By: Larry Pratt

GOF files bried in support of Skoien

Friday, 02 April 2010 00:00 Written by Larry Pratt

Gun Owners Foundation filed a friend of the court brief on April 2, 2010 in support of an appeal by Steven Skoien arguing that his firearm disability for a domestic violence conviction (a Lautenberg conviction) unconstitutionally violates Mr. Skoien's constitutional right to keep and bear arms. That may not be impaired unless he voluntarily relinquishes his citizenship. Click here to Read the brief (pdf).

Citibank Is Anti-Second Amendment

Saturday, 16 January 2010 00:00 Written by Larry Pratt

Bill Davison got quite a surprise recently. After banking with Citibank for two years, he was informed that his account was being closed. Actually, it was not a personal account, but for his business – Tac Pro Shooting Center in Mingus, TX.

He obtained a written policy statement from the bank indicating that along with pornography businesses, any business selling firearms is viewed as a dangerous business that the bank will not serve. I just love lumping guns and girlies together.

If you bank with Citibank, I would suggest that you pull your account and find another bank which you can do here: http://www.thestreet.com/bank-safety/. You will notice that Citibank has a D rating. Not very sound.

Citibank is full of toxic assets and is not a stable business for you to place your funds for safekeeping. This is a two-fer: you get to put your funds in a safer bank, and you get to “vote” against an anti-gun company.

A number of other banks have been content to operate in a much more conservative way. They are often smaller, and frequently operate at a local or regional level. Their policies have kept them from being forced to make loans to people who could not repay.

All you have to do to find all the A-rated banks in your state is select “A” for the rating you want, select your state, and go.

I have put my funds in a local bank near where I live in Northern Virginia.

Republican Establishment: Will There Be Accountability?

Monday, 09 November 2009 00:00 Written by Larry Pratt

The November 3 elections showed that President Obama and his statist allies in Congress have set off a political tsunami.

It seems to be obvious to all who were watching (supposedly the President was not, if you believe anything the White House says) that the huge reversal of Democrat and Republican margins from 2008 to 2009 in Virginia and New Jersey was an amazing event. Virginia in 2008 went 53 percent for Obama, but a year later only 41 percent went for Democrat gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds. In New Jersey, Obama’s 57 percent became incumbent Democrat Governor Jon Corzine’s 45 percent.

Much of the GOP sweeps in Virginia and in New Jersey resulted from independents returning to the GOP fold -- an identification they had surrendered when they could not stomach the big-government records of President Bush and the Republican Congress.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared the night a victory because the Democrat won in the special congressional election to fill a vacancy in NY-23, and similarly in CA-10. Of course, she did not discuss the fact that the CA-10 seat had already been held by a Democrat.

More disappointing is the unwillingness by some of the Washington, DC Republican establishment to admit what happened in NY-23. The Republican loss there was in fact a Conservative and pro-gun victory.

Republican bosses in NY-23 chose an amazingly leftwing Republican, Dede Scozzafava (to call her a Republican in Name Only -- RINO -- is an insult to RINOs). Scozzafava was rated the third most liberal of all the members of the NY Assembly. She has been endorsed by the Working Families Party, an Acorn-spawned entity. When people in the district began to learn how much of a leftist the GOP candidate was, her support began to head into the tank.

Gun Owners of America Political Victory Fund, along with a number of other conservative political committees, endorsed Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman. Other endorsements came from prominent talk show hosts and leading Republicans such as Sarah Palin.

The race in the last month became a two-man contest between Hoffman and Democrat nominee Bill Owens. On Thursday before the election, Scozzafava withdrew, and on Sunday she endorsed the Democrat -- after having received nearly one million dollars from the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), the political committee of the House Republicans in Congress.

This was the conservative victory. A total unknown forced out a completely unacceptable Republican nominee and almost won the seat. Hoffman – and conservatives and pro-gunners -- made it clear that without them, Republicans better get used to being in the minority.

