no profanity. okay, i'll watch my mouth. you know, it's more than just one person. it's his influence on others that we're combatting, and they're going after women. they're going after mothers, they're going after women. what's wrong with that message? the message is that we're not capable of taking care of ourselves. excuse me. that's false. women are equipped. we're strong. and we can be trained to effectively protect ourselves with a firearm. so i totally rebuke that message. and i do that on behalf of all women. we rebuke it. [ applause ] it's perpetuating victimhood for women. we're tired of it. the target on our backs is big enough. we're here to shrink it. and protecting our rights helps to shrink that target even more. so enough of that.

do you believe that they're ignorant? are the efforts ignorant? they are ignorant. but they're not stupid. we can't confuse the two. they're ignorance is that they don't get it. but they're not stupid. the efforts to take away our rights and oppose our rights are meticulously effective. it's strategic. they know what they're doing. and the effort to try to minimize the voice of women will not work. but we have to help amplify the voice of women, because what's the tactic? the tactic is emotion. stories. guess who has lots of stories, guys, that this world is not hearing? women. stories of strength, courage, fierce protection of their family. there are some incredible stories that we need to be sharing and we need to have the

communities hear these stories. our response typically is statistics. numbers. from my cold dead hands, that's what we hear. is that accurate? yes. is it effective? we need stories. we need to tap into the emotion of this topic. we need to be focusing on the stories of survival. who's better equipped to emotioninalize, who is better equipped to share emotional stories and messages? women. we're good at it. we're naturally very emotional beings. not that you guys aren't, but we're pretty good at it. i believe there's three audiences that we're talking to. the anti-gunners, we talk to them. you're talking to a brick wall. cement is set. they're not hearing anything. on the other side is us. second amendment lovers.

you're preaching to the choir. we're all in. it's those folks in the middle that understand that support the second amendment, but they're not fully educated about what it really, really means. that's who we have to reach, because with each tragedy, and yes, they're all tragedies, with each one of those, that cushion, that cushion of their support gets smaller and smaller. and one day, one terrible tragedy, pushes those people. you know, background checks make sense. and they start to shift. that's who we have to talk to. and i believe that women will be the ones that can effectively speak to them. they havemotor mother, they hav wives, and they have sisters. you put anyone in the position, what would you do if that were you? it's whatever it takes. and the firearm is the best tool in a whatever it takes situation, isn't it?

so we have a chapter program, a woman chapter program in 50 states, 235 chapters, that's not about me or the war on women. what it says is how passionately women are coming to firearm ownership and how serious they are. who wants to arg argue with a woman who wants to protect herself? what media outlet, what politician wants to get in my face and be the bad guy and tell me i can't have the tools to equip myself? this program has had over 200 new stories. not one of them negative. not one negative news story. why is that? fascination of women and guns. and because it's women arming themselves to protect themselves. so, a lot of power in our stories. you have a huge army before you

of women that will get things done, we'll do it passionately. we'll network and change legislation. i call on all of you to reach out and talk to women. we're different. we don't talk like you dies do. we don't hear things like you guys do. you need to understand those differences. reach out. because together, all of us, men, women, children, can and will preserve our second amendment rights. thank you. [ applause ] >> thank you. perfect. you have 35 seconds left. thank you. next, we're going to call up todd ratner.

>> good morning. my name is todd ratner. i represent the nsa freedom alliance. i wanted to welcome you all to arizona. this is my adopted home state. i live in tucson. normally when i talk to crowds, i try to tell them how horrible arizona is and how hot it is and how many scorpions we have and how many rattlesnakes we have because i don't want anybody from another state moving out here. but quite frankly, with this crowd, you guys are all welcome to come back and stay as long as you like. many of you know me as knife rights director of legislative affairs. i work very closely with doug ritter and sue ritter is over

there somewhere, if my eyes work well. we work as a team to try to turn back bad knife laws. i'm also an nra director, as many of you know. as if i weren't busy enough, last year, i started the nfa freedom alliance. which is an organization dedicated to easing restrictions on nfa gun owners. and the reason that i started the nfa freedom alliance is because i believe the folks that own nfa items are the single most neglected group of gun owners in the country. we're sort of the, you know, the red headed stepchild in the basement, and that needs to change. nfa gun owners have never had a full-time lobbying organization speaking for them. the nfa freedom alliance is that organization. the need for the nfa freedom

alliance has become increasingly more important with the explosion of the sale of suppressers. that's the one category of firearms, so to speak, even though none of us would really consider them firearms, the atf categorizes them as firearms, that's the one area that has exploded. that's part of why i believe that the nfa freedom alliance is so necessary. it's probably the biggest growing and fastest growing segment of the firearms sales market currently. since starting the organization last october, we've had quite a record of success. we've passed four pro-nfa bills in four separate states, and you think, what does the nfa have to do with state law? a lot of states have duplicative law of the nfa.

there are additional regulations. for instance, one of the most amazing things was when i was doing research prior to forming the nfa freedom alliance, i found out that in the state of texas, it was -- was, past tense, was technically illegal to possess any nfa weapon. however, it was a defense to prosecution if you were arrested for possessing it. now, that may be comforting to some, and it has been comforting to some, obviously, because texas has more registered nfa items than probably any state in the union. it's obviously comforting to some people that i have a defense to prosecution, but what does defense to prosecution mean? it means you may beat the rap, but you're going to take the ride. you're going to sit in the back of the police car. you're possibly going to have to go before a judge. you're certainly going to have

to deal with a prosecutor. if you've got a brain, you're going to have to get an attorney, pay the attorney, and figure out how to get your stuff back, and then hope that the judge agrees with you. this is real. this actually happens. i have got a gun dealer who i work closely with this last legislative session who had his gun and his sbr and his suppresser confiscated from him. he was arrested. he spent the night in jail, cost him after over 11 months and $14,000, he finally got his stuff back. and that's in the free state of texas. and so when i found out about that, that was one of the primarily, one of my primarily missions, was to overturn that law. anybody who knows anything about texas legislature, it's not easy to pass anything, contrary to popular belief. it's very difficult. in one session, we were able to overturn that law, rip it out of the books, repeal it, and replace it with the affirmative

ability to own nfa items as long as they're registered pursuant to the nfa. [ applause ] thank you. in tennessee, we did the exact same thing. tennessee had the same law. in arkansas, we passed a cleo, what i call a cleo self-certify bill, which forces a chief law enforcement officer to certify your nfa forms if you're not a prohibitive possessor. we also made it legal to hunt with suppressers in montana. and those are all things that i was able to accomplish with the help of our friends and donors and folks like -- folks like that, who helped us get it done. we did all of that since just last october. i know that the major question on everybody's mind, especially in this room, is what about repealing the nfa all together? why do we need it? it's one of the most poorly

crafted statutes on the books, whether federal or state. it is so confusing. i sat with jeff from a different nfa organization who knows more about this stuff than almost anybody. we sat in the labby for the past few days and neither one of us can explain a lot of this stuff. what we can explain is how the atf interprets all of this, and it's a big mess. we do have a strategy for eventually repealing the nfa all together, which is what our primary goal is. that is our primary goal. and quite frankly, we're one of the only organizations that i'm aware of, at least, that have actually, that actually has that as a stated goal. we're not afraid to say it. the nfa should be ripped out, root and branch, and thrown in the trash. part of our strategy you folks will understand. 20 years ago when you looked around the country, maybe it's

