You probably heard about the NRA’s big Annual Meeting and Exhibits scheduled for Houston, Texas on September 3-5 of this year. And you probably heard that those events were canceled just over a week before they were scheduled to begin!
All this was supposedly because exhibitors were afraid of COVID-19 Delta. But did you hear about the rescheduled NRA Annual Meeting of Members on October 2nd 2021, in Charlotte, North Carolina? If you did, congratulations! You’re paying attention! Unfortunately, most of the rest of the NRA membership isn’t really paying attention, and they either don’t know that the meeting is about to happen or don’t know that attendance will be limited, requiring preregistration,
which I’ve been told was already maxed out over a week ago.
The October 2 2021 meeting date was only announced to NRA Directors on September 12, just 3 weeks before the event. According to “
Wayback Machine” which tracks changes across the web, the NRAAM.org page announcing the cancellation appeared on August 25. On September 15 the
Wayback Machine shows that the page changed to an announcement that “THE 2021 NRA ANNUAL MEETINGS & EXHIBITS HAS BEEN CANCELLED (sic) AND WILL NOT BE RESCHEDULED.”
That statement makes the following headline announcing that registration for the 2021 Annual Meeting is open, seem incongruent, and probably an artifact left over from the original Houston announcement. Only when you read the smaller print under that headline do you see mention of Charlotte and October 2.
Finally, on Wednesday, September 22, the website was changed so that it automatically forwarded visitors to a ticketing site offering registration for the Charlotte event. On Thursday, September 23, people were reporting that the event was “sold out,” with no more tickets available. Apparently, the room the NRA reserved for their Members’ Meeting, has a maximum capacity under COVID restrictions, of only a few hundred, and the lions share of the tickets were doled out in advance to Directors and their families and friends, just as happened with the Tucson meeting in 2020. Since it only requires 100 NRA members to constitute a quorum at a Members’ Meeting, that requirement can easily be met with just Directors and their spouses.
Of course, there was never any announcement about the Charlotte Meeting in any of the NRA magazines, but a few members have reported that they received an email letting them know about the meeting.
Every one of the members who reported to me about receiving that email was an Annual Member who has not yet reached the 5 consecutive years of membership required to be vested with voting rights in the Association. Maybe that was just a coincidence?
Until just a few months ago, the NRA Bylaws required that information about the where and when of the Annual Meeting of Members – a business meeting that is required by law – must be published in at least two consecutive issues of the Official Journal of the NRA (the three or four pages of inside NRA information published toward the back of each of NRA’s magazines). That Bylaw fell by the wayside after the Association failed to meet that standard last year. After rescheduling and canceling the 2020 Annual Meeting several times, they finally settled on a short-notice, shoestring meeting at a hotel in Tucson. At a subsequent Board meeting, the Board changed the Bylaws, creating exceptions for the meeting requirement in extreme circumstances such as hurricanes or pandemics, and changing the meeting notice requirements.
Under the new Bylaws, the Association is just required to meet the minimum announcement requirements of the state in which the Association is incorporated – New York – which offers several options for alerting members to a meeting. The easiest and cheapest of those options is for the Association to publish an announcement at least once per week for three weeks prior to the scheduled meeting, in a newspaper in the local area of the Association’s primary business location. So the NRA, with some five million members nationwide, is only legally obligated to let those five million members know about their Annual Meeting of Members, by publishing a classified ad once per week for three weeks, in some local Fairfax, Virginia newspaper.
But all indications are that they didn’t even bother to do that.
What can members do about the lack of notice of the meeting and the limited capacity of the meeting room? Sue? That would be just another opportunity for the current “leadership” to funnel even more member money into the pocket of the NRA’s $2 million per month attorney, Bill Brewer.