I joined to get the magazine, and a really neat florescent International Orange baseball cap they were giving away as a promotion. At the time I was considering getting into competitive small-bore rifle shooting and hunting wild turkeys in Pennsylvania. I never did either, not because of any moral or political reasons, but simply because I never got around to it before I lost interest. In those days (the late 1970s) the NRA was not a particularly political organization. They were mostly concerned with shooting sports and training programs, and they were about rifles, not guns in general.

So what I've described in posts above is not about people who have joined the NRA, or even about people who are members now. In fact, I don't talk about the rank and file of the present organization at all, if you take the trouble to actually read my rant. My post is about the organization and its leadership as it is now, its program and its agenda, and the philosophy it promotes.

The NRA is a ruthless industry lobby willing to pervert the constitution, spread hate and discord and exploit the fears and phobias of Americans in order to promote its purely commercial corporate agenda. They rank right up there with the tobacco industry and the climate change denialists, Fox News and Alex Jones. The NRA is just one more conscienceless crooked businessman mafia, the type of position which the entire Conservative/Republican movement seems to be inexorably drifting into.

But RL did get it right when he quoted

“Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher’s macabre old saw: “Your dead kids don’t trump my Constitutional rights.”