Big Changes at CNN.com

First off, today I noticed CNN.com implemented some newfangled commenting system. I really dislike the layout.

But then I stumble across a mostly pro-gun article on raising children in the home with guns. I am shocked, instead of finding one mediocre quasi-pro-gun statement followed by an entire article lambasting gun owners as crazy.  I found a surprisingly delightful article featuring testimonials and insights from parents with small children.

WoW
http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/20/living/guns-children-home/index.html?hpt=hp_bn11

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Apparently, some love for the NRA Annual Meeting over at Yahoo too.

http://news.yahoo.com/photos/kids-and-guns-at-the-nra-slideshow/

Must be “Revenge of the Sixth” day (you know, follows May the Fourth be with you, and Cinco de May).

#nraam Thank You

Dear St. Louis,

Thank you for hosting us and providing us a place to enjoy ourselves.

To all my readers, you’re why I blog, thank you for all the likes, shares and followings. I hope you’ve enjoyed our coverage.

This concludes our coverage of the 2012 NRA Annual Meeting.

Sincerely,
The N.U.G.U.N. Blog

#nraam @PyramydAir Range

Pyramyd Air Range allows visitors to try out over a dozen different air rifles ranging from $70 up to $2,000 competition rifles.

Loading a competition air rifle. Mechanism is extremely smooth.

Great gifts for Boy Scouts of America.

Great for even young (supervised) shooters!

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Why you need to wear eye protection even with air rifles.

Pictured here is a ricochet pellet that hit me. You can see the velocities of modern air rifles flattened the .17 caliber pellet. Consider what one could do to your eye!

#nraam NRA-ILA: Part II

The Gun Owner’s Guide to Social Media

Chris Cox speaking about Supreme Court Justices. 3 justices will be over 80 years old by end of President Obama’s term.

“Going all in…”

30 years ago there was a discussion of a Nationwide handgun ban. Now we’re talking about a Nationwide Right-to-Carry law.

Chris Cox addressing 3rd party candidates.

Media talks about dozens of lobbyists the NRA has in Washington. “We have 6.” So it’s very hard to deal with all the smaller races.

Determination is fair and systematic. We don’t make determination based on affiliation. Nor on race, gender, or any other aspect except their record on the 2nd Amendment.

Cox sake about some of the other laws that NRA seems to have supported. That seemed outside of the the core 2nd Amendment cause. I did feel Chris Cox could of provided a stronger answer.

EVC Christie Caywood from Pennaylvania

Election/Political News
36% cable news (steady for years)
32% local TV (in decline)
25% Internet (growing)
20% Local paper (in decline)

Other areas, talk radio.

Only 4% will unfriend someone on politics.

52% share political information online

Social Media Sites:
– Facebook, avg person on Facebook for 20 minutes
– Twitter
– YouTube, 15 minutes a day for avg American
– Pinterest, 85% women (faster growth than Twitter or Facebook)
– Yelp, reviews and ratings. Review gun clubs. Dealers. etc. 64% of users make over $100,000/yr
– Stumble Upon, 1 billion+ stumbles. 70 minutes session.
– Google+, Mostly male. Not much time used.

First step find your audience. Your friends, family, etc. You don’t need to be breaking news. Just share.

Find, Balance, New Tech, Experiment (use tools), Be Visual (use photos/videos), Join In, Talk…..

10x more likely to be followed on Twitter if you have photo or logo.

Don’t want to create content. Then fan “NRA” and like or retweet. Watch a YouTube video “thumb” it up.

Networks are built on real life. Friends, family, hunting buddies, co-workers.

Social Networks provide real time outreach, measurable impact, peer pressure….influence others.

Krista Kupp – senior coordinator and NRA university.

Getting the Youth Vote. Success in 2012 will depend on the youth vote.

2008 – President Obama won youth vote by 2:1. Based on youth vote Obama would have received 455 electoral votes vs 57 McCain.

