We're sweating in 88f weather in Dallas texas, it was snowing in Wisconsin about 7 days ago.   The booth is set up, new catalogs are printed, key chains available, new Fuck Gun Control T shirts available for sale. We hope to see you guys at the NRA meetings in Dallas.

A couple silencer companies dropped out at the last minute.

Oh by the way we visited Rifle Gear and Modern Outfitters down here.  Two beautiful shops.  Really great to see those guys.  Ran into Colion Noir at modern outfitters, thanked him for his work defending our constitutional rights.

Great, its a big show- they are projecting 80,000 to 200,000 people in a space that appears to be about 2/3 the size of shot show.  We're excited to see the worlds largest firearms show.

We didn't release any new product there.  We made a couple (about 5 new muzzle device SKU's - like 6.5 minimalist, 30 cal hammer comp, 338 minimalist, 9mm hammer comp) this year so far.  A Paladin in 5.56mm is being produced this summer.  The GP5 and GP7 under rail compatible thread mount cans are basically new, The Optimus Micro just recently was released etc.  We have a new suppressor in the works for the fall that is not being spoken of at this point.

A lot of people don't know that they can put a K spacer in their full sized Revolution cans and replace the piston assembly with the minimalist taper mount brake shield and get sporting/hunting type use .308 out of their revolution cans.   They are the toughest aluminum pistol cans made with 7075 billet tubes.

The show went ok, we gave out about half the catalogs we brought, had good participation in our Customer Appreciation silencer raffles.  Modern Carbines were in the Leupold booth, and that put Griffin mounts in the Leupold booth so that was cool.  We had a couple really respected brand sales people come up and tell us their companies were using our cans in some capacity and that was neat.  Schmidt and Bender for example was really cool.  Probably the nicest optics that exist anywhere.

Met some customers, it was a decent time.   Dallas seemed to have a liberal feeling at least in downtown.  We met a major customer for dinner at a restaurant where the "what's happening in Dallas" <whatever its called magazine featured an article on kids standing up to the NRA, instead of announcing the NRA meetings and exhibits.  That was a real surprise to me.

Great to hear you bought a Griffin product, and that the muzzle device promo helped.  We appreciate your business.  I know what you mean.  I took a DDM course for WPS in Texas during a string of record days over 103- it was like 107F every day for a couple weeks.   It would get dark and it would be 104 at night.  I had no idea Texas would be that warm in September/October.    It's just a little wild to go from freezing to 88F in a day's drive.

If you have the current model (last year and a half or 2 of production) that this centerfire rifle feature pertains to (the one with the double stepped 7075 tube with reinforcements over the threads) this statement applies to you.  With the correct configuration (full size config with 17-4 external booster housing, with K spacer replacing 3 baffles, and minimalist taper mount blast shield replacing the internal booster assembly), If you run the new 6.5 caliber specific minimalist, we will cover you without charge if anything negative occurs. We've run it a lot on the intended minimum rated 20" .308, so your use is a little higher pressure than that, but probably fine.

Cool thanks for your support of the 2nd Ammendment.  The anti-gun croud is a louder message and they have been getting their way, and if the rule is going to be the louder person wins, we want to be loud too.

Politically, the NFA people can't be loud enough.  We are a political minority and we are over regulated and our rights are often under fire.  Totally sensible things like efficient processing of form 4's are very very elusive.  The government people typically say it is out of their hands, meaning control of their process efficiency is in the hands of congress, but year after year the issues are mostly ignored by agencies and congress while tens of millions of firearms owners are repressed from protecting their hearing and experiencing a greater enjoyment of their 2nd Amendment freedoms.    For every one person buying a sound suppressor, there are 10 people being effectively repressed and feeling regulated out of their desire to own a suppressor by the totality of circumstances- fingerprints, photos, waiting time, taxes and fees, confusion surrounding the process etc.

