It’s Time The NRA Stopped Acting Its Age
While this was a great interview on RecoilWeb‘s site, they made a misstatement.
While there are 76 board members, it’s safe to say the majority are older, well-established white guys. This explains why the NRA pumps the membership’s dollars into traditional, one-handed, timed-fire pistol matches while it’s slower to adopt more modern competition formats, such as three-gun and other practical shooting disciplines.
No, it does not explain this. In fact, it reveals the Recoil Staff is as ignorant of these events as the NRA board members.
There still are more classified NRA Pistol (bullseye) competitors than USPSA members. The National Matches at Camp Perry continues to draw more participants than national events for practical and 3 Gun competition. “More modern competition formats” are great events with highly-skilled competitors and worthy of attention and support, but conventional bullseye-type competition still has more total participants.
Regardless, it’s more important to support whatever events can get people to actually show up. No single event type will attract everyone, so find and support those events that do appeal to people.
The real reason the NRA board is “slower to adopt” is because the NRA board as a whole is ignorant or disinterested in such events. Yes, there are board members with solid competitive shooting experience and impressive marksmanship credentials, but they are the minority. Promoting organized marksmanship events is simply not a priority or interest for the NRA board and the NRA as a whole.
>> Adam Kraut: I think the biggest threat will be the complacency amongst gun owners.
Excellent observation. Shooting is outpaced by golfing because golf club owners are much more active:
https://firearmusernetwork.com/golfing-and-shooting-demographics/
Complacency and inactivity is much worse than any other threat. Just look at the numbers:
https://firearmusernetwork.com/facebook-is-not-anti-gun/
Firearm User Network 
Feb 02, 2017 @ 09:47:36
Not sure where all these bullseye shooters are. In Texas, participation levels at local club matches for IPSC, IDPA, and 3 gun are significantly higher than numbers at bullseye matches. There are “action” oriented matches every week; the few clubs that have bullseye matches only have one, and the average age of those attending is somewhere between “old” and “damn old”.
It took the NRA 20 years, after the Texas CHL law passed along with dozens of other states carry permit laws, to develop the “Personal Protection Outside the Home” course that actually trained people how to draw from a holster. The NRA-ILA was lobbying to get those carry laws passed while the training arm of the NRA had no course to support that effort. Why? Because the majority of the people at the top of the NRA Training Division are old bullseye shooters completely disconnected from Gun Culture 2.0.
The NRA Board absolutely needs fewer celebrities who get in because voters recognize their names, and more diversity – from IPSC shooters to Constitutional Carry and Open Carry activists. My normal response to the NRA’s “recommendations” for the board is to go look at those that were *not* endorsed, and vote for as many of them as I think are qualified. Because almost always, those being endorsed are “go along to get along” types that support the status quo.
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Feb 02, 2017 @ 14:21:58
NRA Competition Division tracks just under 100,000 classified competitors. This includes everything, such as Action Pistol, PPC, Silhouette, Sporting Rifle, Smallbore, etc., but National Match Course-based bullseye (Pistol and High Power) is the biggest of these. That’s more than the combined card-carrying USPSA and IDPA memberships, even without counting for overlap (people that are members of both.)
There were 680 competitors for the 2016 NRA Pistol championships. Most of them also shoot CMP Service Pistol as there were 554 competitors in the 2016 CMP Overall Individual Service Pistol, which is an aggregate of the President’s Hundred, National Trophy Individual, and National Trophy Team scores.
Rifle bullseye is more popular than pistol bullseye. 1,074 competed in the 2016 CMP National Trophy Individual Rifle and 297 in the 2016 NRA High Power Nationals.
US IPSC Nationals are about 200 participants or less, USPSA Nationals has around 360 participants or so.
I’d say conventional bullseye is still holding on to a crowd.
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Feb 02, 2017 @ 14:39:15
The sizes of the USPSA and IDPA nationals are set by the capacity of the host range, not the demand for slots. And USPSA runs multiple “nationals” because of all the different divisions. If you added up the total number of slots across all the USPSA Nationals, in all 7 divisions, the number would exceed 1000.
NRA is very good at playing “numbers games”, listing instructors that are certified but never teach classes in their count of “certified instructors”. My guess is that if you weeded out all the people who are in the NRA system because they shot a match once, the real number of active competitors would drop. To stay in the USPSA and IDPA systems, you have to pay annual dues.
