Smith & Wesson Loses Duel with Nuns Over Gun Safety
It’s all politics . . .
In a showdown between nuns and guns, the sisters won.
Prodded by Catholic nuns, shareholders of Smith & Wesson’s parent company passed a resolution calling for the gun manufacturer to report on what progress it has made toward making safer weapons.
Sister Judy Byron, representing the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary in Ontario, introduced the proposal at the annual shareholder meeting of American Outdoor Brands on Tuesday, arguing that the initiative backed by 11 shareholder groups was “imperative” for the company’s survival.
“The majority of guns used in crimes in major US cities are AOBC guns,” Sister Byron said of America’s top gun producer. “Each event brings new threats of lawsuits, boycotts, divestment and demonstrations — and along with them, a wave of damaging news stories about gun companies and their inability to make their products safer for civilians.”
AOBC declined to take questions about the resolution during the meeting.
Afterward, however, CEO James Debney dismissed the vote as “politically motivated” and said he was “disappointed” that shareholders had taken their case to the annual meeting instead of to state legislatures.
He also declined to commit his company to producing the report detailed in the resolution, leaving open the option for AOBC to exercise the right of public companies to flout shareholder proposals.
Debney’s reaction was consistent with the CEO’s remarks during an Aug. 30 earnings call, when he decried the same religious-backed proposal as “an anti-firearms agenda designed to harm the company.”
AOBC didn’t respond to requests for elaboration on the resolution’s passage on Wednesday.
Shareholders of Sturm, Ruger & Co., the nation’s second-largest gun manufacturer, passed a similar proposal in May.
Fox News Interviews Vegas Shooting Survivor, One Year Later
It’s been almost one year since the mass shooting in Vegas…
In the year since the 48-year-old was nearly killed in the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history, Gilman has had to get used to living with fear: She has nightmares about family members getting shot, she only sits in spots in restaurants where she can see the exits, and she has to mentally prepare herself for movies that might include rapid gunfire.
And then there are crowds, the toughest new obstacle Gilman must brave since surviving the Oct. 1, 2017, massacre in Las Vegas, which killed 58 people and wounded hundreds of others. Gilman was shot in the back; the bullet punctured a lung, lacerated her spleen and a kidney, broke two ribs and lodged 2 millimeters from her spinal cord.“There are times I’m at the grocery store and I feel that desire to turn around and look and see who’s behind me,” Gilman said. “I try to fight it, to just keep walking, and I think, ‘You’re at the grocery store. There’s no one behind you with a gun.’ But I always feel like I’m looking behind me.”
Gun Rights Policy Conference Attendance Record
More people attending GRPC? Excellent. See you next year in Phoenix…
This year’s 33rd annual Gun Rights Policy Conference attendance hit a record high of more than 800, and for the first time, the entire event was live-streamed via Facebook and more than 115,000 people visited the site, according to the Second Amendment Foundation.
“The impact of this year’s GRPC was far greater than it had been for the past 32 years,” said SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb.
He said the turnout was impressive, especially for an event held in Chicago. But Gottlieb said rights activists from across the country converged on the event because it was essentially being held “in the belly of the beast.” The Windy City is not gun-friendly.
Visitors were able to hear rousing comments from Florida high school student Kyle Kashuv, a survivor of the Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. He has provided a remarkable alternative view of the event, sticking up for the Second Amendment and the rights of gun owners. For his efforts, he was recognized with the Gun Rights Defender of the Year Award. He received a standing ovation for his courage and commitment to the Second Amendment.
FBI: More People Killed with Hammers and Clubs Than Rifles of Any Kind
AWR Hawkins reminding us of a few facts today…
According to the Uniform Crime Report, 467 people were killed with “blunt objects (hammers, clubs, etc.),” while 403 were killed were rifles.
The FBI report also reveals that 692 people were killed with “personal weapons” like “hands, fists, feet, etc..” and that is higher than the number of people killed with rifles and shotguns combined.
On May 21, 2014, Breitbart News reported FBI numbers showing that more people were killed with hammers and clubs than rifles in 2011. More people were killed with fists and feet than with rifles and shotguns combined in 2012.
Salon: Why Did the NRA Support Cody Wilson for So Long? He’s Always Been Shady.
They’re not wrong, but they’re also not precisely right . . .
Cody Wilson, one of that new breed of young men whose career seems to be based on doing shady stuff on the internet, rose to national prominence mainly through the legal battles over his blueprints for 3D-printed guns. Even though gun safety activists argued that the technology to make plastic guns at home would largely serve to empower terrorists and drug cartels, Wilson had remarkable success selling himself to the media as a freedom-loving anarchist whose views were more quirky than toxic.
