Help Me Help You, But First Help Yourself

WARNING! Legislative session starts Monday (Jan. 27th), with at least 12 gun bills already listed- most of them bad!

I'd give you a link, but the only one I have goes to a Mailchimp notice, meaning anyone could hit "unsubscribe."

I guess providing useable and sharable links is beyond many "gun groups." Without them, to put it mildly, reach is limited.

The original sender, Utah Shooting Sports Council, hasn't updated its main page since Jan. 2019. Their "Current Alerts" page hasn't been updated since 2018. Ditto I saw no FB or Twitter links to grab a notice from there.

So many gun groups appear not ready for prime time-- meanwhile, the progs are all slick and well versed on using C3I to their advantage.

[Via Felix B]

Write Someone Else's Congressman

I occasionally get feedback after I ask readers to write a specific congressman that the contact form only accepts communications from constituents living in their district. That's intentional avoidance, of course, as things they introduce, sponsor and vote on affect us all, and they aren't shy about accepting donations from across district and state lines.

What I do is use the address and phone of their local branch office (sometimes requiring I go to the USPS site to get the "+4" for the zip. It's also why I urge all advocates to get on social media, because you can tweet or message any of them that way, and their staffers will pick up and convey to the decision-makers what they see trending.

And no, of course I don't recommend using Facebook or Twitter for trivial pursuits.  I urge you to use it for C3I purposes. Otherwise, you are ceding entire vital areas to a documented enemy, who as WarOnGuns Correspondent Mack H observes, has weaponized social media and uses it to great effect.

More here.

2A*C3

2A*C3 is a community investing in creating command, control, and communication in support of defending second amendment rights. [More]

I get invites all the time but I can't join groups on social media because I only use it to publicize the articles I write. There's no other way for me to get the word out there and after a full day -- and they are full days and then some -- there is just no time left for me to engage any deeper.

That said, having spent 16 years in a past life producing directives for a defense contractor specializing in satellite navigation and communications, I fully agree with the concept being promoted, and have, on occasion, advocated using social media "for C3I purposes" instead of "trivial" ones.

A quote would be in order:

"Communications are the nervous system of the entire SAC organization, and their protection is therefore, of the greatest importance. I like to say that without communications, all I control is my desk, and that is not a very lethal weapon." Gen. T.S. Power, CINCSAC, May 1959

I encourage you to check 2A*C3 out and invite them to keep me apprised of significant developments they are working on.

Judgment Day

No Judge should consider people who defend themselves Guilty Unless Proven Innocent [More]

Coincidentally, the reason this blog was down since Thursday night is I flew down to Florida on Friday morning to drive my mother back up to Ohio for the summer.

UPDATE -- Important info from Ed in comments when writing Gov. Scott:

"Under Florida law, all correspondence sent to the Governor’s Office, which is not exempt or confidential pursuant to Chapter 119 of the Florida Statutes, is a public record. All public record electronic mail sent to Governor Scott will be posted to Project Sunburst at http://www.flgov.com/sunburst, and will be accessible to the public. If you do not want the public record contents of your e-mail or your e-mail address to be published on this website or to be provided to the public in response to a public records request, please do not send electronic mail to this entity. Please be aware that personal information sent in your correspondence, such as home addresses and telephone numbers, may be posted to the Sunburst public records website."

Here's a way to bypass that:

Don't use "social media" for trivial pursuits. Use it because the other side has weaponized it and it makes no sense from a  C3I perspective to cede that ideological battle space to give them the advantage.