Opinion

Tombstone, Arizona – Time has almost run out for nominating new candidates for election to the NRA Board of Directors.

If you are a Life Member of the NRA, or an Annual Member with five or more years of uninterrupted membership, you are a Voting Member of the Association and eligible to help nominate candidates for the NRA Board of Directors.

Director candidates can be nominated in two ways. They can be nominated by the Nominating Committee of the Board, or they can be nominated by petition of the members.

The Nominating Committee (NC) met in early September and nominated 39 candidates, but two of those candidates have since declined, leaving 37 candidates nominated by the NC. Of the candidates nominated by the NC, only 4 were new candidates expressly endorsed by the leaders of the reform movement within the Board, with an additional 4 of the endorsed incumbents being nominated, so that’s eight nominally “reform” candidates out of 39.

Incumbents not renominated included two past presidents of the NRA and one past president of the Safari Club International. All three of those had expressed support for the reform agenda.
Right now, there are 13 candidates that I know of who are actively collecting petition signatures to have their names included on the ballot next year. All 13 of these candidates have pledged support for the reform agenda.

Petitions must be turned in to NRA by the individual candidates by October 8th, 2024. That means that petitions must be received by the candidates by October 6 at the latest to give them time to deliver them to NRA. Petition signers can either mail petitions to the individual candidates or send them all in a package to Rocky Marshall, PO Box 277, Center Point, TX 78010, providing enough time for Rocky to collate them and forward them to the individual candidates. Rocky is asking that petitions be mailed to him for receipt by September 30.

We’re asking all NRA Voting Members to go to John Richardson’s “Only Guns and Money” blog and print each petition.

Then, fill in your NRA Member Number, name, and address, and sign and date each one. If you can easily collect signatures from other NRA Voting Members in time to get the petitions turned in on time, by all means, do that, but don’t delay. A petition with a single, valid signature, delivered on time, is worth more than a petition with 100 signatures delivered a day late.

Petitions must be “wet signed” in ink by the Voting Member, but all of the other information can be typed or filled in by someone else. They must be printed in landscape format, read across a wide dimension of 8.5” x 11” paper, and names, addresses, and member numbers must match what’s on file at NRA. That can be verified by looking at your magazine mailing label. Leading zeros in the Member Number on the label can be omitted. Please make sure that everything on the petitions is clearly legible.

I strongly support getting all of these candidates’ names on the ballot. As we draw closer to the election, I will offer my suggestions as to which candidates I’m personally endorsing for election. My endorsements might not include some of these candidates. There are some I don’t really know yet, and some I won’t be able to endorse based on my own longstanding policies, but I think they all deserve to be on the ballot, and I encourage you to print, sign, and return all of their petitions as soon as possible.

We have made significant headway toward reforming the NRA. It’s slow and frustrating work, but we’ve actually accomplished much more than I had thought possible when I tossed my own hat in the ring for election last year.

There’s still a long way to go and much hard work ahead. Getting more committed, reform-minded Directors elected is the key to accelerating the reform, so please take action today, and let’s make the NRA great again.

About Jeff Knox:

Jeff Knox is a dedicated political activist and the director of The Firearms Coalition, following in the footsteps of his father, Neal Knox. In 2024, Jeff was elected to the NRA Board of Directors, underscoring his lifelong commitment to protecting the Second Amendment. The Knox family has played a pivotal role in the ongoing struggle for gun rights, a legacy documented in the book Neal Knox – The Gun Rights War, authored by Jeff’s brother, Chris Knox.

Founded by Neal Knox in 1984, The Firearms Coalition is a network of individual Second Amendment activists, clubs, and civil rights organizations. The Coalition supports grassroots efforts by providing education, analysis of current issues, and a historical perspective on the gun rights movement. For more information, visit www.FirearmsCoalition.org.