About the NRA rant ...

I may have mentioned, sometime during the eight years that I've been blogging here, that I have a love/hate relationship with the National Rifle Association.

I've been a member many times, and then they do something to seriously piss me off irritate me, and I cancel my membership or merely allow it to lapse.

Eventually (invariably) I consider the valuable protection they provide the members of the shooting community, and I rejoin to show my support.

Then they do something else with which I completely disagree.   It's easier to just let it lapse than to quit .... especially after I've already sent in the membership fee.

That's why I never took out a Lifetime Membership.  And why I quit signing up with a Three Year membership.

Nobody ever said I don't have strong opinions, or that I was reluctant to express them.

This time I decided to make my displeasure public.   Not everyone agrees with me, not everyone thinks I should have been as vehement in expressing my displeasure.



I don't speak as vehemently against, say, "Rosie O'Donell". or "Michael Bloomberg".  I almost never agree with Liberals, but I tend not to rant about them because I have low expectations of them ... and they never disappoint me.

But a group which claims to represent me, and to which I contribute as a member ... they have the power to disappoint me.   And when the NRA passively accepted that "old people are incompetent" (in respect to responsible firearms ownership) I was disappointed.

Thanks for friends and acquaintances who suggested that I was 'over the top' in my criticism.  Yes, I was.  I have high expectations of my friends, but when they criticize me I'm not insulted.  They know me, they don't lump me into an anonymous group of 'low expectations' people about whom they know little and care less; they don't automatically assume that I'm a danger to myself or to my community.

To be sure, they caution me that my public forum seemed, to them, inappropriate.  But had I expressed myself in the same manner to them privately, they might offer to buy the next pizza.

Their comments are more appropriate, and I acknowledge that it's not always appropriate to let the dogs out in public.

Still, I don't take back the criticism of the NRA.
I might, in the future, try not to frighten the horses and the little children.