Posts Tagged → NRA
Great American Outdoor Show last days
This morning I received an email from a regional Yamaha dealer, offering me about a thousand bucks off the ATV I had looked at the other day, while at the Great American Outdoor Show here in Harrisburg, at the Farm Show complex.
And what a show this is, this GAOS. There is nothing else like it in the world. Something like twenty or thirty acres of floor space, covered in ATVs, UTVs, camping and RVing equipment, hunting gear, outdoor clothing and boots, firearms, gun parts, specialty ammunition, scopes, slings, binoculars, tents, roof-top tents with bike racks for your Toyota Tundra, kayaks, canoes, fishing boats (some Carolina Skiffs and some center consoles with twin Yamahas that make my mouth water), fishing rods and reels and lures, fishing and hunting guides from around the world, archery everything, tractors, farming attachments, seed dealers, etc
You, too, need to go to this show. Especially tomorrow, Saturday, or early Sunday, when many if not all of the vendors will be looking to make a deal on some of their wares, like ATVs, UTVs, forestry equipment, overlanding gear, etc. Nothing bugs a vendor more than having to lug back home all of the stuff they so carefully packed up and brought to the show a week ago. This weekend a lot of this stuff will be “priced to sell.”
And if you are a social butterfly, like I am, then you will have the added opportunity of seeing old friends here, like I did. In fact, one person I needed to see about important business just randomly sat down in a chair next to me, and kept looking at me out of the corner of her eye, while I made silly faces at her. Despite being friends for nearly thirty years, she did not recognize me, and I had to re-introduce myself. Yes, much of me is gone and what remains is unrecognizable, apparently, and that is all for the good. We ended up getting half of the business stuff done, while surrounded by all of the great energy of the Great American Outdoor Show, which included many of the people she needed to see, or expected to see, too.
See, when you are friends with a NRA national board member, and one of the better known ones at that, you have to accept taking second seat about half the time you are together anywhere in public, including at a small diner in East Succotash, PA, where such a person is really a celebrity.
I digress. Because the GAOS is really awesome, and filled with many wonders, and if you go you will make friends and see old friends and possibly empty your wallet and maybe empty your bank account, too. For all the right reasons.

Not every mountain house has to be luxurious. Maybe this is what most people can afford, and while it is small, it works just great

With a name like “BuckFinder” what could possibly go wrong with using a drone for hunting…er…they mean finding the deer AFTER it was shot
Re NPR & PBS
Looking like far-left wing opposition research and partisan propaganda outlets NPR, PBS, and CPB are finally going to stop having American taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars supporting them. Good! I mean, why not give taxpayer money to the National Rifle Association, too? The NRA has been around since 1857, making it America’s oldest civil rights organization. The NRA certainly qualifies for getting lots of American taxpayer money, if NPR and PBS do.
Fact is, the entire world has changed since the 1970s, and public funding of radio and television programs goes back decades before that. By the time of Sesame Street and its band of cute fuzzy monsters talking about racial harmony, correct English spelling, and counting numbers correctly, the tide of technology was already turning in other directions. More TV and radio channels were becoming available every year. By the 1990s, the Internet was born, access to all sorts of programming and information became 24/7, and NPR, PBS, and CPB had gone hard left and become fully an arm of just one political party (not the GOP).
The marketplace of ideas and information had changed as radically as the industrial revolution had changed hand labor and home crafts, demand for government funded programming had greatly diminished, and yet NPR, PBS, and CPB were fully addicted to big wads of free taxpayer money. They insisted they were still relevant, and also wanted to be independent of taxpayers, but still getting our money. Which seems like a strange asymmetry. Usually if you get money from someone, you are accountable to them.
Now, bills are passing in Congress to withdraw all taxpayer money from NPR, PBS, and CPB, and it appears this will actually come to pass. This is a just and good outcome. However, we cannot forget the intellectual property of NPR, PBS, and CPB that was also created with public funding. Things like trademarks, logos, copyrights are all intellectual property that belongs to We, The People American citizens.
