Do We Need To Worry About the NRA?

I have been a member of the National Rifle Association (NRA) since 1954, when I joined a youth target-shooting group at my older brother’s junior high school which was located — where else? — in Washington, D.C.

I am now an Endowment Life Member of the NRA, which means I give them enough money each year so they can’t throw me out, no matter what I say.

I went to my first NRA national meeting in 1980, which was held in Philadelphia. All the GOP Presidential candidates showed up, including Ronald Reagan, but I don’t recall any of them speaking to more than a half-filled auditorium because most of the folks attending the meeting were too busy out in the exhibition hall playing with the guns.

The NRA didn’t get into politics in a big way until Bill Clinton made ‘gun control’ a central focus of his Presidential campaigns. In particular, Clinton tried to effectuate a program that would have probably caused two-thirds of the licensed gun dealers in America to go out of business, and from then on, the NRA and the Democrat(ic) Party were at each other’s throats.

Then in 2016, along comes Donald Trump, who not only appeared at the NRA meeting that year, but also had his Presidential candidacy endorsed at that meeting in April, which was the first time that the gun-rights organization had ever endorsed anyone before a…