25 now, tcw permits, shall issue ccw permits were not popular. we didn't see them in states all over the place. florida was probably the first. and politicians all believe the lies, you know the lies, blood was going to run in the streets. we were all going to shoot each other over parking spots. none of that has materialized. today, you have democrats and republicans holding up their ccw permit as a talisman to the gun rights movement to say look how pro-gun i am, i have a ccw permit. why is that? the reason is many of these folks started out in state legislatures as a state senator or a state rep, and they were part of either the original passage of ccw, shall issue ccw permit laws or they have been part of the process to fix them and improve them over the years. we need to do the same thing at

the state level, state by state, with legislators to educate them about the nfa and the effects on the average gun owner. i have talked to -- when i start bringing up these issues with state legislators and i talk to them about it, and i go through the process with them, and i explain it all to them, the reaction is, are you kidding me? i mean, for a rifle that's two inches shorter than a rifle i've got in my safe, i have to go get fingerprints and photographed and pay $200? it's insane. but you can also own a pistol that is in the same exact configuration that's seven inches shorter than the average rifle, but you don't -- and it's the exact same configuration and you don't have to get the stamp. and they're like, this is ridiculous. that's the reaction we want. that's what we want. we want them to say this thing is ridiculous so when they get off the farm team and they end

up going to congress, we have a sympathetic ear and they have some understanding of what the law is. i think i'm getting beeped on. okay. all right. i'm just going to quickly tell you what we're working on right now. currently, we're working on repealing the ban on hunting with suppressers in as many states as possible, it's ridiculous, in europe, it's a requirement to hunt with a suppresser. we need to do that in as many states as possible, where there's still a few states including oklahoma and a few others, alaska has a defense to prosecution law on the books. we have to get rid of that. we're also working on, it's an important effort, the shall certify, to mock sure that the cleos certify the form 4s and form 1s and you don't have to leave your second amendment rights up to the discretion of some local law enforcement officer, and whether or not the 41-p rule that mark talked about

yesterday is promulgated or not, it's still a good thing to have, until we can take some of these items out of the nfa all together or repeal it all together, and in conclusion, i'm going to wrap it up, i want to ask you guys to support me. i'm running this whole thing by myself. i'm the lobbyist and i'm running the whole show. i need your help. if you can help or if you know somebody who's interested in the issue who can help, the website is www.nfafa.org. and then we also have a facebook page, if you look up nfa freedom alliance on facebook, you'll see, we're running fund-raisers and raffles. you can win an spr and a suppresser combo. i say thank you and i really appreciate you. feel free to move to arizona. >> hang on a second, if you don't mind. i'm going to exercise my right as the moderator and in the interest of our friends at

cspan, i'm going to ask todd, put him on the spot and ask him if he could do maybe two minutes on the history of nfa. so when we get on cspan, this will all go out. >> yes, and what i may have to do is -- i can give a quick history. i may have to look at my buddy jeff over there who's the true historian on the nfa. but in 1934, for some reason, the congress in their great wisdom thought that it would be a good idea to add a tax to owning certain items. back then, i believe it was only machine guns in 1934, and silenc silencers. machine guns and silencers in 1934. i'm looking at jeff and he's nodding. but it was in a response to, i

believe it had to do with the prohibition era, supposed gun fights that were happening. they felt if they put this $200 tax on these items, that less people would own them, and somehow, they were going to save the world and people would stop shooting each other with these guns. and we know to this day that none of that works. prohibition in its forms, in all of its forms have never worked. and so that was the genesis of it, in 1934. it was expanded in 1968 through the gun control act. when they added things to the nfa, and one of the things they added, which is the dreaded hughes amendment, which most people in the room know what the hughes amendment was. what it said was that, now that was in 1986, actually. that was in 1986, i'm sorry.

so in 1986, they added the hughes amendment. that's the one that really sticks in everybody's craw, that essentially said that any machine gun manufactured after a particular date in 1986 could no longer be transferred between citizens. even though you were submitted fingerprints, even though you were subjected to a background check, even though the local sheriff had to sign off on your transfer, they said you couldn't manufacture a new machine gun for the purpose of transfer from private citizen to private citizen. thereby limiting the pool of machine guns that are available, and as we all know, driving the price of a machine gun through the roof. and that's -- that's where we stand today with all of these laws in place. that regulate, that regulate some of these guns. but the most ridiculous part about all of it is that there's almost no reason for any of it. it's very arbitrary. it makes absolutely no sense. like i said, you can have an

ar-15 style pistol that is 7 inches long that has a 7-inch barrel, but you can't have a rifle with less than a 16-inch barrel. and for some reason, shotguns have to have a minimum of an 18-inch barrel, and there's no rhyme or reason to it. there's no logic to it because if you can have a 16-inch rifle, why can't you have a 16-inch shotgun? if you have a 16-inch shotgun, you're subject to a federal charge and potentially ten years in jail and thousands and thousands of dollars in fines. so it's absolutely ridiculous. it's one of the stupidest federal laws on the books. like i said earlier, it's time to rip it out root and branch and throw it in the trash. [ applause ] >> thanks. thanks, todd. now, to clean things up, we'll bring up doug ritter, our friend from knife rights org.

>> good morning, gun lobby. knife rights is the knife lobby. you are the knife lobby. we are the knife lobby. and this year, i bring you a very important message. all knives matter. repeat after me. all knives matter. i can't hear you. all knives matter. thank you. we're working on that. these essential tools, knives that millions of americans use every day at home, at work, at

play, are also arms, protected by the second amendment. it is an essential right. for six years now, i have been coming to grpc to share this message. that the second amendment doesn't say firearms, it says arms. as such, knife rights is the second front in the defense of our second amendment. the good news -- [ applause ] the good news is that people all over america are getting the message. our success is translating into both respect and new opportunities. we are being covered by major media. including in many instances, left wing media such as new york's the village voice, and mother jones. and it's all positive.

knife rights' success, and our efforts to roll back the absurd anti-knife laws and to pass preemption, is also introducing the second amendment to an entire group of folks who have never considered the second amendment their own. and in many cases have been anti-second amendment. as a result, of the tragic incident with freddie gray's knife arrest in baltimore and his subsequent death, and similar incidents in a number of urban centers, we're gaining even more bipartisan support. remarkably, this past year, the primary sponsors of two of our pro-knife bills were liberal dems because they're beginning to understand that their constituents are also being jailed over stupid, irrational, and antiquated knife laws just like all of us sitting here.

this year, knife rights continues to rewrite knife law in america. passing -- excuse me, passing five pro knife bills in four states so far. maine, nevada, oklahoma, and texas. with three bills remaining in illinois, michigan, and including a wisconsin bill that would repeal wisconsin knife bans and which also includes knife law preemption so there will no longer be any illegal knives in wisconsin. and worth noting, a tip of the hat to my lobbiest, todd, that bill started out as a switchblades with ccw bill, and it's now morphed with his work on the ground in madison, into a

full-blown knife reform bill. in total, we have passed 19 pro-knife bills in 14 states in 6 years and defeated five anti-knife bills including a machete ban in new york this year. every one of those victories is a win for the second amendment. as you heard yesterday from our attorney, dan, this week saw a critical victory in our four-year-old federal civil rights lawsuit against new york city and d.a. cyrus vance jr. over their persecution of over 60,000 new yorkers. the court of appeals for the second circuit reversed the recently appointed district court judge's ridiculous ruling

that nobody in our lawsuit had standing, sending it back to the lower court for disposition on the merit, finally, after four years. i was thrilled to hear yesterday that already attorneys in two gun rights cases are planning to use this decision in their own second amendment lawsuits. this just goes to show that knife rights really is the second front. we are all in this together. [ applause ] as you heard yesterday from mark barnes, ivory bans are the new stealth front in our fight for the second amendment. both at the federal and state level. we defeated over a dozen ivory ban bills in the states this year with our friends, with the help of our friends at the nra and others. only losing in california.

