What is NRA’s Future?

Wayne will turn 70 in November. He’s the same age as my father, who has been retired now for 8 years. My father is starting to go from an old guy to an elderly guy. How many more productive working years does Wayne have left? Five maybe? Are we to have an octogenarian running NRA? Is there a possibility he’s already losing his mojo and is lashing out?

At some point, NRA will face a future without Wayne at the helm, and they just pissed away the most likely and probably the most effective replacement. Chris was the heir apparent. So what now? This isn’t a long term question. At the very least, Wayne isn’t going to live forever. Chris had already been positioned and groomed. I am hoping the Board starts to understand the depth and seriousness of the matter that is now before them.

18 thoughts on “What is NRA’s Future?”

  1. My bet is either there is an emergency special meeting of the membership and Wayne is voted out (and hopefully Chris is appointed to take over) or

    Chris pops up elsewhere and a new organization – headquartered in Tennessee (not in soon to be more liberal than NY Virginia) emerges to take the place of the NRA

    1. Nothing sobers people up like an existential crisis, and as much as I’d like to believe Chris’s move here is strategic, I think the most likely explanation is he’s sparing himself from the bullshit that is going to follow here and looking out for his career.

      1. absolutely. Id look for staff to start jumping ship fast. I was having lunch with a former long term NRA staffer today and we were discussing what was going on. The one thing we both agreed on was that if Cox were to go, its going to be tough to keep anyone worthwhile there.

        I was greeted with this news as I got back to my office after lunch.

  2. The Board needs to seriously buck up and do something, starting with putting Wayne out to pasture. Then forming a sub-committee with the purpose of reforming the Board itself. It needs to be much smaller and more active, not just a low-activity prestige position.

    1. This 10X over. The bad actors in this whole mess used the boards size and ineffectiveness to run wild. It’s the age old problem of committees and governing boards. The larger they are the less able they are to consider and enact proposals. At a maximum the board needs to be 15-20 members elected on a rotating basis.

  3. Unless the NRA starts actually addressing member issues and stops wasting money on La Pierre…. I predict that the NRA will be gone in 10 years.

    1. if its going down, its going to be done on a much quicker time frame than that.

    2. If the Board doesn’t act soon, there won’t be an NRA Annual Meeting in Nashville next year. The NRA’s finances are obviously in the toilet.

      1. And the folks who donate $25 every year will stop doing that pretty quickly.

  4. NRA is close enough to have a presence on capitol hill, so while a new group formed outside occupied Virginia would be less surround by enemies, it wouldn’t be anywhere near as effective; such as it is.

    This is a disloyalty purge. Disloyalty purges foretell the end. Basically someone’s accumulated enough juice to get pretty big in their britches. At some point they get a bit too big for their britches and someone with less juice calls them on it. When disloyalty purges victimize star players, team morale goes in the $hitter along with effectiveness. You can paint all the pretty pictures you want about it, act like it’s business as usual, but once you start the disloyalty purges, it’s hard to tell where to stop them because when you whack start players from the team, the teammates know they can be next and if they’re close allies with someone who got whacked, they’re already looking if they’re smart.

    This creates a competence vacuum, a leadership vacuum and soon a profit vacuum. Mind you, these things were there in NRA for a long time, but now it’s silly season.

    The recovery will start when enough people realize that Mr. too big for his britches, throwing his weight around and forcing out the star players who are actually doing the work, and they team up and force out the petty, wannabe tyrant responsible.

    Seriously, look for a netflix docudrama coming out with striking similarities. It will make steamy telenovelas look tame.

    1. I often don’t agree with you on things, but I think you’re right about this. Forcing Cox out is a bridge too far for me.

      1. It’s unfortunate that it’s this topic that we have to agree on.

        I’m at NRAHQ regularly, and some of the people I interact with there have been discreetly walking on eggshells.

        If loyalist henchmen end up in ILA leadership to fill the vacuum, we will know this will get much worse before it gets better. On the other hand if someone well respected gets in there, it may signal the ‘getting worse’ part won’t last as long before it gets better.

        1. I dare say it won’t get better if WLP loyalists get in. If this is about money as alluded in another post, they’ll bleed ILA dry in short order….

    2. Dave is spot on. You don’t have widespread disloyalty purges in a well-run organization. Wayne is the problem, as well as the bloated, do-nothing board. Remove Wayne, downsize the Board to those who will be actively involved in providing direction and accountability (not just celebrity status), and return the NRA to its roots. If not, the NRA won’t have to worry about external threats like the NY AG—it will collapse from within.

      1. @Longshot:

        gun rights groups boards of directors are not made up of those who will make the right calls, or the most qualified, or the most ideologically pure, the strongest 2A supporters, etc. Necessarily.

        More often than not they’re made up of ‘close allies of the strongman’. Each of these groups has a leader with some form of dynamic charisma. They aren’t necessarily good leaders or tacticians.

        examples: ‘Bama, Trump, Clinton, Reagan all have some form of charisma and a slice of cult of personality.

        dictators tend to have strong charisma, a huge cult of personality, a powerful id not quite kept in check; Hitler was a prime example of this sort of strong personality.

        leaders of gun rights groups tend to have more of a “Trumpian” cult of personality because many come from our camp or tribe. We tend to be more self sufficient as a demographic, even for the city dwellers among us. More hands on, less needing of government help or assistance, we may even work for a .gov and realize how bad it really is.

        This set of traits that permit a person to rise up to prominence in the gun rights ranks ensures these people will get to press the flesh more, they’ll have unearned popularity because they’re the public face of the gun rights group. They could be terrible people, but be really popular among their demographic. They could also be genuinely good people or anything in between. Good leadership skills is not a requisite to lead a gun rights group or be elected as a politician.

        It’s a popularity contest that is well suited to extroverted personalities.

        you don’t need friends to win votes you need allies, enemies of enemies, business associates.
        There’s a show that’s been running on cable over the last year or so called ‘making a dictator’ that does a fairly good job at describing the conditions that facilitate, rise, rule and sometimes fall of a dictator. There is a surprising amount in common with a run of the mill politician and there is a common failure point among dictators, politicians and heads of gun rights groups – who are also politicians;

        Once they start believing their own legend, they become less able to make good, sound decisions. The narcissistic tendencies overcome the rational mind. It usually starts with a small corner cut or transgression but they get away with it, realize they can get away with more and they do. This escalates the more they get away with it, which feeds their mind’s narrative and legend even more until they are blatant about it. Think Daley or a host of other Chicago politicians, anthony weiner, Duke Cunningham.

        All of these people have some level of belief in their own legends, it’s a matter of degrees and it’s not unique to these people, we all see our ideal selves better than the real thing. The difference is that most people can understand that reality isn’t quite our own ideal.

        LaPierre has come to believe his own legend. The question is will he scuttle the NRA ship as he goes down.

    3. Great points. And disloyalty purge is exactly what is happening. The originating event may even have been justified, but now its being used as an excuse.

  5. I’ve said it before: NRA’s future is in the hands of the NY AG and IRS. I’d say about 18 months after a Democratic administration is elected a weaponized IRS goes for the kill. The NY AG may move sooner, but they’ll want to drag out any action to bleed NDA’s corpse and distract NRA from countering gun control pushes. That probably heats up around a midterm election too, or it could be linked to the next post mass shooting gun control push.

    I hope someone is creating a legally seperate shell entity to save what can be saved.

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