Last night in the chat room for the Gun Nuts Top of the Chain said that he would like to know what to expect at the Gun Rights Policy Conference that he is attending this year. I was a speaker there in 1999 and 2000 and it is quite reasonable to ask that sort of question. The hosts of the show didn’t bring it up on the show and I didn’t have the CPU bandwidth to respond in chat while keeping up with the voice processing at the same time. I intended to address it in my post late last night but I forgot about it. So, better late than never…

The two GRPC events that I went to were about 500 and 700 gun rights activists listening to and networking with other gun rights activists. There were speakers nearly all day long who talked about a variety of subjects (see the links above to the 1999 and 2000 events). Some of the speakers were absolutely awesome. Others were merely good. There were lots and lots of “war stories”. A lot of it could be thought of as After Action Reviews for all the major and many of the minor skirmishes in our battles with the media, legislatures, and the anti-gun organizations.

There were lots of gun books available and many of them were free. Many were scholarly journals on the sociological and legal aspects of gun control. There was some really awesome stuff.

I got to meet and talk with people like Alan Korwin, Neal Knox, a U.S. Congressman (he and I ate lunch alone together), a candidate for U.S. Congress (and became good friends with her), and many lesser known but still incredibly talented people.

Top of the Chain also asked, in my comment section about coming out as a blogger. That’s a little more difficult question because in 1999 and 2000 was before I even knew what a blog was. I didn’t start blogging until February of 2004. I do know the people that put the event on. When I talked to Alan Gottlieb at the NRA Convention last year he said he read my blog and I know they keep a very close watch on what is being said in the major media outlets as well as many of the Internet forums and email lists. I’m certain coming out as a blogger will not be a bad thing in any way. The only thing that could be bad about it would be if the content was offensive in some manner. If the content was racist, homophobic, or advocated illegal violence it would be heavily frowned upon.