’s political views might be. He could come out tomorrow with a statement calling for a ban on “assault weapons,” and I would still hail him as a hero, and relish the opportunity to buy the man a beer – or maybe buy a beer from him, as his family owns a brewpub in Colorado Springs. If you’d like to buy him a beer or show your support, as many in Colorado Springs, and from around the country are doing, you can visit their website at Atrevida Beer Company.
I have no doubt that Mr. Fierro and his family will appreciate and share your support with the same humility and grace they have demonstrated throughout this tragedy.
Illegal Votes are far more Dangerous than Illegal Guns
U.S.A. –-(AmmoLand.com)- Politicians in New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, California, Oregon, Washington, Chicago, and elsewhere, keep telling the world that their constituents – the people who elected them – are stupider, less responsible, less rational, less trustworthy, and more prone to violence than the people in other areas of the United States. And the voters in those states and jurisdictions keep reelecting them.
Is that proof that the politicians are right and their constituents are stupider than the rest of us out here in flyover country?
Twenty-five of the fifty states have enacted permitless, Constitutional Carry laws. Alaska started the trend in 2003 and Arizona and Wyoming followed suit seven years later. That’s a full half of the US states that now require no training, no special investigation, no fees, and no government permission slip for any adult (in most cases, over 21, but in some cases, persons over 18) to carry a loaded handgun concealed on their person in public. As a result, virtually everyone in those 25 states has been killed or seriously injured in road rage incidents, parking disputes, arguments with neighbors, impulsive suicides, and unintentional discharges.… Right?
The predicted bloodbaths didn’t happen, even though so many anti-rights politicians and gun control extremist groups warned that this would be the result in each state as each legislature debated the merits of adopting Constitutional Carry. They ignored the evidence of Vermont, Alaska, Arizona, and each of the states that followed their lead in adopting some version of the idea. They ignored the fact that, in Arizona, anyone from anywhere, who isn’t a convicted felon or otherwise prohibited from possession of a firearm, has always been able to put a loaded gun on their hip, as long as it, or its holster was visible, and since 2010, they’ve been able to legally conceal that gun and walk out the door, and still crime, suicides, and firearms stupidity didn’t shoot through the roof, but instead fell consistently until COVID and the riots of the “Summer of Love” started reversing an almost three-decade trend of declining violent crime.
States like Arizona were on the leading edge of the movement to recognize and restore rights, so there was some chance that the falling crime rates here were just some sort of weird aberration, and the results in other states would be different. But state after state adopted similar positions, and the results in state after state yielded similar results. In some places the data indicated that Constitutional Carry actually helped lower violent crime rates, but nowhere can it be said that adoption of Constitutional Carry produced any significant increase in any crime rates anywhere.
Now, with the clear evidence of 25 Constitutional Carry states, there’s no excuse for any politician to suggest calamitous results from liberalizing gun control laws. Still, that’s exactly what they do, over and over again.
In New York, when the Supreme Court ruled that their ridiculously strict and arbitrary permitting system for carrying a concealed gun was unconstitutional, Governor Kathy Hochul demanded, and got, new, even stricter laws for her constituents, indicating her belief that people in Vermont, Alaska, Arizona, and 22 other states, must be smarter, more responsible, more trustworthy, and less prone to violence than the people of her own state, whom she clearly believes are incapable of handling such responsibilities. Even though the people in all of those other states are able to safely and responsibly own and carry firearms without government mandates and supervision, she insists that her constituents would just start killing and wounding each other.
All I can conclude from her reelection is that she must be right, and the voters in her state must indeed be stupider than most. But then I look at my own state, where a slim majority of my fellow Arizonans just voted in a new governor who embraces the same sorts of elitist, government-knows-best, ideas that governor Hochul does, and I fear that there must be some sort of intelligence-sapping contagion going around, probably spread by legacy media. But at least Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s presumptive next Governor, hasn’t made a habit of telling Arizonans that we could never be trusted with the rights and responsibilities that the citizens of other states have proven to have no problem handling.