and, well, it's california. what more do i have to say? if you had told me nine years ago when i founded knife right that i would be spending a significant amount of my time fighting ivory bans, i would have told you you were nuts, but we cannot, we must not walk away from such an important battle that threatens millions of americans with billions of dollars of taking by the feds. takings which would just happen to remove hundreds of thousands of knives and guns from circulation, making it illegal to sell or trade or even work on them. let me be clear. knife rights abhors the poaching of all species. the proven solution is to attack poaching at the source, not punish lawful ivory owners in

the united states who cannot have any effect on the poaching in africa and the traffic in illegal ivory to china and asia. [ applause ] successful anti-poaching efforts in africa have demonstrated that aggressive enforcement in the field does save elephants. stealing the investment of millions of americans will not save a single elephant in africa. this is the worst kind of feel-good, do-bad government action. if you have any questions whether these ivory bans are good or bad, all you really need to know is that the concept was developed and promoted by the

clinton foundation. and that the largest organization promoting it today is the humane society of the united states. they are raising millions of dollars. they don't give a damn about the elephants in africa. not a penny is going to the elephants in africa. that money is used to fight gun owners. they are raising millions of dollars because they discovered an orphaned baby elephant calf next to a butchered mother raises a whole lot more money than a cute little panda. next year, we expect to be battling bans in over 20 states. every one of which threatens gun owners as well as knife owners. oh, shut up. >> keep going. >> tomorrow, monday, is the

deadline to submit comments on the feds' proposed final ivory ban rule. please, every one of you, if you have not already done it, go to kniferights.org and follow the links on the home page to submit a comment tomorrow, by tomorrow at midnight, in opposition to this absurd pan that will not save a single elephant in africa, but will cost americans billions and potentially remove hundreds of thousands of guns and knives from the market. also this year, the knife owners protection act authored by knife rights was refiled in both houses of congress. the house copa bill sponsored by nat salmon is still in committee, however recently, the copa bill in the senate was passed out of committee. it awaits an approperate bill to

be tacked on to, but given how little congress has done these days, i'm not holding my breath. by the same token, six years ago, they told us that our fifth exemption to the switchblade act would never pass, and we got that done. please help by encouraging your senator and congressmen to co sponsor this bill. the results speak for themselves. knife rights is the second front in the defense of the second amendment. we are rewriting knife law in america. join us, become a member. make a donation, help us continue this extraordinary record of success and remember, all knives matter.

>> thanks, doug. and thank you, panelists for a good kickoff of sunday morning, great panels. good content, appreciate it very much. you can exit stage left. and i'll bring up my next group of speakers. our next panel is packed with experts. it is entitled, using the media to advance gun rights. we will go in the order they are listed on the agenda except that we're going to let our good friend don irvine from accuracy in media go first so that charles heller can adjust his levels and so on. and which is as far as i know not a euphemism, and they'll

each have five minutes. i'm deg going to bring don up first. >> far out, man.going to bring . >> far out, man. >> okay, don, come on up. >> good morning, everyone. i want to thank -- i think everybody should give a round of applause to the second amendment foundation, to allen, julie ann, peggy, and the staff. a wonderful, wonderful conference. this is not an easy thing to pull off. i have done conferences and i know. so i'm going to try to keep my remarks brief. you know, we're talking about the media. this is something i do for a living, i have done for a living for a long type. i think we can say fairly easily that most of us in this room don't consider the media our friend when it comes to gun right. but that doesn't mean they can't become your friends or at least maybe frenemies along the way. this is where it's incumbent upon us to do things to make this happen. everybody in the media is busy.

these reporters, you know, the system has changed so they're not doing the kind of work that they were 20 years ago. newspapers aren't what they used to be. broadcast television has changed. all these things, cable television, now we see more of a move to the internet in the way people get their news. now, you can do things with the media quickly. their information is fairly public. you can find their e-mail addresses usually through the newspaper or the station, you can usually find their facebook account, their name, or their twitter handle or something like that. you can build a relationship, you can build some contacts ifs you use those kinds of things. that's one thing. when you're talking with the media, when you're talking with anybody, really, is that arm yourselves with the facts. i'm not trying to use -- but that is really, really important, because the facts are the facts. the facts actually favor our side. but what happens with the media is that with a lot of these things, it's not that they're necessarily overly liberally

biased all the time, but they tend to be ignorant of the facts when it comes to gun rights. it's incumbent upon everyone in the room to study, bone up on the facts and have the facts at the ready. you can do that very easily now thanks to the internet, to be able to do enough research to go through those things. so i think if you do that, i think you're going to be well armed, as we say. now, my other thing, too, my big passion with this is using social media. social media is extremely important in the battle on gun rights. everybody, the large percentage of the population now is using facebook, they're using twitter. these are ways to do this. if you're really that passionate about gun rights, you own a firearm, think about this, think about social media as another tool in the tool box and also as another weapon. facebook, i want you to be passionate using social media to express your feelings about gun

rights. these things, now, you might think, i only have five friends, or i only have -- what i do with facebook is put up a lot of cat videos. if you're doing that, you're doing it wrong. i'm sorry. you may love cats, but spending all your time is cat videos is not going to advance the cause of gun rights. you can do this because what happ happens? your number of followers on twitter, your number of friends on facebook, everything you do is potentially shareable, potentially retweetable, so that you amplify your voice by many times. you don't even know sometimes the effect that has, but you can see that by doing that. now, what everybody in the room should be doing as well is you should be using it now. if you haven't been using facebook, if you haven't been using twitter, things like this, to do things about this conference at this moment, then you better get on your phones, your tablets, your computers and do something now. because that is another way of doing this and expressing that message. instagram, if you don't really

know what to do with how to write a post or how to send a tweet, you can pretty much take a picture. how many people take pictures with their cameras, with their phones, all the time? instagram is a very easy way to do that. it backfeeds the other way. you can link that to twitter, to your facebook account. you get all that, all in one setting. it's a wonderful way of pushing that out. we're a very visual society. people look at pictures, people look at graphs. they take that, that's an immediacy, they share it, it has an enormous effect by when you go out there and you boom with all of that. one of the things that's effective for the other side, something that we need to do a little more of, is emotion. use emotion. emotion is -- why do we have ferguson, why do we have these problems? i come from maryland. my backyard basically was freddie gray. what happens here? it's the emotion of these people, of the anti-gun rights people who are out there and they're expressing themselves and then they just suck up all the air in the room, basically,

and they do this. if we had that same passion, that same emotion, there are stories, you know, as allen, who you'll hear from later, he goes around saying guns save lives. duh, yeah, it does, but let's tell that message. let's go tell the people, and let's show the people and find the people who have had their lives saved by that and do it and do it now. [ applause ] >> thank you, don. great. and next, we're going to hear from our good friend charles heller. charles. >> thank you. thank you. you know, i'm one of the rare people that will speak here who can say mr. gottlieb, i paid for this microphone. i want to talk a little bit about harnessing the emotion that don just talked about, a good lead-in to the point i want

to make. that's, we're all very passionate about our topic. to us, this is just, it is so endemic to our way of life. we don't think about it. to us, a firearm is another leatherman tool, right? it's just a piece of equipment. and to the anti-freedom people, it's a talisman of evil. and there isn't a great bridge in between them. so while you need to be passionate about it, you need to not -- you need to be careful about the way you express this, especially to people in the media. because your cheeriness, your enthusiasm, can be mistaken for an enthusiasm to do harm. so what you have to do is be very excited like don said, to be passionate, but at the same time, be careful in your language. the expression, you know, shooting to slide lock, to us is just, you know, a failure to reload. to them, it means you empty the gun into somebody.

so you have to be careful with how you language things. i want to talk a little bit about for those of you who of you are involved in here in your state level organizations? okay. everybody in arizona, put your hand down. other state level organizations outside of arizona. okay, because i know about the arizona organization. i know a little about that one. okay, what i want to tell you is when you communicate with the media, your press releases, whether they be, and you can take your press release now and put it on facebook. you can take that and not only give it to the media. you can give it to everybody else. but your press release need have a headline on it that grabs attention. like guns save lives. but it can be less generic and more specific to a circumstance than that. your press release needs to be one page. because as don said, everybody in the media is really busy. and i promise you, i'm a talk show host, and if somebody sends me a 15-page press release, it's going to the delete pile very

quickly. i will sometimes send them back one sentence, give me this in two paragraphs and i'll read it. but that's about as close as you'll ever get to me reading a more than two-page press release. make your press release one page. your premise needs to be in the first paragraph, your solution needs to be in the second paragraph. and your conclusion needs to be in the third paragraph. when you're talking to the media, you need to speak in sound bites. you can't start telling them that, well, yeah, the constitution was written in 1787, but the bill of rights wasn't put in until 1791. you've lost them. it's important, we all know it, but you have lost them. you have to speak in one sentence clips they can use, because i'm telling you, they're going to edit you down to one sentence. make that sentence count. what can you do? you have got the answer, almost all of you, in your purse, pocket, or laying on the table in front of you in the form of your phone.

