Opinion
NRA Voting Members (all Life Members and those Annual Members with 5 consecutive years of current membership) should have now received their March NRA magazine with their voting ballots inside. If you did not receive a ballot package in your magazine, you are probably not a Voting Member. If you think you are, you can call the membership line at 877-672-2000 and discuss it with them.
Even if you’re not a Voting Member, please keep reading. There is a way you can make a difference in this election.
In the ballot package you will find bios of candidates, a discussion of some proposed Bylaw amendments, the ballots, and a pre-addressed envelope for mailing your completed ballots to an accounting firm for tabulation.
Every year the NRA sends out about 2.5 million ballots to eligible Voting Members, and every year, only about 5% to 7% of those ballots are ever returned.
That means that 93% to 95% of ballots are wasted. Pretty sad. The most common reason NRA members give for not voting is that they “don’t know enough,” and leave it to people who they think know more about the candidates and issues than they do.
If you read this article, you’ll know more about NRA elections than the vast majority of NRA members. If you click on the NRA tag link at the bottom of this article, after my bio, and read some of those articles, you’ll know more than 90% of NRA members. Please share that information and this article.
There are two (2) ballots in the ballot package: One for the Board of Directors election, and one for the Bylaws question.
On the Bylaw question, “…should the Board create the position of Chief Compliance Officer (CCO)?” I recommend a YES vote.
The Bylaws require a member vote to create any new officer position, and the Board wants to create the position of Chief Compliance Officer (CCO). The CCO is to be an expert on ethics, best practices, and legal and regulatory compliance. By creating this position as an official officer position in accordance with the proposed Bylaws amendments, the CCO will serve at the pleasure of the Board. That means he or she can’t be fired or suspended by the CEO. That’s important. The NRA was, at its peak a few years ago, an almost half-billion-dollar-a-year corporation, but it was run like a local gun club. We need professional managers who understand the complexities of the corporate, and nonprofit world.
As to the Director Ballot, I’m recommending members to Bullet Vote for only the four reform candidates nominated by petition of the members: Phil Journey, Rocky Marshall, Dennis Fusaro, and me, Jeff Knox – and no one else.
There are 34 candidates to fill 25 seats on the Board, plus 1 to be elected at the Members’ Meeting in Dallas in May (constituting 1/3rd of the 76-member Board of Directors). Twenty-five of those candidates are incumbents, including three past presidents (Carolyn Meadows, David Keene, and John Sigler, all Wayne LaPierre supporters), and one current vice president (David Coy, who is also a LaPierre defender/enabler and is vice chair of the Audit Committee).
Of the remaining candidates, four (including me) were nominated by member petition, and the rest were nominated by the Board’s Nominating Committee. There are a few on the list who I consider to be fairly solid Directors, but almost all of them have just stood by silently while Wayne LaPierre and the NRA “leadership” have driven the organization to the brink of bankruptcy, with only one (Buz Mills of Gunsite) publicly challenging the status quo.
Please Bullet Vote for only the 4 reform candidates who were nominated by petition of the membership. They are:
- Judge Phil Journey, an activist, collector, avid shooter and trainer, deeply involved with youth shooting programs, and former Board member who actively worked to get the NRA back on track and was pushed off the Board for his efforts.
- Rocky Marshall, a former VP of a fortune 100 corporation and firearms enthusiast who served on the Board for less than a year and was also pushed out for asking uncomfortable questions and pointing out disturbing facts.
- Dennis Fusaro, a former Marine, shooter, and activist who considers himself just a regular NRA member and has been very active in gun rights advocacy and political activism for decades.
- Jeff Knox (me), competitive shooter, reloader, and gun tinkerer who has been a Life member, deeply involved in the NRA for over 40 years and has served as a self-appointed watchdog and reporter on the NRA for more than 20 of those years, following in the footsteps of my late father, Neal Knox. Neal Knox was then Vice President of the NRA and saw the direction LaPierre was taking the Association back in the mid-’90s. He tried to nip the corruption in the bud back then, only to be pushed out like so many others.