I recall a Wisconsin politician arguing against the liberalization of their gun laws, by pulling out statistics showing that Wisconsin residents consume more beer, per capita, than the residents of any other state, and therefore were likely to get drunk and shoot each other, if given the opportunity. Similarly, we often hear politicians who oppose lifting restrictions on firearms on college campuses, and support for bans on 18 to 20-year-olds from purchasing guns, ranting about how reckless and irresponsible young people are, and how widespread drug and alcohol abuse is on college campuses. These same politicians are often leading the charge to lower the voting age to 16, allow a 14-year-old to get an abortion without parental consent, and allow 4-year-olds to choose to be the opposite sex. I just saw a video clip of Vice President Kamala Harris giving a speech a few years ago, in which she said, talking about 18 to 24-year-olds; “What else do we know about this population? – They’re STUPID!” Which is interesting when you consider that this age group voted for Biden-Harris in huge numbers. Is that proof that she’s correct in her assessment?
It’s worth noting that, in spite of promises from the Bloomies, the Bradys, and the Demanding Mommies, that politicians who approved Constitutional Carry in their states, would pay a price at the polls, every Governor who signed a Constitutional Carry law and was up for reelection this year, won handily, while Hochul and others who seem to hold their constituents in such low esteem, struggled to eke out a victory, in spite of overwhelming partisan advantage.
Yes, the election of some of these elitist politicians does serve as proof that their low opinions of their constituents are well-founded, but it looks like some of their populations are beginning to wise up and start engaging their brains. Now if only more of their opponents (that’s you, Republicans!) would grasp the reality that trusting the people and supporting individual liberty, actually wins elections.
Tombstone, Arizona –-(Ammoland.com)- Election Day for the critical 2022 mid-term elections is November 8, 2022, but Early Voting has already begun in many states. That means that many of your friends and neighbors could be casting their ballots as you read this.
So what have you done, what are you doing, and what are you going to do, to guard and protect your rights in this election? What can you do?
Let’s start with some simple facts: The US operates under a two-party system. While we’d like to see third-party candidates get elected and shake up the status quo, that very rarely happens and requires some very special circumstances. I won’t claim that a vote for a third-party candidate is a “wasted vote,” as some like to say, but I will say that those votes are usually less effective than direct votes for Democrats or Republicans.
Between the two major parties, the choice for GunVoters is very clear;
Democrats have made gun control a key plank in their official party platform and a major campaign issue.
While Republicans have a strong statement of support for gun owner rights in their official party platform. The words in the platforms don’t mean that all Democrats support all gun control, and it certainly doesn’t mean that all Republicans are strong supporters of gun owner rights, but in broad terms, Republicans are pro-gun, and Democrats are anti-gun.
The division plays out most significantly in the balance of power in Congress and state legislatures. If there is a Democratic majority in a legislative body, that means they control the committees and the floor. They decide what bills are heard or buried. And you can bet your mortgage there will be an active push for more gun control.
With a Republican majority, Republicans will control the floor and set the legislative agenda. While Republicans have historically been disappointing in their failure to push pro-rights legislation, and some of their members have some pretty blatantly anti-rights positions, significant gun control is much less likely to advance under a Republican majority.
What this all means for GunVoters, is that in the big picture, we are always faced with a uniparty choice of “Very Bad” and “Less Bad.”
In some races in some jurisdictions, the choice might be between “Very Bad” and “Very Bad,” or “Very Bad” and “Even Worse,” but even in a race between a “moderate, pro-gun Democrat,” (Do these actually exist anymore?) and a “liberal, anti-gun Republican,” (These definitely exist.) the big picture always demands that GunVoters support the Republican. Not because that individual candidate is the best in the race BUT because that candidate could mean the difference between a Democratic majority and a Republican majority. Consider Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania.
