Year: 2010

The last several years, I’ve posted various facts and figures about NRA membership and participation as told through the lens of votes in the board of directors elections. I know a few people find it interesting, but I always wondered if there was really a purpose. It turns out that it did serve a purpose. I learned that one of our endorsed candidates this year actually found the data when he was looking to run, and used it when making plans for his successful campaign.

In that spirit, here’s the latest data & analysis of how NRA members vote (they don’t) and how you can make a difference (it’s easy) if you want to see certain board candidates rise or fall on the ballot.

There was a significant jump in both the number of eligible voting members this year, and the dramatic rise in the corresponding number of ballots cast. This tells me that either NRA is reaching new, more excited members or the number of people taking the plunge into life memberships may be increasing. I wondered whether there was there could be a subtle influence from the tea party efforts to educate their members on how political parties work to take them over, as such lessons could easily be applied to civic organizations like NRA.

Since the large numbers make it harder to see trends, let’s look at the participation rate for the last few years. You can really see that spike. It’s also worth noting that the next largest number was 3 years ago – the last election for nearly the same slate of candidates. Then I realized that the spike was probably predictable if we saw a jump with the same batch. What causes it? Easy, this is a celebrity ballot. Ollie North, Ted Nugent, Susan Howard, Richard Childress, and Karl Malone. That doesn’t include other widely known political names on the ballot like Don Young, Bob Barr, Matt Blunt, and Larry Craig.

One surprise from this year’s election was not just that Joaquin Jackson won, but how well he did (14 of 25). Apparently the current crop of NRA board voters don’t realize that he threw a significant number of gun owners under the bus, or they just don’t care. Alas, that means he has three more years in which to put his foot in his mouth as a board member.

What’s so frustrating about this is that it is so easy to make a difference in an NRA board election because so few people take the time to vote.

*Elected 76th Director at the meeting. Interestingly, this is the 2nd time he has “lost” and managed to earn a seat for another year.

Just 752 votes determined the “last winner” and “first loser” this year. Last year, it was 725 votes.

If you have a preferred slate of candidates, share them with every voting member you know. Do it quickly after the ballots arrive in your mailbox, or those folks might throw their ballots away. Just like in a political race, a personal endorsement from someone a gun owner knows or respects can carry a lot of weight. In fact, in a race like this where many of the candidates are unknowns, these endorsements make a much bigger impact. It’s why we try to highlight our absolute favorites on the ballot each year. (We vote for more than we list in our endorsements, though usually not for a full slate of 25.)

Not too long before Charlie Daniels came up to Charlotte to play for the NRA Convention, a controversy erupted in the State of Georgia over NRA’s action on two recent bills which are currently awaiting the signature of Governor Sonny Purdue. It took me a while to blog about this, because the issues are complex. It takes time to research the statutes, read the both bills, the amendments and changes. All this while trying to find out how the lawmaking process in Georgia works, trying to understand Georgia Law, and getting NRA’s side of what happened.

The accusation, which appears to be leveled by GeorgiaCarry.org, and appears on GeorgiaPacking.org goes something like this:

The NRA was actively sabotaging SB 308 all night tonight. I witnessed this firsthand. They tried to amend it with something that they believed would draw a Governor’s veto. When that failed, they began telling lies about the bill to politicians and the press. I could not believe what I was seeing. I was spending hours running around correcting NRA lies about the bill.

Then Senator Steve Thompson took the well and said what everybody knew, that the Senators had “cover” to vote against the bill, in spite of GCO’s letter letting them know we are tracking their vote, because “The NRA opposes this bill.”

Except that NRA was supporting this bill from the beginning, as early as March by public record, they even released this letter to the bill’s sponsor to me showing their support for the bill from the beginning. Currently they are urging Purdue’s signature on the bills as finally passed. If this is what NRA opposition to a bill looks like, I’d hate to see what support would be by this standard. Chaining the Governor to a desk with only their bill and a pen, in the hopes that he’ll sign before deciding to gnaw off his leg? The fact is, NRA has supported this bill from the beginning. So what really happened? Here’s what my research into this matter has revealed.

When SB308 went into conference, the conference committee’s first report stripped the airport language out of the bill, which made NRA none too happy, and they asked that it be put back in. Despite the fact that detractors have pointed out that both bills contain language to fix the airport problem, what they seem to have overlooked is that SB308 strikes the portion of the law that SB291 amends with the airport language. If you pass SB291, and pass SB308 without the airport language, you don’t clearly get airport carry in the final result.

The second conference report still did not contain the airport language, and included language from the Georgia Realtors Association, but no one wanted to say what that language was. Given that GRA had caused problems on the parking lot bill of last year, this was cause for concern about their language being in the report. NRA asked that the language be removed. It was not, and NRA did not discover what the language was until the conference report actually came out.

Now the key bit of information here is that when you’re dealing with reports from a conference committee, you can’t propose amendments. It’s not just a matter of asking them to stick something back in. All you can do is demand that the report be voted against, reconvene the conference committee, and get them to vote on a new report. That’s easy to do when you have time, but this was all happening on the last day of the session. The second report wasn’t issued to Senators until 9:25pm. It has to be on their desks for a least an hour before there any action on the bill. Adjournment was at 12am, and then the session would be over for this legislative year. That meant a very frantic push to try to find out what was in the bill, what changes were made, the impact of those changes, and whether or not they were bad enough to warrant demanding Senators vote down the conference report, which very well could have killed the bill for the session. I’m going to guess that while NRA was evaluating the language, they were making preparations for having to kill the bill if the language turned out to do something awful. But in the end they made the judgement call that it was good enough, and supported the bill moving forward to final passage. This would have seemed very confusing to someone who did not have a clear picture of what was going on, which presented some of the anti-gun Senators with opportunity to spread a little FUD around.

So basically, what Georgia’s “no compromise” group is complaining about, at its root, was that NRA seemed willing for a while to kill the bill rather than compromise. I am completely fine with legitimate criticism of NRA — they do make mistakes — but so much of the criticism out there is barely researched nonsense. GeorgeCarry.org is striking me as one of these groups trying to boost itself up by tearing others down. I hope I’m wrong about that, because SB308 is not a perfect bill. There will be more legislating that needs to happen next session. I sincerely hope that GeorgiaCarry.org acts in good faith when that time comes. We do better when we work together rather than trying to tear each other up.