The NRA is offering half-off life memberships:
In appreciation of your support helping us reach over 1,550,000 likes on facebook, we are offering NRA Life Membership for half off for the next 48 hours! To take advantage of this offer, please visit http://membership.nrahq.org/facebooklife. Be sure to share this post and ask your friends to like the NRA!
Let’s see, 1.55 million likes. Brady has 21,666 likes. CSGV has 6600 likes. VPC has 421 likes. MAIG has 4072 likes. And these people wonder why politicians listen to the NRA and not them? Even on Twitter, after CSGV has begged like half the planet to please follow them, and NRA has several different feeds, CSGV is still has an order of magnitude less followers than NRA News.
Great deal, and I still don’t have a Facebook or Twitter. There has to be many just like me.
Also, sometimes the NRA will move your membership up a level from Life to Endowment for the same deal. Call and ask them.
Which NRA magazine would you recommend for a non-hunter?
I don’t read American Rifleman, but that’s more the guns/gear magazine. I get First Freedom which is more the political/cultural stuff. In fact, we both took that magazine until I moved up here. Now Sebastian has switched to Rifleman and I stick with Freedom. We just figured we didn’t need two copies of the same magazine. Though now that we’re both digital subscribers, it doesn’t matter quite as much.
First Freedom is a great place to start. But you can switch back and forth in the years as you want to if you use the web site membership link.
I’m afraid I’m going to throw in some of my old-fart’s cynicism and poop on the party. I want to stipulate that I am only using the NRA as an example, because I experienced it over a lifetime.
A lifetime, for a lifetime membership, is a LONG time. Things will change during that period. I can pretty well guarantee that after say, forty years, an organization will not be the same entity that it was when you were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
I’ve been an NRA member since I was 18, and a Life Member from about ten years after that, c. 1973 — when I first got a real salary, and they first had a reduced-price sale on Life Memberships. I cannot describe the pride I felt at the time, over being an NRA Life Member.
But, without inviting argument by going into painful detail, my perception of the NRA changed. They changed. I don’t think I’ve sent them a donation in about 25 years, most of that being a period I was still very active with the gun rights movement.
Of course, I have made out, economically speaking, and the magazine, while far from being what it once was, was still always worth what I was paying for it. And, my gun club requires NRA membership, so I have that covered more or less for free. But at present I see the NRA teetering, shall we say, “culturally” on an edge that raises the possibility for me that in another few years I may not want to be associated with it.
I am a life member of one other organization, a national shooting sports organization that awarded me an Honorary Life membership. (I just reminded myself that I should be sending them a donation check to at least cover the expense of my membership for this year.) But my life experience has been such that I would think very hard about life membership in anything, even if I was say, 18 – 30 years old and had it to do again.
To digress only slightly, I have been interested in the histories of some organizations that were founded in the early 20th century. There are some that started out with really unsavory associations, but have evolved so that their early histories should be irrelevant; and others that arguably went the other way. There are few that really kept exactly the same identity over more than a decade or two.
Andy B.
I hear what you say quite often. But unlike you, I try to see the big picture and support the national and local organizations. I also did not send in my life membership to save money. I sent it in to let the NRA know I will vote and have my say faster than waiting the 5 years of annual membership gateway. I do vote, I research and I donate often. 20 bucks here, 50 bucks there. I also have a company PAC that donates a matching dollar donation to the NRA foundation each year. So I support the PAC to the tune of 500 dollars a year and NRA Foundation gets 500 bucks.
The NRA has indeed changed over the years, it has grown incredibly. It has become the biggest, baddest gorilla in the Washington zoo. Many of the hunters and sportsman are now being replaced with Concealed Carry members and 2nd amendment advocates just learning their way, I like that.
So you and I are old guys with different ways of looking at things, but I like where the NRA is going. I am sorry you feel success is a bad thing. Back when you I joined we were only 300,000 strong, now we sit at 4.5 million. Hard to not see that as successful. Is this a Neal Knox issue?
I don’t think success is a bad thing, but perhaps I just count success differently from the way you do. And the Great Game ain’t over yet. Remember that it’s hard to see success, when you don’t have the freedom to do what you took for granted, back when you were a kid. A net loss during your lifetime will always look like a net loss.
I will admit that there are many, many things in life for which I go back and review my certainties of the past, and find them wanting, based on what I’ve learned since. Chances are some of my past decisions and mind-changes about the NRA need to be reviewed based on more recent information, not only about it, but about the ideas that were influencing my thought processes, way back when. It’s very easy to settle something in your mind and then not review it for years.
Regarding “success,” however, I will relate a silly parable based on my own experience: Many years ago some of us from my office would get together after work once a week to play Risk in a nearby bar. I had a friend at the time, who if he would show up to play, almost always won. If he didn’t show up, I almost always won. Many times when he was playing, I would look at the board and be convinced I was within one of two turns of sweeping it. All of a sudden, he would come out of (seemingly) nowhere and sweep me and everyone else up. I never quite caught on to how, but the point of the story is that I learned that confidence of success, or trends toward success, and success, are two different things. Look at a game board that looks like it’s all yours, and you could be swept off it and not know what hit you.
