The NRA is in deep do-do and it's about damn time

[MuscleScience]

Interesting,

They do contact you none stop. They need a major change in leadership to right the ship. I don’t think they will I’m afraid. P

[Beetlegeuse]

Interesting,

They do contact you none stop. They need a major change in leadership to right the ship. I don’t think they will I’m afraid. P

I'm an Endowment member (which I figure gives me standing to bitch). I got more solicitations after I bought my life membership than I ever did before. I didn't buy the higher the levels to stop the solicitations but I ASSuMEd that buying life-plus memberships would give them a clue that I had joined to support the cause and them endlessly harassing me won't cause me to think I need to give one red cent more than my conscience already directs. Instead it only give them to know I had discretionary monies I was willing to spend on something as non-fungible as an NRA life membership.

Silly me. I got flooded.

I sent several letters asking them nicely to stop. They ignored me.

Which pissed me off because they were wasting WASTING a portion of my donations in order to send me these solicitations, so I'd have sooner kept that money and spent it on MY OWN needs than see them piss it away.

When I bought the Endowment membership they sent me a new lapel pin and a cheap-shit 12" highly-polished Bowie knife with the NRA logo as my "member rewards." I sent back the knife and asked them what the fuck they thought I was going to do with a knife I wouldn't trust to open a can of beans. But they kept sending more solicitations to upgrade to Patron. I finally sent them a VERY VULGAR registered letter and told them if they ever sent me another piece of mail OF ANY SORT, solicitation, Christmas card wishes, ANYTHING, I would cancel my membership, insist that they purge all my information from their databases, then I would make digital copies of all my levels of life member certificates, photoshop my name off of them and distribute them freely on the Internet. Then anybody who only wanted to be an NRA member for the bragging rights could pretend they were merely for the cost of printing their name on my certificate.

The solicitations stopped.

It's been obvious for a couple of decades to anyone who hasn't been blinded by the lead content in the Kool-Aid they're drinking that the NRA has lost the scent. And the bump-fire stock debacle was the equivalent of running up the white flag of surrender. That was an inexcusable strategic mistake that will continue to haunt 2A/RKBA for decades. Without question, the NRA is broken.

Broken.

The nattering nabobs will cry that there's no replacement for the NRA, that its end also would be TEOTWAWKI, but it's closer to the truth to say that the reason organizations like SAF, GOA, JPFO, etc. etc. etc. can't get any traction is because the NRA is sucking up so much of the available contributor funding from the 2A/RKBA ecosystem. Too many people think they're the only game in town. But the only reason those smaller fish have any contributing membership at all is that some of the more discerning gun owners have recognized that those groups are still combative where the NRA is conciliatory, and they still have something the NRA lost long ago: the fire in their belly for the fight.

In time, any organization that comes to dominate the market for no other reason than people think they're too big to fail will become bloated and lethargic and take their client base for granted. The NRA passed that juncture long, long ago. At the very least they need to be brought down a peg or three. If it collapses under its own weight I won't shed a tear, and I'm confident there are plenty of firebrands waiting in the wings who are more than capable of filling the NRA's shoes. With the difference that these new guys are .still hungry.