On Monday afternoon, a U.S. Marshals Fugitive Task Force attempted to apprehend a career felon, Terry Clark Hughes. Usually the Marshals get their man, even violent fugitives like Hughes. Unfortunately, on this day the 39-year-old Hughes saw them coming.
In the end, the career felon shot and killed four law enforcement officers attempting to take him into custody (again) for a felon in possession of firearms. He wounded at least four other officers before he was shot dead.
CHARLOTTE — Monday marked a dark day for Charlotte, as four officers died and four more were shot while they were working “to keep the city safe.”
The chief of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department confirmed an officer with the department and three members of the U.S. Marshals Fugitive Task Force were killed in a shootout Monday while serving a warrant in east Charlotte.
CMPD Officer Joshua Eyer was critically wounded earlier before he died at the hospital, the chief said. He leaves behind a wife and a 3-year-old son.
New video from a neighbor’s house shows the chaos of one side of the shootout. It shows one U.S. Marshal shot twice and at least two others firing from behind cover.
CHARLOTTE — The chief of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department said they are not looking for any more suspects after four officers were killed and four more were shot in the line of duty on Monday.
US Army financial counselor admits to defrauding Gold Star families: DOJ
ByLeah Sarnoff
A former financial counselor for the United States Army pleaded guilty to defrauding the families of fallen servicemembers out of life insurance payments, the U.S. attorney’s office announced Tuesday.
Gold Star family members are the immediate beneficiaries of servicemembers who have died in active-duty military service and are entitled to a $100,000 payment and the servicemember’s life insurance of up to $400,000, according to the organization.
Caz Craffy, from Colts Neck, New Jersey, pleaded guilty to obtaining more than $9.9 million from several Gold Star families to invest in accounts managed by Craffy in his private capacity without the families’ authorization, according to prosecutors.
Craffy was a civilian employee of the U.S. Army, working as a financial counselor with the Casualty Assistance Office, but he was also a major in the U.S. Army Reserves, where he has been enlisted since 2003, prosecutors said.
From May 2018 to November 2022, the Gold Star family accounts suffered more than $3.7 million in losses and Craffy made more than $1.4 million in commissions, according to prosecutors.
“Those who target and steal from the families of fallen American servicemembers will be held accountable for their crimes,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in the press release.
“Nothing can undo the enormous loss that Gold Star families have suffered, but the Justice Department is committed to doing everything in our power to protect them from further harm,” Garland said.
On Tuesday, Craffy pleaded guilty to 10 counts, including six counts of wire fraud and one count each of securities fraud, making false statements in a loan application, committing acts affecting a personal financial interest and making false statements to a federal agency, according to the New Jersey U.S. Attorney’s Office’s press release.
“Caz Craffy admitted today that he brazenly took advantage of his role as an Army financial counselor to prey upon families of our fallen service members, at their most vulnerable moment, using lies and deception,” U.S. Attorney Philip R. Sellinger said in the press release.
“These Gold Star families have laid the dearest sacrifice on the altar of freedom. And they deserve our utmost respect and compassion, as well as some small measure of financial security from a grateful nation,” Sellinger said.
Craffy entered his plea before U.S. District Judge Georgette Castner in Trenton, New Jersey and is scheduled for sentencing on Aug. 21.
Craffy’s plea agreement calls for a prison sentence of 8 to 10 years, according to prosecutors, and the restitution amount will be announced during his sentencing.
The second week of testimony in the New York trial of NRA, CEO Wayne LaPierre, Secretary and General Counsel John Frazer, and former Treasurer Woody Phillips wrapped up on Friday, January 19, 2024, and things are not looking good for the defendants. A fourth former executive, LaPierre’s former deputy Josh Powell, pled guilty days before the trial began.
Also, just days before the trial, LaPierre announced his resignation, effective at the end of January 2024, at an NRA Board of Directors meeting. Many spectators and even some participants have missed the delayed effect. He’s still technically in charge and, presumably, still having hislegal bills covered by NRA members’ money.
In his resignation announcement, LaPierre said he was stepping down for health reasons. He is reported to be suffering from the debilitating effects of chronic Lyme Disease, a tick-borne bacterial infection that can cause a variety of serious health problems. Having struggled with Lyme Disease myself and had people close to me affected by the chronic form of the infection, I won’t join in the chorus that has suggested the whole thing is some ruse on LaPierre’s part.
Lapierre’s Brain Is Shrinking!?