When I reminisce about those games with my old buddy today, he soothes my ego by saying his strategy was just to wait until I had enough beer in me, and then start playing the game. But even if that is true, there’s a moral in it, if you think in terms of getting drunk on a success that may be illusory.
Interesting parable. I read this twice overnight to make sure I was following the lesson. A game of Risk at a local bar related to a life’s lesson as to the supposed success of the NRA.
Even with out bringing up the NRA revenue that streams in, let’s talk about their goal, to protect the 2nd amendment. Some notables listed below:
“ The NRA had a great night. They beat both Speaker Tom Foley and Jack Brooks, two of the ablest members of Congress, who had warned me this would happen. Foley was the first Speaker to be defeated in more than a century. Jack Brooks had supported the NRA for years and had led the fight against the assault weapons ban in the House, but as chairman of the Judiciary Committee he had voted for the overall crime bill even after the ban was put into it. The NRA was an unforgiving master: one strike and you’re out. The gun lobby claimed to have defeated nineteen of the twenty-four members on its hit list. They did at least that much damage and could rightly claim to have made Gingrich the House Speaker. â€
—Bill Clinton, My Life pp 629-30
“We’re terrified of the NRA. We Democrats are as bad as the Republicans. Everyone is scared of the NRA,†Rendell said Friday on MSNBC.
Ed Rendell, Ex Gov. Pennsylvania.
This is not a game of Risk. This is protection of the 2nd amendment!
I hate these kinds of debates because they accomplish nothing while mostly making us mad at each other; but I have to point out the irony of, not believing a single word that comes from our enemies’ mouths, until they’re telling is how tough we are. As soon as Clinton and Rendell flatter us, we quote them and believe them implicitly?
I’m thinking of a couple of classics; one involves B’rer Rabbit saying “Jus’ don’ tro’ me in dat bra’r patch; and the other is Sun Tzu, in “The Art of War,” commenting on the anticipation of victory; though the latter I would have to look up, to quote accurately.
My final thought is, I have never known an organization that wouldn’t claim credit when things went its way.
But no one wants to hear such things, so I will forebear for awhile.
Geez, I am sorry if I was making you mad. That was not my plan. I often am interested in hearing peoples distaste for the NRA to see if it is founded in any solid basis or conjecture of conspiracy level platitude. I found the debate/narrative informative.
But when you quote a fantasy creature based on an a writers acid trip it makes my “crazy” button pop.
Hmmm, All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved??
Again, my attempt at education failed and I am sorry if I angered you in any way!
Sorry if you thought I meant you were making me mad; not at all. I just know from experience where these things go — to mentions of acid trips, etc. Which incidentally, gives me no idea of what you are even talking about.
Glad we are both not mad. I never get mad when I’m right. The acid trip was you quoting “B’rer Rabbit saying “Jus’ don’ tro’ me in dat bra’r patch” from Alice in Wonderland. Lewis Carrol, aka Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, was a opium addicted crazy man. It is often mistakenly claimed he was on an acid trip. (But acid didn’t exist then.) So to accept lines of a supposedly logic based story on a opium addicted writer fails my mind. Hope that clears it up.
Also, when you start with “I’m afraid I’m going to throw in some of my old-fart’s cynicism and poop on the party,” that might just beg/ask/annoy people like me to go on the defensive.
Since we are about the same age and have about the same timeline for life membership, I felt qualified to rebut your cynicism.
Feel free to discuss further at dannytheman__at__yahoo__dot___com
I’ll just close saying I hope you don’t get mad when I tell you Louis Carrol had nothing at all to do with the Uncle Remus tales with B’rer Rabbit, et el. Those aren’t from Alice and Wonderland. They were rendered as movies by Walt Disney, in “Songs of the South.” Disney of course did Carrol’s “Alice in Wonderland,” too. The “Uncle Remus” tales were by Joel Chandler Harris, published c. 1880, and are alleged to be a collection of African-American folk tales from the slave era.
But Jefferson Airplane did “White Rabbit,” which I guess is kind of appropriate, as a nod to an opium addict.
Just having fun. . .
Not to beat something so off-topic to death, but, I was willing to believe that Lewis Carroll was an opium addict, because of the bizarre nature of some of his creations, but when I looked into it, I could find no reference at the top level to any sort of addiction on his part, e.g.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Carroll
I’m only belaboring this here, rather than backchannel, because if anyone stumbles over this conversation in the future, I don’t want something that may be false taken away as solid historical truth.
It appears there are many questionable myths about Lewis Carroll.
Just to close the thoughts, I’m not sure these are what I was thinking of, but Sun Tzu said:
To see victory only when it is within the ken of the common herd is not the acme of excellence.
Neither is it the acme of excellence if you fight and conquer and the whole Empire says, “Well done!”
To lift an autumn hair is no sign of great strength; to see the sun and moon is no sign of sharp sight; to hear the noise of thunder is no sign of a quick ear.
and,
It is precisely when a force has fallen into harm’s way that is capable of striking a blow for victory.
The last I think is most relevant to what I was trying to say.