This was embarrassing not only to the NRCC staff, but to its chairman, Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas (a conservative pro-gun congressman) as well as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Republican National Committee chairman, Michael Steele. Gingrich and Steele claimed – and continue to do so even after the election! – that choosing Scozzafava was a decision that had to be respected because Republicans should respect local party decisions.

That argument does not fly. Erick Erickson has written on RedState.com that numerous sources have told him that the outrageous decision made by the 23rd district’s eleven county chairmen (the ones who selected Scozzafava) was pushed by the “professionals” on the NRCC staff. They were convinced that the failure to win the special election in another NY congressional vacancy was because a man rather than a woman was the candidate. They are not concerned that the man, Assemblyman Jim Tedisco, was a RINO. So, naturally, they were not concerned that Scozzafava was beyond RINO.

When Ford introduced the Edsal automobile, it was met by car buyers with a yawn -- and it was quickly discontinued. When VHS beat out Beta for the video player market, Beta was also discontinued.

Now that Michael Steel and Rep. Pete Sessions (and their staffs) have been shown to be catastrophically wrong, will they step down? If they really believe that individual responsibility is a key to the success of capitalism and a free society, they should be making public their resignations.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee (the NRCC counterpart in the Senate) seems to have gotten -- and acted upon -- the election memo. Senator John Cornyn of Texas had been pursuing the same parallel strategy for defeat as his House counterpart. For example, Cornyn had bestowed the NRSC’s endorsement (and a fundraising advantage) on Florida Governor Charlie Christ who is running for the US Senate. Christ is the Arlen Specter of the South -- a purebred RINO.

Immediately after the returns came in from the November elections, Cornyn stated that the NRSC will not be getting involved in U.S. Senate primaries. He has said that financial support will no longer be given to candidates in primaries, although he has not said if they plan to continue making endorsements -- which are signals that the establishment sends to donors as to which candidates they would like to see the grassroots support.

What does all this mean? If you want to advance the pro-Second Amendment agenda, contribute to the Gun Owners of America Political Victory Fund.

Sorry, Sen. John McCain’s love of restricting your First Amendment rights means that you have to be a paid member of GOA to contribute to its Political Victory Fund.

Go here to join Gun Owners of America: http://gunowners.org/ordergoamem.htm

Defund Taxpayer Supported Science Fraud

Monday, 21 December 2009 00:00 Written by Larry Pratt

Trofim Lysenko was Stalin’s favorite scientist because he liked his meshing of evolution and Marxism. Comrade Lysenko “proved” that there is no such thing as a gene. A lot of money was dumped into the “research” of this crackpot, and woe to those who declared that the emperor had no clothes.

Lysenko’s gene-free view of science led to claims that wheat plants could produce rye. Any disagreement was labeled as “political sabotage” -- similar to the contemporary global warming “elite” who libel and banish those who do not worship at their altar.

It turns out that Lysenko’s spiritual children are the global warming alarmists in today’s scientific establishment. The recent dumping of their emails on the internet exposed the fact that their “research” was as invalid as Lysenko’s. As an aside, it seems that the emails were posted from a server in Tomsk, a Russian secret police city. If the Ruskies did the deed, the best guess is that this major oil producer was alarmed by the West’s efforts to commit economic suicide by forcing a cutback in petroleum consumption.

The emails were parked on computers at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. But the scandal is not just a British booboo. America’s leading climate Casandras were also part of the scam.

Perhaps you have heard of the now-infamous “hockey stick” graph that supposedly proved the Industrial Revolution, which massively improved the lives of millions of people, was the cause of global warming? The “hockey stick” was a fraudulent representation of data which showed a straight line of constant temperatures with a sharp uptick at the end. That uptick is allegedly the time that industrialization supposedly started generating global warming. Well, it turns out the “hockey stick” graph was as valid as a three-dollar bill.

Those of us active in defending the right to keep and bear arms don’t find it surprising that when politicians fund research, you get political science, not real science. Dr. Arthur Kellerman is the Trofim Lysenko of research on guns and public health. He grabbed some of our money that was funneled by the drunken spenders in Congress through the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

In exchange for our hard-earned money, Kellerman came up with a study that “proved” that someone with a gun in their house is 43 times more likely to be killed than a disarmed householder. Kellerman’s “research” made a few questionable assumptions to ensure that his conclusions arrived at the proper outcome.