LaPierre has been in the courtroom every day during the two weeks of the trial. Still, his attorney has now submitted doctors’ notes asking the court for special accommodations for LaPierre during his upcoming testimony. The lawyer, supported by the doctors’ notes, says that, along with headaches, vision problems, and fatigue,
LaPierre is also suffering from cognitive issues related to the loss of cerebral mass. In other words, he’s saying LaPierre’s brain is shrinking, impacting his ability to think clearly and remember things. Because of this, the attorney is asking that the judge allow LaPierre and his lawyers to call timeouts during his upcoming testimony, possibly breaking it up over several days rather than trying to grind through one or two days of uninterrupted time on the stand.
The judge seems willing to accommodate LaPierre’s physical limitations and allow other witnesses to be called when and if LaPierre is incapacitated. This raises another important question about who’s running the NRA and why LaPierre remains officially in charge.
According to the letters from his doctors, LaPierre’s health has been in decline for several years.
His current condition was reported to NRA President Charles Cotton on January 3, 2024, two days before LaPierre announced his pending resignation. So why is LaPierre still holding the Executive Vice Presidency of the NRA?
If LaPierre is unable to testify for several hours consecutively due to his illness, and considering he is attending the trial in New York instead of being at his office at NRA headquarters, why didn’t he resign immediately on January 5? This was when the NRA Board was meeting, and they could have appointed a temporary replacement then rather than waiting for a month.
The NRA Bylaws say that in the case of a vacancy in the office of Executive Vice President, the Executive Director of General Operations is to fill the position until the Board meets to name a suitable replacement. LaPierre unceremoniously fired Joe DeBergalis, the ED of General Operations, shortly before Christmas, replacing him with Andrew Arulanandam. Arulanandam has been LaPierre’s top PR flack and spokesperson for several years. While his face is familiar to some members and the media, it would be a stretch to suggest he is qualified to run General Operations, and he’s certainly not qualified to be the CEO of the NRA.
During his testimony on Thursday and Friday, former Executive Director of NRA-ILA Chris Cox voiced a similar sentiment. Cox suggested that LaPierre demonstrated poor judgment in hiring, pointing to Josh Powell and Andrew Arulanandam as examples. Powell was LaPierre’s deputy who oversaw the collapse of the NRA’s controversial CarryGuard program and has already pled guilty in the New York trial. Arulanandam, who first worked under Cox in ILA before being moved over to NRA HQ by LaPierre, did not impress Cox while he was at ILA. Cox warned LaPierre that Arulanandam had “terrible” political judgment and was “lazy in core competencies.”
LaPierre ignored Cox’s warnings and kept Arulanandam on, promoting him to higher positions, eventually setting him up to take over as EVP and CEO upon LaPierre’s resignation.
This has laid the table for a bit of a battle within the NRA Board of Directors. It has been reported that Tom King, who has been one of LaPierre’s chief supporters on the Board and a close ally of NRA President Charles Cotton, has been calling fellow Directors to urge them to support a move to put Cotton in the EVP position.
Along with his duties as President, Cotton serves as the Chairman of the NRA’s Audit Committee, as I explained in a recent article, “Charles Cotton Must Never Be Allowed to Head the NRA!”. The Audit Committee is supposed to be the Association’s watchdog tasked with ensuring that the staff and vendors always operate within applicable laws and policies and conduct business in a manner that is above reproach.
Cotton served as vice chair of the committee for several years and then switched places with then-chairman David Coy. Between the two of them, they have been Chair and Vice Chair for the past 20-plus years, and they continue in those positions now, even though they’ve been President and Vice President of the Board for the past three years. Cotton and Coy were supposed to keep the NRA on track and away from even a whisper of corruption.
They failed spectacularly in that assignment and were rewarded for their failure by being elected to the offices of President and Vice President.
The best way for the NRA Board to demonstrate that they’ve learned nothing at all from the scandals and corruption that have plagued the NRA for the past 20 years and been publicly known for the past five years would be to hand the EVP position to Charles Cotton.
The trial continues on Monday with video testimony from former NRA President Carolyn Meadows. Ms. Meadows has been excused from testifying in person – or even via live video link – due to her own health issues, so her video deposition is being played.
It’s worth noting that Ms. Meadows’ health has been a limiting factor since she was first elected in 2019. She barely attended any Board meetings as President after she was elected, meaning that First Vice President Charles Cotton filled in for her for almost all of her two terms. He then served two terms as President himself, then orchestrated a Bylaws change to allow him to serve a third (effectively fifth) term as President.
