Maybe The NRA Isn’t So Crazy After All.
Along
with fundraising appeals from Kamala, Bernie and the Wilderness Fund,
yesterday’s mail also included a lovely letter from Wayne-o asking me to join a
very exclusive NRA club – the Golden Eagles. In fact, I have been pre-selected for
membership by the NRA Honors Committee, and all I have to do is send
back my acceptance form and I’m in. It’s really a great honor and I can’t turn
them down.
Oh, I
forgot. I also have to send a check or credit card payment for $250.
Now
considering the fact that yesterday I walked into Dick’s and Titleist has the
nerve to want almost $500 for a new driver which won’t get my tee shot any
further down the fairway than the driver I have been using for the last ten
years, I can hardly be upset that the boys from Fairfax want half that much to
induct me into the Golden Eagles club.
But what
I found most interesting about this appeal was how it seems to me that the
Fairfax bunch may have actually decided to go back to being what they have
always been before a combination of phony Trump flattery, candy-ass video personalities
and cockamamie marketing schemes got them to briefly lose their minds.
Let’s
start with Trump. No other Presidential candidate had ever made gun ‘rights’
the centerpiece of a national campaign. Schmuck-o Trump never made a speech
without reminding everyone that he was infatuated with guns. Now the fact that
he never even owned a gun or used a gun – so what?
As for NRA-TV,
it was one thing to have bores like Grant Stinchfield droning on and on about the
Socialist threat to gun ‘rights,’ but spicing up the video airwaves with Colion
Noir prancing around or Dana Loesch giving us the tough, ‘f-me’ look? If that
was the best idea cooked up by Ackerman-McQueen to promote gun sales, the
agency should have been canned long before they got into a fight with the NRA
Home Office over who was going to pay Wayne-o’s clothing bills.
The
dumbest move made in Fairfax was when they tried to replace their traditional
training approach (and the 100,000+ certified instructors) with an online
training and insurance program which went nowhere fast. The trainers (I having
been one of them) were the organization’s shock troops. Most trainers engaged
in little actual training activities, but they were always the roots which held
the grass together and could be counted on to show up in large and noisy
numbers every time gun ‘rights’ faced any kind of threat.
Here’s
where things stand now. Trump has stopped pushing the 2nd Amendment
at his Nuremburg rallies; NRA-TV is temporarily shut down (although you can
watch reruns which are even more boring than the original shows) and last month
Wayne-o sent out a letter to all the trainers telling them that he was grateful
for their continued support. This was
the very first communication I ever received from the NRA which didn’t
ask me to respond by enclosing a credit card number or a check.
When the
annual meeting turned into an exercise in the veritable sh*t hitting the
veritable fan, I assumed the NRA would respond by ramping up the volume,
becoming even more extreme and using the bad news about its management
practices as proof that the anti-gun campaign had reached a new and dangerous
pitch. But it’s pretty tough to accuse someone like Ollie North of being
opposed to private ownership of guns.
On the
other hand, North and his supporters may have done the NRA a great
service because perhaps without realizing it, their attacks have forced Wayne-o
and the remaining leadership to stop pretending that every anti-NRA
message is somehow the handiwork of Mike Blomberg, George Soros and their
Socialist pals. Nothing would make me happier than to see the NRA get back to
its traditional role as a supporter of using guns the way they should be used.
