For your consideration.
I too, ‘sorta’ agree with Ms. Hammer.
And I totally agree with Mr. Richarson.

I Actually Agree With Marion On This

As weird as it may seem I find myself somewhat in agreement with Marion Hammer. I was forwarded an email from her to the NRA-EVP Search Committee.

She made the point that the committee needs to look outside the current NRA operations for the person that can be a success as the next CEO and EVP of the NRA.

Here is her email and the members of the committee:

TO: The Members of the NRA-EVP Search Committee:

Congressman Bob Barr – Chairman
Professor David Coy
Carol Frampton, Esq.
Curtis Jenkins, Esq.
Sheriff Jay Printz
Barbara Rumpel
Chief Blaine Wade

Friends,

At the risk of being redundant, I must say that these are tough times for the NRA.  The right leader or leaders is essential for NRA’s future.  I say leaders because I’m not sure that you can find one person who can do the job.

You might need someone to be the public face of NRA. To do the TV and all media coverage and essentially be the person out front representing NRA and the work we do.

You also might need to find someone to be the workhorse.  Someone to make the tough decisions about running the day to day operations who won’t be afraid to “break some eggs to make an omelet”  and who isn’t afraid to terminate people who are only interested in themselves and not the NRA and our cause.

I seriously doubt that anyone currently involved with NRA operations meets either need.  Don’t be afraid to look outside of NRA for fresh new leaders who care about NRA.  Our members are depending on you to find the right person or persons.

When I look at you, I see 2 current NRA Officers, 2 lawyers, 2 law enforcement representatives and one average person.  None of you is what I would consider a high end business person, yet we must look at the business perspective.

Whatever you decide, Is up to you.  I wouldn’t want to be in your position with the world watching me and expecting perfection.  Nonetheless, you must live in a “fishbowl” until the job is done, and then you must live with your decisions.

Please take your time and be thorough. Please be transparent with the NRA Board and don’t be afraid to reach out to Board members for information and advice. Always remember that there are good business people with incredible business knowledge on the Board who are there to serve.  Use them.

I wish you all the very best of luck as you embark on a mission that is essential for the future of NRA and our members.

Marion Hammer

Now as to what bothers me in all of this.

The committee is composed of the same old Board members who allowed Wayne to get away with his grifting, who didn’t object to Brewer’s billing, and who allowed a whole host of things that has led the NRA to be reduced to a shadow of its former self. Unless I am greatly mistaken and we the members get really lucky, anyone chosen by this bunch will not renovate nor reinvigorate the NRA. The organization will continue to muddle along with same old mindset appealing to an ever aging membership.

Interesting that Buz Mills was left off the list. Likewise, it is interesting Charles Cotton is off the list. Could this be so that Cotton could be their pick for the next EVP? God forbid!

The right of a citizen to bear arms, in lawful defense of himself or the State, is absolute. He does not derive it from the State government. It is one of the high powers” delegated directly to the citizen, and `is excepted out of the general powers of government.’ A law cannot be passed to infringe upon or impair it, because it is above the law, and independent of the lawmaking power.
[Cockrum v. State, 24 Tex. 394, at 401-402 (1859)]

Suspect in overnight Elkmont burglary dead

ELKMONT, Ala. (WHNT) — A suspect in an overnight home burglary in Elkmont is dead after he was shot by the homeowner, according to the Limestone County Sheriff’s Office.

Deputies with the sheriff’s office responded to a report of a burglary around 4:20 a.m. on Saturday at a home in the 17000 block of Morris Road. The homeowner reported they were woken up by someone who was, “violently attempting to gain entry” into their home.

LCSO says the owner of the home armed himself and waited for deputies to arrive, but before they made it the scene, the offender kicked in the door and entered the home unlawfully.

The suspect was met by gunfire from the homeowner once inside, according to the sheriff’s office. The suspect, later identified by investigators as 44-year-old Christopher Jason Hovis of Hartselle, retreated back outside where he died as a result of his injuries.

Officials say the investigation is ongoing, however, they added that preliminary results indicate this is a justified shooting. There are no charges being filed at this time.

The US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit has reversed a lower court decision dismissing a Second Amendment challenge to Georgia’s law banning public carry by 18-20 year olds.

202213444

Mastermind of Mexico Lawsuit Against Gun Makers Admits It’s a Backdoor Route to Gun Control

Gun control activists are thrilled that a federal appeals court has allowed the government of Mexico’s lawsuit against several major U.S. gun makers to proceed, at least for the time being, because they’re hoping that the litigation will lead to the obliteration of the firearms industry.

