Opinion
Your Vote is Desperately Needed in this year’s NRA Board of Directors Election.
There are only four (4) candidates on the ballot who have been vocal advocates for reform within the NRA, and without your help, those four candidates will not win seats. Ballots must be received by April 28th, 2024, which means they must be in the mail by April 24 or 25 at the latest.
A brief window will open in July, during which a judge will decide what steps are needed to repair the damage of decades of corruption and failed leadership within the NRA.
Leading up to that judge’s decision, the NRA Board can take steps to help guide the reorganization of the NRA, stop the corruption, return power to NRA members, and restore the NRA.
Unfortunately, the current Board members are the very folks who allowed the corruption to take hold and who have spent the past 5 years and over $100 million NRA member dollars, insisting that there were no problems, that NRA executives had done nothing wrong, and that everything was fixed back in 2018.
Only a couple of current Directors have challenged the Board “leadership,” and only 4 candidates on the ballot were nominated by petition of their fellow members and are publicly advocating for major changes on the members’ behalf.
Those 4 candidates are Phil Journey, Rocky Marshall, Dennis Fusaro, and me, Jeff Knox.
You can make a difference in helping to get these 4 candidates elected so they can advocate from the inside, push the Board in the direction they must go, and have standing to offer advice to the judge before he decides what steps to order in this case.
The current Board “leadership” is now trying to claim that they were “victims” of unscrupulous vendors and “insiders.” They claim that this has been their position “all along” and that they corrected the “problems” back in 2018 before any of the scandals exploded onto the public scene. Yet these same “leaders” have spent the past five years telling you that the whole affair was nothing but a political “witch hunt.” In their 2018 world, LaPierre was a hero, working diligently to correct past mistakes, root out problems, make “course corrections,” and “right the ship” – with no mention of his role in “un-righting” that ship.
The current NRA Board reelected LaPierre 5 times, spent over $100 million of your dollars, and demonized anyone who asked hard questions or pointed out inconvenient facts.
They shunned and purged any Director who questioned their narrative, including Lt Col. Robert K. Brown, Tim Knight, Esther Schneider, Sean Maloney, Frank Tait, Phil Journey, and Rocky Marshall. They declared those of us calling for transparency and reporting on the corruption to be the “Enemy Within,” traitors, and “NRA Bashers.”
But after former Executive Vice President and CEO Wayne LaPierre was found civilly liable for over $5 million in “excess compensation” and failure to fulfill his legal and moral obligations to act in the best interests of NRA members, and after former Treasurer Woody Phillips was similarly found liable for raking $2 million out of NRA accounts, and after the NRA Board was found to have failed in their fiduciary responsibilities to safeguard the members’ assets and protect the Association, the NRA “leadership” is claiming that these “guilty” verdicts somehow “vindicate” them and their actions.
NRA members should be insulted that their elected servants think them so stupid.
Had the NRA Board actually taken their current position “all along,” had they done as I suggested in multiple articles here and elsewhere at the time and removed any and all executives, Directors, employees, and vendors with any taint of corruption, self-dealing, or conflicts of interest on them, and dedicated themselves to transparency and demonstrable good governance, this entire fiasco could have been settled and cleared up at least 4 years ago. The New York lawsuit could have likely been avoided. The membership would still be close to 5 million. The Association wouldn’t have wasted $100 million plus on attorneys and spin doctors, and the NRA would still be the most powerful, respected, and influential organization in the rights movement.
Some in the gun community insist that the NRA should just be allowed to die, that it’s too far gone and can’t be saved, or that it’s never done anything to preserve or protect gun rights, and that voting in the Board election is a waste of time. These are often the same people who insist that the US is corrupt beyond redemption and only a new revolution can restore the Republic. The folks who refuse to vote in presidential and congressional elections or give a few bucks to good pro-rights candidates, while they’re saving up for night-vision optics and more ammo for the “coming struggle.”
That self-defeating attitude becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don’t act now, you could be forced to act later, and the later actions will cost a whole lot more than a few minutes to research and mark a ballot and the cost of a stamp.
There are some 2.5 million NRA members eligible to vote this year, but at best only about 5% of the people who received a ballot will bother to return it, and the majority of those will simply put a mark next to the 25 incumbents and call it good. Don’t be part of the apathetic majority who can’t be bothered to vote. Dig out the March issue of your NRA magazine, find the ballot, put a mark next to the names of Phil Journey, Rock Marshall, Dennis Fusaro, and Jeff Knox, and mail it in. While you can vote for up to 25 candidates, you can vote for as few as 1. We ask you to mark only the 4 of us, which gives more weight to your votes and improves our odds of winning seats.
After you vote and mail your ballot, please send a text message, email, or direct message to every friend who might be an NRA member and urge them to do the same. Copy the link to this article and post it on your favorite shooting-related social media. Email it to your state association newsletter editor and your local gun club and ask them to print it or post it. Do whatever you can to activate a few of those 2 million plus NRA members who don’t usually vote and convince them to participate this year, when we have the chance to enact real reforms.
We’re doing everything we can to get elected, but we need your help. Please don’t miss this opportunity. It very well could be our last chance to save the NRA and make it what it was meant to be. I hope to see you in Dallas for the Annual Meetings and Exhibits.
If you go, please be sure to attend the Meeting of Members on Saturday morning, where we will be trying once again to push the Board in the right direction. With your help, we can make the NRA a strong and effective voice for you and all gun owners.
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.
