by Ballots for the 2024 NRA Board of Director election must be received on April 28th. Assuming you are a NRA voting member, if you have not sent in your ballot, do it now! Again, I would urge you to bullet vote and not vote for the full 25 candidates that you are allowed.
You can see my ballot here. I voted for the Four for Reform plus Rick Ector as he broke with the Old Guard to endorse Wade Callender for EVP. Owen Buz Mills is also worthy of your vote but he had requested people bullet vote for the Four for Reform. He was of the opinion that he would be elected anyway. I also voted to add the Chief Compliance Officer bylaw change even though I think it is closing the barn doors after the horses have escaped.
While I don’t think four or five people are enough to change the direction of the NRA but it is a start. With the issues facing the NRA and how the current Board has failed in its fiduciary duty, we need to start somewhere.
Below are two documents that were exhibits in the jury trial phase of the People of New York v. NRA et al. The first is a move by Joel Friedman, who by the way is on the ballot, to do most meetings in executive session so they can act in secrecy. This move was seconded by Tom King and Marion Hammer. Secrecy and “Wayne said” is what go the NRA into the trouble – both financial and legal – that it currently faces.
Exec-Session-People_of_the_State_of_v_People_of_the_State_of_TRIAL_DOCUMENTS_3205The second document involves a discussion of a Facebook group founded by Save the Second co-founder Ron Carter. Ron is a friend of mine and is one of the good guys. He is not only a competitive shooter but took a leave of absence from his day job in order to provide humanitarian aid to the civilians of Ukraine. Regardless of your opinion of that conflict, ordinary people needed help and he stepped up.
The discussion by the Board members revolved around certain Board members who had joined the Facebook group and what sort of retribution should be meted out to them. You will remember that the New York jury found the NRA guilty of retribution against whistleblowers. Look especially at the comments from Charles Cotton, Marion Hammer, and Willes Lee.
Here is a link to the document as it isn’t showing correctly when embedded.
I voted for the 4 reform candidates only.
I honestly like what Rick does and recognize he is new to the board. He isn’t in the Janet Nyce category. (Kissing Susan’s Butt)
But if I truly want to get to only 11-13-15 board members, I don’t see him there.
I’d like to see him on the Foundation board.
Friedman’s comment on “we need to get a positive message out” makes sense, too bad he prefaced it by saying he supported “neutralizing” the people concerned about what the Board is doing.
SSDD with Hammer, King, et al… sigh
At the abbreviated Members’ Meeting in Tucson in 2020, I introduced a resolution calling on the Board to work harder to avoid doing any routine business in Executive Session. I was motivated primarily by the 2019 board meeting in which even the nominations and election of officers was done in Executive Session. I was unaware of the above-posted document. My resolution pointed out that under Roberts’ Rules, Executive Session should be restricted to only those matters that actually require some level of privacy like private personnel matters and legal or legislative strategy. In the resolution, I was asking for the members present to tell the Board that they want more transparency, not less. As is true with all resolutions from the floor in a Members’ Meeting, there was nothing binding about the resolution, just a statement to let the Board know how the members feel about an issue. Director after Director stood up to argue that the resolution was unnecessary, that they weren’t using Executive Session to hide anything from the members, and that I’m just a troublemaker trying to make something of a non-issue. In the end, the members there — dominated by Directors, their spouses, and staff — voted to table the resolution or refer it to some committee.