what you need to do is write down one sentence clips that you can use. because when that light is shining in your face, or when the on-air light comes on in a studio, it induces stress. it does two things. it makess sphincters slam shut and brains go numb. and then your emotion kicks in and you say something really dumb. and that gets preserved forever on the internet. and on top of it, you know, you have this contorted face saying it. and that's what goes on the internet. all right. so what you want to do is look people in the eye and calmly have a go-to phrase, because at the end of every interview, somebody from the audience, tell me this, what is anyone who has ever been interviews, what is the reporter if they're any good at their job whatsoever, what do they ask? what?

is there anything i have missed? yes. there really is. we should never penalize the innocent for the acts of the guilty. that's one phrase that sometimes when i get interviewed gets tacked onto the interview. what it does is it's a little bit of a reach out to the people who may not share, as don said, what our passion is. they may not share our passion, but it's a bridge to somebody who gets it. they say, oh, yeah. i believe in that. even people that are like aclu members will say, yeah, we probably shouldn't punish the innocent for the acts of the guilty. and thank you for listening. >> thank you. my cheat sheet here. and next, we're going to bring up blogger john richardson of only guns and money.

there you go. >> thank you, ma'am. hi, i'm john richardson. this morning, i plan to tell you how i as a citizen journalist use the internet to advance gun rights and how you can use it, too. as the representative of new media on the stage this morning, first let me tell you how i got started. i have been a longtime reader of blogs, and then in may 2010, i finally decided, you know, i can do just as well. and i started my blog, no lawyers, only guns and money. the name was a play on the song "send lawyers guns and money." i'm a financial planner, not a lawyer, hence the name. i didn't have many readers at first, but then something happened. allen gur won the mcdonald case, and then used this ruling and then using this ruling, the

second amendment foundation in grassroots north carolina sued north carolina to overturn our ban on firearms during states of declared emergency. i saw it as my mission to report on the details on this case and the other follow-on mcdonald cases. i worked hard to provide background information so that readers would have a really good understanding of the issues. i felt that if people who supported gun rights had better knowledge than what was presented to them in the mainstream media, we could argue our side more persuasively. fast forward to today. 4200 plus blog posts later, 1.7 million visitors, and there have been many more cases and a good number of wins. somewhere along the way, i added the role of podcaster to my efforts on behalf of the second amendment. i'm now a co host of the polite stoit podcast, which has been live streaming this event this

weekend. my blog as well as the podcast does four things. it educates. it informs. it advocates. and it entertains. the first three help advance the cause of gun rights. while the fourth is, well, you know, we just need to laugh a bit sometimes. especially if it's at the expense of gun prohibitionists. let me give you some examples. our podcast, the polite society podcast, has a regular feature called defense of gun uses. we compile instances of how a lawful gun owner has used a firearm to defend him or herself and their family. the examples have often included a robbery or a home invasion. we look at what the person did right and what they did wrong. we don't sugar coat it, as we consider this essential education on the rights and responsibilities of gun owners. the best example of a

blogosphere informing people to help advance the cause of gun rights was the act that david, mike, and dave workman did in exposing operation fast and furious that got started right here in phoenix. [ applause ] it was bloggers that connected the whistleblowers to congressional investigators. it was bloggers that introduced the whistleblowers to sheryl atkinson so she could air their stories on television. many other bloggers including myself took the ball that david, mike, and dave started and we ran with it. and it was not some botched sting operation. it was a scandal. and it was due to the efforts of new media and not old media that it got attention. we in the new media are open about our efforts to advocate on behalf of gun rights and the second amendment.

back in 2011, atf was soliciting public comments on whether to implement a recording requirement that would require border states to inform them when someone baltimore than one semiautomatic rifle within a five five-day period. the gun control lobby had a letter generator. we didn't. with this assistance of one of my readers, we set up a letter generator with a prewritten letter. our letter generator sent 3,203 letters to omb opposing this power grab. atf still implemented, but by god, they couldn't say there was no opposition. in terms of entertainment, there's been too many examples. an old journalist once said, freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. well, as a blogger and a podcaster, i do own one. and thanks to the internet, so does everyone in this room.

when you post pictures of yourself taking a new shooter to the range on facebook, you're advancing the cause. when you post a picture of a new gun you just bought to gun you just bought to instagram, you are normalizing guns. when you treat a link to an article that is pro-gun, you are spreading the message. let's not forget tumblr, youtube, et cetera. it helps advance the gun culture. if there is one message i want to leave with you this morning, it is this. we are in a cultural war against strong, well-funded, top-down opponents. they have the mainstream media on their side. we have the grass roots. new media gives us the tools to conduct our cultural guerrilla war, build our grassroots support and spread our message of self-reliance, freedom and

gun rights. thank you for your time today. [ applause ] >> thank you, john. and herb stepp, author and commentator, former commissioner under rudy giuliani and one of our board members will now take it away. [ applause ] >> thank you. thank you, peggy. i realize as we're in the homestretch of the conference that i am the only person in the room who's been fired by michael bloomberg. [ applause ] i knew that would be the top credential i could point to. i wish i could report to you i was exercising my second amendment rights in lower manhattan, but it was mundane, the new marry placed virtually all the commissioners of giulia giuliani. i'm not sure cameras can pick this up, but for the audience at home, we have hundreds and

hundreds of prosecond amendment people here, mostly in black ties and evening gowns. we have a daunting task as our other panelists have pointed out. we're dealing with an emotionally-driven conversation as dr. john lott has pointed out. a lot of the people he runs into in the media don't even understand the studies he's been doing linking private gun ownship to reductions in crime around the country and even around the world. in my hometown of new york city, discussions or interviews on the gun issue don't even acknowledge our viewpoint of pro second amendment doesn't come into the reporting. some are committed zealots. we heard about a website that deals with the gun issue. obviously, we're not going to get anywhere with them. but here's who we have to work

on, and we've heard variations of this. the journalists, reporters on tv, newspaper, radio. some of them are lazy. but more likely, just like almost all of us, they're strained to the breaking point, too, with their jobs. so the new york daily news, you may have read, fired a bunch of their columnists and reporters. so where does that leave the rest of those folks to do? they've got, they're really scrambling to do their jobs. maybe they're covering one or two stories a day. probably covering three now. so they don't have the time to focus on the facts of our issue, or really many other issues. and then the cocktail party anti-gunners that we probably all encounter at a barbecue or wherev wherever, thinking this is the fashionable viewpoint. if your local club or state association has been wronged, i suggest, and it had is the executive summary of my talk.

use honey, not vinegar in dealing with these folks. don't become the person that's easy to dismiss and just ignore. so if you've been wronged, appeal to the sense of fairness in the news organization. again, newspaper, radio station, tv station. you might go to the reporter directly. you might go to an editor. and then you can ask for rebuttal time in those cases. and first, i would say, establish some kind of sense of rapport. you might even commend a reporter on something else, you know, i really liked your coverage on x, on some other story that has nothing to do with the second amendment or guns, but you really did a number on us and ignored our view point or left x, y and z facts out of your report on the gun issue. invite the media to events. maybe it's to a target range, a shooting range or some other event where you're celebrating an anniversary for your local

club which i think is coming up in western new york, right? what i would add, though, is don't just send a letter to the newspaper or the tv station, invite individuals. and i think you'll get a better response than what we heard about yesterday. to echo what we've heard before on this mpanel today, use socia media. get the word out through twitter, facebook, and some of the other sites that i'm not familiar with. there's a lot of gray hair in the room, but do what i do in my own situation. i sometimes post my column or a book review i've done on facebook or another site. i first got hope from my younger adult children. so whether you have kids at home or hot,not, a nephew or niece, some of the younger members of your clubs undoubtedly know this. so tap them. follow these reporters on twitter. they're always really eager to

