We have all been there waiting and waiting for a file to download or upload. Some of us including me still (somewhat) remember the days before high speed internet where we had dial-up modems running at 1200 and 2400 baud. When I transitioned from a 56k baud modem to DSL at 3 Mbps I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Now if my cable modem isn’t running at close to 100 Mbps I begin to wonder what is wrong.
So at the junction of firearms and computers, we have this:
I am sure new NRA President Charles Cotton would be pissed off to see himself represented by a trio of monkeys. However, given his performance as Chair of the NRA Board of Directors Audit Committee, it is wholly warranted.
This has become even clearer thanks to a report in the blog NRA In Danger. Several good, honest, and forthright NRA staffers sent a memo to the Audit Committee outlining “top concerns”. I’ll let NRA In Danger tell the story of how Mr. Cotton decided to neither hear nor see the problems.
A major event in the beginning of the controversy over internal corruption came when NRA Treasurer “Woody” Phillips left suddenly in 2017, and the inexplicable decision was made to hire an honest Treasurer, Craig Spray. Several employees who were deeply concerned about what was going on wrote a “Top Concerns” memo for the Audit Committee, which was presented at an emergency meeting in July, 2018. Note this is nearly a year before the scandals burst into the open (April-May 2019). The Committee’s response? Its chair, Charles Cotton, left the room before the memo was presented. Its Vice Chair, who then served as chair, never gave Cotton the memo (obviously he knew Cotton didn’t want to hear of it).(emphasis mine) The committee (which is entrusted by the board with keeping everything honest) made no mention of the event to the board. Officially, nothing happened that day in July.
Read the “top concerns” memo yourself. It was an exhibit filed by the New York Attorney General in the NRA’s abortive attempt at bankruptcy. Given Mr. Cotton’s behavior that day and many others since, I am somewhat surprised that the complaint asking for dissolution has not been amended to make him a co-defendant.
NYAG-Bank-Ex-72_Top-Concerns-Memo-2Catherine Herridge of CBS News had an update on her investigation into waste and fraud at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. She reported that Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has become involved. Sen. Grassley is the Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and is very serious on protecting whistleblowers in government.
Sen. Grassley has now sent letters demanding answers to Attorney General Merrick Garland and BATFE Acting Director Marvin Richardson. He has also sent a letter asking the Office of Personnel Management about their suspension of BATFE’s ability to classify certain law enforcement positions. All the letters were quite detailed and indicated his office had significant knowledge of the affair.
It should be remembered that Sen. Grassley was one of the very first politicians that demanded an investigation into Operation Fast and Furious aka Project Gunwalker. He worked closely with then-Chair of the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee Darrell Issa to get answers.
One of the cardinal rules of business is that it costs much less to keep a customer than it is to go out and get a new customer. Indeed, some studies show it costs five times as much to get a new customer than to keep an existing one. Moreover, just retaining 5% more customers can push profitability by anywhere from 25% to 95%. If your new car came with satellite radio, this explains why Sirius XM offers such incredible deals to keep you enrolled.
Now let’s apply this to the NRA. Reportedly officers of the NRA keep telling the board that they are gaining 100,000 new members monthly. This is a correct statement. However, what is not talked about much is membership retention.
Examine the chart below that was handed out in a recent NRA committee meeting. You had a million member spike in the year after the Newtown murders. However, in the next year total membership dropped by 500,000. You see and up-down pattern through 2018 when membership hit a peak of about 5.2 million members. Since 2019, the pattern has changed from the earlier up-down pattern to a continual decline. Membership currently stands at about 4.6 million as of the end of August. An earlier reported figure of 4.2 million was in error.
As Bitter has reported in a couple of posts, voting participation is down and increased secrecy about the organization’s affairs is harming it. Why would you want to be part of a group that forbids you from expressing your pride in being a part of it?
The answer is you wouldn’t. Add in that there are clubs ditching the 100% NRA membership requirement along with the willful ignorance of many Board members and you have a disaster in the making.
As proof that not everything I post has to do with the NRA, I present this discussion between Ken Hackathorn and Bill Wilson on Bill’s favorite hunting rifle. It is a Ruger Model 77 in 9.3×62 which he has taken to Africa a number of times.