It is not as if NPR, PBS and CPB can get scads of private cash and continue on with their far left attacks on American culture and politics. No. They will have to relinquish the use of all of their identifying logos and trademarks. They have no claim on this public property. Oh, NPR can go ahead and do it is whatever they want to do, but they are going to have to come up with new names and new logos. It’s not my problem if they are undistinguished and unidentifiable in the marketplace.
It is almost as if they really did need that public funding after all, despite telling Americans for the past thirty years that our tax money was only a small amount of their overall budget. I think they were most aware that removing the public money also meant removing all of the other public taxpayer investments made there over the years, too.
It is almost as if without all the taxpayer money, NPR and PBS will really in effect cease to exist…Welp, too bad, NPR. So long Screwy, see ya in Saint Louie!
Sorry, that won’t work either, because that’s a Looney Tunes Bugs Bunny line, already taken, and you NPR people are going to have to use something else. Good luck, don’t take a wrong turn at Albequerque!
Vote: NRA Board of Directors
The National Rifle Association board of directors election is happening right now, and your vote counts a lot. And a lot is at stake. The organization is recovering from decades of bureaucratic malaise and overspending, personal ego battles among leaders, and frankly, the overstayed-your-welcome of its longtime Executive VP, Wayne LaPierre. The more people asked Wayne LaPierre to step down, the more he clung to power, hogged public attention, and damaged the careers and lives of those NRA staff and associates whom he perceived to be less than groveling to him.
The NRA has had some rough times, no doubt, and other worthy groups like Gun Owners of America have seized the opportunity to grow their market share of the 2A crowd. But it is still a fact that the NRA is the best sheriff in town to take on the anti-freedom tyrants. Though NRA has had some internal drama (and so has GOA), no one does its job better. NRA still deserves your membership, your support, your donation when purchasing things at Midway.
Yes, Donald Trump is now president, and so no, the federal government is not presently at war with our 2A rights and the groups that protect them, like the NRA. But presidents come and go, and our advocates like NRA must be able to stay in the fight, during the good times and the bad.
Presently there is an internal contest going on at NRA, at the board level and amongst some of the staff, about Whither NRA. There is an effort to keep the “old regime” folks around, when what is needed is a complete overhaul, a housecleaning, an NRA 2.0. For that to happen, new voices and fresh faces have to be voted onto the board. I happen to know a few of the board members (spanning all positions on Whither NRA), and I have been asking them what their opinions are about some of the new faces and some of the old faces.
Couple of recommended NO votes: Larry “Bathroom Bud” Craig (for God’s sake, NRA, have you no shame?), Sandra Froman (been a board member for long enough now, thank you), Joel Friedman, a fantastic 2A stalwart who tied himself too closely to Wayne LaPierre and the old NRA establishment.
Recommended YES votes:
- Knox Williams of the American Suppressor Association. I do not own suppressors, nor am I interested in suppressors. My gun interests are in the circa 1775-1925 range. However, a lot of new gun owners are very into suppressors and the modern sporting rifles they connect to. Young people like Knox Williams speak this new language and are necessary for the NRA to walk effectively into the 21st century.
- Jonathan Goldstein, a well known Second Amendment attorney from here in Pennsylvania.
- Al Hammond, Mitzy McCorvey, Anthony Colandro, Charles Hiltunen, Isaac Demarest, Todd Ellis, and Jim Wallace are all fresh voices much needed on the NRA board.
Your official NRA ballot is due before April 6th, 2025, so get it in the mail, pronto.
Great American Outdoor Show is under way
The Great American Outdoor Show is under way here in Harrisburg, PA, and I highly recommend that everyone who can visit it before it ends this weekend. It is held at the Farm Show complex between Cameron Street and MaClay Street, which is something like ten or fifteen acres of space. And this show fills that all up with vendors of every sort, visitors, lots and lots of hunting and fishing guides and outfitters (I am not really clear on what the difference is between a guide and an outfitter) from all around the world, hunting dog trials in the arena, hunting how-to demonstrations, calling contests, etc.