give you their twitter address and commend them on one report so you're establishing rapport so that you'll have some credibility and some, something in the bank when you talk to them about the gun issue, the second amendment issue. now if you've really suffered a hit, if needed, ask for a correction. i was able to get a retraction from the "new york times" when i was 20 years old, when i first met alan got leeb and we were working on james buckley's campaign. i got a letter to the editor, because my -- this is a ten-second count down to electric shock, by the way. some large papers have an ombudsman that's supposed to deal with issues of fairness and bias and errors. so you may ask if your local news organization has an ombudsman. maybe it's part time. maybe it goes right to an editor, but ask. give the story to a competitor. so maybe the tv station has

wronged you, but maybe the radio station or the newspaper will write about it, especially if they're from different media groups. interest in local journalism schools. some journalism schools keep tabs on errors and bias in local media. speak with the publisher directly about what happened and why they're wrong and what we can do to correct it. tell don irvine at aim or brent bow zel about it. a brog, which we heard from mr. richardson. get a columnist interested. and website comments. so, to sum up, use honey versus vinegar. try to establish rapport with some of these folks who aren't the committed zealots against the second amendment. you have more options than ever to get the word out on the second amendment and correct the

bias or errors in the media. thank you. [ applause ] >> thanks, herb. you narrowly avoided the knitting needle. i'm going to bring up cheryl todd on knnt, the patriot radio show. i'm sorry. >> kknt. >> and you've got five minutes, too. >> all right. good morning! i am cheryl todd of az firearms.com. we're a small mom and pop's gun shop a little west of here in avon dale, arizona. and as such, we are the backbone of this country and this industry. and we are, i'm also the host of the newest local gun talk radio show here in the valley, gun talk az on kknt, salem, the patriot radio. thank you.

[ applause ] and i am so honored to have been asked to come here and speak to you today on the topic of how to use the media to protect our rights, because it's really something i'm passionate about, not only as a gun store owner, as a citizen of this fine country, but also as a mom, a wife and a grandma. it is so important. i agree with ronald reagan. he said that our freedoms are only one generation away from extinction. and i like to take that a step forward and say our freedoms are always one generation away from extinction. and it is our responsibility to pass that baton. and so, thinking about that, we decided, you know, we use the social media that my panelists are talking about, facebook, twitter, all of those fine things. but we wanted to go to a larger audience. so, for us, we decided, let's think about pod casts versus radio. pod cast is wonderful.

we've got the polite society with us today. thank you for the work you're doing. [ applause ] and, but for us, we felt like it might be reinventing the wheel in a lot of ways, because we don't have what salem has, which is the infrastructure already in play. they've got the equipment, they've got the staff. they've got the signal, the audience. all i have to do is show up with my hour's worth of content, and i'm good to go, and every show becomes a recording, which then is a pod cast. so it's kind of the best of both worlds. it's very economical, affordable. if anybody's thinking about doing this in your cities n it your states, i would encourage you to look at the small stations, because there's a lot of value there. when you look at marketing dollars, it's a very smart way to get the message out that i think we all agree is so important. plus, radio gives us built-in revenue-building streams, sponsorships, on-air ads, we're

building a referral website. so that will financially sustain the message you're trying to get out. all right, so we know how we're doing it. who are we speaking to? well, i'll quote another famous guy, bill gates. he said the future in leadership is in influence. how are we influencing by talking on the radio? i think just by speaking up. we are the majority, but we've been silent for way too long. so we've got all of us who involve our second amendment rights. we're never going to move from that position. we've got the whole anti-second amendment group who probably i are never going to move from their position. but there's this whole middle space. and these are the people who haven't decided yet, and they're trying to figure out, where are they on this spectrum. are guns good? are they evil? and so we try to engage in conversation and build relationship and influence and

inform and educate. and the way we do that is we go to facebook and twitter, and we find those stories on local news stations that you're never going to find on cnn or fox, and we bring those into the show about good guy with a gun. safe, responsible gun owner, doing the right thing, protecting their family, protecting theirselves, and put that into people's consciousness, so they can think critically for themselves about where they might lie on this spectrum, and in doing so, we put the onus back where it belongings. we stop being in this defensive posture, this collective guilt we feel, every time a bad guy does something bad with a gun, we say that we have this foundation, it's called shall not be infringed. the shiniest example that the anti-second amendment crowd has of their gun-free zones and tight restrictions is what,

d.c., chicago and detroit? well, once that middle space understands the true stories, the true news that's going on out there, it's going to put a lot more pressure on the anti group to step up their game and show why would that be the better choice. and finally, i'll just say that we try to do it with a lot, to resist the teeth the nashing, and eye rolling. being in a room with all of you fine people and hearing all of your stories, that is going to feed me. and i can go back out on the air waves. share your stories, drop that pond and start the ripple effect flowing, and i'm so excited to take all of your stories back to gun talk az. thank you so much for having me. [ applause ] >> thank you, cheryl.

and batting cleanup on this panel is our good friend david workman, senior editor of the gun mag. [ applause ] >> i'm supposed to keep this as short as possible. so thank you very much. and -- [ laughter ] just a couple of pieces of advice, since i deal with the media a lot for the citizens committee, i'm also a member of the media, i'm a card-carrying journalist, been in the business for 40 years. if you do an interview with a reporter, don't show up wearing a tee shirt with a message on it with a four-letter word. don't try to tell them that there's black helicopters coming for you and that jade helm really is coming. wad that up in your tin foil hat

and throw it in the trash. they will call you a moron. get right to the point. give them sound bites that they can use. use facts. be able to back those things up. we're in the middle of a lawsuit in washington state right now. i've spoken to several reporters about this. they send camera crews over to our offices. alan gottlieb has done the same thing. and i've been in the room for some of those. one thing i've found very useful in a situation with seattle which has done this $25 tax, and we are fighting that on the basis of it's a violation of the state preemption law. i printed out a copy of the state preemption law, highlighted where the seattle

lawsuit is going wrong and explain this to the reporters. they look at that and they say, yeah, they really wrong, aren't they? that plants the seed that there's another side to this story. it gives them a resource that they can look at, and they can take this to their editor and they say yeah, well, wait a minute. those guys over there, they say this is against the law. they say the law is on their side, and guess what? looks like they're right. we do have the facts on our side. we have to use them wisely. as i said, you're an ambassador. you want to become a regular, reliable news contact for these people. they want to be able to call you to get the yoe blig tory comment. so make sure you give them something with good, raw meat in it. something they can use. i can't begin to tell you the number of stories that i have

done where i'd call somebody up for an interview, ask them a bunch, and they get off on some tangent that has absolutely nothing to do with the story at hand. and i thank them politely and go find somebody else to talk to. so if you're going to establish this relationship with a member of the press, me included, be up front, be accurate. get to the point, get past the point and go about the rest of your lives. you're going to get the attention that this issue deserves, but you've got to do it right, and you've got to do it smart. and, again, thank you very much. [ applause ] >> thank you, dave. thanks for keeping it short. thank you all panelists, all great points, good information. we still hope to have q&a later

in the morning, but if you need to talk to cheryl or john or don or herb or even dave, you know, you can catch them out in the hall. i'm going to bring up my next two panelists who are already behind, because they should have been up here ten minutes ago. but this will be an interesting one. and its title is oddities, movies, language, journalism and guns and only seven minutes each. and our panelists are alan corwin -- i'm not sure who that guy is. [ laughter ] >> sweet. >> and jay neil shoeman who has not been with us for several years. i think the last grpc he was at was our l.a. one.

