I spent entirely too long on the phone yesterday morning talking to “Eric” at NRA-ILA. I started the conversation by asking him what it would take before the NRA would withdraw its support for H.R. 2640. He replied that the support would be withdrawn if some sort of gun-control amendment were attached.
I’m not a supporter of HR 2640 so you can only imagine how the conversation continued. I finally decided that I wasn’t going to change the minds of the officers of the NRA with a simple phone call so I politely ended the call.
Afterward though, I kept playing the record over and over and dwelling on the part where ‘Eric’ kept saying that the membership just needs to be educated as to the true benefits of the bill.
Perhaps.
But isn’t that a reversal of how the NRA is supposed to work? Isn’t the NRA supposed to represent the members? Since when does the NRA (or at least the NRA officers) consider education of the membership part of the job? Are we so ignorant of the political machinations of congress that we need to be “educated” by those elites who cater to movie and rock stars in order to bolster their own public images? Isn’t this the same problem we have with our “representatives” in congress?
I’m sure there are a lot of issues that divide the GOA and the NRA and HR 2640 is just the most recent, but ‘Eric’ couldn’t complete a paragraph without telling me how the GOA had lied about the Bill and how they spend most of their budget on mailings asking people to leave the NRA and join the GOA.
Well, I get a lot of GOA stuff in the mail and he’s right in that they point out the difference between the two organizations but any plea to leave the one and join the other is remarkably low-key. Instead they ask their members to write their congresscritters in an effort to pass or defeat some legislation. The NRA, OTOH, is content with letting the ILA do all the lobbying (obviously the members are to stupid to do anything like that.)
Now then, a bunch of guys are going to call me an “NRA-basher.” Fair enough, but I am a member. I’m just not a blind member. I don’t like someone peeing on my leg and telling me it’s raining and that’s what the NRA is trying to do here.