http://ideas.time.com/2012/12/19/viewpointwe-need-a-moderate-pro-gun-alternative-to-the-nra/I like this and would totally get behind it. A politically neutral version of the NRA. No agenda. No obsessive patriotism. No scapegoating. A REAL sportsmans club that is about the enjoyment of using guns. No defending a 30 round magazine because of some imagined slippery slope that is told will play you right into the evil governments hands to control your freedom and liberty. No politics, no agendas, no lobbying, just gun safety and responsible gun use - probably the way the NRA used to be before it became a political tool.
This could take off as demographics change and gun enthusiasts become a little wiser and better equipped to deal, realistically, with the world around them.
The days of the NRA, as it is, seem numbered. Time for new thinking, or more correctly, rebuilding.
[quote">[size=150">Before the nineteen-seventies, the N.R.A. had been devoted mostly to non-political issues, like gun safety. But a coup d'état at the group's annual convention in 1977 brought a group of committed political conservatives to power—as part of the leading edge of the new, more rightward-leaning Republican Party. (Jill Lepore recounted this history in a recent piece for The New Yorker.) The new group pushed for a novel interpretation of the Second Amendment, one that gave individuals, not just militias, the right to bear arms. It was an uphill struggle. At first, their views were widely scorned. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, who was no liberal, mocked the individual-rights theory of the amendment as "a fraud."[/size">
Read more:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/12/jeffrey-toobin-second-amendment.html#ixzz2FkNx5jxx[quote">[size=150">Conservatives often embrace "originalism," the idea that the meaning of the Constitution was fixed when it was ratified, in 1787. They mock the so-called liberal idea of a "living" constitution, whose meaning changes with the values of the country at large. But there is no better example of the living Constitution than the conservative re-casting of the Second Amendment in the last few decades of the twentieth century.[/size">
...enter the eighties, Reagan, Orrin Hatch and Antonin Scalia and suddenly it's a god given right to arm yourself with semi-auto handguns and rifles. Baloney. And everyone knows it's baloney.