I talked to a NICS examiner from the FBI at SHOT 2018 and he said he literally does the same background investigation for NICS as the suppressor requires, but said the NICS forms have to be processed in a certain period of time, but the suppressor forms go into a "convenience" pile.  So when 200,000 guns are sold in a week, the NICS does over 200,000 background checks, but 200,000 silencer background checks might approximate one year of silencer purchasing nationwide, and might get processed in 12 months.  That just doesn't make any sense.   At that point it really becomes difficult to say, "I'm being told the truth and there just isn't enough administrative time to do this."

 Obviously firearms sales don't waterfall like that every day of the year so if 200,000 is possible in a day, the convenience pile should only delay during intense overages of firearms sales.

Beside obvious factors, we met a former DEA, former delta operator who mentioned fast tracking of form 4's common with his friends, and we pushed an individual transfer for one Police officer that went ~10 days (form 4).  The FBI NICS agent was saying no fast track process existed, but that's just can't be true- the 10 day form 4 wasn't a freak accident.  He might have honestly not been aware of it, but we've seen one form 4 transfer go about 10 days, and that was supported by a conversation with the former DEA agent who had similar stories.

I don't know what the problem is or who is responsible, but I do know that a lot of improvement could happen if the government just wanted to do a solid for the American people, without involving congress at all.  That doesn't absolve Congress from doing their job and helping the people on their end, but it shows how passing the buck solves nothing.

We obviously live in a period of general dysfunction in the government.  Trump is not projected to get through his cabinet appointments in his first term of 4 years, so this isn't the only place for the government to improve performance obviously.

BTW People aren't incapable of working with the government to solve problems, I'm sure a lot of people would pay a reasonable expedition fee like $100 to transfer a silencer in 10 days or less.  Not that they should have to pay a fee anyway, but I'm sure they would if it actually solved the 6-14+ month waiting periods.

Gary Hughes talked about an NFA owners card.  -  a buy and walk card for NFA items.  It's amazing the kind of logical solutions the free market could offer this simple problem of too much processing time.   A background check is like a security clearance.  The government doesn't require their sensitive people to pass a check everyday before they can go to work.  Neither should it be logical for a citizen to be treated as if they need to be checked every day.

That agent was saying there was no fast track capability and saying he has to wait on his silencer transfer the same as everyone else.  The problem with me believing his argument was that I had the experience where I saw a form 4 fast tracked and he was basically trying to tell me the sky isn't blue.  Either he wasn't privy to it, or he was lying to me.

There is a website update being implemented that allows us to better support dealers with items not carried by distribution.  We have a very large product catalog and a lot of dealer customers can't get everything in the product portfolio through distribution channels.  The apparel category disappeared in the process, it's a known issue, it's on a short list of things to rebuild.

It's not ideal, but you could get anything not available through customer service at  Phone 262-200-0003  I don't alter the website content so I can't immediately fix that problem.

That's nice of them to do, but it seems illogical that a form can be fast tracked when they can't efficiently process the forms.  When the government solves problems for some but not all, that kind of seems like a great way to avoid ever really solving the problem.

We really appreciate and care about customers.  I'm glad you appreciate the hard work we do to try to be what customers need us to be.  We have thousands of customers a year, but we can't do that without every one of them and we really appreciate you all.

Photos were taken today for shirts so that's getting done. I'll try to let you know when they are up.  I realized there is a merchandise tab on the second row that at times blends with the background JAVA picture revolve on the front page, and I was wrong about the page disappearing, merch is there, but the new shirts are not on it and are being added.   I'll see if we can maybe drop shadow that - I can't make any guarantees, but it would be cool if there was a white border on the tab text, I went to the site hoping to answer your question, knowing of the recent changes and I couldn't find the Merchandise tab so it's obviously not obvious enough.

3 of the new shirts (Merchandise page)

Merch is a work in progress we have a bunch of stuff in the pipeline.   I agree on the second line of nav bar- it's part of the e-commerce template we can't modify, so no white drop shadow is available.  
We will try to put brighter pictures in the flash box to keep those more visible all the time in the future as we rotate the flash pictures out.