Why I was really interested in it is because I am seriously thinking of having a Remington Sportsman 78 .30-06 aka a poor man’s Remington 700 ADL rebored to 9.3×62. I could replace the barrel but I think it would be just as cost effective to have it rebored. It is a wonderful caliber to use on tough African plains game and is potentially allowed to be used on dangerous game. The latter depends on the country. Some have the .375 H&H or Ruger as the minimum while others that were under German colonial control often allow its use.
The CBS Evening News ran an investigative report on Tuesday, October 5th, that featured a whistleblower accusing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives of waste and fraud. The whistleblower alleges that BATFE paid a large number of administrative people an extra 25% for supposedly being available on call for law enforcement operations. The problem is that this certification was false. When the whistleblower brought it to the attention of higher ups and management, he got lower performance evaluations that led to his termination. Given how hard it is to fire any one in Federal employment, it seems BATFE went out of their way to terminate this whistleblower.
I am somewhat surprised that CBS News ran any report that was critical of BATFE. However, the reporter, Catherine Herridge, did come over to CBS from Fox.
In normal years, a candidate for the NRA Board of Directors who wanted to be nominated by petition would have months to gather the needed signatures. This is not a normal year.
The window to gather signatures opened with the Annual Meeting on October 2nd and closes on November 16th. Thus, instead of almost six months, a candidate will have approximately six weeks to gather 477 signatures of NRA voting members. As a reminder, those eligible to both vote and sign such a petition are Life, Patron, Endowment, and Benefactor members and Annual members with 5 continuous years of membership. If you have had a break in your annual membership, the clock restarts.
Runners-up on the ballot including petition candidates are eligible to move up into board openings when sitting directors resign or die. As NRA Secretary and General Counsel affirmed to Frank Tait at the 2021 Meeting of Members, write-in candidates do not qualify.
Frank Tait is the only person I know who is attempting to run by petition this year. If you know of anyone else, please put their information in the comments.
I plan on signing Frank’s petition. I only wish there was an event in the next week or so where I could gather a full page or more of valid signatures.
If you would like a copy of his petition, it is available for download here.
Return the signed petition to Frank Tait at 425 W. Wayne Ave. Wayne PA 19087. He needs them in hand by November 11th. Mine will go out in the mail tomorrow.
Please do not sign a petition if you are not a voting member. You can find your membership number on the label of whatever NRA magazine you receive.
We need more people who represent the actual members of the Board and fewer who represent either their own interests or those of Wayne.
Take a look at the picture below. It was originally posted on the blog NRA In Danger.
I have labeled it to point out Frank and the security monitor that the powers that be assigned to follow Frank everywhere in the Meeting of Members and the Board Meeting.
How damn paranoid do you have to be to put a security guard on one dissident member when you’ve already stacked the meeting with the Board, their spouses, and staffers whose jobs depend on kowtowing to Wayne?
The worst part is that you and I paid for this travesty with our dues. Even the KGB and Guoanbu are more subtle than this bumbling Gang of Four.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives is celebrating National Disability Employment Awareness Month. They decided to put a post up on Facebook about it.
It said, in part:
ATF is committed to building and sustaining a diverse and inclusive workforce. ATF welcomes and encourages applications from persons with disabilities and will reasonably accommodate the needs of those persons.
Given the snafus, incompetence, and general f’ed up nature of ATF, many immediately thought they were talking mental disabilities.
However, a much better comment brought up one of their recent rulemakings.
Someone named Spike Cohen said:
Aren’t you trying to ban pistol braces, which if implemented would make firearms much less accessible for disabled people?
That comment had over 2,000 likes and loves as it well should.
UPDATE: I just found out that Spike Cohen was a 2020 Libertarian candidate for Vice President.
The headline come from a quote by newly-elected NRA President Charles Cotton regarding the NRA Annual Meeting held in Charlotte on Saturday.
If that was all you knew about the Meeting of Members held in Charlotte, you would be excused if you assumed the meeting room was packed to the gills, that members’ concerns were respectfully heard, and that every member of the Board of Director was there.
The reality is much different.
As you can see in this photo sent to me by Rocky Marshall, attendance was sparse. He counted 128 attendees and there were probably a few more by the time everything got underway. Even last year in Tucson during the height of COVID, the Meeting of Members had more attendees. I would say the majority in attendance in Charlotte were Board members, their spouses, and NRA staff.