Member numbers for USPSA and Cowboy Action shooting are over the 100,000 mark, indicating that many people have, at one time or another, been members. If NRA never deletes names due to inactivity, or keeps the names on the list because they are NRA members who maybe shot a match once, the comparison you are making is not valid.
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Feb 02, 2017 @ 15:35:20
>> If you added up the total number of slots across all the USPSA Nationals, in all 7 divisions, the number would exceed 1000.
Which is still less than CMP Service Rifle, though it is more NRA/CMP Pistol. Also, I did not include participants in SAFS or the CMP Games in those totals. Smallbore Nationals used to be held at Camp Perry as well, though they’re held elsewhere now.
>> My guess is that if you weeded out all the people who are in the NRA system because they shot a match once, the real number of active competitors would drop.
Non-participants are weeded out. The rulebooks state Classified shooters failing to participate in a Sanctioned or Approved tournament are dropped in three years, five years if the Classification is Master or higher. Earning an initial Classification requires enough rounds for record, which takes more than one match.
Technically, a USPSA or IDPA member does not have to shoot any matches but will remain a member for as long as they continue to pay dues. I doubt this happens very often (would you renew your USPSA membership just to continue to receive Front Sight?) but it’s possible.
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Feb 02, 2017 @ 15:47:31
I’ve been a member of SASS for more than 10 years but have never shot a cowboy match. It’s on my to-do list in 2017.
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Feb 02, 2017 @ 18:09:20
>NRA is very good at playing “numbers games”
How is that any different than someone holding multiple USPSA cards?
You claim that the training division is made up of a bunch of bullseye shooters and that’s the reason they have pathetic training for CCW right? Name names and specific examples.
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Feb 03, 2017 @ 06:08:50
I don’t believe NRA, USPSA, or other shooting organization is playing numbers games concerning classification data. My access is limited to what numbers these organizations make public.
Participation in conventional competition has been declining since the 1960s, even as NRA membership increased tenfold. However, since then new formats have been created, so some of this drop off is likely due to participants choosing options that didn’t exist prior.
Despite this decline, participation rates in conventional disciplines compares reasonably to newer practical formats. As a percentage of NRA members, and especially as a percentage of gun owners as a whole, participation in anything is rather low. Improving this deserves much more attention and effort than pro-gun organizations are currently giving it.
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Feb 03, 2017 @ 08:20:42
For the past 15 years, Tom Givens has run an instructors conference called the Rangemaster Tactical Conference. It’s attended by representatives from all the major private sector schools and many of us in the 2nd and 3rd tier. NRA, despite being informed about it, has never sent anyone to attend. No one from the NRA training division has ever shot an IPSC or IDPA nationals as best I can tell. And the content of the updated NRA Personal Protection books (inside and outside the home, as well as the Defensive Pistol course) indicates that they are generally unaware of the standard curriculum taught in a majority of private sector schools that have been teaching those topics for 20-30 years. It’s only been since the creation of the Defensive Pistol course that NRA even recognized that training outside the insular NRA bubble had any value at all.
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Feb 03, 2017 @ 08:33:15
I’d describe NRA’s instruction as vestigial, more like public sector qualification rather than what folks like Givens are offering. It could be argued that’s adequate for the intended demographic, but an organization as big as the NRA certainly should be taking it further. Having a defensive shooting program and ignoring Tom Givens is definitely bad business.
Interestingly, the NRA HQ range hosts an IDPA club
https://www.facebook.com/NRAIDPA/
The range is closed Tuesdays for action events.
https://nrahqrange.nra.org/
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Feb 03, 2017 @ 17:39:22
>No one from the NRA training division has ever shot an IPSC or IDPA nationals as best I can tell.
Since you have some knowledge of the people that are in the NRA training division, maybe you could post their names. That way we can cross reference them with the NRA National Pistol Championships. My guess is that they have never shot a bullseye pistol match either and you are talking out of your fourth point of contact, about people in the NRA Training Division.
Oh, except for the people that teach NRA Coach schools since I beleive they are actually required to have a NRA qualification card.
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Feb 03, 2017 @ 22:02:35
Look up John Howard. Stanton Wormley. Daniel Subia, Bill Poole, Josh Powell. They may not all still be with NRA. The training division is very small.
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