Volume 38 | January 01, 2024 | |
A Monthly Electronic Newsletter from the Louisiana Shooting Association, Inc. | | |
|
LSA Annual Meeting of Members and Elections
The Annual Meeting of the Members of the LSA and Elections for the Board of Directors will be held on Sunday, March 3, 2024 at the Cabela's in Gonzales, LA. Cabela's opens at 10:00 AM and the meeting will start as soon as possible after members are registered for the meeting.
You will be able to renew your membership at the meeting and credit cards will be accepted.
Each year at our Annual Meeting of Members, one third of the Directors are elected to our Board. From those elected Directors, the Board selects the Officers of the Corporation in an open forum.
The current Officers and Directors are:
President: Daniel E. Zelenka, II (2025)
Vice-President: Everett Baudean (2025)
Secretary: CPT Paul Prokop, USCG Ret. (2024)
Treasurer: Jay D. Hunt, III (2024)
Director-at-Large: Barret Kendrick (2025)
Directors:
Paul Angrisano (2025)
Ron Duplessis (2024)
Clifford Grout (2026)
Ronald “Buck” Kliebert (2024)
John K. Laws, III (2025)
Joseph “Jay” Meynier (2026)
John Overton (2026)
CPT George Petras, USCG, Ret. (2026)
Dave Ramey (2026)
Dwayne Vidrine (2024)
Alternate Directors
1st Alternate: Bruce A. Lemmert (2024)
2nd Alternate: Chris Thayer (2024)
The Officers and Directors highlighted above have terms that will end at the March 3 meeting.
If you are interested in running for a Director role, please let us know. We'd love to have you serve your Association.
| | |
Big Changes are Coming for LSA's On-line Platforms
After a number of years with our current on-line platform, the LSA is upgrading our systems. This will mean changes for you!
-
We will be adopting new, more advanced enterprise software. For the previous several years, the LSA has maintained our membership data using gomembers OnDemand enterprise software. When you renewed your membership on-line or purchased items from our on-line store, you were taken to their server. This software worked well, but the developers of the software have not made any improvements to the platform in many years. This forces the LSA to use Authorize.net to process credit cards, Gulf Coast Web to host our website, and Constant Contact to send out our emails to our members. All of these, of course, cost your Association money.
-
We are switching to StarChapter soon. StarChapter will host our membership rosters, serve as our enterprise on-line store, process our credit cards, serve as our email marketing platform, and host our integrated website all for a monthly fee that will be less than the combined costs of all of our other platforms.
-
So, what does this mean for you? At some point in the near future we will lock our membership roster. You won't be able to join or renew during this short period while we transfer our records to our new software. After that, you will receive an email from us facilitating your logging in to your new account. We often get asked about an auto-renewal option for memberships. With our current platform, that is not possible. With the new StarChapter software, we will be able to accommodate those who want that ability
We don't yet have a timeline for these changes, but it will be in the first quarter of 2024 and we'll be sure to keep you informed on our progress.
| | |
The GVA claims there were 417 mass shootings in 2019. The FBI says there were 30, because it uses a much narrower and realistic definition. | |
Bloomberg lauds the Gun Violence Archive for its Pretend Data
| |
By Lee Williams
Whenever Bloomberg Businessweek writes about firearms or the Second Amendment it’s forced to disclose to readers that its owner is rabidly anti-gun.
No one has spent more of their personal wealth to infringe upon the Second Amendment than former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. So, when the topic is guns, his mainstream news wire adds a strange disclaimer, which labels the work as propaganda for the boss, not news:
“Michael Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg Businessweek parent Bloomberg LP, also founded Everytown for Gun Safety, which advocates gun-safety measures.”
In a recent story titled “Tallying the Best Stats on US Gun Violence Is Trauma of Its Own,” Businessweek extols the alleged virtues of the long-debunked Gun Violence Archive, which is the legacy media’s favorite source of sensational, misleading and inaccurate mass-shooting data.