I don’t recommend voting for anyone else on the ballot. There are a few candidates who I believe will work with us to help reform the NRA, but don’t need your vote because they will win election in any case. There is also an unfortunately large number of incumbents who have failed to take a stand against corruption and cronyism, making it impossible for me to recommend them.
As I write this, the jury in the New York case against the NRA and three of its top officials, including Wayne LaPierre, is still out. The jury has been deliberating for a full week. Verdicts could come back any time. Yes, I said “verdicts,” plural. The case is complex, with 4 defendants – LaPierre, Former Treasurer Woody Phillips, Secetary and General Counsel John Frazer, and the NRA itself, along with a wide variety of specific questions for the jury to decide for each of them. The Verdict Sheet is 17 pages long, more like a college final exam than a simple “Guilty/Not Guilty” proposition.
I fully expect the jury to find for the plaintiff on most of the charges, meaning that the NRA and its co-defendants will be facing sanctions. What exactly those sanctions might be will be decided in the next phase of the trial, in which the judge, who has been very fair throughout this case, will hold hearings before deciding how to proceed. It’s very likely that LaPierre and Phillips will be ordered to pay some restitution to the NRA, and possibly face some rather meaningless proscriptions against working for nonprofits in the future. Frazer could potentially lose his law license and be barred from some types of work. The big question is what the judge will decide to do about the NRA itself.
In previous rulings in this case, the judge has expressed some frustration with the NRA Board of Directors and officers’ failure to take any substantive actions to correct glaring problems. While they claimed in the trial to have been victims of unscrupulous executives and to have “course corrected” to keep that sort of thing from happening again, they have spent the past 5 years covering for those same executives and allowing much of the questionable behavior to continue unabated.
I think it’s very likely the judge will order some reforms and will remove some executives, officers, and other NRA “leaders,” but it’s impossible to guess just how far he might go.
I personally think it would be appropriate for him to remove all of the officers, along with the entire membership of the Executive Committee, Audit Committee, and the Finance Committee, if not the entire Board, then appoint the remaining Directors or a group of NRA state affiliate leaders to serve as an advisory committee through a reorganization process.
Meanwhile, some members have been asking about what the reform candidates are hoping to achieve with our campaigns for the Board.
Unfortunately, with so much up in the air, it’s very difficult to formulate a strategy. All we can do is try to put pieces in place and be ready to act when the judge’s decision comes down. Electing the four reform candidates could be an important piece of that puzzle.
Personally, one of my major goals is a total revamp of the Board structure. I think a Board of 9 to 15 Directors would be more effective, efficient, and responsive to the needs and desires of the membership. Further, I think those Directors should be people with specific skills and experience needed to manage a $400 million per year corporation. That would take me out of the running, as all of my business experience is limited to small businesses, not major corporations. I’d be fine with that. My father used to keep a plaque on his desk that said something like, “It’s amazing what you can achieve when you don’t care who gets the credit.” I’m a firm believer in that and would gladly step aside for better-qualified candidates to guide the NRA forward, as long as they are deeply committed to defending the core principles of the Association and restoring the critical programs that have been allowed to wither over the past 5+ years.
I’ve written in the past about the qualities I think are needed for CEO candidates and about ways I think the NRA could be effectively restructured to be more efficient and effective. I’ve asked my fellow candidates to review those articles and provide feedback. I plan to write a fairly comprehensive article on the subjects next week, incorporating their thoughts and ideas along with my own. In the meantime, I will try to answer any questions that pop up in the comment section below.
Read Related:
NRA Board Bullet Voting , What is it? Why Do It On Your NRA Member Ballot
Open Letter: To The Board Of Directors Of The National Rifle Association Of America
About Jeff Knox:
Jeff Knox is a second-generation political activist and director of The Firearms Coalition. His father Neal Knox led many of the early gun rights battles for your right to keep and bear arms. Read Neal Knox – The Gun Rights War.
The Firearms Coalition is a loose-knit coalition of individual Second Amendment activists, clubs and civil rights organizations. Founded by Neal Knox in 1984, the organization provides support to grassroots activists in the form of education, analysis of current issues, and with a historical perspective of the gun rights movement. The Firearms Coalition has offices in Buckeye, Arizona, and Manassas, VA. Visit: www.FirearmsCoalition.org.
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