January 2025 -

January NRA Board Meeting: Resolutions And Bylaw Amendments

The NRA Board of Directors will hold their winter meeting on Saturday, January 12th, in Dallas, Texas. Thanks to a nameless director who actually believes in transparency I have a list of the resolutions and bylaw amendments that will be presented at the meeting. Some of these will be for discussion only and some will be for voting.

Resolutions

Special Litigation Committee Dissolution (Amanda Suffecool) – review of resolution presented in September
Special Litigation Committee Dissolution v. 1 (Amanda Suffecool & Rocky Marshall)
Special Litigation Committee Dissolution v. 2 (Buz Mills & Rocky Marshall)
Nomination of Charles Brown for Board of Directors ballot (Buz Mills & Rocky Marshall)
Nomination of Paul Babaz for Board of Directors ballot (Buz Mills & Rocky Marshall)
Creation of a Committee of Reorganization (Buz Mills & Rocky Marshall)
Relocation Committee Dissolution (Buz Mills & Rocky Marshall)
Executive VP Search Committee Dissolution (Buz Mills & Rocky Marshall)
Criminal Background Check of Directors and Officers (Charlie Beers)
Resolution regarding Reclamation of Expenses relating to NYAG v NRA (Dennis Fusaro, Jeff Knox, Phil Journey, & Rocky Marshall)

Bylaw Amendments – Q&A Only

Committee Assignment Procedures v. 1 (Al Hammond, Amanda Suffecool, & Rick Ector)
EVP Advise and Consent by BOD (John Sigler)
President BOD Limitations (Jay Printz, Kayne Robinson, David Keene, and Ronnie Barrett)
Conflict of Interest (Dennis Fusaro & Jeff Knox)
Article VII Dissolution (Buz Mills & Rocky Marshall)
Committee Assignment Procedures v. 2 (Al Hammond, Amanda Suffecool, & Rick Ector)

Other than the resolution regarding the reclamation of expenses relating to monies paid out on behalf of Wayne LaPierre, I have not seen nor have been provided with the text of any of the resolutions or bylaw amendments.

And speaking of transparency, I look at the small towns near me such as Waynesville and Fletcher. They have populations of 10,667 and 8,158 respectively. Despite their small size, their governing boards publish their meeting agendas and minutes online. The Town of Waynesville goes a step further and livestreams their Town Council meetings on YouTube. The town’s Board of Adjustment on which I served for 19 years even has their minutes going back to 2005 online.

If small towns – and larger cities – all around the United States can be this transparent and make their agenda and minutes so readily available, why cannot the NRA Board of Directors? I was disappointed that Judge Cohen in his Final Order did not address this. However, it should not take an order from a judge to make the necessary changes needed for transparency. It should be remembered that the Board of Directors serve and represent the members and not the other way around.

Durham DA: Prosecute Felon In Possession? Nah!

Santana Deberry is the district attorney for Durham County, North Carolina. The county and the 16th Prosecutorial District are co-terminus. Deberrry first took office in 2019 and was re-elected in 2022.

According to the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, Deberry was backed to the tune of over $260,000 by George Soros through monies funneled through organizations such as Fair and Just Prosecution and the Forward Justice Action Fund.

Thus, it should come as no surprise that the conviction rate for murder in her district is lower than adjoining districts as well as the state average. According to WRAL, in Deberry’s first four years as DA, her office only had a 24% murder conviction rate comparted to 67% in adjoining Wake County and 45% for the state as a whole. Her initial campaign for office said she was going to concentrate on the prosecution of violent crime while minimizing petty crime prosecution.

A more recent investigation by WRAL of Deberry’s office found that they have a policy dictated by Deberry of not prosecuting “felon in possession of a firearm” charges if there was no violence or threats of violence. Adjoining prosecutorial districts take a very different approach. In Wake County, now the state’s largest county, if there is sufficient evidence to prove that felon was in possession of a firearm, they refuse to drop the charges. Likewise, DA Jeff Nieman whose district includes Chatham and Orange Counties says his office “prosecutes all possession of a firearm by a felon charges” so long as they have sufficient evidence.

Durham County’s Gang Violence Reduction Manager conducted a study in 2022 of inmates in the Durham County Detention Center and asked why they carried firearms.

The response?

“It was very interesting,” he said. “I asked them why they carried a firearm. And some of them said they saw no consequences for carrying a firearm.”

While many inmates so no consequences to carrying a firearm, both the police and the community are seeing the consequences with the crime rate in Durham. As Mary Long, the sister of a 2019 murder victim notes:

You can’t just allow the crime to happen without accountability, and that seems to be where we’re faltering — the accountability end…

It’s disheartening to hear the stories, the amount of violence that’s in the front page of the news, and then not to see remedies being taken. To just dismiss it and allow them to walk out the door, without any accountability? That’s scary.

Sarah Krueger, an investigative reporter with WRAL, goes more in-depth on this story and how she found the internal memos detailing the no prosecution policy in this audio podcast.

Durham County is the bluest of the blue. In the 2024 election, Democrat candidates including VP Kamala Harris averaged about 80% (if not more) of the vote while Republican candidates got about 18% of the vote. In 2022, the breakdown was the same. Deberry was unopposed for re-election that year though she did receive fewer votes than other candidates in contested races.

The moral of the story is you get what you vote for.