In spite of her age and poor health concerns, Ms. Meadows has been nominated for reelection to the Board in the coming election…. She and another woman from Georgia were both added to the list of nominees after Phil Journey, Rocky Marshall, Dennis Fusaro, and I (Jeff Knox) were qualified by petition as nominees. Some speculate she and her friend were added to pad the field and make it even harder for any of the four reform candidates to be elected.
Ballots should be in the March issue of NRA magazines, which will hit mailboxes around mid-February, so please be sure to vote and encourage your NRA friends to vote. “Bullet voting,” i.e. voting for just the four Outsider Candidates for NRA Board, myself included, and no one else, gives us the best chance of winning seats, so please spread the word on that, too.
Is the NRA slowly dying? Newsweek says so! NRA Exec. Vice President Wayne LaPierre. (Photo: NRA)
In a recent article for Newsweek, journalist Kate Plummer argues that the National Rifle Association is “slowly dying.”
She points to the following to make her case:
Membership Decline: Wayne LaPierre, head of the NRA, predicted in 2013 a growth to 10 million members. However, as of a recent report, the membership has declined to about 4.3 million.
Financial Struggles: The NRA’s revenue dropped significantly, with a 52% decrease in overall revenue and a nearly 59% drop in membership dues since 2016. Membership dues in 2022 were down more than 40% from 2018.
Past Successes: The NRA had 230 legislative victories from 2003 to 2013.
Recent Failures: More recently, the NRA failed to secure major legislative changes in 2017 and 2018, even with Republican control in Washington.
Lawsuit by New York Attorney General: Letitia James filed a lawsuit alleging misappropriation of funds by top NRA officials, including LaPierre, for personal use.
Bankruptcy and Financial Mismanagement: The NRA faced a $64 million reduction in its balance sheet over three years, turning a surplus into a deficit.
Shift in Views: An NBC/WSJ poll showed 40% viewing the NRA negatively in 2018, a first-ever overall negative perception.
There are other headwinds for the organization, Plummer points out, including the rise of the Bloomberg-funded Everytown for Gun Safety over the past decade.
Thanks to Bloomberg’s billions, Everytown has proven to be a force to reckon with. For example, it just outspent the NRA 10 to 1 in its own backyard, in the 2023 Virginia elections.
Has the NRA seen better days? No doubt about it. But is it “slowly dying” — doubtful.
Look, the elephant in the room is Wayne LaPierre. He has become a divisive figure due to the aforementioned allegations of financial mismanagement. It’s not only about what happened to the organization under his watch but also what he was personally doing with donor dollars.
LaPierre was, apparently, flying in private jets, buying lavish suits and receiving other “excess benefits” to the tune of $300,000. LaPierre has since made good, though. He cut a personal check to the organization to right his wrongs.
For some members this was enough. For many others, including key “whale” donors, it wasn’t. As a result, those who were still disgruntled flocked to other pro-gun outfits, including the Second Amendment Foundation, Gun Owners of America, and the Firearms Policy Coalition.
The truth is gun owners may have stopped donating to NRA due to LaPierre’s perceived shenanigans, but they haven’t stopped donating to the pro-gun cause. Nor have they stopped buying guns.
To Plummer’s credit, she acknowledges this in her article.
Plummer writes, “Forty-five percent of U.S. households owned at least one firearm in 2022, according to research compiled by Statista, the highest figure since 2011—and 8 percentage points higher than in 2013, the year LaPierre said the NRA was on track for ‘unprecedented’ growth.”
One can argue that the pro-gun movement has never been stronger. With approximately 72 million gun owners in this country, gun banners certainly have their work cut out for them.
Four million of those still belong to the NRA, as highlighted earlier. Four million dues-paying members is nothing to sneeze at. And it all but ensures the NRA will continue to have a role to play in the 2A battles to come, even if that’s in a diminished capacity for the time being.
It’s also worth pointing out that LaPierre, 74, is not going to be around forever. So, it’s reasonable to think that a change in leadership could rejuvenate America’s longest-standing civil rights organization,.
Whether it’s through internal reform or a renewed focus on its core mission, the NRA’s fate isn’t sealed yet. It’s a dynamic entity in a country where the debate over gun rights is far from settled. The story of the NRA, like the story of gun rights in America, is still being written, one chapter at a time.
We all wish that schools could be impregnable bastions of peace and harmony. However, that has never been the case.
As a dad I really cannot even imagine the agony of losing a child. The imagery of the aftermath of a school shooting is compelling beyond reason. In the face of such breathtaking tragedy, everybody everywhere wants to do something constructive to make it stop. However, effectively quelling such an egregious horror is a Gordian problem in the modern age.
