If you are just joining the “Thirteen Tips” conversation, welcome. This series of posts lists a lawyer’s advice on what you can do when municipal government moves to suppress the practical, real-time, right to keep and bear arms. I’d further explain the need but, by now, we are all aware of Chicago’s unconstitutional handgun ban. You may be aware that local government in New Orleans went door-to-door confiscating guns a few days after Katrina. Chicago and New Orleans during Katrina represent the extreme but other cities and counties have clever council commies aiming to achieve by practical impact what the U.S. Congress and signers of the Constitution declined to impose by law.

These municipal gun control measures undermine the Second Amendment by creating exceptions or zones of gun control. The effect of this is to give a wink and a deceptive nod to the theoretical right to keep and bear arms, but to use local government to enforce gun bans that sound like ”just not here, not at this place, not at this time.” The goal of these gun controllers is to create so many piecemeal exceptions that the right to keep and bear arms cannot be practically exercised. Put another way, if you really just must own a gun (They can’t understand why anyone needs a gun.) then you should keep it at home. And, if you just must have one at home, then it should be disabled by some kind of lock–but that’s a blog for another day.

Example? You’ll hear “guns and alcohol don’t mix” as an argument for outright total bans against carrying a handgun into any establishment that serves alcohol, even if you are not drinking. If you cannot carry your handgun into a restaurant that serves alcohol, then you are an unarmed victim when the carjacker strikes as you and your wife and toddler get out of the car in the parking lot. You are unarmed when you take that after-dinner stroll through the riverside park before heading back to the hotel.

So, the “Thirteen Tips” posts guide you as you stand up to address your local governing boards and commissions most effectively. We gun owners are for the most part discrete, quiet about our guns, and unorganized below the level of membership in a national organization. That is our weakness.

The last tip was “organize.” Organizing is a “force multiplier” when standing up in opposition to some municipal Marxist making a motion to mop up your weapons. Mostly, we aren’t organized at all but, when they make too overt a move to infiltrate gun control into the back door, we stir. We might even organize. They think the NRA orchestrates our ire but, we are not lemmings following The Great Leader or usually any leader for that matter.

I recommend you drop back and read the earlier tips first, archived in May 2010, beginning with the first one. The first one, appropriately, states the mission: http://bit.ly/9AUEHT The next tips are all designed to serve that mission.

This next tip will probably be the one readers like the least but, folks, it’s just got to be said. If you were my client and we were heading to trial, this is the kind of frank, practical advice I would give you before taking the stand to testify. This tip cautions against the human tendency to be not so nice, particularly when we perceive that we are threatened. Here we go.

Tip Number 9)  Email the lawmakers, but keep your anger under control and give them no ground for claiming that they were “threatened.”

They may accuse a gun rights advocate of threats anyway but give them no basis. Some politicians think threatening their seat at election time is tantamount to threatening them with assassination, but be careful little mouth what you say. Liberals love to try to turn the tables on law-abiding gun owners, making us out to be unstable and dangerous. I suspect I saw a  municipal lawmaker conspire with a newspaper reporter to print a story smearing gun owners, claiming to have been threatened in emails. Oh, she had “lost” the emails so her story couldn’t be refuted, but plainly she tried to undermine the moral force of the gun owners’ arguments by general implication that we are all just barely containing our rabid near-insanity.

In this strange age in which we live, even rational, well-reasoned but passionate argument scares some. Fiery looks and words may convey to the lawmakers the exact opposite of the message you are trying to get across. What is that message? (See Tip Number One again.) The message is: “You do not have to fear the armed citizen.”

Here’s some good advice for you late night email correspondents: Draft messages and draft beer do NOT go together; walk away and reflect before you come back to  hit that “Send” button.

While we’re trying to make sure we preserve the right impression, Tip 10 is good advice for appearing and speaking at public meetings, too.

 Tip Number 8)  Organize.

Remember Jonathan Winters in the movie “The Russians Are Coming–The Russians are Coming!” running around town, rallying the townspeople against what he thought was a Russian invasion, yelling, “We’ve got to get organized!?” You don’t remember? Oh, yeah, that was a while ago. Well, anyway, you’ve got to get organized or you won’t have those numbers talked about in Tips 6 and 7.

We are for the most part quiet, private and discrete about our weapons. That is our nature and, in a culture that tries to suppress the right to keep and bear arms, we try not to affront their sensibilities. That’s why many carry concealed instead of openly. We just don’t need the hassle and there are tactical reasons to be covert as well.

However, now is not the time to stay isolated.  The opposition bitterly think the NRA orchestrates all of us like mean little puppets. They imagine that Chris Cox flies in personally to rally the troops, maybe even bringing in some professional ACORN type organizers with him. They HATE the NRA and scoff if you tell them how unorganized your group really is. They cannot accept that you are grassroots. Never mind that the NRA consists of about 4 million actual, human, ordinary citizen members. The point is lost on them. Best advice when you get up to speak: Don’t even mention the NRA. Form your own organization.

Organizing is fun, too. I met more gun owners during the last City Council dustup than I’ve ever met at a range! Great guys and I came away really glad that the commies proposed the gun ban ordinance. Other friends showed up whom I never suspected were so passionate about the right to keep and bear arms. But, reality check: We are just not that organized. It is not already done for you.

Tip: Come prepared to collect email addresses and names. Tell everybody that the guy who takes the list and starts doing Forward-Forward will be shot! You may have a local NRA coordinator. He may be a ball of fire, or he may be distracted and ineffective. The official NRA coordinator might take on the job of getting the troops out but you cannot count on the NRA to organize you.

You may have an already-in-place, active state organization chapter.  Good! You have community-organizer infrastructure in place. In whatever form we-the-people take in your locale, and whomever the “you” turns out to be, you must locate, rally the troops, and keep them informed.The Board may put the vote off, or refer the matter to a “workshop.” Your unit may have to show more than once. It’s vital to keep in touch and honor every one’s privacy by learning to email groups of addressees without disclosing the individual email addresses to every recipient.

If you personally are not the one to take charge, that’s OK. I’m just sayin’, however you do it, the gun owners have got to get organized instead of remaining isolated, quiet individuals, appearing at the meetings alone and leaving quickly without joining together. It will be work but it will be rewarding.

If you’ve been with me since Tip Number 1, you know our mission is to calm anti-gun fears. Well, Tip Numbers 6 and 7 calm some of those fears, and create others.  Good fears. Fears of voter backlash.

Tip Number 6)  Show up in force.

They understand numbers. If you show with four others, you send a message alright. If you show with 200 courteous others, all sitting together and ready to stand up as a bloc, you send the message you want.

Tip Number 7)  Show up with a variety of ordinary citizens.

While we’re talking numbers, let’s talk the mix. Here, you need your daughter-in-law, your son and their young friends to come out. COGs (Crusty old guys) in too great a proportion convey a sense that the right to keep and bear arms will die out soon enough on its own and proponents are “out of it.” Wives, girlfriends, now is a time for you to shine! We need the group standing up to show that the gun owners come from all walks of life and that right to keep and bear arms proponents are far more broad in scope than the opoponents  want to believe.

These two tips are directly related to Tip Number 8, coming soon.