ISRA Annual Meeting

After being delayed at the restaurant because their machine broke down (they eventually decided to not charge me at all) I made it back to the meeting halls for the Personal Protection Workshop. The instructor, Kent Peacock, gave the presentation and turns out to be an occasional DOOT reader.




Raffle Items:.300 AR030 and M1 Garand



Exec Dir Richard Pearson introduced Todd V. for the IL Legislative update:


He mentions that the atmosphere has changed in Springfield. Legislators have gone from being hostile or avoiding ISRA/NRA lobbyists to coming up for chats, asking questions on FOID's and even buying their own firearms. We are also in active negotiations w/ various police agencies over the future of CCW in this state. Just more examples of the fact that the PuSH'ers have lost the legal, legislative and cultural battle over guns.

Sitting w/ Don Gwinn. He's concurrently typing but hasn't hit send yet. He's finally updated his blog w/ his views.


President Don Moran discussing the current court cases the ISRA is fighting and the effects Mcdonald is having in the state.

Richard Pearson and Don Moran discuss the expansion of the ISRA in support of members who have run afoul of nonsense decisions and laws by the courts and police.
An example was a woman in labor who was temporarily put in the mental wing of a hospital because of overcrowding in the maternity ward. This was reported to the ISP and she had her FOID card revoked. To date they have supported over 300 cases.

ISRA-PVF (state level) and the Fed-PAC (nat'l) voters guides expected w/i the next week.

Pearson referred to legislators as 'Congress-critters'. Gun bloggers have had their impact on terminology.

Member's meeting: Membership continues to increase with an average of 10%/year, much through the drives at gun shows and distributed press releases.

36K people trained in the use and safe handling of firearms last year including civilians, police and military.

Mike Weisman; grassroots roundup:




IGOLD growing every year. Strong partnership w/ IllinoisCarry.com. 2nd Amend. Freedom Rally in Chicago. Townhall meetings are being attended across the state. Black Women's Expo booth. African Arts Festival support. Range software upgrades.

Finally got a chance to talk to Otis McDonald for a few minutes and get a photo with him.


MeetnGreet

Banquet

ISRA Annual Meeting Meet n Greet

Down at the Rend Lake, IL Resort w/ all the ISRA and other IL firearm advocacy bigwigs, diehards and locals. Had a great time talking to everyone I already knew and getting to know others I didn't. Tomorrow we have seminars and the members meetings.

Otis Mcdonald, Don Moran and Todd V.

Richard Pearson. ISRA E.D.
Todd V. discussing politics.

The Rowe's of Illinois Carry and Al Tiscareno of ISRA.

Don Moran and Mike Weisman critiquing the food.

I'm One Of Those 'Darkest Corners'....

Via SIH, comes a rant trying to disabuse the fact that most gun control laws have their foundation in blatant racism.

By this CSGV's intern's view, since I and others were writing about this well before McDonald was settled, that makes DOOT one of "the darkest corners of the gun rights movement".

Cool. If they get this worked up about it, I know I'm in the right direction.

Papers Please

Is the Chicago handgun registration supposed to reduce crime or just be a burden in an effort to reduce ownership?

Some pretty good evidence for the latter is the fact that there is only one registration office that they have already moved.

The second is that they have no idea how their own form needs to be filled out:

yesterday the gal at 48th & Kedzie told me Section D is to be filled out showing the gun shoppe where and when I bought the firearm I want to register. Just to be safe I called the gun desk this morning 312-745-5164 and was told No, you should list the name & address of the person who has been storing the gun for you OUTSIDE the City limits and then list the Date as the date you are filling out the application (today's date) as the date you are bringing the gun into the city, even if you are not bringing it in until after you receive the registration for the thing.

This is my shocked face.

Clueless and Naive

That pretty much sums up the local Democrat candidate for the IL 110 State Rep. seat, Dennis Malak.

Since this is a gun blog, let's start w/ that.

"I do not personally see the need for people to own automatic weapons, or other excessive weapons,"

'Automatic weapons'? Does he mean semi or fully? Does he know the difference?

'excessive weapons'? Huh? WTF are those?

"I also believe that we need to better educate the public on how to use and respect guns, and require that lock boxes be provided with every purchase."

A 'lock box'? Again, WFT is he talking about? Just for a handgun safe we're talking increasing the costs by possibly hundreds of dollars. And for rifles? Right. Sure.

For this I would like to see gun registration fees be reduced for taking a certified gun training and safety course.

And what 'registration fees' are those? We don't have registration in IL Mr. Malak. That would be Chicago.

That's the clueless part. Now the naive part of his platform (on the economy):

My plan calls for a truly temporary tax increase for two years.

Does anymore really need to be said on that one?

So this guy's got some good intentions ( and we all know which road is paved w/ those) but he doesn't have the practical knowledge or realistic world view to hold a public office.

So Days Of Our Trailers officially endorses incumbent Chapin Rose for office.

Just Like Chicago, The Numbers Don't Add Up

Facing overwhelming losses to many of their supporters, the PuSH'ers have again regurgitated the Mexican Gun Canard usually attached to pictures of RPG's, Machineguns and other firearms you won't find at your local gun show.

But I really love this line by Paul Helmke's ghost writer:

Violence in Mexico has increased since Congress allowed the federal assault weapons ban to expire in 2004.

That's a nice correlation. Too bad for them it doesn't hold true for the US. You know , that place where crime has dropped or stayed the same since the AWB expired. One would think that we should have seen a spike as well.

But we haven't.

The same holds true for Illinois and Chicago. No state level laws relaxing restrictions have shown any increase in crime but Chicago, with strict laws like Mexico, has 5x the murder rate across the board as well as higher crime. Again one would think that the rest of the state should see high crime rates w/ all these guns freely available.

But we don't.

And people are realizing that.

So does MAIG, BC and all the rest. And that's why they're terrified.

Guns Up, Crimes Down....

I still am not one to claim causality but the correlations are still there.

FBI Releases 2009 Crime Statistics

According to the figures released today by the FBI, the estimated number of violent crimes in the nation declined in 2009 for the third consecutive year. Property crimes also declined in 2009, marking the seventh straight year that the collective estimates for these offenses dropped below the previous year’s total.

Isn't that just amazing?

Illinois is, of course, still in non-compliance w/ FBI standards so we'll have to wait for the IL UCR to do some number crunching.