After New York City Mayor
Michael Bloomberg told New York
Magazine that gun lobby leaders’
pro-gun remarks were
“reprehensible,” Alan M. Gottlieb,
Chairman of CCRKBA and Founder
of the Second Amendment
Foundation (SAF), announced that
the two groups have cancelled plans
to hold their 20th annual Gun Rights
Policy Conference (GRPC) next year
in New York City and will hold the
event elsewhere. The annual threeday
conference draws hundreds of
participants, and provides over half
a million dollars in revenue to hotels,
restaurants and other businesses.
Informed of the CCRKBA-SAF
decision, Bloomberg reportedly
stated on New York radio station
WLIB that he basically distained rank
and file gun owners.
Nationally-syndicated columnist
Michelle Malkin noted in The
Washington Times and other media
outlets that CCRKBA and SAF had
cancelled the 2005 GRPC in New
York City in favor of another location.
She then asked if Bloomberg, “the
gun-phobic mayor,” will “be revoking
the concealed carry permits of the
city’s rich and famous any time soon?
Licensed gun owners in New York
City include record executive Tommy
Motola, liberal actors Steven Seagal
and Robert De Niro, talk show
bigwigs Howard Stern and
gazillionaires Winthrop Rockefeller
and Donald Trump. While these
well-connected gun owners are free
to walk the streets without fear,
nestled in their gated communities
and surrounded by bodyguards, it is
average citizens who suffer the most
from the gun control paternalism of
the elite.”
Speaking of next year’s GRPC,
please remember to attend this
year’s GRPC if you are able. Taking
place in September in suburban
Washington, D.C., it’ll be a big one,
coming as it does just a matter of
weeks before the presidential
election. For further information,
see the CCRKBA web site,
www.ccrkba.org, or phone 425-454-
4911. Each year, this event attracts
some of the most well known
spokesmen and spokeswomen of
the gun rights movement in the
United States as well as hundreds of
leading gun rights activists from
virtually every part of the country.
“When Americans watch the
nightly news images of U.S. troops
on duty in Iraq and Afghanistan,”
states pro-gun U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson
of South Carolina, “they see them
carrying out their most difficult duties,
using the finest small arms in the
world. Those weapons are proudly
made in South Carolina’s Second
Congressional District by FNMI, FM
Manufacturing, Incorporated, in
Columbia, South Carolina. Since
the mid-1980s, FNMI has been
building the M-16 rifle, the M-249
Squad Automatic Weapon, and the
M-240 Medium Machine Gun for the
U.S. Armed Forces. In other words,
FNMI is the principal supplier of small
arms to the military. These arms are
universally recognized as the finest
infantry weapons in the world,
perhaps the finest ever made.”
David Skow of White Bear
Township in Minnesota, writes on
TwinCities.com that, “it’s been
almost a year since the passage of
the concealed carry law, and the sky
hasn’t fallen. There haven’t been
any road rage shootings or Wild
West shootouts like the gloom and
doom crowd predicted. In fact, it
appears that people actually can be
trusted to be responsible in
exercising their Second Amendment
rights. What a huge disappointment
this has to be for the gun control
crowd, but not to worry. In their
typical fashion, they’ll just continue
to ignore the facts and conjure up
more horror stories to make us
believe that we can’t be trusted to do
the right thing.”
An Argentine mayor is so fed up
with crimes on his patch he has told
farmers to go ahead and gun thieves
down in cold blood, reports Reuters
from Buenos Aires. “I endorse killing
criminals in your farmland, I endorse
it,” said Jorge Simoni, mayor of the
municipality of Villarino in southern
Argentina. “The life of a guy who
gets up at five o’clock in the morning
to produce, to work, comes first,” he
reportedly said in a television
interview aired last month. “There
will be a thousand reasons why
people go out and steal, but I don’t
excuse them.”