so that are bewill be a good ti all. we're going to start out with alan corwin, author, and bon vi von. >> i'm alan corwin of gun laws.com. and we won our first amendment lawsuit against phoenix, so our guns save lives bus stops are back up all over town! [ applause ] but the news media still refuses to say anything about your first gun. when did you ever hear the media say anything about getting a gun? am safely armed. and they don't say anything about this. the unbiased, fair and balanced

news media sense censors this m. is anyone in this room pro-gun? can't hear you. are you pro gun? i still can't hear you, are you pro gun? well, some of you get the idea. i think being pro-gun is a really bad idea. and here's why. if you're pro gun, what's the other side? anti-gun. and they think guns are really bad. so they think being anti-gun is the right way to go. they think that's the moral high ground. you should be anti-gun, because guns are evil. and they kill us on the words all the time. and we let them. i think you're really pro

rights. [ applause ] and if you're pro rights, what does that make them? anti-rights. and who wins that battle just on the words? you do. we're pro rights. they're antirights. you're pro freedom. they're antiself-defense, and we win that on the words. we have to win the war of the words. words matter. [ applause ] they want you to talk about assault weapons. assault is a kind of behavior. it is not a kind of hardware. when they, that's why they're having such a hard time defining it. when they introduced dianne feinstein's assault weapons bill it was 100 pages long. and on page 2, it says an assault weapon has a pistol

grip. on page 13, i read these things. unlike anderson cooper and wolf blitzer. wolf? on page 13, it said a pistol grip is anything that can function as a grip. that's all firearms. they wanted a ban all firearms by calling them assault weapons and assault is a kind of behavior. they're using deceit to beat us. they can't win on the merits. so they use deceit. and that's what we face in the media. they talk about gun control. that's a false flag for citizen disarmament. we want to talk about crime control, and that's a phrase they don't use. words matter. and that british guy? who wasn't even a citizen? abusing our air waves? he kept asking why does anyone

need, need, an ar-15 or 30-round magazine. that's a communist question. in america, ownership of property isn't based on need. like someone's in charge of deciding what you need? and therefore you can have it. you don't need ten pairs of shoes. you don't need a refrigerate irthe siir t the size of a closet. the real question is why does anybody want an ar 15 like many of you guys already own. you want it for the same reason the police do. and they still can't figure that out. you want it, because it's better. it's safer. it works great. it's accurate. it's easy to maintain. more ammunition is safer. they don't understand this. this is a question of wanting

something in america. and they just don't get that. and now we're at the heart of the matter. the media doesn't ask the real questions and has become the greatest threat to american freedom that we face. [ applause ] anderson cooper, wolf blitzer, rachel, even o'reilly, when will they ask hillary or the guy currently in the white house, why do you want another background check? what about the one we currently have that according to the brady center whose statistics we can accurately face, what about the 2 million felons you say you've stopped with the current background check? 2 million felons? where are they? we have their names and addresses. we have their names and addresses. where are they? they tried to buy a gun. hillary, isn't that illegal? where are they?

your husband passed this background check. well, wait a minute, i'm sorry, they're not all felons. some of them are crazy. you let them go? you want to spend money on another background check? why aren't the reporters asking this? i'll tell you why. they're not reporters. they're prop began diss with a dark side. [ applause ] were these criminals allowed to confront their accusers? were they even told what they're charged with? where's the aclu? these people who denied their rights by some kid in front of a computer in clarksburg, west virginia. where's the due process? who are these criminals that they stopped? we don't even know. and they're out running free, trying to buy guns, and they want another background check. they should spend some of that billion dollars that they want for another background check on dealing with the criminals they say they found who don't know

what they're charged with, who weren't given a trial, and we don't know anything about them. it's a fraud. and the people posing as reporters aren't asking these questions of any of the presidential candidates. that's what we face in the media. it's not media. it's propaganda. and the trapdoor's going to open in a moment here. [ applause ] well, they've got a guy running who's a socialist. socialism is the archenemy of us and capitalism. and they're practically promoting him. we stand for wealth. and they're promoting the guy instead of challenging him. why isn't the lame stream, mainstream media asking him, who's going to pay for free college? you have to come to alan gottlieb's gun rights policy

conference to get this kind of truth. or to my website, gun rights.com, to get more of this kind of truth. and that's the problem with the media. that's what we face. that's where you'll find out what black lives are really about, or the don't encourage evil initiative that we're introducing. that's why you come here. that's what we really face. i'm alan corwin of gun laws.com. thank you all for being here and god bless america. thank you very much. [ applause ] >> thanks, alan. thank you so much, alan. and now we'll hear from neil schulman. neil? [ applause ] >> i'm j neil schulman, author and film maker, and i made this movie, "alongside night" about

the american revolution returning to our time, and we gave copies to just about everybody who attended this conference. [ applause ] and for those of you watching on c-span, you can go to amazon.com and buy it. so let's talk about the first american revolution. by the rude ridge that arched flag. here once the embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard round the world. ralph waldo emerson wrote those words about felons illegally in possession of firearms who on april 19th, 1775 used those illegal guns to shoot at police, legally appointed by the governor to confiscate their illegal guns. in the exchange of gunfire, lee cops were killed and nine cops were wounded. sheriff david clark, i have bad news for you, this country was founded by cop killers.

roughly ll lly 226 years later passenger jets disarmed firearms by united states federal law were overpowered by jihad eye militia men armed only with box cutters. four per aircraft. two of those captured aircraft were used as weapons to crash into twin towers. and one in washington, d.c., and one flight where the disarmed passengers fought the jihad eye militia men who rather than surrender crashed the plane into a field near shanksville, pennsylvania. in subsequent wars, it cost the united states thousands of more lives, trillions of dollars and a wounded warrior class. gun control gave us 9 /19/11.

[ applause ] i'm a writer and film maker who's sold stories and screenplays to hollywood production companies, including an original script for "the twilight zone." march 7, 1986. this was given out as a counter point to the movies that show firearms as dangers to public safety. writers and producing led by harvey weinstein hate public gun ownership. but they make movies full of guns. hollywood gets past its position by using guns to shoot off the heads of zombies or being used

by cops. shows are dominated by military personnel and cops as the armed heroes. on the other side is a political right wing, dominated by politicians who assign absolute human rights only to the unborn. anyone breathing air has only government-granted privileges, driving licenses, and so forth. they talk about the right to work but want to build a wall to keep out workers. they want gun rights only for the law-abiding. in other words, any one who uniquely complies with thousands of tear ran cal regulations. i'm here to agree with the signers of the declaration of independence, a legal document more binding than the constitution that when any government, police and regulations become oppressive of the people's rights the people have the moral right to resist abuse under color of law and existing federal law agrees with

me. look up title xviii us code 242. which says that any official who violates constitutionally protected rights is acting as a criminal and has zero legal authority to do so [ applause ] title xviii, u.s. code section 242. title xviii u.s. code section 242. by the way, the second amendment in a recent seventh circuit applies to illegal immigrants, and i'm going to tell you something that's not pleasant to hear. it also applies to drug gangs. nowhere in the u.s. constitution is the word drug used. if it ain't listed in the constitution of the federal

government, anything they do on this subject is void ab inish yoe. that's how black lives matter can get together. thank you. >> thank you, neil, thank you, neil, and thank you again, alan. great, i'm going to bring up my next panel. i've got my cheat sheet for. which is outreach in a brave new world. and other participants are phil watson of the second amendment foundation who helped put together our shoot on friday, so many of you probably got to meet him. brian hartang, and andrew gottlieb, the newest member of the staff team, director of

outreach and development. i'm here to tell andrew, that yes, you can work with your parents. so we'll let andrew start it off with about eight minutes, andrew. [ applause ] >> hi there, everybody. so i got a question for all of you to start. how many of you are under the age of 30? [ laughter ] so we not beyond me. how many of you are active on facebook? that's good to see. how about twitter? any one on reddit? that's good to see. so these are where people my age, people under the age of 30 are getting their news. 68% of people would rather go online to get their news than read a newspaper or another trusted site. and we believe it. so we all talk about media and

how we deal with it every day, they're always against us. social media is the one outlet that we go et to shape. there is no bias other than what we want it to be. i put in all your folders, if you still have them, a sticker that has #2 a, which is basically the face of our movement on social media. anything that's searched by that comes up. everybody uses it, including us, and that's how we get our messages out. the difference with social media is, it's all about people, not money. so, because of this, because we are that active silent majority, we are the majority. we get to control what's out. so the more we can post, obviously, the more we get our message out what we want to say, and we get the younger crowd, which is what we need. this room shows that we have a lot of older people. and like we've said in the past, we lose our rights one

generation at a time and our generation is the one we have to capture so that that doesn't happen. second amendment, number two, for a reason. just like in texas, where we have our 3d printed case with the first amendment, the second amendment is also involved and weigh have a generation told by the media what is right and what's wrong, and every day we have a fight where it's hard to go against media that tells us we're crazy. so the whole idea that i want to talk about is that we need to be more educating on social media, more open, less arguments, more education. so i want to see everybody be more active in the future. i want to see you posting the hash tags. i want to sigh getting on these new sites so we can shape the movement. we get to control what's there. let's not lose it. i have a question for all of you. how many of you are going to sign up after this, how many of you are going to get on reddit,

facebook and twitter and actually post and be active? >> what's a reddit? >> google it. so what reddit is, reddit is basically a forum, an open site where anyone can post whatever they want, it's all sorted into categories. it's a lot like wikipedia in a sense, but it's all driven daily. and we actually get quite a bit of traffic on our website from social media aspects from younger people. and when we don't have anything to teach them to really get our side across, we lose them. and so we really need to be active on these sities on all this media so we can contract the message we want to get across and get them. because we cannot afford to lose another generation and lose our rights. thank you guys, very much. [ applause ] >> what a guy. thank you. thank you very much, andrew.

