More on Feldman

Both Ryan and Uncle have posts going today about this guy. Yesterday I pointed out the reason he was forced out was that he was willing to make too many deals, in order to reach a middle ground. I also feel I should point out that Feldman was big on being a media darling too. I managed to dig up an incident from 1998 that points this out:

Even before the summits began, Sarah Brady, Handgun Control Inc. (HCI), sent a note to Feldman, acknowledging his presence in town and challenging him to meet her in the emergency room of the District of Columbia General Hospital to see, in her words, the suffering caused by Feldman’s efforts on behalf of the gun industry.

Feldman accepted the challenge and arrived at the hospital at the appointed hour, but Brady did not show. There were, however, members of the news media present, waiting to record the showdown. Rather than touring the hospital, Feldman sent Brady a note stating he found it “inappropriate to subject the hospital’s patients to a media event which might cost lives. You, more than most, can appreciate the personal trauma of an injured or ill loved one, and how wrong it would be to be used as a media prop at this vulnerable time. An emergency room is not an appropriate place to debate solutions to our nation’s crime problem.”

The Brady’s played him like a harp, and delivered the gun manufacturers an embarrassing media faux pas. I’m not even a media person, and even I know that the proper response to something like that is to ignore it. I doubt Sarah Brady thought he’d actually be dumb enough to show, but he didn’t disappoint.

Filling in the Gaps

While the ATF takes mom and pop operations to the woodshed for minor paperwork infractions, this article, where Ryan gets a lot of press, has a very interesting tidbit:

But if records are the bar by which gun dealers are measured, at least one expert says the ATF itself may have difficulty.

A gun manufacturer who specializes in legal reproductions of historic weaponry told WND a recent audit of the business found no discrepancies in his records, but it did reveal mistakes in the ATF records.

“What was of particular interest to me was that the NFRTR [BATFE’s bound book of machineguns, etc] was off by four machineguns,” Len Savage, of Historic Arms LLC, said.

“It is so bad [the BATFE own record keeping] that the inspectors have a form for correcting it using dealers records,” he said. He submitted a Freedom of Information Act request and discovered that the federal agency “is very quietly trying to fix their own inept record keeping by using our [store and business] records to fill in the gaps.”

An AFT inspector, Herbert Blount, told Savage that when the agency moved to a new building, officials “lost/misplaced” records for more than 500 businesses and replacements were being sought.

“As we are all human and errors do occur, I was more than happy to help him out. What really bothered me was that seven days later he called and explain he ‘misplaced’ the records I had just sent him a week previous,” Savage said.

Boneheads.

Loss Prevention at Gun Shops

Since my sister works in a retail loss prevention unit (basically, she catches shoplifters), I found this story to be rather amusing.  It takes a certain kind of stupid to try to steal a gun from a gun shop, but that didn’t stop an Ohio man:

Saturday afternoon a white male in his probable 30’s entered Lock Stock & Barrel Gun Shop in New Boston to look at firearms. He decided he liked a particular AR15 rifle, moved toward the front door proudly holding it up, then politely telling the sales staff “Thank alot guys!” and ran out the front door.

The sales staff, consisting of a local firefighter who is former military and an NRA Range Safety Officer; the owner who is former military and an NRA Instructor and a gunshop employee who is an NRA Range Safety Officer and an avid bodybuilder weren’t feeling nearly as generous as the thief may have previously determined.

Read the whole thing.

Breaking News: oIoo From Google

Hopefully you get my little ASCII illustration there. SayUncle gets removed from the AdSense program because of firearms content. I don’t keep ads on Snowflakes in Hell, and have no intention to take ads. I especially won’t take ads from Google, even if I decide to start for some reason. Next time I take a call from a Google recruiter, I’m going to remind them why I’ll never work for them.

UPDATE: The ASCII art is a middle finger, for those of you who didn’t get it.

Career Choices Guaranteed to Shorten Life

Choosing to rob gun shops is one such poorly thought out career choice.   What’s surprising to me was he wasn’t wearing the firearm on his person.  I don’t know any gun shop owners around here that don’t do that.