Leftists apparently live in this surreal twilight zone. The most vocal among them believe that schools are safe spaces that can be made somehow miraculously free from violence solely by means of some fresh new legislative dictum. I want that, too. However, I also want to wake up every morning to a pile of gold nuggets sitting on my doorstep. Just because I want something a lot won’t make it so.
Lunatics were shooting up schools back when American women dressed like this. It is a timeless problem.
History’s Statistics On School Shootings
Schools have never been safe spaces. They just aren’t. There were three recorded school shootings in the 1850’s and another five in the decade that followed. The 1870s saw seven, while the 1880s had ten. Do you detect a trend?
By the 1970’s that number was up to 42. In the 1980’s there were 62. The 1990s had 99, and much of that was under an assault weapons ban. We endured a total of 298 school shooting episodes in the 20th century.
This miserable turd is about typical of the genre. Soulless creations of the Information Age, these bloodthirsty nihilists slaughter the innocent to get their fifteen minutes of fame.
In the first decade of the new millennium, the number actually dropped to 80. However, we jumped to 252 in the 2010s. Thus far three years into the 2020’s we have had a further 133. Why is that exactly?
Back when you could buy these things over the counter there were not nearly so many school shootings as there were after we had all these gun laws.
It’s not the gun, it’s the people
America is awash in guns, but America has always been awash in guns. Prior to 1934, there were literally no limits on the firearms you could own. Individual citizens could mount a cannon in their front yard or pick up a Thompson submachine gun at their local hardware store over the counter, cash and carry. It’s not the availability of guns. I would posit that today’s problem is the people.
We are rightfully outraged when kids shoot up their schools yet remain inexplicably unimpressed when they spend untold hours doing the same thing on their game consoles for fun. I can’t begin to explain it. I only work here…
The skyrocketing rates of school violence tend to follow our enlightenment as a society. Movies and video games have grown ever more violent. Murder or rape somebody in the real world and there are legal and moral consequences. However, watching murder or rape on the big screen or on your television is simply entertainment. There’s something intellectually incongruous about that.
At the same time, our society has steadily cheapened human life. Rates of abortion exploded after Roe vs Wade in 1973 (63 million in total to date), and now ten of our fifty states have legalized assisted suicide. Not debating the rightness or wrongness of those things in this venue. Simply observing a temporal correlation.
Plummeting Farther
We have also vigorously excised God from our schools and public spaces. As church attendance has plummeted, random violence and generally poor citizenship have exploded. Just as the absence of light is dark, the absence of God is godlessness. I suggest we might just be getting what we asked for.
This is a screen grab of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. These two dirtbags brought school shootings into the Information Age. Their weapons were already illegal, incidentally.
The media would have you believe that the scourge of the school shootings perhaps began with Columbine. Back in 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold traipsed into Columbine High School with a TEC-9, a Hi-Point 9mm carbine, an illegal sawed-off shotgun, 99 explosive devices, and four knives and proceeded to slaughter thirteen innocent people.
Those two freaking monsters will have all of eternity to atone for their crimes. However, Columbine wasn’t even close to when it all started. The Alpha school shooting took place in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, on 26 July 1764. Twelve years before we even became a nation, we had already had our first school massacre. Were I pressed to divine an explanation it would simply be that people are horrible.
The Setting of That First School Shooting
The American colonies in the mid to late-18th century were literally unrecognizable from what we enjoy today. The central government hailed from London, and what there was of civilized America was populated by rugged individualists who knew both hard work and discipline. As those early Europeans were busy carving a new homeland out of territory previously occupied by a wide variety of Native American tribes, conflict was inevitable. What follows was one of the most infamous events of what historians call Pontiac’s War.
There were no good guys here. Both sides slaughtered wholesale.
The French and Indian War had wrapped up the previous year, yet few of the participants were really thrilled with the outcome. A loose confederation of Native American tribes centered around the Great Lakes banded together to drive the British out of their lands. Recall that back then most of who we might view as Americans were loyal subjects of the British crown.
We’ve always been monsters. To deny this reality is to deny our very natures.
The Reality
It is tough for us modern folk to appreciate just how brutal things were during this time. History has sanitized much of the horror from the narrative, but there was more than enough atrocity to go around on both sides. The Indians kicked off this particular party by attacking British forts and murdering or enslaving hundreds of colonists. Prisoners were routinely killed, and the line between civilian and soldier seemed forever blurred. Along the way, both sides developed a white-hot hatred of the other. As has been the case since the very dawn of human history, humanity fractionated by race and each side slaughtered the other wholesale.