and we'll bring brian up next. >> good morning. name is brian hartang, and i'm the president of rapid response television. and i'm going to talk a little more about traditional media. we started rapid response television about three years ago. and really, it was in response to, i was in the outreach fund-raising industry for many, many, many years, but one of the things that became apparent, really about five years ago, is that we were all fishing in the same pond. meaning that when you looked at who we were doing outreach to, who we were trying to approach, everybody was basically preaching to the choir. you know, what, what we're after is we're not after reaching out to folks in this room. people that spend a weekend at a gun rights policy conference, we don't need to reach out. you guys are engaged. you want to reach out to the

majority out there that agree on second amendment rights but aren't necessarily engaged and the way we fail to do that and reap that audience, because social media and regular media, where do they get the names? how do they decide who to go out to? a lot of times it's because of somebody who has engaged in, somebody who has done something to get on the radar screen. but we're after the millions of people that are not on the radar screen out there that do believe in second amendment rights, and we do a lot of work with saf, an and you might have seen some of the ads that we do. but we do it through tv, but we do it a little different than a lot of the ads that you see out there. we don't do psa ads. we don't do nice, fancy, feel-good ads that just tell a story our ads, the way we do it, we use traditional, direct

marketing, direct response techniques like you see when you sell products on tv, and we mirror that with how do people, the traditional techniques for fund-raising at outreach. so when we produce an ad, we really accomplish three things, one, it's down and dirty and gets to the point and gets people's attention. the second goal is to get people to look at the tv. what is this? what are they talking about? second thing we do for the first 30 seconds of a one-minute spot is hit them between the eyes on an issue. we're trying to get people to believe in second amendment rights and our freedoms, and we want them to rolook at the tv a say yeah. you're damn right, i agree with that. and when we raise money, we want them to participate and make it as easy as possible.

whether it's call a number or go online and sign a petition to send millions of names and voices to congress before a vote. whether it is to get people to become members and gain members for organizations like saf, or whether it's to shut down the phones. one of the things we have is we make it very easy for people to call in and not just put a phone number that goes to the general congressional office, because that's nice, and it's a minor irritant to congress men and senators when you call their office in d.c. it's a real irritant when you load up every single phone number that they have in their home states, in their regional offices and we have technology that will actually search out and find a free line. so, if they have 15 numbers, we'll load all 15 numbers. and when you call in, we have technology that will actually

find the next line. and when you shut down all their lines, then people are going to start calling them, and they're going to start caring. in tv, second amendment has been one of the biggest issues and the most passionate issue that we've done. and there's some reasons for that on tv. part of it is that there is a passion out there. so people, it's easy for people to engage in. part of it is tv is not on the pro, on the pro-second amendment side. tv is not used as aggressively that it is on the other side. and there's some reasons for that. that i learned the hard way three years ago. so i always like to tell this story to kind of tell you why that happens. in spring of 2013, we had our first major pro gun rights

campaign. going for our client. and i was told by a major provider that had about, over 30% of all the u.s. homes that they would not run my ad. okay. and i asked them why. and they said because the issue's too controversial, and we will not run that issue on our network. okay. that night, i'm laying in bed or a couple days later, i'm laying in bed watching tv and a bloomberg ad comes on, so needless to say, i didn't sleep that night, and i was on the phone the next morning with a lawyer, with the network, because, as you mknow, they hav to give equal time. so if they do an issue, they have to do the opposing issue, so it's something i battle on a daily basis. money is an issue out there, bloomberg is putting a lot of money into it. but understand that the

mainstream media is also doing their part to shut us down. the providers are doing their part to shut us down. they'll find every excuse that they can find to not air a tv ad that is pro second amendment and pro guns. but they won't hesitate on taking bloomberg's money and running his ads. so it's something that is important that we have to keep pushing. we have to be on tv, because it is a medium that reaches out and grabs a broader audience. and it catches people that are unexpected, and that's the best time to catch them, when they're not looking for it. so tv is a medium that we need to keep fighting for. we need to keep investing in and we need to keep out there to get the message out and get the outreach. thank you. >> i like these brave new world people. they're very good on time, so. we'll turn it over to phil now. phil watson.

>> hi, my name's phil watson, i'm the special projects director for the second amendment foundation. i worked there for about four years now. ancame over from a place called the leadership institute from arlington, virginia, which is why i am wearing a seersucker suit to honor morton blackwell. weerl' going to go across the parking lot to the crest view room, and we're going to have a meeting there on grassroots lobbying. so i hope to see as many of you there as possible. a lot of my work with the second amendment foundation has been focussed on things to do with outreach, public relations, getting, getting grassroots gun owners involved. and i really, i've really done

some interesting things to try to get the truth out there to the public. i went to alan bought it leeb one day and said we've really got to start looking into what michael bloomberg is doing, and we basically found out and with our research project "meet the mayors", that a lot of the people that joined bloomberg's group, "mayors against illegal guns" didn't know they'd joined or were felons. [ applause ] it's true. and we put that out there. it went, it goes completely viral every time we do something with it. there's over 30 now of these people that have worked with michael bloomberg that have been charged and convicted in courts

of law of everything from, you know, pedophilia to assault to violating the gun themselves passed. so it's very interesting when you hear bloomberg talk about this stuff as if he, he really has clean hands, and he really doesn't. and one of the things that really shocked me about michael bloomberg when i, i continually look into him and what he's doing was just this last year he did this conference at the aspen institute. and he said all young minority males should be disarmed. and i come from a mixed race family. and i think that's a crazy statement. and i think that, i think that is a plainly, obviously racist statement, and i don't think

michael bloomberg has apologized yet. and he should apologize, and he has to. because if we're not going to demand an apology for when this guy does something wrong, then who is? the media's not. we all know that. the media loves to help him out with his message, so i want to give you an interesting tidbit about a book i've been reading. it's called "trust me, i'm lying", and no, it's not written by michael bloomberg. it's a great book. it's going to give you a lot of tools to sort of traverse the media landscape. and a lot of techniques in there are techniques that i've used. and one of the fun things was giving tips to bloggers. sometimes things happen out there, and you don't know,

always know it's us. but things like when michael bloomberg's websites were found out to be registered on the city of new york servers, that went viral. that originally started with us giving tips to bloggers out there. and michelle malkin's website picked it up. the ace of spades website picked it up and it went viral from there on out. and it's little things like that that we can do to sort of give the media a nudge. a lot of the outreach i do is online. i don't know a lot of the people that i talk to all the time. i meet them. i meet them online. all over the world. and we've done, we've done great work with our international group, the international association for the protection of civilian arms rights. and we've got over 30 groups i brief now all over the world.

