by According to an email sent out to the NRA Board of Directors, the NRA Annual Meeting and fall board meeting will now be held on October 2nd in Charlotte, NC.
I don’t have any more details at this time but will post when I do.
I used to joke that Charlotte was full of charlatans. Actually, it is Charlotteans. But in this case, the joke becomes reality given Wayne, Brewer, and the majority of the board.
I don’t know why October 2nd was chosen or why Charlotte other than it is a hub for American Airlines. I do know that the USCCA Concealed Carry and Home Defense Expo is scheduled for that same weekend in Fort Worth, Texas.
While Charlotte is an easy drive for me, I’m just not sure it is worth it. I have a local gun show that weekend. I also have a dear friend and relative whom I haven’t seen since her husband’s funeral coming through town for dinner. Against this is the Annual Meeting where I will have the chance to beat my head agains the wall in a futile attempt to change the status quo. I think I just may have made my choice.
They don’t have the protection of a force majeure situation. They simply chose not to have their meeting at the time announced to members, they were not forced to cancel by government regulations or restrictions. Now the board just happened to write a bylaw that says if a pandemic is happening, they can change the meeting. But they, helpfully for them, didn’t formally define that or even restrict it to a pandemic happening where they are planning to meet. (If a pandemic is declared across multiple countries on another continent and has zero cases here, they could argue their bylaws allow them to cancel whatever the hell they want.)
Interesting since this means that about a month’s worth of people clicking over to 5 years of membership and month’s worth of life membership purchasers were denied their right to vote under the bylaws of the organization. NRA changed the rules on them – in violation of their own bylaws – without a valid legal reason in my personal reading of the bylaws.
Also, the bylaws still state that they must follow notice requirements of the state in which they are incorporated. There were different rules in place during the emergency disaster order by Cuomo, but Cuomo ended that order before he left office. So we’re back to the old rules. Those rules are:
“A copy of the notice of any meeting shall be given, personally, by mail, or by facsimile telecommunications or by electronic mail, to each member entitled to vote at such meeting. If the notice is given personally, by first class mail or by facsimile telecommunications or by electronic mail, it shall be given not less than ten nor more than fifty days before the date of the meeting; if mailed by any other class of mail, it shall be given not less than thirty nor more than sixty days before such date. …
Whenever a corporation has more than five hundred members, the notice may be served by publication in a newspaper published in the county in the state in which the principal office of the corporation is located, once a week for three successive weeks next preceding the date of the meeting, provided that the corporation shall also prominently post notice of such meeting on the homepage of any website maintained by the corporation continuously from the date of publication through the date of the meeting.”
Now if I’m following NY law correctly as a non-lawyer, then they have to send, via first class mail to all eligible voting members, notice within 10 days of the meeting. That’s a ton to spend on postage when they could have planned it later and went with member communications via the magazines. The alternative as a larger organization isn’t on the table anymore since they don’t have 3 weeks anymore and they definitely have no such banner up across their websites in an appropriate time or manner.
I’m not sure I understand how this meeting is being legally held with current notice requirements and without the protection of legal restrictions on meetings. I could clearly be missing something, but I fear that given their track record, I may not be and this meeting date and announcement is problematic.
I am not a lawyer either. However, I believe your analysis is correct. That said, I don’t think they care. As the Pink Floyd song goes, it is just one more brick in the wall of the NYAG’s case for dissolution.
Interesting… I’ll be in Fort Worth to learn. I’m about done with the NRA in all forms… sigh
Just found an old copy of the bylaws and this is definitely a change – the former ones (at least some from 2012 I have sitting around) required annual meetings to be announced to members in at least two copies of the official journal. They did away with that requirement at some point. (Part of the joy of there being no requirement for the board to report to the membership the bylaws changes they make unilaterally.)
Now most groups I’m in have had to do bylaws updates to account for this kind of extended weird place we find ourselves in. Previously, they just cancelled meetings or did more via mail in WWII, WWI, and during the Spanish Flu pandemic. Or, they went on and conducted just their business as quickly and safely as possible. I’m sympathetic to needing to change with the times, but this is nuts that they removed any kind of notice requirement other than following the laws of their state of incorporation, but then also are choosing not to follow (at least in my understanding) the laws of their state of incorporation. That is, unless they do a massive email blast and first class mailing. That’s still a ridiculous amount to spend on printing & mailing.