Category: Gun Rights Organizations

Time lists this article as being from 2001, but it’s clearly not.  It’s from January 1990.  It talks about J. Warren Cassidy being Executive Vice President of NRA, who resigned in 1991, and was replaced by Wayne LaPierre.  Joe Foss is still NRA President.  The best date for the article is it references the 1989 Stockton Massacre as happening “a week ago last year”.

Read the whole thing.  It gives a snapshot in time of NRA, at a time when membership was declining, the inevitable passage of the Brady Bill and Assault Weapons Bans were on the horizon, and the future of NRA seemed more uncertain.  In those days, there was plenty of infighting between, I guess what we today would call the “pragmatic” faction of NRA, and the more hard line “Knoxers.”

The NRA of today has considerably less infighting in comparison to those days, but the political climate is much better.  That sounds crazy considering who controls Congress and who’s in the White House, but those were really dark days.  The media pointed to declining NRA membership as evidence of its losing support among mainstream gun owners.  The only people who suggest NRA is impotent now are the Brady Campaign, and my Governor.  I don’t think anyone really believes them.

The NRA board election ballots are due by this Saturday, so if you have not yet sent in your ballot, better do it today if you want it count.  Ballots received after the deadline, Saturday April 25th, won’t be counted.

It seems pretty clear that Obama is willing to push a treaty that would appear to require extensive licensing in order to participate in many shooting activities, including reloading and home building, as well as requiring the United States to share such licensing information with the Mexican Government.

While it would hardly be fair to call John Tester and Brian Schweitzer of Montana anti-gun, after all, Schweitzer just signed a bill that’s a pretty bold midle finger to the federal gun control regime.  But the fact is that Obama is the change Tester and Schweitzer told Montanans to vote for:

“I heard him tell us in Montana that he is not going to take our guns away,” the governor said.

The Obama campaign disputed Cox’s comments, saying the candidate has been honest about his position on guns.

“The NRA is wrong to suggest we are misleading anybody,” said campaign spokesman Caleb Weaver, adding “gun owners have nothing to fear from Barack Obama.”

– Missoulian

And now for Tester:

U.S. Sen. Jon Tester says Barack Obama is regular guy who is no threat to gun owners. Tester said Thursday that he spoke with Obama “straight up” on the gun issue. The senator says his fellow Democrat understands the issue much better than he used to.

Now we know how Barack Obama understands this issue, and Tester and Schweitzer were both dead wrong to try to pull the wool over the eyes of Montanans about Obama.  No one who took a serious look at Obama’s record could come to the conclusion that he was “no threat to gun owners.”

NRA is not going to call either of them to account for it, because it wouldn’t be smart politics.  Tester will vote the right way in the Senate, and Schweitzer will sign pro-gun bills.  But I can’t really stomach the thought of those two getting off easy for helping bring us to this point with President Obama.  I know Tester will vote against CIFTA in the Senate, and I appreciate that.  Gun owners should appreciate that too.  But if groups like GOA want to do something that would be useful, generating a little embarrassment over their support of Obama during the campaign would be in order.

Gun owners in Montana should be reminded that Schweitzer and Tester campaigned hard for Obama in Montana, and deliberately tried to cover up for his anti-gun record.  Now Obama has made his positions clear, and gun owners in Montana should make their position clear to the Governor and Senator Tester: we don’t like being lied to.  GOA would be the perfect vehicle for helping send such a message.  But will they?

Yesterday Bitter got relatively steamed by her treatment by someone in the Secretary’s Office, and talked about an election related mistake on the ballot.  It turns out that, while it is incorrect, it wasn’t a mistake.  Someone at NRA explained it thusly:

The 30 BOD candidates with instruction to vote for not more than 25 is the Nominating Committee Report. It is Board Policy that the Nominating Committee Report be printed in the Ballot issue of the magazines. The Nominating Committee Report cannot be changed, no matter what happens between the time the Committee makes its report and the ballots are printed. The Nominating Committee gave its report before Jim Supica resigned from the Board. Jim’s resignation is the reason we are electing 26. The 26th highest vote getter will fill his unexpired, one-year term.

So basically, they were required by policy to print the wrong information.  It was correct when it was written, but became incorrect through circumstance.  I think this is something that the Board should reconsider.  Either it needs to allow for changes that are matters of fact, or the Nominating Committee needs to take care not to include information in its report that might change between the time they make the report, and the time the ballots go out to membership.  No doubt this confusion is depriving some members of a vote, and a concern of that nature deserves to be taken seriously.