With regard to having members’ concerns being respectfully heard, a concerted effort was made to suppress even a vote on the only resolution brought before the members in the meeting. Frank Tait submitted the resolution that expressed no confidence in Wayne LaPierre and the Board of Directors and which said Wayne, Meadows, Cotton, Lee, and John Frazer did not deserve to be re-elected. Friend of Wayne Joel Friedman raised an objection to the resolution and a vote was called on whether to consider it. The vote was an overwhelming majority to sustain the objection and not consider the resolution. With that, the meeting adjurned.
If there was a bright spot in this whole charade, it is that NRA General Counsel and Secretary John Frazer was forced to read the resolution in its entirety out loud and that it became an official part of the meeting records. There is no word whether Frazer gritted his teeth or whether his blood pressure started to rise in response.
Stephen Gutowski notes in his new publication The Reload that 28 members of the Board of Directors bailed on the meeting and the follow-up Board Meeting. That means only 48 or members of the Board bothered to show up.
Moving on to the Board Meeting where officers and executives would be elected. The only surprise is that Wayne was not able to be re-elected by acclamation as Judge Phil Journey nominated Rocky Marshall for Executive VP and CEO. The vote on that was 44 votes for Wayne, 2 for Rocky, and 2-3 abstentions. They then went on to elect the full slate of officers and executives that were in the Nominating Committee recommendations that I posted on Friday night.
Such was the paranoia of the NRA that Stephen Gutowski was kept out of the Board Meeting because he was not an active NRA member. He had been allowed to sit in on other NRA Board Meetings in the past. Moreover, I was told by both Frank Tait and Rocky Marshall that they were shadowed throughout both the Meeting of Members and the NRA Board of Directors Meeting by a couple of security guards. Frank did note that they kept the CDC-recommended six feet away.
I have to laugh when I read the official statement by Wayne on being re-elected as Executive VP.
“The NRA is focused and energized–standing tall in the face of unprecedented attacks on our Association and constitutional freedoms,”…“I am honored by the trust placed in me by the NRA Board of Directors and the millions of patriots they represent. Together, we will continue to confront our adversaries and fight for our freedoms and values. We are resolute in our mission as America’s greatest defender of constitutional freedom.”
The Board of Directors may have represented the members at one time but that time is past. If Wayne and his cronies were really the greatest defender of constitutional freedom they would have allowed consideration of Frank Tait’s resolution, they would not have obstructed the case that became DC v. Heller in its early stages, and they would have gone far beyond the legal requirements for notification of the Annual Meeting. On this last thing, they didn’t even meet the minimum requirements imposed by NY law.
We are beginning to see the impact of the willful ignorance of the Board of Directors. Membership is reported to have fallen down to about 4.2 million members from a high of 5.5 million. Moreover, I know of a very large gun club in Pennsylvania that will be dropping their 100% NRA membership requirement. Without such a requirement, you have to believe that a lot of annual members will start dropping off the roles. Finally, I am hearing on various forums that range from hunting to 2A activism that a large number of traditional donors are keeping their wallets closed. Now I may be just listening to the choir on this but I’m starting to see it in too many places to ignore.
It seems the powers that be within the NRA are politicking the NRA Board in advance of their meeting tomorrow afternoon. Since it will be the first Board meeting after the Meeting of Members, new officers will be elected and trustees for the NRA Foundation and the NRA Special Contribution Fund will be selected.
I was sent anonymously a copy of the Nominating Committee report that was slipped under the door of every director in Charlotte a short while ago.
Three things stand out. First, they are attempting to influence the Board’s vote on the election of officers and trustees in advance of the actual meeting. Second, in doing so, they violated the confidentiality of their own executive session. Finally, making Willes Lee as a trustee of the NRA Foundation given his service on the Special Litigation Committee will be a red flag to not only the Attorney General of New York but to the Attorney General of the District of Columbia who is suing the NRA Foundation. Attorney General Racine’s lawsuit alleges the Foundation put the interests of the NRA ahead of its own.
I seem to remember an absurd comment by North Carolina’s own board member Walt Walter that leaking stuff from an executive session should be punished by death. Hmmm.
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