Then Wilson was charged for sexual assault in Texas and went on the lam, cashing in his bitcoin (of course) for nearly $1 million and fleeing the country. Wilson, who was accused of paying a 16-year-old girl $500 for sex, was then arrested in Taiwan and deported back to Texas. He’s now out on bond, and the whole seedy incident is shining more light on the question of who was involved in helping Wilson burnish his image as a respectable social activist with something to say. Even before this sex crime charge, Wilson’s history was deeply troubling, but that didn’t stop the National Rifle Association from repeatedly championing him as a freedom fighter worth admiring, rather than a character with an unsavory past and deplorable associations.
NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch, in particular, has been aggressive in promoting Wilson, a man she referred to as “my friend” when she interviewed him at the end of July on NRA TV. Salon discovered that Loesch interviewed Wilson twice on her NRA show, once on her radio show and once more on her show on The Blaze, as well as taking a picture with Wilson and discredited gun researcher John Lott in 2013, on an occasion when she called Wilson one “of 2A’s best.”
Moms Demand Action Says a Gun Ban is the Eventual Goal
Up next on News We Already Know . . .
Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, and Stephany Rose Spaulding, the Democrat hoping to unseat Rep. Doug Lamborn, say they often cry when they’re together.
A Sept. 25 town hall featuring the pair at Colorado College was no exception. The tears flowed more than once during a conversation about gun safety, local politics and the importance of intersectionality in activism.
Spaulding and Watts both addressed the idea that they’re fighting respective uphill battles: Spaulding in a Republican district that’s easily elected Lamborn six times, and Watts in a legislative landscape that has long been shaped by the powerful gun lobby.
Spaulding, a licensed minister and associate professor of women’s and ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, said she decided to run for Congress after attending the Women’s March in Washington.
“This is not the easiest district to be an African-American woman who is progressive and a pastor,” Spaulding said. “…So what if it’s hard? Life is hard!…In life we don’t get to back down just because it is hard and there are roadblocks.”
Dutch Government Wants to Register Race, Religion on Firearms Permit
Why yes, it could be coming to a country near you . . .
The Dutch government wants to register the race, ethnicity, political views, and religion or philosophical conviction of anyone who applies for or renews a firearm license. These new requirements for firearm licenses are written in a legislative proposal that will be submitted to the Tweede Kamer, the lower house of Dutch parliament, next month, the Volkskrant reports.
The bill is a modification of the Weapons and Ammunition Act. The changes are made to comply with a tightened European directive on the possession of weapons, following a series of terrorist attacks in Europe. The objective of the directive is to improve the traceability of firearms within the EU through proper registration, to facilitate automated data exchange, and to combat illegal firearm possession, according to the newspaper.
For the Dutch government, this means registering privacy sensitive details and storing them for 30 years, according to the newspaper.
“Risk factors for weapon possession are diverse”, Ministers Ferdinand Grapperhaus of Justice and Security and Carola Schouten of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality – involved in the bill because of hunting permits – said in the explanatory notes to the law. For this reason the police need information “from various sources” to weigh “whether it is safe to allow someone to own a weapon” when a gun license is requested.
No, Elizabeth Warren, Anti-Gun States Don’t Have the Fewest Gun Deaths
Also, you’re not Native American, Fauxcahontas . . .
Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren recently tweeted a misleading statistic about school gun violence, in another example of Democrats skewing the facts to support an anti-gun narrative.
“Massachusetts has the lowest rate of gun deaths in the county [sic] & can serve as a model for the federal gov’t to develop policies to keep schools safe,” she tweeted. “@RepKClark & I surveyed MA educators & have a series of recommendations for @BetsyDeVosED to help stop gun violence in schools.”
Warren clearly meant “country” instead of “county.” But “covfefe” typo aside, Warren’s letter to Secretary Betsy DeVos is powerfully written, including evocative references to Columbine, Parkland, and “public attacks in which the shooter and victims were generally unknown to each other.” In other words, senseless murder.
The Kavanaugh Fight Is About Guns, Not Abortion
Is the Democratic Party using Roe v. Wade to distract from their real goals?. . .
The Kavanaugh confirmation is about the future, not refighting the cultural battles of the 1970s. And next up on the Democratic agenda is sweeping, national gun control – and possibly even confiscation. In the 2016 campaign, candidate Hillary Clinton stated that the U.S. needed to consider the Australian model of a national semi-automatic gun ban. California congressman Eric Swalwell went even farther, explicitly endorsing an Australian-style mandatory gun “buyback” and “going after resisters” here in the U.S. Prior to the passage of the infamous “SAFE” Act in 2013, New York’s Gov. Cuomo publicly stated that “confiscation could be an option.” H.R. 5087, the Assault Weapons Ban of 2018, has nearly 200 Democratic sponsors. It includes a total ban on AR-15-style rifles and magazines capable of holding more than ten rounds, plus a national ban on private transfers.
These policies – and more – are already the law in the liberal bastions of New York, Massachusetts, and California. All have been upheld by the federal Circuit Courts.
That’s where Kavanaugh enters the picture.