Gun lobby: Who got elected to the NRA board?

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This year’s gun lobby board election brought a few surprises, as the National Rifle Association has been trying to keep the results (and the low voter turnout) quiet.

George K. Kollitides II is the founder and CEO of Freedom Group, America’s largest and most profitable firearms consortium. One of the company’s  products is the Bushmaster AR-15 semi-automatic rifle that was used last December in the Sandy Hook school massacre.

Last year Freedom Group led the gun industry with record sales of almost $1 billion, or $931.9 million. Kollitides also quietly served last year on the NRA’s shadowy Nominating Committee for the NRA’s 2012 board elections, as reported in January in Mother Jones. His place on the Nominating Committee likely helped get his name on the NRA’s official ballot this year.

Yet he still lost his bid for the NRA board, according to election results just published in the August edition of the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine, available only to NRA dues-paying members, a copy of which was obtained by MSNBC. Kollitides remains a Trustee of the NRA Foundation, according to its latest annual report. The foundation’s activities include organizing gun safety and target shooting competitions for children.

Calls to Kollitides’ office at Freedom Group’s headquarters in Madison, North Carolina, requesting comment were not returned.

Other gun industry executives sit on the NRA’s board. Pete Brownell is the third-generation family CEO of Brownells, Inc., America’s largest supplier of firearms parts, tools and accessories. He easily won his reelection. His father and chairman of the board for the family business, Frank R. Brownell III, is also President of the NRA Foundation.

A representative of Brownells in Montezuma, Iowa, told MSNBC.com that neither executive was available for comment.

Two more gun industry executives sit on the NRA board.

Please continue reading  the story here: http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/08/19/gun-lobby-who-got-elected-to-the-nra-board/

Christie moves right on gun issues with veto

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Last summer, after Hurricane Sandy, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie showed independence from his own party when he embraced President Barack Obama. The move made Christie a target among his GOP colleagues for appearing to betray then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney. But Friday night Christie,  a possible 2016 GOP presidential candidate, seemed to move back to the right on gun issues when he vetoed three key gun bills in New Jersey.

Christie has defied the gun lobby in the past by defending New Jersey’s gun control laws, which have long been among the strictest in the nation. The state requires a background check and lifetime firearms identification card for any firearms purchase, an additional permit for any handgun purchase, and a waiting period of 30 days before another handgun may be bought.

But the New Jersey governor’s Friday veto of new gun control legislation backtracked on his previous record.

One of the bills would have prohibited .50 caliber rifles in New Jersey. The weapon is described as a “long-range anti-material” and “anti-personnel” firearm that “provides an inexpensive means of neutralizing lightly armored targets,” according to the product description from one Phoenix, Arizona-based manufacturer. California is currently the only state to ban .50 caliber rifles.

The other two New Jersey measures would have required state agencies to report lost and stolen gun data to a federal database, embedded information about gun permits onto an individual permit holder’s New Jersey driver license, created instant background checks within the state, and required safety training for New Jersey gun owners.

Please finish reading the story here: http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/08/18/chris-christie-moves-right-on-gun-issues-with-veto/

Was that gun used in a crime? Now you can find out

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On Sunday in New Orleans, Laderika Smith, 28, returned from the store to find her five-year-old daughter bloodied and lying on the bedroom floor with a gunshot wound to her head. The girl soon died. Her mother has been charged with Relative Cruelty to a Juvenile. She has not yet entered a plea.

“It is all too common,” Doctor Gary A. Smith, president of the Child Injury Prevention Alliance, told MSNBC. “Children are curious. They watch TV cartoons and a make-believe world,” he added. When kids see guns, “they don’t recognize the danger.”

Smith’s daughter fatally shot herself with a .38 revolver that her mother kept in the home, as Smith admitted to New Orleans police. For decades, a .38 revolver was the firearm most commonly used in crimes, according to ATF studies including a July 2000 report, which is the last time that the ATF issued any comprehensive report. Instead, for more than 12 years– since the first inauguration of President George W. Bush in 2001–the ATF has provided little or no such national data to the public.

“Why was it stopped for over 10 years?” ATF Acting Deputy Chief of Public Affairs Donna Sellers told MSNBC. “I cannot really answer why a decision was made to stop publishing that information,” she added. “The decision was made this year to increase transparency and provide the public with more thorough information on crime guns.”

On June 19, the ATF published its findings for Firearms Trace Data for 2012. Data for previous years posted on the ATF website’s statistics page include no more than very general information for each state along with the District of Columbia and U.S. Virgin Islands, making in difficult to discern national trends of the types of firearms used in crimes, or where they were bought.

The data for 2012 includes nationally aggregated summaries including “Firearms Types” and “Top Calibers” of weapons “Recovered and Traced” in crimes, along with data on where the weapons used in crimes were purchased and where they ended up, and how long they have been in circulation.