That can be a hard pill to swallow, but that’s an extreme and rather unlikely scenario. More often, it’s a choice between an anti-gun Democrat and an anti-gun Republican, which is easier to justify. But even if there were a case as described above, say between former Senator Max Baucus (a nominally pro-gun Democrat from Montana). Former Senator Mark Kirk (a vocally anti-gun Republican from Illinois), the overriding factor that GunVoters should be looking at in the General Election is not where the individual candidates stand but how their election would impact the balance of power in the Senate. A vote for Democrat Max Baucus in this hypothetical race would also be a vote for Chuck Schumer (vociferously anti-gun Democrat from New York) to be the Senate Majority Leader. That’s critical to remember.
With a closely divided House and Senate, the game is not chess nor even checkers, it’s a simple game of Tic-Tac-Toe. Block your opponent from gaining squares that will give his team an advantage. While I am not at all thrilled with Mitch McConnell (R-KY) as Senate Majority Leader, having him in that chair is inestimably better than another two years of Chuck Schumer in control.
Now that we’re through the Primaries and into the General Election, it’s not about Blake Masters, Mehmet Oz, or Herschel Walker, it’s about Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.
It’s All About Guaranteeing a Red Wave in November. So what can you do?
As my mother always said: “If you can’t say something nice about the Republican, say something negative about the Democrat.”
Make it a point to take every opportunity to remind people that it’s Democrats who got us where we are today and who are dedicated to radical gun control. Hot-button issues in your state might vary, but choose the issue that will have the most powerful effect on the people you’re talking to. In Arizona, you can point out that Mark Kelly founded a radical gun control organization that spends millions of dollars to push extremist legislation and support radical, leftist politicians who will advance that anti-rights agenda. But you don’t have to focus only on gun rights. In Kelly’s case, it’s worth mentioning that he voted the Biden party line 100% in his first year and 97% in his second. He’s trying to paint himself as some kind of maverick among Democrats, but his voting record says he’s right on board with Schumer and Biden.
Voting has already started, and if Democrats retain their majorities – slim as they might be – it will be painted as a mandate from the voters to push their agenda even harder, including more attacks on our rights. So we must do everything we can to ensure that every gun owner and every American who cares about liberty understands what’s at stake and casts a ballot.
GunVoters have the power to shift elections – if we stand up and get involved. Stockpiling ammo and making bug-out plans is fine, but putting at least as much effort into trying to avoid the need for those plans is much more practical and productive.
Work now to win the fight to avoid the fight. The time to take a stand is now.
Tombstone, Arizona –-(Ammoland.com)- Election Day is fast approaching, and as I feared (and as usual), Republicans are doing their best to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It’s up to us to try and save them from their own stupidity.
I know there are many Republicans who have proven to be less than supportive of (and sometimes downright hostile to) the battle for our rights. I don’t like it, but we must keep the bigger picture in mind.
We GunVoters must act in our own best interests. Like it or not, we live in a two-party system.
One of those parties has declared all-out war on our rights, while the other has an official policy of supporting our rights. Unfortunately, their support often turns out to be more lip service than action. While I’d love to see the two parties competing for our votes by trying to outdo each other with pro-rights legislation or have a viable third-party emerge with a solid pro-rights platform, those cards are not in our hands.
Until things change, our options are limited.
Only a few Democrats in Congress – or in state legislatures – claim to support gun owner rights. Virtually all of those will follow their party leadership in support of gun control legislation when called upon to do so, regardless of the pro-rights promises they made in their campaigns. On the other side of the aisle, Republicans talk a good game, but when they gain power, the talk tends to fizzle, and we don’t seem to get much traction. And far too often, a handful of Republicans split off from the party line and vote in favor of some Democrat-instigated gun control measure or refuse to support rights restoration legislation – all in the interest of being perceived as a “moderate,” or worse, a “maverick.”
As frustrating as it is, it’s the hand we have been dealt, so we need to make the best of it. That means doing our best to deny Democrats a majority in any legislative body. A Republican in Name Only [RINO] or two amid a herd of elephants is a nuisance, but a few RINOs amid a herd of jackasses is a catastrophe. That’s because the party with the majority gets to set the agenda. We might not get what we want from a Republican majority, but we are less likely to get new restrictions on our gun rights. On the other hand, a Democrat majority is guaranteed to push through an anti-rights agenda, giving the RINOs an opportunity to stab us in the back.