Archery, modern firearms from cheap utilitarian to high-end-more-expensive-than-your-car, black powder firearms, knives (t-o-o-o-ns of knives, especially Pakistani-made Damascus blades), survival gear, pickup trucks (Dodge Ram appeared with a huge array of trucks this year), ATVs and UTVs, tractors, rifle slings, handgun holsters, body armor and related “tactical” stuff (some day I am going to explore exactly what “tactical means, because like the vague and abused term “bushcraft” it can mean a lot of different things), dog cages, recreational boats, tons of camouflage clothing, cowboy boots, wool socks, travel trailers (there are some real neat new additions to the sort of “survivalist” doomsday trailer genre), especially the “OverLand” style kit, which turns a pickup truck into a Swiss Army knife of travel comforts neatly packed into a tidy package, log homes, log furniture and cabin decor, wild game cooking classes…I know I am forgetting something.
And in case you have not read this fact before, I am the guy who started the 2013 boycott of the old Reed Exhibitions show, which predated this current show. It started in response to their sudden demand that vendors not display AR15 platform rifles, because of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting. Our boycott led to the failure of the longstanding Reed show in 2013, which then was taken up by the NRA in 2014. The rest is happy history.
If you do an internet search on this subject, you will find some articles where I was interviewed. My favorite line from those interviews was “The British did not understand us Americans in 1776, and they still don’t understand us in 2012.”
We are in 2025 now, twelve or thirteen years later, and based on things that many British politicians and police are saying about extraditing Americans violating their speech laws, it sure seems the British still do not understand or respect Americans.
If you enjoy any kind of hands-on outdoor recreation, namely hunting, fishing, camping, hiking, boating, then this show is definitely for you. The entrance fee is $15.00 per person per day, although there are probably various discounts and bulk purchases that I do not understand. They are out there if you look.
And if anyone sees famous political activist Scott Presler there, please call me. I am a pathetic groupie of his, and I spent all yesterday looking for Scott, like a lost and sad little puppy. He said he would be at the Great American Outdoor Show…
Insurrectionist Democrat Party part 2
In 1865 the Republican Party ended the first Democrat Party insurrection by taking away the Democrats’ African slaves and defeating the Democrats in the Civil War. But instead of putting a stake through the vampire’s heart, and ending the Democrat Party’s culture of lawlessness and insurrection, the GOP got all soft and sad faced for the po widdle Democwats. And despite a hundred subsequent years of Democrat Party Jim Crow, KKK, lynchings, beatings, and voter suppression, the GOP looked the other way.
And the Democrat Party never forgave the Republicans, and so now here we are again, Democrat Party Insurrection Part Two. Not only a stolen election in 2020, and not only the weaponization of the entire federal government against Democrat Party political opponents, and not only opening the American borders wide so that the American people can be replaced by illegals who will vote for more lawlessness, but now we have the first time ever in American history that a sitting president is trying to jail his opponent.
Yes, yesterday’s fake conviction of President Trump was 360 degrees of fake crimes, fake evidence, fake process, a fake and deeply corrupt judge who screamed at the defense counsel, threatened to jail the defense witnesses, and who allowed all kinds of illegal behavior by the prosecution. But the conviction is still very real, because if they can, the Democrats will indeed put Preisdent Donald Trump in jail. These are lawless people who engage in lawlessness for a concrete purpose. They are not half heartedly fooling around.
So what happens if the insurrectionist Democrat Party is successful in jailing their political opponent Donald Trump? Do you really believe they will stop at that person? If the GOP fails to mount a vigorous offense in response, then the entire method and purpose of the Democrat Party will be focused on fake accusations against Republicans everywhere, and then jailing them in kangaroo courts. After that, the Democrat Party gets what it was after in 1861, when they started the first American Civil War – full control.
If you are a normal American and are shocked at the lawlessness you are witnessing, then the real simple response is a) stop voting for Democrat candidates, b) stop donating to the Democrat Party and its many subsidiaries, and c) get involved and fight back any way you can, whether it is running for school board or dog catcher. This has to be a bottom-up response to the attempted elimination of Trump, because you cannot look to elected Republicans for answers. The GOP culture is weak and wussy and timid. So YOU need to succeed, or we will watch this Democrat Party Insurrection Part Two succeed where they failed in the past.
