The NRA has released its nominees for the 2024 Board of Directors elections. The list does not include any nominees that might be nominated by petition of the members, as those haven’t been determined yet. Petitions are still being circulated and collected until early November, after which those who collected enough valid signatures will be announced.
Just a reminder, Judge Phil Journey, Rocky Marshall, Dennis Fusaro, and myself, Jeff Knox are all running as petition candidates calling for reform of the NRA. More on that down below.
The Nominating Committee has nominated a total of 28 candidates to fill 26 seats. Of those 28 candidates, 25 are incumbents currently serving on the Board. As in most elections, incumbents generally enjoy a significant advantage. These 28 candidates, along with any petition candidates that manage to qualify, are running for 25 three-year seats, which will be voted on by mail-in ballot early next year. The candidates who fail to win a seat in the mail voting have the opportunity to be elected to a one-year seat that will be voted on by the members present at the Annual Meetings and Exhibits in Dallas in May.
I won’t go through the entire list – you can look at it in this link – but I would like to highlight a few stand-outs on the list, with the most significant being David Coy of Adrian Michigan.
Mr. Coy has been on the Board since 1998 (25 years) and is currently the Second Vice President in line for the presidency. As a VP, Mr. Coy serves on the Executive Compensation Committee, which is responsible for setting Wayne LaPierre’s annual compensation (currently $1.7 million per year). The Special Litigation Committee which is responsible for overseeing the various lawsuits NRA has been embroiled in over the past 5 or 6 years (at a cost of hundreds of millions of NRA members’ dollars). Mr. Coy also serves as Vice Chairman of the Audit Committee, following many years as Chairman of that committee. This is the committee of the Board responsible for overseeing the NRA’s finances and ensuring that there are no shady deals, sloppy contracts, or conflicts of interest that might unduly influence financial decisions. Mr. Coy has been Chair or Vice Chair of the Audit Committee for the past 20+ years. Charles Cotton replaced Mr. Coy in the Chair, who is currently serving a near-unprecedented third term as President of NRA.
Mr. Cotton and Mr. Coy are among the members of the Board most culpable for the current scandals.
Both had long held oversight positions where they should have seen the problems developing and could have made corrections before the problems got too bad. Instead, they have consistently rubber-stamped Wayne LaPierre’s orders and refused to take any significant actions to correct the problems.
I believe David Coy has been grossly negligent in fulfilling his fiduciary responsibilities to the Association and should not be reelected to the NRA Board of Directors.
Also on the ballot are two former Presidents of the Association, David Keene of Ft. Washington, Maryland, and John Sigler of Dover Delaware. Both have been members of the Board for over 20 years, and both have been staunch defenders of the LaPierre regime. Being Past Presidents, both also serve on the influential Executive Council, which is supposed to be the wise, elder statesmen of the Association. To my knowledge, Neither publicly nor privately has called for any significant changes within the NRA to address the business and financial issues, and both have participated in free junkets and hunting trips at NRA’s expense. Keene has actually been paid thousands of dollars to attend Friends of NRA Banquets around the country.
I believe that both Keene and Sigler have failed to represent the NRA membership effectively, failed in their fiduciary obligations, and should not be reelected to the NRA Board.
Among the remaining Nominating Committee nominees, seven have been on the Board for over 20 years, including Wayne Anthony Ross, who has been on the Board since 1980, and Edie Fleeman, who’s been on the Board since at least 1993. Four more have been on the Board for at least ten years, with the rest elected since 2014. Of the three “new” candidates, I know only one, Regina Roberts, who is a trans activist out of California and has always been solid on gun issues. I understand that Craig Haggard is a State Representative in Indiana who, if elected, would be the third current or former Indiana politician currently serving on the Board. The last “new” candidate, Suzannah Warner Kipke, is the wife of a Maryland State Legislator and a big political fundraiser. I can only assume that the Nominating Committee considers all three to be LaPierre loyalists.
Ronnie Barrett, founder of Barrett Firearms Manufacturing, is also on the list. Mr. Barrett has been on the Board since 2009 and has defended LaPierre. He will almost certainly be the top vote-getter in the coming election due to his wide name recognition and respect in the community. He is one of the Directors I’m most disappointed with, as his influence could have helped to rally support for significant changes within the Association. Shortly after the scandal broke in 2019, Mr. Barrett was high on my list of possible replacements for LaPierre, at least on an interim basis, but he joined those rallying around Wayne instead.
