Riding Shotgun With Charlie

#254

Rick Patterson

CCRKBA Board Member & Liberty's Keystone

It's nice to be able to film a show that isn't too far from home. Rick Patterson is only in Connecticut. He's a board member of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. And he owns Liberty's Keystone. We had an interesting conversation about some of the goings on on the international level of firearms.

Rick has been involved with the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the CCRKBA, and even the SAAMI. Before all of that, he started off in the oil business. Hoping to be the VP of the company, he was passed over when the spot came open. A family member saw the ad for the NSSF job and he applied. Having the position filled already, he didn't get that job. But with his experience in environmental compliance, business planning, and whatnot, they had a position dealing with shooting ranges and offered that to him. Fortunately, he was a good fit and took this job.

While at NSSF, Rick was involved in creating their shooting range program, the 5-star shooting program, the Where To Shoot website. He also worked with the EPA and OSHA on lead management. While the Violence Prevention Center was out trying to shut ranges down with accusations of lead poisoning, his team worked to put together the science behind metallic lead in soils and a management plan.

Over the years, ranges were considered successful if they had a good number of members and raised money for their range and cause. But it's important for ranges to have plans to keep the range around for generations. The things Rick's team worked on changed how that was done and how it was developed.

Some of the stories Rick shares are about how local towns wanted to stop an indoor range. So the community pushed to have the parking lot be totally covered with double bullet proof protection and entirely covered. The issue with that is it will now be cost prohibitive to have a parking lot that way, thus not being able to build the range since it didn't meet the requirements the town wanted. Of course, there are people that will bring an entire unused cartridge into the police station and say it landed on their property just like that therefore the range must be shut down.

The executive director of SAAMI opened up and Rick was able to get that position. At the same time, the UN was getting involved with gun control. Under Rick's leadership, he was able to get NGO status for SAAMI and was able to have some input on topics that concerned firearms.

Some of the conversation was about Germany pushing for serialization of ammunition. One German company who had a patent on serialization was pushing for that to happen. But they didn't have to figure out how it's supposed to work, they just declare that it needs to be done. And that will be someone else's problem to figure out the solution.

Rick is a very knowledgeable man who has done many things with the groups and the UN. There's two sides to the UN, there's one side dealing with regulations and one that deals with politics. Eventually, the UN realized that even if firearms production ended and no one made another gun, there are going to be millions of them around for a long time. So they need to change their tactic and approach to going after something like ammunition.

We talked about the small arms treaty and other things at the international level, shipping regulated materials around the world, and much more. It was a very interesting conversation. There's so much more to what is going on than people know or even realize. We've got someone like Rick on our side, who understands how these things work. And he's worked hard to keep things going for us and our firearms.

Favorite quotes:

"Sometimes success is just being able to stall it out before you get some draconian law passed."

"A successful range is one that's here today, tomorrow, next week, next generation, serving the shooting public."

"The countries that are the biggest offenders of the arms deals are not party to it."

Liberty's Keystone Website

https://libertyskeystone.com/

Second Amendment Foundation

https://secure.anedot.com/saf/donate?sc=RidingShotgun

Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

https://www.ccrkba.org/

Please support the Riding Shotgun With Charlie supporters.

US Law Shield

Legal Defense for Self Defense. Use "RSWC" as the discount code and get 2 months for free!

https://www.uslawshield.com

Patriot Mobile

Use this link and get one month for free!

https://patriotmobile.com/partners/rswc

Or listen on:

iTunes/Apple podcasts

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/riding-shotgun-with-charlie/id1275691565