“Tracing crime guns provides critical information that assists domestic and international law enforcement,” Sellers told MSNBC.

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Six months after Sandy Hook, grassroot groups and the gun debate

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After the horror of the Newtown shooting, gun reform advocates expected to finally see a change. Yet Friday marks the six-month anniversary of the tragedy at the Sandy Hook Elementary School and, largely due to the efforts of the gun lobby, none of the nation’s federal gun laws have changed.

“The NRA and special interests have been schoolyard bullies,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut told reporters after a press conference Thursday with Newtown family members in the Capitol. “We lost the first vote, but we’re going to win the last vote.”

Groups on both sides of the debate including Mayors Against Illegal Guns and the National Rifle Association have already begun spending money on attack ads against senators who did not vote as the groups’ wished this spring. But advocates on both sides seem to agree that the debate will be decided not by money but by the ability to mobilize grassroots support and voters.

“[A] real grassroots gun control movement? It doesn’t exist, and has never existed,” recentlynoted Sebastian, a pen name for a popular Second Amendment activist and blogger in Pennsylvania read by activists on both sides. The blogger has dismissed well-financed gun reform efforts as “astroturf,” as opposed to real grassroots support, deriding Mayor Bloomberg as “Astroturf-in-Chief.”

“Sebastian’s right about the past,” Mark Glaze, the director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, told MSNBC.com. “For a generation, the NRA had three advantages,” he added. The gun lobby has long enjoyed a strong grassroots base, members who make gun rights a priority when they vote,  and a budget of up to $250 million a year to strengthen their clout.

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For NRA’s new president, not his father’s gun club

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James W. Porter II [CORRECTION: The original article incorrectly reported James W. Porter, Jr. Mr. Porter was named after his uncle, not his father.] assumed the unpaid, but politically important post of president of the National Rifle Association Monday. While the role puts the Birmingham, Ala., attorney for the first time on a national stage, he is hardly an unknown within the gun lobby.

Nearly 20 years ago, I observed Jim Porter in action behind closed doors at an NRA board meeting in Minneapolis. He was committed, boasting to colleagues that “when you open my veins, NRA blood runs out.”

But he was also a “traditionalist” then, on the opposite side of the gun lobby’s more radical rising stars. He had little to prove: his credibility was assured by his legacy status as the son of Irvine C. Porter, who served as NRA president from 1959 to 1960.

Under his father’s leadership, the NRA was still trying to define its national role. Coming out of the violent tumult of the 1960s, NRA leaders voiced support for more gun control, not less.

“The National Rifle Association has been in support of workable, enforceable gun control legislation since its very inception in 1871,” the NRA’s then-paid Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, ret. Gen. Franklin L. Orth, wrote in American Rifleman magazine in 1968.

Porter and the NRA have been on a radical journey ever since.

CORRECTION: Original story also identified the late Neal Knox as an Oklahoman National Guardsman. Mr. Knox was born in Oklahoma, and later served in the Texas National Guard.

Please read the full story here: http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/05/06/for-nras-new-president-not-his-fathers-gun-club/

Fresh off victory, NRA looks toward 2014

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Fresh from its biggest legislative victory in years, the gun lobby is gearing up for its next project: backing their congressional champions in the 2014 midterm elections. But this time the landscape will be different. At least one, if not more, gun reform groups are promising to spend millions of dollars challenging those incumbents who voted against gun control.

Both sides in the nation’s debate over gun policies are already looking to raise money to spend in 2014, in what promises to be an unprecedented struggle. The National Rifle Association morphed into the gun lobby only in the late 1970s when the group abandoned its more than a century long practice of backing gun control measures. Today’s NRA leaders are already preparing their supporters for the fight.

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How the gun lobby has already blocked Boston’s bombing investigators

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One avenue of investigation is already closed off to forensic officials working the Boston Marathon bombing case due to efforts dating back decades by the National Rifle Association and gun manufacturers.

The FBI said Tuesday that gunpowder, along with pieces of metal and ball bearings, were packed into at least one pressure cooker and another device to make the crude bombs that killed three people—including an 8-year-old boy—and wounded more than 170 more during the Boston Marathon Monday.

But a crucial piece of evidence called a taggant that could be used to trace the gunpowder used in the bombs to a buyer at a point of sale is not available to investigators.

“If you had a good taggant this would be a good thing for this kind of crime. It could help identify the point of manufacturer, and chain of custody,” Bob Morhard, an explosives consultant and chief executive officer of  Zukovich, Morhard & Wade, LLC., in Pennsylvania, who has traced explosives and detonators in use in the United States and Saudi Arabia, told MSNBC.com. “The problem is nobody wants to know what the material is.”

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