a lot of the people i've never met in person. i just know that they do great work and that the only way i can communicate with them usually is online. and so if you can, go there and do, do us a service and repost our stuff and look at that stuff because it's very educational. there's a whole world out there, it's not just a fight in the un united states. there's a battle with bloomberg and the other billionaires. there's a battle with cities like seattle, which is really a propaganda war. sort of funded by bloomberg. and a battle against ourselves. and so the battle against the cities, seattle's a perfect example of that, on the plaintiff for one of our lawsuits, to get rid of the new seattle city gun tax. and it's really an outrage. they want to tax every single

gun sold in seattle and every single bullet sold in seattle. and blame law-abiding citizens, like everybody in this room, for the actions of a few criminals, and i think it's an outrage. and so we should definitely watch out for stuff like that, because, look, bloomberg's going to try to use anything and everything he can to ban guns, and if he can't ban guns, he wants to make them cost thousands and thousands of dollars. he can afford them. he can afford them for his security guards, but he doesn't want us to have them. so that's really important to fight stuff like that. [ applause ] thank you. one of the most amazing discoveries that we've made was just going through all these, all these online records of records requests that we had made. and we found the gun control

playbook. and it was an 80-something page media guide to how, how to basically ban guns. and i want to give you some talking points today how to, how to fight that. one of their talking points there is, look, they want to divide us, okay? they want to break us down into little groups. this is pitting us against ourselves. open carry versus concealed carry versus hunters versus different types of guns. and they want to make everybody out to seem like, seem like a criminal and seem like you don't care. and the one way to really fight that is just to turn their talking points around on them. and

battle of la deung valley. and a look now at the 2016 elections and gun policy. representatives from the firearms coalition, the citizens committee for the right to keep and bear arms, and other groups address the 30th annual gun rights policy conference in phoenix. this portion is just over 40 minutes. >> well, the 2016 election is going to be here before we know it, and we need to be engaged now. let me start off by saying we all owe hillary clinton a very big thank you. why? an anti-gun rights rhetoric is going to ensure the result is

going to be a record turnout of gun owners in the 2016 election. [ applause ] >> she's already doubled down on barack obama's assault on gun rights to get her party's nomination. voters are going to impact not just the presidential race, but every race on the ballot from the u.s. senate all the way down to dogcatcher. it will impact every democrat on the ballot and like it or not, democrats have made gun control an extremely partisan issue. not all democrats are anti-gun and not all republicans are pro-gun rights. the party that controls congress or a state legislature controls that flow of legislation and it's important to our whole battle of the right to bear arms. the importance of the presidential election cannot be

limited at all. for us, judicial appointments are critical to our continued success in the courts and believe me, our opponents would love to shut that courthouse door in our face. only a few cases every reached the supreme court of the united states. judicial nominations to lower courts are very important and always fly below the radar. we have seen damaged second amendment rights of obama nominees in courtrooms from massachusetts to oklahoma. i can think of only two judges appointed by democrats that voted to overturn gun rights allows. believe me, if hillary clinton is elected president, all those nominations to the courts are going to be worse. we can't forget the importance of the u.s. senate election.

the senate confirms those nominees to the courts. so let's take a look at the playing field for what we're dealing with in the 2016 election. the key to senate control in 2016 presidential election is going to be down to a few states. we'll go state by state and look at this. if the gop presidential ticket wins by a hair, it will be exceptionally difficult for the democrats to take back the u.s. senate. if the democrats squeak through the presidency and catch the senate, they'll do the trick against us. most analysts acknowledge that democrats have a plausible chance of taking a minimal victory in the u.s. senate. the democrats need to gain four seats to control the senate if a

democratic president gets elected. otherwise they need five. five might be a little bit of a heavy lift to capture the senate on the election map. there's only a certain number of states that are in play. those states are florida, i illinois, new hampshire, north carolina, ohio, pennsylvania, and wisconsin. if you're from those states, that's really the battleground in this election. moreover democrats have to hold shaky senate seats in colorado and nevada. other than illinois, these are states that should be very competitive for the race to the white house, which will make the presidential coat tails all that more important. because the rival democratic majority is difficult, the republicans are still more likely to keep the majority than the democrats to grab it. at least a small net gain for the gop is expected though.

not losing any net seats probably requires the republican nominee to not only win the presidency, but capture more electoral votes. it guarantees no anti-gun legislation can ever get to a president's desk. the u.s. house is where we're able to stop the whole obama agenda and with hillary clinton, if she's elected, it will be twice as important. obama took office in 2009 with 60 democrats in the u.s. senate. they had 250 seats in the house of representatives. today there are only 46 members of the senate in the democratic caucus. the worst showing since the first year after the ronald

reagan landslide. across the capital and the house there were 188 democrats. now the republicans have more seats than when herbert hoover took office in 1929. this, however, is really the tip of the iceberg. when you look at the states, the collapse of the anti-gun rights democrats fortunes are even worse. republicans now hold 31 governorships, nine more than they had when obama was inaugura inaugurated. the gop has won governorships in purple and even deep blue states. maine, massachusetts, new jersey, maryland, wisconsin, michigan, illinois, new mexico, nevada, ohio. the last midterm elections only one republican governor tom corbett in pennsylvania was

replaced by a democrat. in alaska, they lost to an independent. every other republican was returned to office. now turn to the state legislatures. although if you're a loyal democrat, you may want to avert your eyes to this. in 2009, democrats won full control of 27 state legislatures. republicans had control, full power, in only 14. now the gop is in full control of 30 state legislatures. the democrats hold power in just 11. [ applause ] >> in 24 states, republicans control the governorship in both houses of the legislature to give a total control over the political process. that increased power at the state level has already led to serious consequences for both democrats and anti-gun rights lobby. for their political future and

for their goals have been put in jeopardy. the gun rights movement has already identified over 16 million gun owners that are registered to vote. we're on schedule to double that number by election day 2016. [ applause ] >> and most of that work is being done in battlegrounds states and contested congressional districts. this data vault, so to speak, is important to bloomberg's attempt at any ballot measures in states like nevada, maine, and coming up probably here in arizona. we also have to remember, by the way, with independent expenditures and bloomberg's track record, he is planning on spending millions of dollars out of his own pocket targeting to certain pro-gun members of congress and the senate to try to make an example of someone who supports gun rights that he

can say he took down, so our work is really cut out for us. the latest polling data should give our opponents heart burn. the latest cnn poll out just a few days ago in your opinion, do existing laws make it too easy for people to buy guns, too differe difficult, or just about right. certainly this is good news for pro-gun candidates, but this news should give hillary clinton, barack obama, michael bloomberg, and his every town group a migraine headache. 10% responded the current laws to buy a gun are too difficult. when you add the 10% to the 49%, it gives us 59% supporting laws the way they are with no changes, no more gun control, no new bills passed.

so that's good news for us and for our candidates. but of course what the other side tries to do is rebrand it. they don't try to sell it as gun control in the elections. it'll be sold as common sense proposals, mental health issues, various preventive causes, anything domestic violence. they're not going to talk about gun control. they know that's a losing proposition, except for hillary clinton who has doubled down on it. that's why we owe her a big thank you. that's good news for us. next year's gun rights policy conference is in tampa, florida, a key battleground state. that state will determine the future of our gun rights in the 2016 elections. with your help, we'll turn out the gun vote like never before. for all of us, the 2016 election, again, starts today. in 2016 we must fight to win.

thank you. [ applause ] >> does anybody know what i'm about to say? good morning, gun lobby. [ cheering and applause ] >> he made that reading from the grpc microphone for almost every year of the past 30 years, and i'm proud to do it again this year, but this year i want to change it up just a little bit. good morning, gun voters.

[ cheering and applause ] >> you know, when we talk about lobbying, we're talking about legislation. we're talking about influencing those that we have elected to do what we want them to do, what we hired them to do. when we talk about gun voters, we're talking about getting those guys in, and we can't separate the two. we can. often we do, but we shouldn't. lobbying and political action on the election front are both critical to long-term survival and winning. and unlike the rumors that the nay sayers say, alan and i, nra, goa, we're not in this business to drag it out and make money. we're in this business because we believe in it and it's what

we do. i would much rather have a real job where i go to real regular hours, come home to my family, go out shooting every now and then, than to spend 14 hours a day in front of my laptop trying to get the message out to those who don't understand why it's so critical that we defend our right. in the coming election 2016, it's racing up on us. we've got a crowded field on the republican side, and i just want to comment. yesterday for the second time that i've been attendance to a grpc, we had a presidential candidate in the room. we spoke with us. he endorsed our positions. yesterday when governor jim gilmore was in this room, i would be willing to bet that there were at le