Obama only won 30 year old vote by 1%

Youth voter turnout up 50% in 2008 because President Obama excites them.

Youth voters not impressed this year, not as excited with Obama.

NRA University

52 NRA Universities in 20 states since 2007.

Reach out to campus carry organizations, college Republicans and college Democrat organizations.

David Burnett speaking about Students for Concealed Carry

“Disarming victims doesn’t protect victims.”

Students for concealed carry introduced bills in 30 states, and positive effects in 10 states.

Campus carry movement is reaching into Europe too.

How did a group of students with no money & just social networking, form one d the most effective new grassroots organizations?

5 Guidelines:
1. Don’t do it alone.
2. Use the Internet
3. Make use of the media (empty holster protest)
4. Be better than your opponents.
5. Don’t quit

“Repeatedly asked where is the headquarters for Students for Concealed Carry. Answer – online…”

Utilize local media. Annual events are springboards for your cause. Empty holster protest “sexy news”

While our cause excels every time a gun free zone fails. We can’t be happy for that.

Avoid partisan politics.

Gun rights movement is not made up of one groups, rather it’s made up of many smaller groups.

NRA 2nd Vice President

Changing public policy is matching up the nail (public issue, idea, policy change) with the right hammer (We are the hammer).

Tough issues require bigger hammers.

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming…

To any who may of missed our April Fool’s satire, the N.U.G.U.N. Blog is still the pro-2nd Amendment, Freedom and Liberty blog it’s always been.

We hope you enjoyed the humor and satire yesterday.  The idea popped into my head a few weeks ago and I just couldn’t resist.   

Expect more content for freedom lovers and new gun owners in the future. NRAAM is just a couple of weeks away in St. Louis, and we’ll be there providing coverage!

 

NRA Annual Meetings 2012 in St. Louis

Tickets are purchased!

The N.U.G.U.N. Blog will once again be covering the event. This year we are hoping to two something slightly different. I will be attending with two of my nephews who are fond of history and in recent years we have introduced to firearms.

They will be covering the event with me, and answering their own questions regarding firearms, gun control, and the NRA.

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If any of our readers have an HD camcorder that records to hard drive (or large format memory card) that we can borrow, please contact me via email. Thank you!

NRAAM 2011 – Revisited / Chiappa Rhino

There are several posts I had intended to make upon my return from this year’s annual meeting in Pittsburgh that I just never got around to making.  

Chiappa Firearms – Maker of the Rhino

I finally had an opportunity to handle this firearm on the exhibit floor. It is definitely an interesting design both aesthetically and mechanically.

The exterior hammer is in fact NOT a hammer. Rather it is an activator for the hammer that allows you to cock the hammer manually. It can be disconnected and essentially turn the firearm into a double-action only mechanism. There is a small red button that functions as a cocked indicator. As can be seen in the video.

Now my first impression of the Chiappa Rhino was – “Wow, they’ve created the first triple-action firearm.”

The trigger pull on the units I tried felt like 30 lbs. It was pretty overwhelming. And not something I’d feel comfortable recommending to anyone without super strong fingers.  I saw a fair amount of discussion in the blogosphere regarding this “triple-action” pull. Had I been left with that as my experience I would have been very disappointed.

Later I encountered another booth with Chiappa Rhino’s on display. When I handled these units the trigger was very comfortable and easy to use.  Literally worlds apart. One was nearly unusuable and the other comparable to the average revolver. When I asked the Chiappa reprepresentative she informed me that these were the 2nd revisions and had a number of improvements. And that the ones I had seen earlier at a dealer’s booth were an early release.