And if you think Republicans are all mean and wacist n stuff, nonsense, just wait until these fascist Democrats have their hands around your family’s throat… then you will understand MAGA and Tea Party and NRA etc.
Get crackin’, ‘Merica..
That curious Rural-Urban divide thing
That curious Rural-Urban divide thing is really bugging me, and I want to share some personal experiences and observations about it with you.
If we could just please get away for one minute from the Justice Sonia Sotomayor bribery scandal, please. Yes, far-left Justice Sonia Sotomayor took over THREE MILLION DOLLARS IN BRIBES from Penguin Random House to protect Penguin Random House when their critical lawsuit arrived before the US Supreme Court, and no, Sotomayor did not step aside and recuse herself or anything high-minded like that. She just blatantly ruled in favor of her three million dollar friends at Penguin Random House books, like nothing was the matter. Even though this is very much The Matter because bribes are a big no-no.
With all of the talk these days about ethics on that Most High and Illustrious Court, we would think that Justice Sotomayor’s blatant and impeachable criminality would be the main public subject of ridicule and hate these days. But we would be wrong, because evidently America’s urban people are really hating the rural people right now, instead, and they would rather discuss Naughty Rural People than that crooked, lying, cheating, impeachable Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
OK. So be it.
Seems like the general happiness, low crime, and high quality of life among rural residents is drawing the vengeful eye of the jaded urbanite. Rural people hunt, own lots of guns, commit almost no crimes with said guns, and yet are being told by the angry urbanites that they must nonetheless give them all up, and get in line for their creepy crawly bug breakfast.
Also bothering the Most High, Superior, Better Edumacated and Definitely Unhappy urbanites are things like “rural people smell bad”, “rural people drive large pickup trucks that expel a lot of carbon”, “rural people cut down trees and own chainsaws”, and a real big complaint is that rural people drive tractors and spread animal manure on fields. Pee-yew it stinks and is dirty! Stop it!
I know that in a rural bar a person could sit down over a cold Coors Lite or a delicious Yuengling Lager and have a reasonable, quiet conversation with a clueless-but-judgmental urbanite about how the rural people grow all the food and fiber and pretty wood that the urban people eat and use, and that rural people fill their stomachs with clean and cleanly killed wild game instead of mass-murdered industrial factory beef and chicken, and that rural guns hardly hurt anyone. But such a conversation is about as likely to happen as Justice Sotomayor is likely to resign her corrupt big ass from the US Supreme Court.
Liberal urban elites are similarly mysterious to rural hunters and their neighbors. For example, most American urban areas are crime ridden hellscapes with high taxes, high cost of living, low quality of life, poor public services, and yet…all the “educated” “knowledge jobs” are located in these sh*tholes. Supposedly these catastrophic urban areas are elite and nonetheless superior to rural places. They just are.
The real question I see is whether or not an urban person can overcome their prejudices, rise above their own fragile ego, and move to a healthy mental place (please do not move to my physical place, unless you become a NRA Life Member) that works for them and for rural people. The live-and-let-live nature of rural life tells us that rural people don’t sit in judgment of others, they are simply happy when left to themselves. It’s a pretty cool way to live, and mystified urban people could learn a thing or three from them.
Step one in your urban person learning process? Leave us the hell alone. Mind your own damned business, quit criticizing us, and stop telling us how to live while your own communities and people are in massive disarray and melt-down.
Step two, if you move to our rural communities because they are pretty, undeveloped, safe, and friendly, do not continue to vote and behave the way you did in the urban sh*thole place you just ran away from. Your former urban jackass lifestyle ruined your former hometown, and we don’t want any of it polluting our little slice of heaven out here in the sticks. So, if you move to a rural place, register as an Independent voter, buy some guns, learn to hunt, become self-reliant and less judgmental, and learn to hear what other people think. You might come around to thinking a US Supreme Court justice taking bribes is a bad thing.
Great American Outdoor Show is on

This is a fake rhino, not a real one. It’s meant to provide people a realistic trophy without actually killing a living animal
Right now I’m sitting in a nice old fashioned wooden rocking chair in the Farm Show complex in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, at the Great American Outdoor Show. Been chatting with each successive guy who sits in the rocking chair to my left about every ten minutes. We all agree America is in huge trouble, and we worry about our kids’ future.