If we want to minimize the chances of bad legislation getting passed, our only option is to do everything we can to ensure the Democrats don’t win a majority in any legislative body.
That means ensuring that Republicans win – even the back-stabbing Republicans we can’t trust.
The time to hunt RINOs, is during election Primary season before they get into the General Election. Once in the General election cycle, GunVoters must prevent Democrat majorities, even if that means using RINOs to block seats.
Just a few months ago, it looked like Republicans were going to sweep the elections in November. But, as Han Solo said to Luke Skywalker, “Don’t get cocky kid.” Republicans got cocky and stupid. A handful of them – including their Senate leadership – rescued the Democrats’ failing gun control scheme in the wake of the Uvalde horror. Then Republicans pushed for total abortion bans around the country after the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade. Next, they gave Joe Biden and the Democrats another win with the “Inflation Reduction Act,” which was immediately re-characterized as a “climate change” bill. And they leaped right into the trap of helping to put Donald Trump back into the forefront of the campaign cycle, arguing whether the FBI and the Justice Department were playing fair or acting as enforcers for the Democratic administration.
All of those things served to either help activate the Democratic base and a lot of Independents or to turn off the Republican base.
Love him or hate him, Donald Trump is not on the ballot this November and shouldn’t be at the center of this election. Joe Biden’s not on the ballot either, but it’s his agenda that this election is all about, so it’s him and the actions – and consequences – of his policies that should be in the limelight.
Republicans should be focused on the economy, inflation, Biden’s destructive energy policies, foreign policy, Afghanistan and the resulting collapse of world stability, and the rights of parents to have control of the curriculum being fed to their children in public schools. They should be highlighting the repeated and ongoing failures of this administration and the repeated promises from the Democrats that if they win majorities, they intend to abolish the filibuster, stack the Supreme Court, and ram through every bad idea that’s been thrown on the table over the past twenty years.
Biden’s divisive Philadelphia speech, and the ongoing smearing of patriotic, Constitution-loving Americans as dangerous extremists bent on destroying democracy, should be met with outrage and disgust.
That speech played over the top of images of the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, along with clips of the “mostly peaceful protests” of the Democrats’ “Summer of Love” and snippets of price tags from grocery stores and gas stations should be the most prevalent commercial on TV and the internet from now until Election Day.
Republicans must remind the American people that things were better before and can be better again. That it’s our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who are being saddled with the debt and disaster this administration has fostered. And that a smaller, less powerful, less intrusive federal government, respecting the people’s core rights and the Constitution’s basic limitations, with more power and control given back to state and local government, is the only way to bring our country back.
What good is it to “save the planet” if we destroy our nation and our quality of life in the process? And especially, what good is it if we fail to “save the planet” and still destroy our Republic?
The Democrats’ policies aren’t saving the planet. They’re not building a brighter future. They’re not making us safer or freer or more prosperous. They’re eating our wealth and the wealth of generations to come. They’re destroying opportunity, stifling innovation, emboldening our enemies, and driving up crime rates, poverty, homelessness, drug addiction, suicide, racism, and oppression.
If you want to stop the assaults on our liberty, the attacks on our right to arms, our right to free speech, our right to assemble, our right to protect our families… You must stand up now and get involved in the political process. Those who say it’s useless are just guaranteeing their own prophecy. Those who would rather call for civil war than getting out and vote are closing the door on peaceful solutions and inviting their own destruction. You can’t win if you can’t get the American people on your side, and if you can get the American people on your side, then do it now, when there’s a chance to do it without resorting to violence.
Get involved with your local Republican clubs. Volunteer to be a poll worker or a poll watcher. Volunteer to make calls or knock on doors for good candidates. Write letters to the editor of your local papers, supporting good candidates and exposing the bad.
I believe this election could be our last chance to save the Republic. Please do your part to ensure that the anti-rights extremists don’t win.
