NRA cancels the Annual Meeting in Houston

Status
Not open for further replies.
Covid seems like a convenient excuse. I wonder how much several businesses pulling out of the exhibits and other political turmoil the NRA and WLP is going through had to do with this decision. No doubt Covid is playing a role but that that is far from the total story IMHO.
 
Last edited:
meetings planned in Houston
Well, ask near any Texan, Houston is a bit of an armpit. Which is why the place is so huge, no one actually wants to live there, but they'll commute 40-50 miles to go to work.

They could easily re-venue to San Antonio. Changing to places with incredibly low couf rates, like Midland-Odessa or Waco would get them into issues of airport access. But, Lubbock would probably have paid them to book their convention center.

So, there's probably more to be seen here than is being shown--and "optics" are probably very much "at play" here.
 
The backhanded slap by "progressive" judge Hidalgo makes it sound like more than Covid too. No doubt she considers this a "win" for gun control.
Yep I'm gonna bet anti Turner and Hidalgo had a huge hand in this. Probably told them they could not use the convention center without a huge list of protocols. Glad I got out of there several years ago. I will also add that there have been 0 gun shows in Houston but they are having them in Pasadena and Conroe...
 
From a progun site. WLP, justified Covid fears and industrial drop outs did the trick. Of course, conspiracies are more fun.

Agreed.

Considering that OTC was held last week (the largest oil and gas trade show in the world), and the show was somewhere between 1/10th and 1/4 the size…no surprise this was killed. Likewise, football, dove season, and all the other contributors aligned.
 
Harris County and Houston city governments are pretty radical Dems. Not friends of the NRA.

I live about 90 miles NE of Htown. Despite the sprawl it's not a bad place but then with my county < 20K in population it's a change of pace when we visit.
 
They could just as easily move it up to fairly gun-friendly Dallas, or the even more gun friendly Fort Worth.... but it sounds like they've decided it's not cost-efficient.
 
They could just as easily move it up to fairly gun-friendly Dallas, or the even more gun friendly Fort Worth.... but it sounds like they've decided it's not cost-efficient.
Dallas, may have firearms but is as blue as Austin, sadly.

Another major problem is that the Dallas Convention Center is still being used as an "overflow facility" for "undocumented unaccompanied minors" (as are about a dozen other convention venues in the State).
 
Well, ask near any Texan, Houston is a bit of an armpit. Which is why the place is so huge, no one actually wants to live there, but they'll commute 40-50 miles to go to work.

They could easily re-venue to San Antonio. Changing to places with incredibly low couf rates, like Midland-Odessa or Waco would get them into issues of airport access. But, Lubbock would probably have paid them to book their convention center.

So, there's probably more to be seen here than is being shown--and "optics" are probably very much "at play" here.

Yep. DFW has one or two meeting places as well.
 
Ok, folks want to turn this to some antigun, immigrant BS. Get real. Don't live in conspiracies and your own paradigm.

It is clearly not that. It is the failure of WLP to do the right thing and let the NRA have clean and competent leadership.

Also, the failure of TX to deal with Covid and instead have a significant proportion of the population and state government adopt a realistic virus containment process led to ridiculous levels of infection and hospitalization.

TX is in the highest category of new infections.

Companies don't want to fly their employees into a risk. The folks won't go. There may be liabilities to send folks into risk. Also, that combined with the negative karma of the current NRA.

That's what did it. Not antigun, immigrants or whatever tinfoil theories you might have to avoid actually facing who was to blame because they are our 'side'.
 
Last edited:
NRA canceled the NRAM last year due to covid so there's no surprise they were bitten by "the bug" again.


Important Announcement: NRA Annual Meeting Cancellation

Due to concern over the safety of our NRA family and community, we regret to inform you that we have decided to cancel the 2021 Annual Meeting & Exhibits. This cancellation applies to all events and meetings that were scheduled in Houston. We will provide future notification regarding a rescheduled date for the annual Meeting of Members.

We make this difficult decision after analyzing relevant data regarding COVID-19 in Harris County, Texas. We also consulted with medical professionals, local officials, major sponsors & exhibitors, and many NRA members before arriving at this decision. The NRA Annual Meeting welcomes tens of thousands of people, and involves many events, meetings, and social gatherings. Among the highlights of our annual meeting are acres of exhibit space featuring the latest and greatest firearms, the display of countless accessories, and the offering of adventures and group gatherings that many travel hundreds, and some even thousands, of miles to experience. We realize that it would prove difficult, if not impossible, to offer the full guest experience that our NRA members deserve.

The NRA’s top priority is ensuring the health and well-being of our members, staff, sponsors, and supporters. We are mindful that NRA Annual Meeting patrons will return home to family, friends and co-workers from all over the country, so any impacts from the virus could have broader implications. Those are among the reasons why we decided to cancel our 2021 event.

We would like to thank our members, attendees, exhibitors, and staff for their understanding and support. We are grateful for the many contributions of the George R. Brown Convention Center, state and local officials, community organizers, area hotels, and countless event venues across Houston. We receive enormous support from Houston and the State of Texas – and we hope to return to the Bayou City for a full annual meeting experience.

The NRA looks forward to a Celebration of Freedom in Louisville in May 2022. In the meantime, we will support many other NRA local events and smaller gatherings – in a manner that is protective of our members and celebrates our Second Amendment freedom.

We wish continued health and safety to our entire NRA family.​

The only help they needed was the risk and the pull out of participating partners.
 
Last edited:
IMO a number of reasons that add up and are real. Covid, City and County leaders, opening weekend of Dove season in Texas and College football are enough to affect attendance.
 
Houston and the greater metro area is a working city not a tourist Mecca. Anyone that comes here to play on mountain tops overlooking deep blue waters didn’t do their research. Still a gun friendly place for a big arse city.

I remember the 2013 NRA convention here . . . what a show. Tons of people and no covid. Good times.

The ‘demic still sucks. Worried about 2021 not being as productive as we’ve hoped, here in SE Texas and across the state.

I just came back from work near the Red River and just south of that in the Metroplex. The metroplex has always felt like a bigger blob of the same problems that we have in SE Texas. I hope y’all don’t mind while I work up there with a few pistolas with me.
 
Ammoland said:
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.
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top