In my previous post about NRA’s Board Elections, at least two comments indicated that people who knew themselves to be verified voting members did not receive ballots at all this year. Now, two wouldn’t be a big deal. But this whole thing started when a friend of Sebastian’s didn’t get his ballot either. It’s completely anecdotal, but that does seem like an awful large percentage of confirmed voting members I know.

But then I started thinking back, and I never received my first ballot, either. I received credentials to vote on the floor at the Annual Meeting, but when I looked in the magazine back at home, I had no ballot. (I didn’t look for it before because I didn’t think I had been a member for 5 years yet.) My mother didn’t get her first ballot, either. We knew she had been a member longer than I had, yet they still weren’t sending her anything.  This leads me to wonder about the scale of this problem.

If you absolutely know you were a fully paid life member before March 27, 2009 or had completed 5 years of membership with no lapses of more than 30 days by that date, could you please leave a comment in this post if you did not get your ballot either in the NRA magazine, or by first class mail if you joined after the magazine went out, but before the March deadline? If you know someone, send them this way to comment.  I realize this isn’t a scientific survey, but I’m trying to get an idea of how large the problem.

The Board of Directors helps guide the overall priorities of the organization, so it is important. Not to mention, a good director can help NRA accomplish goals without the investment of staff time, freeing them up to work on other things. A quality director will ask tough questions when needed and voice concern or offier praise when appropriate. When you consider how few people vote in these elections, and the tight races at the bottom of the ballot, 5,000 ballots mishandled could result in a radically different tally. If it really is a problem, it should be solved.

You’ve heard us talking about NRA voting for months, but what if you didn’t get a ballot? Do you think you should have received one? Are you pretty confident you’ve kept your membership up for 5 years straight with no lapses or upgraded/purchased a life membership in advance of the ballot mailing?

We just got word that someone who we sponsored as a life member upgrade didn’t receive a ballot even though he qualifies for one. Not good. If you are in the same boat, today is the last day to request a replacement ballot.

You need to call 1-800-672-3888, choose option 6, and then dial extension 3700. They will promptly send you a new ballot. You will need to return it ASAP since they need it in hand by April 26. Call today – don’t delay!

UPDATE: Nevermind. Apparently someone in the Secretary’s office is giving out false information. Yesterday was the deadline, regardless of what I was just told less than an hour ago by the same office about how they would process requests submitted today.

Of course, the guy who is now answering that extension also tried to convince me that more than 550 people work in the Secretary’s office and “any one of them could have answered the phone.” Um, no. I do NOT appreciate being lied to. There are not that many staffers in the Secretary’s Office, and their phone systems don’t randomly transfer a call to the Secretary’s Office to say, Competitive Shooting. Apparently, the Jim Land’s staff thinks I’m dumb enough to believe that calling a specific extension could get any random staffer to pick up – even the Federal Affairs staff in the DC office!

So then he lectured me on how tight they must run clean, tight elections and they can’t have any room for error. Oh, really? How about misstating to the membership about how many votes they have?

Yes, something I purposely chose not to bring to light earlier is how the division that handles elections incorrectly told the membership about how many people they could vote for depending on which section of the voting information they read. The ballot itself says you can vote for 26 people (25 regular seats, plus filling the rest of a term emptied by a resignation). However, as an observant commenter here noticed, on the page facing the ballot, they warn members they are only allowed to vote for 25 candidates.

You could say it’s a typo and no big deal. However, you can also say that given the typo is on the official report of the nominating committee, it’s a means of denying members their 26th vote. I guess it depends on how much you hate NRA as to how you see it. Considering that their biggest problem for disqualified ballots are people who vote for the wrong number of candidates, it’s not exactly a minor issue. (Last year there were almost as many disqualified ballots for the wrong number of votes as the difference between the last winner and first loser. In other words, enough to potentially swing an election.)

So, those clean, tight elections? Yeah, so much for that. Giving out false deadlines, denying a 26th vote to members, and then lying about how many staff are in your division…not clean nor tight.

The top vote getter in 2008 was Tom Selleck with 84,399 votes cast. His name was selected on more than 92% of valid ballots. He received 13,856 more votes than the next highest winner – Peter J. Printz.

The difference between the “last winner” and the “first loser” for a board seat last year was 1,664 votes. The last winner’s name was selected on approximately 63% of the valid ballots.

Your vote can make a difference!

For the next week or so, reminders will be popping up to make sure people mail in their NRA Board Election ballots.  These reminders come from some of our favorite people. We do hope everyone will consider our endorsements for the NRA Board Election, and check out our interviews with the candidates that can be found at the link above.  Your vote only counts if the ballot arrives by April 26th, so get them in the mail.