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NRA Bristling With New Blood, Purpose
Josey1
Member Posts: 9,598 ✭✭
NRA Bristling With New Blood, Purpose
TOM JACKSON
Published: Apr 27, 2002
L AND O' LAKES - These are heady times for the National Rifle Association, despite its continued status as the most politically incorrect dues-paying group in the Western world. As the NRA gathers for its annual banquet in Reno, Nev., it finds itself freshly energized on any number of fronts.
Membership? That's up, surging past 4.2 million members, headed potentially, for historic highs by the end of the year. Five million is the goal, says Beacon Woods Second Amendment activist Bill Bunting, even if he has to recruit half the newcomers himself.
Add affiliate members - people who identify in surveys with the NRA's hard line on the Second Amendment without joining up - plus staggering numbers of new, first-time gun owners since 9/11, and the group can claim empathy with more than one-third of the U.S. population.
Political purpose? As if ongoing local, state and federal attempts to nip and tuck the Second Amendment didn't keep it sufficiently busy, the NRA was first on the block to challenge the sweeping new campaign finance reform law in federal court. Small wonder. Congressional supporters of the changes prominently mentioned, as a good thing, the NRA as one of those PACs whose influence would be reduced by financing reforms.
Events Driving Renewal
Squeeze a presidential election, an outlandish terrorist attack and a another federal intrusion on the Bill of Rights into just 18 months and it's easy to understand how the defenders of a founding fathers proviso - what NRA banquet keynote speaker Sen. Zell Miller (D- Ga.) regards as a plank of the American cultural platform - would see their base grow deeper, wider and increasingly prickly.
A tiny, but representative, slice of that citizenry will gather in the woods off Ehren Cutoff today for Pasco Sheriff Bob White's Florida Sheriff's Youth Ranch Shootout. Tampa Bay Sporting Clays president Bob Bess promises eggs and ham on the breezy clubhouse porch, followed by hours of shattering skeets for charity.
This free exercise of the ``right to keep and bear arms'' warms the heart of Santa Fe resident and Gainesville native Al Hammond, 42, gentleman farmer, former agriculture businessman, shooting sportsman, hunter and, for the last nine years, the NRA's Florida field representative. In this role, he is responsible for the 85 percent of state NRA business that is not related to lobbying: education, safety, member relations, and minding a foundation that funds grass- roots gun-awareness projects.
But just because he's not lobbying doesn't mean his job isn't political.
Respect And A Healthy Fear
Blond, robust and perpetually smiling, Hammond is the personification of the NRA's catch-'em- early philosophy. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Hammond is the NRA's Florida liaison to Boy Scout councils, 4-H chapters and JROTC units, whose numbers are lately resurgent.
Teaching safety and familiarity with firearms ``removes the mystique'' that often gets curious kids into trouble, Hammond says. The goal is lifelong respect for guns, but even if the outcome is only a healthy fear, that can be useful, too.
Hammond's own early experience was shaped by the threat of his father's wrath if he did ``anything crazy'' with a gun. It is a legacy he has passed to his children, both teens.
In this bustling NRA era, spreading the Hammond family tradition may be its most important work.
Tom Jackson can be reached at (813) 948-4219.
http://tampatrib.com/Pasco/columns/MGABVFZRI0D.html
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878
TOM JACKSON
Published: Apr 27, 2002
L AND O' LAKES - These are heady times for the National Rifle Association, despite its continued status as the most politically incorrect dues-paying group in the Western world. As the NRA gathers for its annual banquet in Reno, Nev., it finds itself freshly energized on any number of fronts.
Membership? That's up, surging past 4.2 million members, headed potentially, for historic highs by the end of the year. Five million is the goal, says Beacon Woods Second Amendment activist Bill Bunting, even if he has to recruit half the newcomers himself.
Add affiliate members - people who identify in surveys with the NRA's hard line on the Second Amendment without joining up - plus staggering numbers of new, first-time gun owners since 9/11, and the group can claim empathy with more than one-third of the U.S. population.
Political purpose? As if ongoing local, state and federal attempts to nip and tuck the Second Amendment didn't keep it sufficiently busy, the NRA was first on the block to challenge the sweeping new campaign finance reform law in federal court. Small wonder. Congressional supporters of the changes prominently mentioned, as a good thing, the NRA as one of those PACs whose influence would be reduced by financing reforms.
Events Driving Renewal
Squeeze a presidential election, an outlandish terrorist attack and a another federal intrusion on the Bill of Rights into just 18 months and it's easy to understand how the defenders of a founding fathers proviso - what NRA banquet keynote speaker Sen. Zell Miller (D- Ga.) regards as a plank of the American cultural platform - would see their base grow deeper, wider and increasingly prickly.
A tiny, but representative, slice of that citizenry will gather in the woods off Ehren Cutoff today for Pasco Sheriff Bob White's Florida Sheriff's Youth Ranch Shootout. Tampa Bay Sporting Clays president Bob Bess promises eggs and ham on the breezy clubhouse porch, followed by hours of shattering skeets for charity.
This free exercise of the ``right to keep and bear arms'' warms the heart of Santa Fe resident and Gainesville native Al Hammond, 42, gentleman farmer, former agriculture businessman, shooting sportsman, hunter and, for the last nine years, the NRA's Florida field representative. In this role, he is responsible for the 85 percent of state NRA business that is not related to lobbying: education, safety, member relations, and minding a foundation that funds grass- roots gun-awareness projects.
But just because he's not lobbying doesn't mean his job isn't political.
Respect And A Healthy Fear
Blond, robust and perpetually smiling, Hammond is the personification of the NRA's catch-'em- early philosophy. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Hammond is the NRA's Florida liaison to Boy Scout councils, 4-H chapters and JROTC units, whose numbers are lately resurgent.
Teaching safety and familiarity with firearms ``removes the mystique'' that often gets curious kids into trouble, Hammond says. The goal is lifelong respect for guns, but even if the outcome is only a healthy fear, that can be useful, too.
Hammond's own early experience was shaped by the threat of his father's wrath if he did ``anything crazy'' with a gun. It is a legacy he has passed to his children, both teens.
In this bustling NRA era, spreading the Hammond family tradition may be its most important work.
Tom Jackson can be reached at (813) 948-4219.
http://tampatrib.com/Pasco/columns/MGABVFZRI0D.html
"If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege." - Arkansas Supreme Court, 1878