A new op-ed in Newsweek from Jonathan Lowy, head of Global Action Against Violence, makes that clear. Lowy, who was formerly the general counsel and vice president of Brady’s legal team, is the architect of Mexico’s lawsuit, though you have scroll all the way to the bottom of his op-ed to discover his role in the litigation.

From the outset of his piece, however, Lowy makes his hopes for the lawsuit clear: a way to impose all kinds of new gun control restrictions without a vote in Congress or even unconstitutional executive actions by

Joe Biden.

U.S. gun laws are broken. Even when states muster the political will to enact reasonable restrictions, for example as California did recently, they get blocked in federal court. With federal and state action on guns stymied, the gun violence epidemic can seem hopeless.

But now there’s finally some hope, and it’s coming from outside the United States. A federal appeals court just issued the most significant opinion ever to go against the gun industry, ruling that Mexico has the right to sue manufacturers to hold them accountable for gun trafficking and gun violence.

It’s always amusing to me when anti-gunners like Lowy use the phrase “reasonable restriction”, which implies there’s some gun control law that he would find unreasonable. I’ve been covering Lowy’s anti-2A efforts for two decades now, and I can’t recall him ever concluding that a gun control bill goes too far. Lowy has described the Heller decision as a “radical expansion of prior precedent limiting the Second Amendment to well-regulated militias—that is, today’s National Guard”, and warned ahead of the Bruen decision that striking down “may issue” licensing regimes “would have stark—and deadly—consequences in the real world”; a prediction not borne out by reality.

Lowy’s hope, in other words, isn’t that the courts will decide that gun makers and sellers have to jump through additional hoops before they can lawfully transfer a firearm. He’s aiming for the eradication of the firearms industry, and he’s using Mexico’s unwillingness to confront cartel violence head-on to do it, even as he promises that gun owners wouldn’t feel any impact if the courts ultimately accept his arguments.

Mexico has done what the U.S. failed to do: bring an effective lawsuit that could change the way guns are sold in this country and trafficked to others. It’s part of a promising new movement, led by my organization, Global Action on Gun Violence, to bring international pressure on the U.S. gun industry and policymakers to crack down on the illegal gun market like the rest of the world does. While the U.S. has abundantly demonstrated it can’t or won’t take effective action on guns, international actors, unconstrained by our gun-friendly politics, can and will.

The resulting reforms will not prevent law-abiding people from buying guns, but they will stop the supply of guns to straw buyers, traffickers, and other criminals. The U.S. stands to benefit as much or more than Mexico.

All you have to do is read Mexico’s initial complaint, which Lowy helped to create, to know what a lie that is.

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Resistance to sudden violence, for the preservation not only of my person, my limbs, and life, but of my property, is an indisputable right of nature which I have never surrendered to the public by the compact of society, and which perhaps, I could not surrender if I would.
— JOHN ADAMS

I can see a ‘Circuit Split’ sometime in the near future…..

Wyoming’s Appeals Court Upholds Law Barring Drug Users From Having Guns
The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Wyoming, on Friday upheld a federal law barring drug users from possessing guns. Hunter Biden is charged under that same law in a federal court in Delaware.

The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes Wyoming, on Friday upheld a federal law barring drug users from possessing guns.

The appeals court didn’t say that the statute, 18 USC 922(g)3, is altogether constitutional, just that a lower court judge was wrong to proclaim it unconstitutional in this case.

This decision comes after the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals chipped away at the law in a separate case by saying it unconstitutionally denied a marijuana user’s Second Amendment rights. That case is now before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son, is charged with that same law in a Delaware federal court. His case is ongoing.

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Judge blocks Omaha’s ban on guns in public places while lawsuit challenging it moves forward

OMAHA, Neb. — Nebraska’s largest city won’t be able to enforce its ban on guns on all public property, including parks and sidewalks, while a lawsuit challenging that restriction moves forward.
Douglas County District Judge LeAnne Srb issued a preliminary injunction Friday blocking that ban, but she refused to put Omaha’s restrictions on “ghost guns” and bump stocks on hold.

The Liberty Justice Center filed the lawsuit on behalf of the Nebraska Firearms Owners Association arguing that the city restrictions violate a new state law passed last year that allows people to carry concealed guns across the state without a permit and without the need to complete a gun safety course. A similar lawsuit challenging gun restrictions in Lincoln remains pending.

“We are thrilled with the court’s decision to grant this injunction and uphold Nebraskans’ rights against executive overreach,” said Jacob Huebert, president of the Liberty Justice Center. “Under Nebraska law, local governments do not have the authority to regulate firearms — the right to bear arms is protected across the state.”