Surrounded by “Make My Day Come And Take Them” tee shirts, holsters, every type of firearm accoutrement, custom knives, lots of firearms manufacturers hawking their wares, many NRA staff, the top hunting guides and outfitters in America and Canada, outdoor clothing, RVs, ATVs, boats, boots, bows, trucks, campers, kayaks, anoraks, and exotic stuffed animals both real and fake, I am totally in my element.
If you enjoy the outdoors, and all-America types, this is the place to be. It runs through this coming Sunday, and I hope to see you here.

This is the self-proclaimed “Selfie Stand” where visitors are invited to document their visit. So I did
Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act and stabilize America
The Democrat Party decided that trying to steal an entire country in broad daylight was better than having corrupt Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton go to jail and the Party remaining in political purgatory for a generation. In for a penny, in for a Pound, they thought, and so they committed enormous voter fraud across America, figuring the risks were worth it. If you doubt me, go look. Project Veritas alone has scads of actual videos of people committing felonious fraud.
Despite not one state’s Election Day results being certified, the Democrat Party’s communication arm, known as the Mainstream Media/ Big Media, and Big Tech (Google, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube etc), is also in on this theft. These partisan political activists are aggressively pushing a false narrative that Biden won, and everyone should just get over it and move on. Given that the same partisan activists have pushed a nonstop negative narrative about Trump for the past four years, and also censored information contrary to their narrative, no one is surprised, even though their speech now is not protected by the First Amendment.
What both the Democrat Party and Big Media and Big Tech are doing is declaring war on the American electoral system and on the people who own it, you and me, We, The People. They are in open rebellion, and what the Fake Media people are doing is fomenting that rebellion. That is illegal. It is treason.
The question in this situation comes down to who has a stronger willpower. The Biden/ Harris pretenders to the throne, or the current and future president, Donald Trump.
Donald Trump has played by the rules for five years, and at every turn all of his enemies, who are also the enemies of a free and democratic America, have not played by the rules. They have used every illegal trick and theft and lie to try to undermine him or eject him from office. The spying by Obama, Russia collusion hoax, Ukraine hoax, fake impeachment, tax hoax, constant lies by the Big Media and information suppression by Big Tech etc etc etc, all of these fake narratives and lies were thrown at Trump to knock him out, either politically or literally out of office. And despite it all, he prevailed and won a second term in office, fair and square. Trump’s Electoral College number appears to be 300.
So will Donald Trump stay in office and use the presidency to restore order to America? Or will he allow himself to be bullied out of office by a bunch of thieves? If he stays, he should invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows the president to use federal troops to quell rebellion inside America. This is also playing by the rules.
The Insurrection Act has been used several times in our nation’s history, including fairly recently by President Eisenhower, because in the 1950s and 1960s the Democrat Party refused to racially de-segregate schools in the South. Armed troops were needed to bring the rebellious Democrat Party to heel once again (that seditious political party should have been officially disbanded in 1865 after the Civil War they started).
There is no easy way to say this, but everything I see and hear over the past few days is that a sizable portion of the electorate is going to fight about this attempted theft. And we already know that the Democrat Party’s Brownshirt street thugs – BLM and Antifa – are prepared to fight. So it seems that fighting in the streets is inevitable, one way or another, no matter who moves into the White House or who stays there.
The question is, does President Trump have the strength of character and the nerve of Abraham Lincoln to stare down and quell an open rebellion by the Democrat Party? I hope so. Because if he buckles and gives in, not only will all of the unbelievable crimes committed by so many Democrat Party bigwigs go unpunished, there will be an enormous crime wave under color of law against the “enemies” of the Democrat Party. For example, they will declare the NRA a domestic terror organization, raid its offices, and hunt down its members. Once in office, Biden’s continuing criminal activity will have some semblance of legitimacy, and we can’t let that happen.
Dear Mister President, please invoke the Insurrection Act and bring stability to America. Get the LEGAL votes counted.




































