In January, the NRA decided that enough was enough, and that they would stop letting themselves being Letitia James’ favorite whipping-boy and get out of town. Letitia James happens to be the New York State Attorney General, and she happens to work for Andy Cuomo, who happens to be the most anti-gun Governor in lo, these 50 states.
Don’t get me wrong. I like Andy. I think he’s been a good Governor even though he seems to have some staff around him who can’t keep track of anything involving Covid-19, but if he wants to run for Senate or even President, that’s fine with me.
But when Andy was Secretary of HUD under Clinton, he wrote the deal which Clinton foisted on Smith & Wesson and which S&W stupidly agreed to follow – a deal that almost put the second-oldest, continually-operating manufacturing company in America out of business and would have put the entire gun industry in the dustbin if other gun companies had followed suit. By the way, the oldest continually operating manufacturing concern in the United States is an outfit located down in Hartford with the name of Colt.
Back in 2019, after our friend Mike Spies published his superb reportage on the financial flim-flam engaged in by Wayne-o and some of the other boys at the NRA, Attorney General James announced that her office was conducting an investigation into how the NRA was managing, or to put it bluntly, mis-managing its financial affairs. In fact, this investigation had been going on since at least 2017 under the auspices of Letitia’s predecessor, Eric Schneiderman, but the reaction to the Spies article pushed things forward a bit.
At some point the NRA boys decided it was time to get the hell outta Dodge. So, on January 20 of this year, they announced they were leaving New York where they had originally been founded in 1871 and moving down to the Lone Star State. This move was part of a reorganization plan which was part of a Chapter 11 filing – in other words, America’s ‘oldest civil-rights organization’ was broke and was declaring itself to be bankrupt.
There was only one little problem, a problem named Letitia James. Because why should the New York State Attorney General have to drop her attempt to bulldoze the NRA out of existence just because the subjects of her investigation believed they had done nothing wrong? So, Ms. James countersued and the whole issue wound up in a Texas bankruptcy court where a three-week trial ended last week.
Going in to the trial, I suspect that the NRA gang believed that they were going to plead their case because they had found the perfect judge. The case had been assigned to a federal judge named Harlin Hale who prefers to go by his nickname – ready? – ‘Cooter’ Hale. Ol’ boy Cooter is the son of a Louisiana cotton farmer, his son is a security officer for the Air Force, and he is a member of the Elder Board of his church where he has taught Sunday School for the past 25 years.
Now how could a group which has been maligned and unfairly attacked by all those New York liberals for defending 2nd-Amendment ‘rights’ come up with a better judge than Harlin DeWayne ‘Cooter’ Hale? No wonder that when Wayne-o testified, he sometimes sounded like he was either unconscious or asleep. On several occasions he even had to be reminded by the Court that a long-winded response to a question hadn’t been a response to the question at all.
What finally happened when the trial came to an end? The judge wasted no time in issuing a ruling which shut down the bankruptcy filing and sent the NRA packing back to New York. He said: “The Court finds there is cause to dismiss this bankruptcy case as not having been filed in good faith both because it was filed to gain an unfair litigation advantage and because it was filed to avoid a state regulatory scheme.”
Talk about a kick in the ass.
May 13, 2021 @ 12:35:42
The left just wants to shut down the NRA so they can enact gun confiscation. No doubt you’d love for that to happen. And Mike, I thought you were against profanity here.
May 13, 2021 @ 16:23:50
I had to read this line twice: “No wonder that when Wayne-o testified, he sometimes sounded like he was either unconscious or asleep” reading it the first time, thought you were making reference to the current leader of our nation.
May 15, 2021 @ 07:59:30
I seriously doubt there will ever be gun confiscation in the US short of the red flag laws, where a specific person who is deemed dangerous by a court can have their guns confiscated. https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/21/us/red-flag-laws-explainer-trnd/index.html
First off, any straight off confiscation would be unrealistic for a myriad of reasons. The closest the US would come would be mandatory buybacks, but again, those would be difficult to enact. The mandatory buyback comes from Australia which has a stricter “takings” provision in their constitution than the US does. Takings being where the government can acquire private property for public use. The Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution mandates that if the government takes private property for public use, the government must provide “just compensation.” Typically, a “just compensation” is determined by an appraisal of the property’s fair market value.
Now, just imagine how much it will cost to buyback the firearms of anyone willing to turn them in for a fair market value: i.e., bluebook cost.
The main factor in getting people to turn in their guns for payment would be criminal prosecution and that any amnesty after the buyback period would be a definite turn in your guns for nothing. Well, the something would be that you wouldn’t be prosecuted for having it.
Another option to a buyback would be mandatory registration under the NFA. Any luck the registration would be less expensive and not as restrictive (e.g. not requiring someone to sell the gun in the registered state or go through a lot of paperwork to do it).
That means your choices would be: register your firearms, sell them back to the government for a fair price, or run afoul of the gun laws and never have a hope in hell of ever owning one legally.