Just before gun owners filed these lawsuits, Nebraska Attorney General Michael Hilgers published an opinion stating that state law preempts executive orders from the mayors restricting guns.

Omaha City Attorney Matt Kuhse said “while it is unfortunate that the court enjoined the city’s ability to protect our public spaces, we will abide by this order.” But the city will continue to fight the lawsuit.

Counterpoint: More guns don’t equal more crime

There may be no tenet of faith so fundamental to the cult of gun control than the idea that more guns equate to more crime — a theory that was soundly disproven in 2023.

Just four years after the biggest recorded one-year spike in our nation’s homicide rate, it looks as if the United States may have just gone through the biggest one-year decline, an impossibility according to gun control activists.

There are millions more guns around than there were four years ago, yet the vast majority of cities reported fewer homicides than they did in 2020. That includes several cities where permitless carry recently took effect. Atlanta reported a 22 percent decline in murders. Toledo, Ohio, saw a 34 percent drop in the homicide rate, almost identical to the 33 percent decline in Oklahoma City.

The mayor of Miami boasted that the city had the fewest homicides since 1947, even though gun-control activists predicted the state’s permitless carry law would lead to more violence when Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it into law last year.

Those same advocates also asserted that the demise of “may issue” concealed carry laws, which required applicants to demonstrate a justifiable need to have a firearm in self-defense, would also lead to more dangerous cities. There’s no evidence that the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen had any detrimental effect on public safety last year.

Indeed, in the first full year that “shall issue” concealed carry was in place, Baltimore recorded fewer than 300 homicides for the first time in nearly a decade. At the same time, Los Angeles and New York saw 10 percent declines, even as more citizens were lawfully carrying firearms in self-defense.

Meanwhile, some of the most gun-controlled locales in the country saw their violence grow worse last year while it remained stagnant in many others. For instance, the District of Columbia reported the most murders in more than two decades. Bridgeport and New Haven, Connecticut, saw double-digit increases in homicide, with New Haven’t murders spiking by almost 65 percent.

Seattle witnessed a 20 percent rise in the number of homicides, while the number of murders in Oakland, Calif., and San Francisco were almost unchanged from 2022.

The truth is that most U.S. cities had fewer murders last year regardless of the amount of gun-control laws in place. That shouldn’t come as a surprise given the local nature of violent crime, which is typically driven by fewer than 1 percent of a city’s population and who are already well-known to local police and the criminal justice system. The most effective crime-fighting strategies are those that target the most likely and prolific offenders, which means that gun-control laws aimed at legal gun owners are wildly off-target.

Those strategies vary wildly from city to city, just like their crime rates. And their effectiveness depends far more on the individuals guiding those programs than any legislation signed into law by a governor. Take Kansas City and St. Louis, which operate under the same Missouri gun laws but saw the number of homicides veer off in different directions last year, increasing by 7 percent in Kansas City while dropping by more than 20 percent in St. Louis.

Gun-control advocates may want to point at Kansas City’s woes while ignoring the progress made in St. Louis, but if we’re serious about improving public safety, we need an honest accounting of what’s working, what isn’t, and yes, what can be done without infringing on the fundamental right to armed self-defense. The data are telling us that more guns don’t equal more crime, but unfortunately, the gun control lobby and their allies in elected office don’t seem to be listening.

it’s always the same old tired, worn out ‘objections’ that have never happened.

Nebraska Legislators consider bill to alter self-defense laws

LINCOLN, Neb. (WOWT) – On Thursday the Nebraska Legislature’s Judiciary Committee heard testimony on a proposal that would allow the use of force to defend yourself or someone else from serious harm without the “duty to retreat”—that is, the requirement for you to first try to leave the situation and go to safety, if possible.

It would also give you immunity from prosecution for using that justifiable force.

“I’ll address the first point of the bill removing the duty to retreat from our state laws,” said Sen. Brian Hardin, who proposed the bill. “Bills similar to this are often referred to as stand your ground laws.”

Hardin said this would provide an avenue to ensure that an individual who is already a victim of a crime and had to use force as self-defense is not also “victimized by the legal system.”

Supporters said it’s not just related to firearms.

“Whether armed or unarmed, the idea that citizens are required to endanger themselves by turning their backs and running away from a clear-and-present danger is nonsensical, especially when you understand the remainder of our self-defense statutes,” said Patricia Harrold, who is the Nebraska director of Women for Gun Rights.

Opponents said that’s not an accurate portrayal.

Under current state law you are not required to retreat first if you’re in your home or workplace.