Dean Cain, who played Superman in the ‘90s TV series “Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman” is also on the ballot and will be among the top vote-getters. Cain has served on the Board since 2018 but has not been particularly active.
As mentioned above, there are at least four members actively attempting to get our names on the ballot as reform candidates through the petition process.
Judge Phil Journey of Hayesville, Kansas served on the Board in the late ‘90s and was elected again in recent years. He’s a former member of the Kansas State Senate, where he was a leader in passing rights legislation. He’s an active shooter and collector, and has been an outspoken critic of the current regime. The Nominating Committee chose not to renominate Phil when his term expired last year.
Rocky Marshall of Boerne, Texas also served on the Board in recent years, and was dogged in his efforts to get more transparency from LaPierre and the Board officers. He’s a former executive with a major telecom company, and currently operates a successful company manufacturing truck parts and accessories. Like Phil, Rocky asked too many questions in Board meetings and after his initial term on the Board, the Nominating Committee chose not to renominate him.
Dennis Fusaro is a long-time rights activist and political operator. I first met Dennis back in the early 1980s. He worked for Gun Owners of America for a number of years, then moved on to working for other advocacy groups and got heavily involved in political campaigns. He’s been an active member of Virginia Citizens Defense League for many years, and continues to be very politically active.
Jeff Knox
I’m a lifelong shooter and firearm tinkerer for those who don’t know me. For the past twenty years, I’ve been the Managing Director of The Firearms Coalition, working with grassroots groups around the country and producing our semi-regular newsletter, The Hard Corps Report, as well as being a regular columnist for Firearms News magazine (previously Shotgun News), and AmmoLand News along with several years on WND.com. I’ve been a Life Member of the NRA for about 40 years, having started buying the membership on an installment plan with my first check out of Basic Training in 1978. I’m a veteran of the US Army and a Life Member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. I also spent several years as a civilian contractor to the Army, traveling to bases around the US and abroad inspecting and repairing their small arms, from the M9 pistol to the MK19 machinegun grenade launcher and everything in between.
I’ve been writing and warning about problems inside the NRA for decades, but I had no idea just how bad the problems had gotten. The Association’s annual revenue has gone down by approximately 50% in the past five years, while the number of Annual Members has fallen by about 30%. Meanwhile, major core programs of the Association have been cut to the bone or discontinued altogether. Legal expenses have gone through the roof, with over $60 million paid to a single law firm last year alone and probably significantly more than that spent on the same law firm this year.
I have known all three of my fellow reform candidates for many years, and I’m proud to go together with them into this battle to save what’s left of our once-great organization.
We all know that we won’t be able to change things by ourselves, but nothing will ever change if we, as the members of the NRA, don’t start doing things differently. We hope to be the beginning of major changes going forward. But we can only do it with your help. We each need some 500 valid signatures of Voting Members of the NRA – that’s Life members or folks who have been Annual Members for at least the past 5 consecutive years.
Getting those signatures is no easy feat, so please, if you’re a Voting Member of the NRA, we ask that you go to www.FirearmsCoalition.org.
Print all four of our petitions, sign them with your NRA Member Number (it’s printed on the mailing label of your magazine, along with the address that NRA has on record, which is what needs to be included), fill out the other information, and mail them to me at PO Box 303, Tombstone, AZ 85638. If you are able, please get other qualified NRA members to sign as well. If someone is unable to locate their NRA Member Number, they can still sign and we can get the number from the NRA, it’s just more work.
Petitions need to be received by me before the end of October, so please don’t delay getting the signed petitions back to me. If you’re unsure about getting additional signatures, send me the ones with your signature, then print out another set to circulate among your friends or at gun shows and club meetings.
The current “leadership” of the NRA is not going to fix anything. They just want to reelect the same people who allowed this mess to happen in the first place. Twenty-five incumbents running for 26 open seats, with only a few additional candidates to round out the field, is ridiculous. And there are only 26 on a Board of 76! Please help us get four solid candidates committed to transparency and reform on the ballot. One way or another, either through the courts or by the efforts of rational, independent Directors finally standing up and demanding reform, the NRA is going to be reorganized and restructured. However that happens, having these four reform candidates on the Board can only be a benefit.
I hope you agree and will do what you can to help.
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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