For example, he stipulated that a successful self-defense use of a gun had to result in the death of a home invader. Cute. Real scientists such as Dr. Gary Kleck of Florida State University find that of the more than 2 million times a year that Americans use a gun in self-defense, they only fire their gun two to three percent of the time.

Kellerman’s methodology is equivalent to the “hockey stick” tricked up by Penn State’s Dr. Michael Mann. One way Mann “found” that global warming did not begin until the last 150 years was to overlook the centuries during the Middle Ages that were warmer than now (where they were growing vegetables in what is now Greenland’s tundra, for example). Like Kellerman, Mann simply ignored data that didn’t support his theory.

The chaps at East Anglia did the same thing that Kellerman did until he got caught. Their modus operandi is “don’t let the public see the data they paid for.” The British Lysenkos destroyed a lot of their data and otherwise refused to comply with British Freedom of Information laws. Kellerman withheld his data for years until Congress forced the Centers for Disease Control to tell him to cough it up.

Is it not time we cut off the looting of our pocketbooks with this kind of fraud?

He Had a Gun and Nothing Happened

Thursday, 20 August 2009 00:00 Written by Larry Pratt

From New Hampshire to Arizona, Americans openly carrying firearms have been seen outside presidential appearances. The most remarkable thing about this is that some find this behavior to be remarkable.

American citizens are the sovereigns in our system of government. Indeed, We the People created the government which, at least in theory, only does what we tell it to do in the Constitution. Sovereigns are expected to be armed.

The Second Amendment was added to our Constitution to ensure that the individual right to keep and bear arms not be infringed. Infringement would impair the proper functioning of the militia which had been America’s homeland security system all through colonial times and well into our republican era.

The armed attendees made it clear that they were exercising their right to keep and bear arms. Zero tolerance of firearms has become so extreme that even a picture of a gun can get a student kicked out of school. The presence of armed citizens helps correct the notion that guns are inherently dangerous.

Americans are increasingly deciding to go about openly carrying firearms even when they might legally carry concealed. Some would like to say that this constitutes disturbing the peace. It is a strange view that accepts as normal a police officer openly carrying a firearm but finds it alarming when a sovereign citizen -- the cop’s boss -- does the same.

In addition to the educational value of going about openly armed, the presence of such citizens has another positive impact. Real homeland security is being maintained. The Secret Service is tasked with protecting the president and other select individuals -- and nobody else.

For those who object to openly armed citizens being present near presidential events, do they have any concern for the wellbeing of those who do not benefit from Secret Service protection?

A few years ago, I was at a conference where the governor of the state of Arizona was to speak. Shortly before the appointed time a member of the governor’s security detail came into the room from a service entrance, looked around the audience which included at least a dozen people openly carrying sidearms, ducked out of sight and returned with the governor.

The governor’s security was aware of the armed attendees, and was also aware that the guns were holstered and obviously under control. They evidently thought that was proper gun control.

There are those who don’t like Americans owning guns at all, let alone carrying them openly. They can be counted on to run around squawking like Chicken Little that the sky is falling -- a calamity brought about by the presence of an armed citizen in public. We are warned that: “Somebody might grab the gun and do something bad! The armed citizen will intimidate others! Tempers will flare and blood will run in the streets!”

These are the same alarms that are sounded when any measure designed to facilitate citizens keeping and bearing arms is advanced. And the alarms are always false. Before passage of Florida’s concealed carry law, for example, we were warned that the Sunshine State would become the Gunshine State. But the fearmongers were all wrong, as evidenced by the way the state’s murder rate fell through the floor.

One would think that consistently being wrong would be embarrassing, but one would be wrong about those who assume that common citizens are untrustworthy and dangerous.

A tip of the hat to those who have stirred the debate. And, our thanks to them for exercising proper gun control and reminding us of how homeland security should be conducted.