Hi everyone – A couple weeks ago I posted a thread about preemptive activism to oppose new firearm legislation in this sub. I want to give a couple updates in order to keep this campaign visible and let you know this is real, and we’re going to do stuff.

First, THANK YOU to everyone who expressed interest in helping this campaign in the last post!

Update 1: Let’s talk goals.

I’ve spent the last two weeks talking to folks at a high level about the scope of this campaign. Basically, I’ve been trying to understand what a really good defensive and offensive strategy looks like for all of us as firearm owners. The first thing is deciding upon goals: what are we going to do, what is the thing we will accomplish? Then, how do we measure that goal to make sure we’re getting there?

I have my own personal feelings about what our collective goal should look like, but I want to turn this question around and ask Reddit:

• What do you think we should be doing?
• What should our goals be?

Think about: what are your personal goals, what should our collective goals be?

Personally, I have a limited scope of interest and only so much time I can put into building a new group, so it’s very important to me that I accomplish my personal goals, however I am eager to leverage my work time in a capacity that enables other people to reach their vision and their goals as well. My goals are simple: I want to undermine the support of 2015 and 2016 unspecified anti-gun legislation by preemptively changing the public perception of firearm owners in Oregon, especially Multnomah and Washington County. This means that I’m not working (at this time) to introduce Legislation, I’m not forming a 501c or PAC, and I’m not taking any donations (besides beer and ammo, “more, please”) or handling money. However, if people have different goals that mostly align with mine, then I want to work together to build that. For example, if you’re really interested in getting an Oregon PAC off the ground or Petition Committee, we should sit down for some tea.

Update 2: Building Allies!

I’ve roped in a couple allies from the veteran community, and as you can imagine military veterans are “up in arms” about this just as civilian gun owners are. One of my close friends, Wray, who is astutely educated in Oregon firearm law/culture, US Army veteran (11B, OIF), former President of Oregon-IVAW, and an exceptional public speaker, has agreed to support this campaign. Many others are willing to as well, and I personally have received overwhelming encouragement from my veteran friends.

I hope to reach out to the LEO community, and am actively searching for a great contact who can advocate with us (preferably, a retired elected LEO, like a constitution-loving sheriff).

Critically, I’m actively searching out victims of violence who are comfortable talking about their story of empowerment through self-defense. If anyone had any leads here, feel free to comment below or PM me. Any leads in this area would be great, because we’ll need to collect stories of empowerment through self-defense.

There’s lot of other people and talent we’ll need to tap in order to take meaningful actions:

• People that have a talent and capacity to do media: especially video, audio, websites, and printed materials.
• People with an aptitude toward public relations: generating press releases, and have experience in public messaging, or work at media outlets.
• People that have legal experience, especially in firearm law, but also in political campaigns and general practice attorneys.
• People who work in the firearm and self-defense industry.
• People that are great researchers, who can dig into really obscure things and help the group collectively understand and process the meaning of a topic.
• People who are passionate, who have free time on their hands, and want to take positive actions or otherwise help!

If you can help, chime in and I’ll add you to the watch list possible volunteer roster!

Update 3: Where are the cool kids?

While I love the Reddit platform, I realize that /r/pdxgunnuts isn’t super active. However, PDX Gun Nuts is super positive and I think we need to brainstorm and evaluate other potential forums, sites, and outlets to rope in more allies. It’s also important to make sure we don’t poke a beehive of political extremists, so let’s think about and brainstorm the other firearm websites/communities before we go about soliciting their members. For me, at least, it’s important that we focus on Multnomah and Washington County. I can think of a few, but I know folks have insights that I don’t have.

TL;DR: I want to know: what do you think we should do for a collective goal? Who should we reach out to? What other local firearm communities exist that are awesome?