Posts Tagged → national rifle association
Vote: NRA Board of Directors
The National Rifle Association board of directors election is happening right now, and your vote counts a lot. And a lot is at stake. The organization is recovering from decades of bureaucratic malaise and overspending, personal ego battles among leaders, and frankly, the overstayed-your-welcome of its longtime Executive VP, Wayne LaPierre. The more people asked Wayne LaPierre to step down, the more he clung to power, hogged public attention, and damaged the careers and lives of those NRA staff and associates whom he perceived to be less than groveling to him.
The NRA has had some rough times, no doubt, and other worthy groups like Gun Owners of America have seized the opportunity to grow their market share of the 2A crowd. But it is still a fact that the NRA is the best sheriff in town to take on the anti-freedom tyrants. Though NRA has had some internal drama (and so has GOA), no one does its job better. NRA still deserves your membership, your support, your donation when purchasing things at Midway.
Yes, Donald Trump is now president, and so no, the federal government is not presently at war with our 2A rights and the groups that protect them, like the NRA. But presidents come and go, and our advocates like NRA must be able to stay in the fight, during the good times and the bad.
Presently there is an internal contest going on at NRA, at the board level and amongst some of the staff, about Whither NRA. There is an effort to keep the “old regime” folks around, when what is needed is a complete overhaul, a housecleaning, an NRA 2.0. For that to happen, new voices and fresh faces have to be voted onto the board. I happen to know a few of the board members (spanning all positions on Whither NRA), and I have been asking them what their opinions are about some of the new faces and some of the old faces.
Couple of recommended NO votes: Larry “Bathroom Bud” Craig (for God’s sake, NRA, have you no shame?), Sandra Froman (been a board member for long enough now, thank you), Joel Friedman, a fantastic 2A stalwart who tied himself too closely to Wayne LaPierre and the old NRA establishment.
Recommended YES votes:
- Knox Williams of the American Suppressor Association. I do not own suppressors, nor am I interested in suppressors. My gun interests are in the circa 1775-1925 range. However, a lot of new gun owners are very into suppressors and the modern sporting rifles they connect to. Young people like Knox Williams speak this new language and are necessary for the NRA to walk effectively into the 21st century.
- Jonathan Goldstein, a well known Second Amendment attorney from here in Pennsylvania.
- Al Hammond, Mitzy McCorvey, Anthony Colandro, Charles Hiltunen, Isaac Demarest, Todd Ellis, and Jim Wallace are all fresh voices much needed on the NRA board.
Your official NRA ballot is due before April 6th, 2025, so get it in the mail, pronto.
Choices: Principles vs Institutions
Humans create institutions to institutionalize our values, religious practices, hopes and aspirations, cultural identity, etc. Our institutions are created in order to make permanent and carry our values forward, a sort of vehicle. Schools, libraries, government agencies, religious institutions, family foundations, charitable foundations, unions, associations, etc, every single one created with a mission to implement certain principles.
Over time people naturally identify with a particular institution, become a champion of it, and a stakeholder to it. Again, private schools, public school PTAs, library associations, the National Ukrainian Club, various church and synagogue umbrella groups, Democrat Party, Republican Party, etc, you know those particular institutions in your own life, because they reflect your values.
What happens when the institution no longer represents or reflects the founding principles that breathed life and cause into it?
Examples abound: The United Nations works against the western democracies who founded it and currently pay for it. The Democrat Party has become a wild communist orgy of anti-Americanism; the Republican Party has forsworn its abolitionist roots and has become a bunch of establishment do-nothing fuddy-duddies; the National Rifle Association accretes multiple layers of bureaucracy into everything it does, instead of spending its limited money pursuing individual freedom; school teachers unions become outlets for destructive radical politics, far outside the mainstream of American families; a local church or synagogue is poorly run by a small group of self-reinforcing, self selecting, like-minded establishmentarians who cannot and will not respond to changes in their respective demographics…
The one that got me thinking about this subject is the Pennsylvania Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs, a sportsmen’s group I had a long relationship with, which then attempted to take a hard left turn into climate alarmism and gun regulation back in 2020. In one quick weekend of fake votes and heavily manipulated elections, the PFSC leadership torpedoed the institution the leaders said they loved. Their far-left politics alienated their base, and the group has not yet recovered its former standing.
With PFSC, I took a hard and public stand, and while I succeeded in stopping the old group from becoming leftist stooges of the charitable foundation trust fund sector, I also lost a lot of friends. People who were loyal to the PFSC they remembered, and who they wanted it to still be. Some blamed me for damaging PFSC’s public reputation, while I blamed PFSC’s leadership for making unpopular decisions its base rejected. For sure the messenger got shot!
In 2020, PFSC’s leaders jettisoned the principles on which PFSC was originally founded, and a great portion of their natural base stopped believing in the institution.
Recently I stepped back from a formal leadership role in a local house of worship, as the venerable institution begins to crumble onto itself. Leaders there, who fondly remember this house of worship from their childhood, cannot make the tough decisions necessary to keep it alive, and in fact keep making decisions that guarantee few or no young people will join it and keep it going. This particular institution is beginning to greatly deviate from its own founding principles, and its base, its natural adherents and admirers, no longer recognize it.
One last example: The US Environmental Protection Agency was a place I badly wanted to work in while I was in college back in the mid 1980s. When I finally got to work at the USEPA, I realized that a great deal of the basic principle that had undergirded its founding had been long since tossed overboard. In place of the simple principle of a clean environment came a whole regime of anti-capitalism, anti-America regulations. After seven years as a policy staffer at USEPA, I could not wait to get out. I now think the agency needs a whole new name and a very clear mission change.
So should we be loyal to the hollowed out shells of institutions that now exist mostly in facade, gutted of what they once stood for, hopeful that they will somehow regain their former glory, or should we seek to create new institutions that are more representative of the principles that enervated the originals we so dearly loved and identified with?
Change is a constant, evolution is healthy, and institutions that do not change to some degree become stale, immobile, static, and fragile. But those that deviate from their founding principles are destined for a much faster devolution, because most people just simply stop believing in them.
The competitive free market will cause new institutions to spring alive, bringing hope and aspiration anew to old principles, replacing the old institutions as they dry up and wither away. For me, I am of two minds: Stay loyal to the old institution until that is no longer possible, on principle, and then help found a new one, on principle.