Unconfirmed photo of NRA Nominating Committee meeting
Mother Jones has a great piece that examines how NRA leadership is selected.
Its 76 board directors and 10 executive officers keep a grip on power through elections in which ordinary grassroots members appear to have little say.
The NRA leadership is known as much for its organizational secrecy as its absolutist interpretation of the Second Amendment. That may be why, until now, little has been known about some of its most powerful insiders. They sit on the NRA board of directors’ nine-member Nominating Committee, which, despite ballots distributed annually to legions of NRA members, closely controls who can be elected to the NRA board.
Guess who sits on the current nominating committee? George K. Kollitides II, the chief executive of Freedom Group. What, pray tell, does Freedom Group manufacture? Guns! Included in that list of manufactured guns is the Bushmaster AR-15 that was used at the Newtown massacre.
Why am I not surprised?
But what about those voting ballots that are sent out to NRA members — they count for something, right? Um, well, if you can get past the fact that the list of candidates are cherry picked by the nominating committee, then yes.
“Read the bios in your ballot and you’ll see that almost all were nominated by the nominating committee,” complained “Pecos Bill” from Illinois last January in one pro-gun-rights forum. “Seems the NRA, fine organization that it is, is being run like a modern corporation and the ‘good ol’ boys’ are keeping themselves in power.”
God bless democracy.
In related news, The Onion continues to use satire to make a related point.
“In what sources said was most likely an attempt to prove some kind of point about something, a harpoon-wielding Wayne LaPierre went on a vicious, indiscriminate skewering rampage through the greater Fairfax area this morning. “As you can see, the question of what object a mentally ill person uses to harm another human being is not the issue…
“A harpoon, much like a rifle, is a tool used primarily for hunting, and yet many of our nation’s lawmakers insist upon drawing a legal distinction between the two.”
I’m guessing the point they are making is the fact that a semi-automatic AR-15 can, on average, fire 45 rounds in a minute. A harpoon cannot.
-BCP
