Back in early October Ammoland published an open letter to the NRA’s community of competitive shooters. It was penned by NRA Past President John Sigler. John chairs the NRA’s F-Class High Power Rifle Committee and was a member of the United States F-Class Rifle Teams that won the 2023 World Championship in South Africa.
In other words, when it comes to NRA competitions, John knows what he’s talking about. I know this because I’ve shot many rounds of sporting clays with John when he was just a local NRA leader in Delaware, well before he ran for the board of directors.
As a grassroots second amendment activist, John was instrumental in helping me as the campaign manager running the campaign for a woman who would go on to win and become Delaware’s Attorney General.
John is well versed not just on NRA competitions but NRA’s local election efforts. The best of both worlds in an NRA leader.
In his open letter John advocates for a renewed focus on growing NRA competitions to its once former glory, where competitors weren’t counted by the hundreds but the thousands. A time when matches were packed with competitors from throughout the U.S. and from around the world.
The NRA needs a strong, and fully funded, competitions division, because as John points out “NRA competitive shooters are the solid backbone of NRA and that it is the competitive shooting community that makes the rest of NRA happen – and that includes the political side of NRA at NRA-ILA.”
These are the volunteers that attend rallies, man phone banks and go door-to-door. That’s because as any competitive shooter knows, some of the strongest bonds in the shooting community are those bonds within the community of competitors.
The previous, now gone, ‘powers that be’ at the NRA had no use for NRA’s Competitive Shooting Division other than to syphon off money out of its budget to spend elsewhere. Somebody had to pay for those massive legal bills, I guess.
While all of John’s points in his open letter are, well, on point, there is one aspect of NRA’s competitions that has always been sorely lacking for as long as I’ve paid attention to NRA competitions. And that is the public relations value of the shooting sports.
The NRA has never really done much of any PR for their matches, other than give them some ink in their member magazines. That’s all well and good, but as somebody that has handled PR for the Scholastic Clay Target Program (SCTP), the U.S. Practical Shooting Association (USPSA) and the International Defensive Pistol Association (IDPA), and gotten press for these sports in newspapers, on radio and TV in local media markets around the country, a blurb in an NRA publication isn’t nearly enough. Not even close.
There is a great deal of rich content to be mined at NRA matches, particularly the famed national matches. Once held at Camp Perry, the best shooters in the world gathered there to compete for the NRA’s top titles.
At a past NRA Show I found myself talking (i.e. complaining) to Lars Dalseide, formerly of the NRA where he held various roles including Senior Media Specialist, Communications Manager and Media Manager. I voiced my frustration with the fact that some of the great matches at Camp Perry had little to no coverage.
Lars mentioned he had wanted to go to the matches for media purposes but, for what I assume were inside baseball political reasons, could not. To be blunt, this was stupid, mostly because for room and a couple meals I would have gladly spent a week at Camp Perry working for Lars to find human interest stories from the firing lines. Stories that could have been used online and sent out to local media outlets to spotlight competitors back in their home towns.
The same lack of media focus existed at the Bianchi Cup. Michael Bane once went with a camera crew from his show Shooting Gallery to cover the event but could get no assistance with planning and scheduling in order to cover the shooters he wanted to highlight.
When we talked about it later I quipped that the agency the NRA used, at the time, probably didn’t put the effort in because they couldn’t find a way to increase their billables for the event.
The final straw that proved to me that the NRA didn’t value PR as part of their competitions came when I was introduced to a guy who was launching a new competition format for the NRA.
He had a grand vision, which he seemed sure was revolutionary, innovative, or whatever self-deluding adjective one uses to convince an organization to give them a budget. However, he had absolutely zero plan for promoting competitors, beyond an NRA website and publication.
Frankly, that’s not unusual. Most competitive organizations have no plan whatsoever to generate news stories in local media, opting almost always to take the sour grapes position of “the mainstream media never covers the shooting sports.”
A lot of people like to believe this but it’s nothing more than code for ‘I don’t know how to do it, plus it sounds like a lot of work.’ Having done it, successfully, I can tell you it is a lot of work. But sometimes I forget that not all of us grew up in a family-owned business where work is expected and not a four-letter word.
For the NRA to truly move forward towards John’s vision of a strong future for its Competitive Shooting Division it needs to do so with a commitment to both its competitors and to telling their stories.
After all, you can’t simply kick ass and take names without telling people about. It’s that last part where the NRA’s track record has fallen short…way short.
— Paul Erhardt, Managing Editor, the Outdoor Wire Digital Network
