What's In A Name- Firearms-Rights

What's In A Name- Firearms-Rights supporters should get a great laugh out of this one.

Citizens for a Safer Minnesota has been, for about a decade, the Twin Cities' main anti-gun organization. They've been behind the disinformation that has spearheaded most of the gun-control, and anti-gun-owners' rights, legislation in recent memory.

But they are apparently not so not with the paperwork.

Last spring, a couple of Twin Cities firearms-rights activists and lawyers - Joe Olson of Minneapolis and David Gross of St. Louis Park, both longtime Second Amendment activists and prime movers in Concealed Carry Reform Now - discovered that CFASM hadn't kept it's bases covered, according to this article from Gun Week:

Olson told Gun Week that he discovered that CSM had not filed its required annual registration for non-profit corporations, and as a result, the corporate names were, quite literally, up for grabs.

“There’s a box to check for inactive corporations, and they both came up as inactive. I pulled up the pages that describe their status and noticed that the tax-exempt organization had stopped making its annual filings in 1995,” Olson related. “I pulled up the lobby and they stopped making filings in 2000. I stared at that for about three seconds and remembered that, after 2000, if you failed to file for one year, you are (considered) dissolved.”

So - the name and trademark for Citizens for a Safer Minnesota now belongs - to citizens who actually want to make Minnesota safer for its citizens!

CFASM's woes won't end there. According to Olson in Gun Week:

The former CSM group could be in serious trouble with the Internal Revenue Service. Because the tax-exempt arm of the group has been dissolved for three years, since December 1999, they may have to pay taxes as an unincorporated association on all of their grant money and contributions for the three tax years that have passed.

Perhaps worse, Olson suggested that every one of their donors “have made contributions to a non-existent organization” and, as a result, may have to consider filing amended tax returns eliminating the charitable deductions they took, and pay the additional taxes and interest.

“The donors probably won’t get a negligence penalty,” he said, “but the entity should.”

. How much money does this involve? Good question.

More to come on this. I'll keep you posted.

Posted by Mitch at December 6, 2002 11:44 AM