Upheaval at Gun Owners of New Hampshire -- 8 of 19 Board members resign

Press release -- March 8, 2006 - Updated August 2006
Contacts:

State Representative Elbert "Bick" Bicknell*

* Update August 2006: Bick has moved to Arizona: tel (928) 685-4219, email redryder@tabletoptelephone.com

Sam Cohen, Sam.Cohen@comcast.net, (603) 224-2374 (principal author)

Upheaval at Gun Owners of New Hampshire

The late science-fiction author Robert A. Heinlein famously wrote that “an armed society is a polite society.” Well, not always, at least in small groups. Over the last year, visitors to the open Board meetings of Gun Owners of New Hampshire, once known as the state’s “powerful gun lobby,” have seen so much factional hostility, personal attacks, and belligerent outbursts that they describe the group as taken over by wingnuts, wackos, and crazies.

The President and seven other members of GO-NH’s 19-member Board of Directors are resigning. Those leaving include all four state legislators on the Board: the President, State Representative Elbert “Bick” Bicknell; State Senator Robert Boyce; State Representative Harriet Cady; and State Representative Richard “Stretch” Kennedy, the longest-serving Director. The others leaving are Ed Naile, Chairman of the Coalition of New Hampshire Taxpayers; Jeff Newman, Chairman of the Concord Republican City Committee; Sam Cohen, New Hampshire spokesman for Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms; and retired Air Force Major Richard Aldrich. In addition, four of the seven new candidates for election to the Board are withdrawing, including Evan Nappen, one of the foremost gun-rights attorneys in the Northeast. Still more members, including other State Representatives, are also quitting the organization, refusing to be associated with GO-NH.

The crisis had been building for some time, but reached a head in December of 2005, when the publications editor hijacked the organization’s official newsletter, composing and publishing it without consulting or even notifying the Board, the President, or the publications committee, in violation of both the bylaws and even basic expectations of duty. That issue contained an anonymous so-called Letter to the Editor critical of the President, accompanied by an editorial comment sympathetic to the letter-writer. When pressed, however, the editor, Evelyn Logan, admitted that there was no such letter; she said “it was a phone call.”

Worse, that newsletter contained an article by Ms. Logan that accused witnesses in the Blake Douglass Londonderry High School yearbook photo case of committing perjury in Federal court, others of conspiracy to commit and solicit perjury, and the Federal judge of judicial malfeasance. The same article also strongly suggested that it was legal to carry a gun in a school — in contradiction to the warnings earlier made by one of the resigning directors, and which were included in an article Ms. Logan had refused to publish. Anyone who might be arrested for relying on her statements about guns in schools as expert advice would certainly have a cause for action against GO-NH and its Board, and neither her article nor the newsletter as a whole included any legal disclaimers. All of this was done when the Board and its attorney of record (a friend of Ms. Logan) had failed to take all precautions necessary to protect the organization, its officers, or its directors from liability.

Despite all of this, a majority of the Board refused to remove Evelyn Logan from her position as editor, even though they were informed that she had similarly hijacked the newsletter of the national Second Amendment Sisters organization, and had been dismissed because of it.

The last straw was a meeting of the Board held at the clubhouse of the Pioneer Sportsmen club in Dunbarton in late February. Since three of the four legislators on the Board, and one other director, couldn’t attend that meeting, the “negative faction” formed a majority. First, they voiced the irrational opinion that they didn’t like having legislators on the Board. Then, they decided to call for the removal of directors who had distributed personal email messages recommending certain candidates for election to the Board, although this was done in response to Evelyn Logan’s doing the same thing via her own electioneering email. Finally, they voted that any director or candidate for director who didn’t reveal their Social Security Number within five days, despite privacy objections, would be considered to have automatically resigned, bylaws notwithstanding. This meeting was witnessed by several directors of the Pioneer Sportsmen club. At their next club meeting, Pioneer Sportsmen voted unanimously to drop their club membership in GO-NH due to this behavior. Meanwhile, the eight directors named at the beginning of this article decided that enough was enough.

With similar bad conduct on display over the last few years, membership in Gun Owners of New Hampshire has been shrinking. The resigning directors, however, want to reassure GO-NH members and others that they will continue to vigorously support Second Amendment and sportsmen's rights in New Hampshire, and in particular will continue their close relationships with the legislature. They will form a new, more effective association, and will invite others to join as they move forward.

For more information, contact State Rep. Elbert “Bick” Bicknell at (928) 685-4219, email redryder@tabletoptelephone.com. (Contact info updated August 2006; Bick has moved to Arizona).

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