The puffery is strong in this piece. The author, Madison Muller, who usually writes about weight-loss drugs, is clearly trying to prop up the foundering GVA. Businessweek is not the first media outlet to jump to the GVA’s defense. Last year CNN defended the Washington D.C.-based nonprofit from serious allegations raised in a special report by the Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project, which GVA founder and executive director, Mark Bryant, dismissed as “irrelevant.”
Bloomberg’s recent story is best defined by what it doesn’t say. There is no serious discussion of GVA’s loose, all-inclusive definition of a mass shooting, which states that anytime four or more people are shot or even wounded, the GVA rings the mass-shooting bell. Unlike the FBI, Bryant’s team does not exclude anything. Even if the shooting is drug or gang related, which are the two main causes of shooting deaths in the country, the GVA counts it. The nonprofit also includes shootings that are self-defense or the result of domestic violence.
Using Bryant’s all-inclusive definition, the GVA claims there were 417 mass shootings in 2019. The FBI says there were 30, because it uses a much narrower and realistic definition. This year, the GVA claims there have been more than 72,000 shootings, of which 636 were mass shootings – an average of more than 1.7 per day.
Continue Reading
| | |
|
“This is a huge victory for Second Amendment rights, especially for young adults. The Biden Justice Department argued that people in this age group were not adults, which was patently ludicrous. The government simply could not defend the constitutionality of the handgun prohibition, and Judge Kleeh’s ruling makes that clear.”
- Adam Kraut
Excutive Director, SAF
| |
|
FEDERAL JUDGE STRIKES HANDGUN SALES BAN FOR 18-20 YEAR OLDS IN WEST VIRGINIA
In a case that may have important implications for a similar cased filed in Louisiana by the LSA, the Second Amendment Foundation, and others, a federal district court judge in West Virginia has ruled that a federal law prohibiting handgun sales to 18-20-year-olds is “facially unconstitutional,” and granted a summary judgment in a case brought by the Second Amendment Foundation.
In a 40-page decision, U.S. District Chief Judge Thomas S. Kleeh with the Northern District of West Virginia wrote, “(B)ecause Plaintiffs’ conduct – the purchase of handguns – ‘fall[s] [within] the Second Amendment’s ‘unqualified command’ and the challenged statutes and regulations are not ‘consistent with the Nation’s historic tradition of firearm regulation,’ the Court FINDS 18 U.S.C. §§ 922(b)(1) and (c)(1) facially unconstitutional and as applied to Plaintiffs.”
He enjoined the defendants — in this case the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, ATF Director Steven Dettelbach and Attorney General Merrick Garland — from enforcing the provisions “against Plaintiffs and otherwise-qualified 18-to-20-year-olds.”
“This is a huge victory for Second Amendment rights, especially for young adults,” said SAF Executive Director Adam Kraut. “The Biden Justice Department argued that people in this age group were not adults, which was patently ludicrous. The government simply could not defend the constitutionality of the handgun prohibition, and Judge Kleeh’s ruling makes that clear.”
"There was never any historical evidence supporting this arbitrary ban on the purchase and ownership of handguns by young adults,” noted SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb. “As we maintained all along, history goes in the opposite direction. At that age historically, young adults were considered mature enough to serve in the militia, the military and take on other responsibilities. We’re delighted with the judge’s ruling.”
The case was filed in September 2022. Joining SAF were the West Virginia Citizens Defense League and individual citizens Steven Robert Brown and Benjamin Weekly. They were represented by attorneys John H. Bryan of Union, W.Va., and SAF’s Kraut, who is a practicing attorney based in Westtown, PA.
| | |
Get Your 2023 M1 Garand Raffle Tickets! | |
Tickets for the 2022 M1 Garand Raffle in Support of Junior Shooting are now on sale. The drawing will be held October 19, 2024. Winner need not be present to win!
Buy Raffle Tickets
| |
|
All donations stay here in Louisiana and are spent solely on Junior Shooting! | | | | |
