It Was One Year Ago Today …

… that Bitter said to me in a text message “You should really be blogging”, which got me started on this whole thing. Ironically the first post was about taking another girl shooting. A lot has happened since I posted about that. Wow. We’re at 2288 Posts, 8468 comments, 173,000 visits, and more than half a million page views, all in the last year. What kind of things am I proud of this year?

Well, starting to date Bitter is something to be proud of, though, hopefully no one hates me too much for taking her off the market. Hopefully everyone thought our April Fools Joke was funny. I was shocked our readers thought we had that bad a taste :)

I got people’s attention with a feature I called “Full Auto Day“, in honor of Congressman William J. Hughes, who ruined that bit of fun for all of us. That got a lot of people to notice me, and got me a lot of Google love, that is still coming in to this day.

There was the infamous Zumbo incident, where I think the new media demonstrated it had developed real power. That’s the point where I first noticed the anti-gun folks like to believe we take marching orders from the NRA. The NRA didn’t weigh in until after it was all over.

I got the Brady Campaign’s attention first here. Peter Hamm’s appearance later provided a lot of amusement as well. I helped expose one of their board members as a sock puppet.

Virginia Tech was an awful tragedy, that a certain anti-gun group wasn’t above using for fund raising. NRA, fearing threats from Democrats on new gun control, hijacked Carrie McCarthy’s NICS bill and turned it into something good for gun owners. Other groups saw opportunity to take NRA down a few pegs, and begin spreading nonsense about the bill. I was happy to refute much of that on more than a few posts.

Philadelphia City Councilman Jim Kenney telling me “F*** you” was one of my highlights of the year.

Bitter and I attended the NRA Annual Meeting and Exhibits in St. Louis. We got to meet a lot of good people in the pro-gun rights movement, like Dave Kopel, Dave Hardy, and Robert Cottrol. I found myself at one point sitting across from Joaquin Jackson. The annual meeting was where the idea that NRA and bloggers needing to work together more was hatched in a conversation between some bloggers. We didn’t know at the time that NRA was getting the same idea.

Which brings me to perhaps my proudest blogging accomplishment for the year was showing up at the fall NRA board meeting as Scott Bach’s guest, and ending up in a room talking to Chris Cox about how NRA could work with blogs. While the end result of this was not wheelbarrows full of cash coming our way, or bloggers getting marching orders from the NRA, Chris was kind enough to send out his Director of Grassroots and Media Liaison out to the Gun Blogger Rendezvous in order to get barbecued asked difficult questions by gun bloggers for an hour or so. The relationship with NRA has been progressing along nicely, and we hope to really further it with the Second Amendment Blog Bash in Louisville this May.

The year 2007 was pretty good for this blog. I am very thankful that you all read, comment, and support me in this endeavor. I hope you will all stay tuned in 2008, where we’ll have an election, and plenty of other activity. 2008 will be a nail-biting, pivotal year for gun owners, because this will be the year we either start settling this issue politically, or we begin the process of losing our gun rights, and probably any measure of a constitutionally limited government along with it.

Hold on to your seats folks, 2008 is going to be a bumpy ride.