Category: Gun Rights Organizations

I’m in the car on the way home from the NRA Board Meeting.  Bitter and I didn’t stay for the whole meeting.  We decided to head over to The Nations Gun Show in Chantilly, VA to meet up with reader AughtSix.  I bought some primer, powder, and bullets while I was there, and then AughtSix was gracious enough to treat Bitter and I to some BBQ.

It’s good for us to go to the meeting to represent bloggers.  NRA has really put themselves out there with the outreach, and there’s a lot of interest in bloggers and blogging among staff and board members.  They have shown themselves to be serious in reaching out to us, and I think it’s important for us to show we’re serious about being part of the NRA.  It helps validate NRA’s effort in this for board members and staff to see us there.  Hopefully this is a relationship that will continue to develop.  The NRA/Blogger relationship has come a long way since the 2007 Fall Board Meeting when Chris Cox and I sat down to figure out how we could work together.

Last night Bitter and I had the honor of attending the President’s Reception.  My iPhone camera isn’t the greatest, but I managed to snap a couple of blurry photos.  One of them is President Sigler thanking Alan Gura for his work on the case, the other is of David Young with his book marked up with all the citations that he’s gotten on the various court cases, including Heller.  Alan Gura said I should promote David’s book, and I couldn’t agree more.  They are:

• The Origin of the Second Amendment (paperback here)
• The Founders’ View of the Right to Bear Arms
  

We owe a great deal of gratitude to David, and to all attorneys and scholars who were recognized by President Sigler.  Without them, we would not have had victory in Heller.

We started out going to the Public Affairs Committee.  Nothing of note really happened there, and it was relatively uneventful.  Susan Howard, of the TV show “Dallas” fame chairs that committee.  Main topic was on increasing membership numbers, through reaching out to younger people.  NRA is focusing efforts to attract more members from our police and military, who will tend to be younger.

Wayne LaPierre mentioned that a lot of young shooters have parents and grandparents who are NRA members, but have not joined themselves.  He also mentioned that the latest polling shows that the public perception of NRA has never been more favorable.  Wayne mentioned NRA traditionally hasn’t had a lot of money to do advertising, but they are setting up funds to address that, and get the NRA message out there.

Chris Cox’s report to the committee stressed the upcoming elections, saying “at five to four, it’s frightening.” in reference to the fact that the next administration will likely pick two or possibly three of the next Supreme Court justices.

After the Public Affairs Committee, Bitter and I made our way to the Civil Rights Defense Fund Committee.  Although what goes on there isn’t, strictly speaking, privileged information, it wouldn’t be a good thing for me to spread details to the four corners of the earth.  But Civil Rights Defense fund is the committee which funds the legal defense for gun owners who have their second amendment rights violated.  One thing about CRDF is they never have enough money to fund all the cases they would like to take.

CRDF also funds the research of Dave Hardy and Dave Kopel, who both gave reports on their research to the committee.  Dave Hardy, in particular, has done some really outstanding work in the past few months.  I’ll leave it up to him to elaborate on that if he wants to, but hopefully he’ll get it published soon, because it’s good stuff.  Dave Kopel has been working hard on research on the international front, which we’ve talked about a lot on here.  Funding their research is money will spent, as far as I’m concerned.  The CRDF also recognized attorney Steven Poss, who convinced his firm to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of legal work to help us win the Heller case.

Bitter and I had a surprise appearance on Cam & Company.  Surprise to us, because we went there to say hi to Cam and ended up doing two segments on the show in studio.  I think I did pretty well!  Despite the fact that I can’t shut up here, I am not a talkative guy in real life, so having to be the social butterfly at these things is not a natural act for me.

At least until 9:00PM tomorrow, you can catch us on the rerun at nranews.com.  Just click through the introductions, and a link to the last show will appear.  Let me tell you, it’s thrilling to be on Cam’s show.  But it’s even more thrilling to have people sending talk backs for me on his show.  For you readers who have sent me stories, I will get to them.  It’s tough to blog with the NRA committee schedule, and catching up with people I know.  A lot of NRA people are reading gun blogs now, and they know who we are.  It’s quite a difference from a year ago, when NRA was just touching their toes into the bloggy waters.  Now they are in for the swim.

I knew Legal affairs would be iffy to attend.  Mostly because discussion of that stuff tends to be sensitive — when you’re dealing with attorney client privileges, and with NRA being a party to lawsuits, I had a feeling we might not get to stay long.  After a brief introduction by Chris Cox, where he outlined two pronged legislative and legal approach with getting Washington D.C. to comply with the Heller ruling, the committee went into executive session and we had to leave, along with Dave Hardy, who doesn’t have a seat on that committee.

