What Is Local Organization?

That’s right, what is local organization? How do people who support the Second Amendment, and I mean people who know they’re apart of the Militia, and not just “gun owners”, get organized and make their voices heard?

David Codrea on his blog, posted this, https://waronguns.com/whos-the-boss-2/ and he was nice enough to link a recent blog post of my own in it, https://2awhiterook.com/nevada-firearms-coalition-vs-nra-counselor/, yet what’s most interesting, and disgraceful is that apparently this NRA HQ bullying, and barging in and attempting to take over local organizations isn’t anything new.

Codrea posts a link to a blog post of his from 2018, https://waronguns.blogspot.com/2018/03/now-everybody-read-from-this-page.html In it, he relates his own experience with an NRA grassroots coordinator, and an NRA ILA boss and posts a link to https://www.pagunblog.com/2018/03/07/dear-nra-2/

Now the pagunblog post written by ‘Sebastian’ is extremely well thought out, and written. Perhaps the most important takeaway is this, “The other thing I learned is that people did not recognize NRA as an organization that they are or should be directly involved with. We might like to say “I’m the NRA,” but I’m not sure that’s really ringing true for a lot of people these days. NRA is an organization that sends them a magazine and asks them for money. A lot of members might agree that NRA is important, and that why they maintain their memberships, but they are more in the role of passive consumers of what NRA is offering.“

That was written in 2018. Imagine how much truer it is now? What’s, shall we say, a nationalized NRA gotten us? The same is true of other groups as well. But since NRA is the most well known, let’s keep this limited to them.

Probably the biggest issue is, we have an NRA with 76 directors, who were elected by membership, with whom membership cannot contact due to a long time non functioning member to director email system. (Don’t believe me? You try emailing the BoD and see what happens).

We’re told there’s new management, “NRA 2.0”, a mass wave of “reformers” elected to the board, who’re “righting the ship”, but so what? Emailing my woke Democrat “elected officials”, I can do in a couple minutes. But emailing “my” NRA? Yeah, sure.

So how do individual members voice their concerns to the people they elected to run the NRA? To my knowledge, you can’t, unless you know their non NRA email. And even then, in my experience, you still become blacklisted, because you refuse to tow the party line. And oh yes, the NRA has a party line, that you WILL NOT CROSS. And if you do, you’re accused of “abuse” and your name and member ID goes on a black list, in the NRA Secretary’s office… https://2awhiterook.com/nra-director-accuses-me-of-abuse/

But back to Codrea’s 2018 blog post, he makes some vital observations, which the people in Nevada, and surely every other association across the country could surely learn from, “If you want to organize, do it locally with those of like mind and purpose. You’re going to need to learn who you can count on anyway in your AO. Don’t turn your back on opportunities to join in coalitions, but only if your goals are the same and never at the cost of losing your autonomy.“

He’s right. And right for many reasons. We as a society, on every issue always look at D.C. and what’s going on far away. But how many of us pay attention to what’s happening locally? Not many.

We can’t stay 100% focused on Washington D.C., we must be focused on all levels of government, federal, state, county, local. We must make connections, local ones. How many of us, even know our neighbors? We must form local organizations, and be able to advocate for expanding Second Amendment rights at the local level, and fighting against further anti 2A restrictions at the local level. Yes, D.C. is important, but we can’t have tunnel vision. We must work on dealing with all levels of government.

When Codrea writes your local organization can’t lose its autonomy, well, what did the Founders think of centralized power? They weren’t too fond of the idea. Second Amendment organizations, must take the same view, a republican form of organizing, where, there’s no centralized control from say, a building in Fairfax, Virginia. Where decisions can be made locally, by the people who know the situation best.

Then there’s another angle to consider, the rotten apple. If Second Amendment advocacy is decentralized, and more locally controlled, say a group who represents your state, or a group formed from your local gun range, or just people you find online who live in your general area, that insulates you, from the domino effect which occurred when NRA corruption was about to become mainstream news, programs slashed to the bone to pay for lawyers, etc.

And as ‘Sebastian’ in his blog post points out, what could be done, if NRA helped state and local organizations? Or as Codrea pointed out, why did NRA ILA urge other organizations to not support his groups petition to John Ashcroft? Maybe we’re better off if NRA doesn’t try to help?… Again, decentralization. Local control. A republican form of advocacy.

One last thing, when Codrea makes the point about finding people locally you can count on… Don’t forget, the Second Amendment is also about collective defense, the Militia, something these large “gun rights” groups are loath to speak about. They dread the ‘M’ word.

Make local connections. First for the immediate political issues, and second, for potential emergencies, especially the violent kind. Don’t be a fudd.