So if you’ve heard that the Rhino requires Rhinoceras strength to pull the trigger. This doesn’t seem to be the case for the newer production models

http://chiappafirearms.com/products/75

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By far, this gentlemen (on left)  at Alexander arms was the most entertaining individual of the whole event. I swear this is Montgomery Scott’s great-great-great grandfather. First off, the Scottish accent was in full effect. Second, he was a technical/engineering geek. I spent about 15 minutes just listening to him explain to others a variety of technical jargon. Seriously, at the end I was half expecting him to beam up. So wish I had taken a video, in hindsight.

http://www.alexanderarms.com/

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Let’s not forget that a lot of them bitter folks clinging to their guns love cars too!

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Once again, a special thanks to the Gun Up guys for letting me crash on their couch.

http://www.gunup.com/

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Lastly, be aware that the NRA gives away free wine if you know where to find it. The NRA wine club had some free samples going and they were fairly generous with the portions.

Crosman Benjamin Air Rifles

Anyone up for a .357 pellet gun?

Crosman’s 357 Big Bore ePCP was one of the more interesting products in the new product display area.  I was quite fascinated with this unit as I had recently seen the NRA’s history coverage of Lewis & Clark’s air rifle.  So I sought to see the unit and had the opportunity to discuss it with Crosman

It doesn’t have the 20 round capacity of the Lewis & Clark rifle. Rather it uses a cylindrical cartridge system. Which can be seen at the bottom of the following photo. The pressure capacity, will allow for up to 20 shots to be fired. The unit uses pressurized CO2 (usually from something like a SCUBA tank). This was one area of slight disappointment. I’d love for a manual means of pressurizing. But I understand the difficulties involved in that.

It does not use an ordinary .357 bullet, rather it fires a special pellet in 357 caliber. The Benjamin 357 has been used to take down prey as large as wild boar.

Sadly, Pennsylvania does not allow the use of air rifles in hunting. It’s something I’d like to see changed, as I believe it to be a bit archaic of a law.  Air rifles have come a long way since the Red Ryder BB gun era. Many new models are pushing pellets at 1,200fps. And there are a handful of big bore air rifles pushing very large projectiles at 600fps-800fps.

The law should be reconsidered to designate what game can be hunted with what air rifles, and what are the minimum operating specifications (ie: 1,200 fps with x ft lbs of force).

Read more about the Crosman Benjamin 357 big bore air rifle

A few folk I met at NRAAM exhibits

The Cornered Cat (Kathy Jackson) at the Concealed Carry booth.

The GunUp crew (Caleb and Dan)

More NRAAM

Life’s been busy, I do apologize that it is taking me so long to get these posts up.

A beautiful revolver…

A neat gun safe. Not sure if this is really practical space wise. But for those with lots of space who want something a little different. Also could be a nice safe for gun ranges to put their rental guns in, especially if they’d build one with polymer walls.

Crystal guns. Makes for a nice competition trophy or award for those who have expended much effort protecting our 2nd Amendment right.

HK, because a 100,000 rounds wasn’t enough.

LaserLyte’s booth. They have a new laser for the LCP. It clips on the side. The laser button is not activated by grip, rather it’s on the side. It encourages your trigger finger to be safely on your slide.

I bought my wife a rainbow Kershaw, it’s a beautiful knife with an impressive blade. Can cut a piece of paper.  But I was unaware of the fact that they make kitchen knives. I believe I will have to pick up a set of these. 

More knives. 

Metal targets. They had a variety of configurations.

Interesting new holster manufacturer. Really wish I could have gotten one of these to test. I’ve contemplated the use of neoprene in a few holster ideas I’ve had. This was the first holster I’ve seen to use it.  Looked comfortable. My only thoughts on the design is that it only had one clip. I’d love to see a two clip version. Second, they use a fabric to provide a generic retention. I’d like a firmer protective  retention device. One that would remain open for re-insertion into the holster as well.

Regardless, I love innovation and wish these guys luck.

Winchester’s booth.

New Zombie targets. High color, and some of these are even splatter targets. (I wonder if they show the typical flourescent color or blood red?) I wonder if these will be showing up in Walmart soon?