Hunting policy was actually a pretty interesting committee meeting.  Legislative affairs is mostly stuff I’m already pretty aware of, so it’s not really anything surprising.  Most of the really interesting information comes out in the discussions in executive committee.  But this had several issues that I wasn’t wasn’t at all familiar with.

One thing NRA has been working on is right-to-hunt constitutional amendments.  Oklahoma has been the first state to pass one of these consitutional amendments, which has strong language and actually offers protection for hunters.  Other states have such amendments, but usually include wording such as “subject to the state regulatory powers.” which makes the right effectively symbolic.  Oklahoma’s has real teeth.  Right now they are working with states where the game commissions are constitutional entities, since it makes it easier to create right-to-hunt provisions, while still maintaining the comissions’ ability regulate hunting in accordance with sound wildlife management processes.

Another thing that’s happened is that the Bush Administration has declared a conference to rethink this whole North American Wildlife Conservation Model, which was established by Teddy Roosevelt nearly 100 years ago.  Some updating of policy would be beneficial to sportsmen, but obviously this model has worked for nearly a century, so major changes would not be in the interest of sportsmen.  NRA is working with various other groups to make sure this turns out to be beneficial to sportsmen.

One issue that was brought up that I think is very facinating is the issue of the fence between the United States and Mexico, which has serious implications when it comes to hunting and conservation.  The fence is apparently not planned to consistently follow the border, but will cut off significant parts of United States territory to hunters.  The fence is also meant to stop people, but it wll also stop a lot of wildlife and game species which range across Mexico and the southern United States, which will have the effect of cutting some populations of from another.  Understand that NRA is not taking a position for or against a border fence here, just that it was discussed in terms of its impact on hunters and wildlife.

I had the opportunity to attend both The Legislative Policy Committee, and also the Hunting And Wildlife Policy Committee, which I’ll talk about later.  All the NRA committee meetings are starting out this year with a disclaimed about the Biparisan Campaign Finance Reform Act, and asked if anyone was working as an employee of a volunteer for a campaign for federal office.  Committee members or attendees who raised there hands were asked to recuse themselves from the proceedings as to avoid any charge of “coordination”.

After that Chris Cox went into his address.  Although Norton’s bill has been voted out of committee, if the House leadership lives up to their end of the bargain, it will be HR6691 that ends up getting passed.  Once out of The House, it will be an uphill battle to get the Senate to pass the bill before the end of their session, but NRA intends to try.

The next big issue is the National Park rule change to allow carrying of firearms for self-defense.  We were told that the new rule could be expected on or around October 8th.  Cool.

Then onto BATF reform.  There are two issues on this front.  Ongoing is the effort to get The BATF Modernization and Reform Act, HR4900 passed.  The other is that NRA has been working with Sullivan’s office at ATF in an attempt to fix ATF new ridiculous definition of “manufacturing” which even includes giving a paint job to firearms.

They are also actively working with the Transportation Security Administration to change the new rule that prohibits checking .50BMG or larger rounds in checked baggage.  This has been a big problem for big game hunters, who use the larger rounds.  Apparently a more legitimate interpretation on the DOT rules would allow calibers up to .75, which covers just about all the cartridges out there which are currently lawful.

I would also note that one of the committee members asked Chris about their blogger outreach efforts, and Chris said he was very supportive of the effort, and there was every intention of continuing these relationships.  He mentioned the NRA-ILA mix and mingle happy hour in Louisville, as something ILA did as a thank to for the work we’ve done.

The rest of the committee was done in executive session, which is limited to committee members.  Right now the Legal Affairs Committee is starting, so I need to wrap this up and head over to that.

I will be going to the fall meeting of the NRA Board of Directors this Thursday through Saturday, to report on the major themes, or any interesting happenings.  What I expect will be major topics of discussion are the coming election in November, getting H.R.6691 passed as quickly as possible, and legal strategies post-Heller.  The board meetings also allow me the opportunity to meet up with fellow bloggers Scott Bach, Tom King (both blogging board members), and usually Dave Hardy and Dave Kopel (not board members, but usually around).

As I’ve said before, NRA is not a closed society.  Any member is free to attend the board meeting and watch the proceeding.  If you get to know some of your local board members, they can invite you in to sit in on some of the committee meetings, which are open for observance by members.

Bitter does a much more detailed comparison of the outreach by the Republican National Committee and the Democrat National Committee when compared to the National Rifle Association.  In short, NRA did pretty well in comparison.