Being captured by the natives was all but unthinkable. Their capacity for torture was limited solely by the technology of the day. During one engagement while Fort Pitt was besieged by Native American warriors, British officers tried to infect the Indians with smallpox by means of contaminated blankets. Such biological warfare would be condemned in the strongest terms by most of the planet today. Back then it was just part of doing business.
These scumbags didn’t have a corner on the monster market. Human beings have always kind of sucked.
The end result was a bloodbath. This raging venom drove those involved to some terribly dark places. One of those dark places was a schoolhouse in what is Newcastle, Pennsylvania, today.
The Massacre
The carnage began the day before when four Delaware Indian braves encountered a pregnant white woman named Susan King Cunningham out walking alone. They clubbed her to death and then cut the fetus from her womb. The Indians later passed by the occupied home of a widow woman who had her windows boarded up against the weather. Presuming the house to be vacant they did not investigate. On 26 July 1764, these four braves made their way to the small wooden schoolhouse that serviced the area.
Inside was schoolmaster Enoch Brown and eleven students. School accommodated all ages back then, so the accumulated kids were of sundry sizes. Brown could tell immediately what the Indians intended to do.
The taking of scalps is a curiously ghastly tradition that dates back centuries.
Brown pleaded with the Indians, two of whom were apparently fairly old, to take his life but spare the children. In response, the warriors shot him and took his scalp. They then clubbed and scalped the rest of the children in attendance.
The details of the attack are inscribed on a historical marker at the spot today.
Time has muddled the details somewhat. I found two major narratives. The most common had ten of eleven children perishing in the attack. The eleventh, a young man named Archie McCullough, apparently lost consciousness and came to after the Indians had departed. He purportedly climbed into the fireplace until he was certain the Indians were gone and then made his way to a nearby stream to clean his wounds. He was found there by locals who investigated further and discovered the horror in the schoolhouse. Period reports claimed that the schoolmaster Mr. Brown died with a Bible in one hand trying to protect his charges.
The Rest of the Story
The location of the grave was determined with certainty years after the event.
Brown and the ten children were buried in a communal grave. The site was not well marked, and locals feared that its location would be lost. In 1843 the area was excavated and the bodies were discovered. There were indeed ten children and one adult all buried together. There is a granite monument and a well-maintained park commemorating the site today. The names Ruth Hale, Eben Taylor, George Dustan, and Archie McCullough have survived, though the rest of the kids’ names have been lost.
Not sure who made this image, but it gets the point across quite convincingly.
Miraculously, little Archie survived the horrific attack. He recovered physically but was justifiably never quite right afterward. He purportedly married and had a son and daughter. Archie eventually settled in Kentucky, but his trail goes cold in 1810.
A man named John McCullough had been captured by the Delaware Indians and held captive in their camp since 1756. He was apparently a cousin to young Archie McCullough. The elder McCullough was present when the war party returned from their gory foray.
As always seems to be the case, such unrestrained violence didn’t end well for anybody.
After he was released, McCullough wrote this of their reception, “I saw the Indians when they returned home with the scalps; some of the old Indians were very much displeased at them for killing so many children, especially Neep-paugh’-whese, or Night Walker, an old chief, or half king,—he ascribed it to cowardice, which was the greatest affront he could offer them.”
The Backlash
As you might imagine, when news got around that the Delaware Indians had murdered ten children and a schoolmaster in cold blood, the locals wanted some payback. With the approval of Governor John Penn, the Pennsylvania General Assembly reinstituted the scalp bounty that had previously been in effect during the French and Indian War. This offered $134 for the scalp of any adult male Indian above age ten and $50 for a female, payable by the government in cash.
The site of the Enoch Brown Massacre is pleasant and peaceful today. Not so much 258 years ago.
There resulted a fairly unrestrained slaughter by enterprising capitalists who were handy with a gun and adroit at holding a grudge. The entire Conestoga Tribe was wiped out in the aftermath. The pastoral nature of Enoch Brown Park lends no overt insights into the horrors that took place there some 258 years ago.
If somebody disagrees with me on my right to keep and bear arms then good for them. Just don’t get all in my space about my own lifestyle choices. I think one of us in this hypothetical argument is actually showing tolerance.
Of all of Satan’s many diabolical inspirations, I think school shootings might be the worst. That someone might feel somehow justified in taking the lives of innocent children in response to some political insult, social inadequacy, or warped sense of justice simply astounds me.
However, make no mistake, there is nothing new under the sun. People are bad. We always have been. That’s the reason those incredible old guys penned the Second Amendment in there right behind the First.