“Traditional self-defense laws, like Nebraska’s, do not prohibit a person from using deadly force if they believe it’s necessary to protect against serious harm,” said Alison Shih, legal counsel for the gun violence prevention group Everytown for Gun Safety. “It merely requires a person to take an alternative course of action when they are in a threatening situation outside of their home, if they know that they can safely do so.”

Douglas County Attorney Don Kleine also worries about the repercussions it could have when dealing with criminals.

“We have gang problems in Omaha at times,” Kleine said. “I’m worried about a gang involved with another gang and using this defense saying, ‘Well, I had to use deadly force because I thought this other gang member was going to draw it out on me, and so I shot.’

“So there’s all sorts of consequences for this that I think are unintended.”

Hardin disputed other critics, saying it would not give someone “a license to kill.”

His proposal first has to make it out of the Judiciary Committee before it can be debated on the floor.

A Simple Moment of Weakness
Reconnecting with History—Special Installment

“The President’s job—and if someone sufficiently vain and stupid enough is picked he won’t realize this—is not to wield power, but to draw attention away from it.” —Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

My phone buzzed early in the evening. A message from one of my paid subscribers telling me about an impending press conference by one of my least favorite subspecies of humanity: a politician. She requested that I watch the conference and give my take on the potential historical significance of the event and/or share some history that might inform her understanding of the event.

This is not my idea of a “good time.” I would literally rather explain the evolution of torture techniques during the Spanish Inquisition—that, at least, would have a flavor of the lurid to leaven the horror on display.

Nevertheless, I allowed myself to be convinced. I need to keep my paid supporters happy (and yes, if you’re a paid supporter, I will pay attention to your requests for topics—I may not always fulfill them the next day, but they will go into the hopper. I’m an honest intellectual whore: I know how to sing for my supper). Besides, the event in question turned out to be a lot more important than I was hoping it would be. So here we go.

The Immediate Context

To get us all on the same page, here’s the skinny:

During his years as Vice President, Joe Biden appropriated a bunch of classified documents, some of which wound up in file boxes in his garage. On the face of it, this seems an even more egregious a violation of the official documents handling laws than did former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email server (a matter on which the DOJ declined prosecution) and former President Donald Trump’s stockpiling of maybe-declassified-then-reclassified-but-maybe-not documents in his part-time residence at Mar-A-Lago resort in Florida (for which he is currently being prosecuted).

The special prosecutor’s report on the Biden matter dropped today. You can read it here. You can read a Twitter thread digesting it here (warning: partisan account).

Tucked among the pages were an implied justification for declining to prosecute (the administration cooperated with the investigation, and without obstruction charges in the mix the rest becomes harder to prosecute) and a startling explicit justification: President Biden, the most powerful man on the planet, is incompetent to stand trial.

Relevant excerpt from the prosecutor’s report
Another relevant excerpt

Biden held a press conference in response:

It did not go well.

You can watch it for yourself here:

 

Even as Biden declared himself competent and his memory sound, he forgot the name of the church from which his son’s memorial rosary was procured, he mixed up the President of Egypt with the President of Mexico, he inadvertently (if subtly) changed American foreign policy with regards to the current war between Israel and Hamas, he seemed unsure for a fleeting moment whether his dead son was, in fact, dead [3m11s], and he claimed responsibility for the crimes of which the special prosecutor had just declined prosecution (even while denying they took place and dissembling about their nature).

In my lifetime so far, I have seen seven Presidents. If I were to evaluate them by competence (Note: This is NOT a comment on the policies or politics of any of these men), I’d characterize them thusly:
Two of them were pretty-okay (Reagan and Bush 1), one was not politically astute (Carter), and then there was the parade of the most incompetent, self-involved, and corrupt dip shits ever to occupy the Oval Office, each one worse than the last (Clinton, Bush 2, Obama, and Trump—the first two of these were, at least, capable of holding productive conversations with other people in government, despite their inability to be consistently interested in the actual prosecution of their own avowed policy agendas).

Even if he hadn’t done so before, Biden revealed in this press conference that he is, hands down, the least-fit occupant of the Oval Office in the history of the Republic (which, in light of his four immediate predecessors, is a hell of an accomplishment).

What Happens Now?

In a “normal” world—which is to say, the artificial world my generation was taught about in our high school history classes, which is far from normal—Joe Biden would be removed from office tomorrow, on 25th Amendment grounds, by his own party. The party itself would not lose power, as they still control congress and would still control the White House, and they would head into the November Election from a position of moral strength: “We care so much about the country that we will remove this good man who isn’t up to the job anymore.”

Failing that, he would be impeached by his own party.

And, failing that, he would be locked out of a brokered Democratic Convention and not allowed to run for a second term.

But that “normal world” is long gone.

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