I write from Atlanta on the eve of the 2025 National Rifle Association (NRA) Annual Meeting where for once, the gathering has been relatively free of scrutiny from media stars too busy freaking out about President Trump’s latest social media post to predict its imminent decline. The cadre of progressives who’ve waged a lawless campaign of public lawfare against the nation’s oldest civil rights organization maybe think they’ve taken it down, rendering it mute and unable to influence the national conversation.
Let them. They couldn’t be more wrong.
No doubt the big meeting will be quite the blockbuster. If the idea of strolling “14 acres of the latest guns and gear,” taking in seminars and workshops, entertainment from the likes of Big & Rich and more with up to around 70,000 fellow freedom-loving Americans is your bag, you might want to pack one and get yourself to the Georgia World Congress Center this next weekend. Just saying.
The NRA is of course alive and well. If it weren’t for its 3.5 million dues paying members and the several million more who align with the notion that the group speaks for the rights of law-abiding Second Amendment advocates, the most anti-gun administration in American political history would be running the nation right now, for starters.
NRA-backed Constitutional Carry regulations are now the law of the land in 29 states. More than 200,000 people showed up at the 2025 Great American Outdoor Show in Harrisburg, PA. NRA events are always jam-packed. Always.
In the months ahead, competitive shooting events including America’s Rifle Challenge and World Shooting Championship at Camp Atterbury Indiana, and NRA National Matches at four locations across the country and course training, safety and education sessions by the thousands continue, every day, in cities and towns across the nation will keep the organization and its members busy advancing the rights of lawful gun owners and sportsmen.
There will be nary a peep about the good news – or about the NRA’s rapid rebound from its largely self-inflicted wounds from the recent past thanks to trusted new leadership under the presidency of former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr (R-GA) because its runs counter to the hopeful narrative ubiquitous in the authority media that gun groups are dead, and gun ownership is a non-issue.
Throughout most of its storied 154 year history, the NRA was known as the preeminent firearms training, education, and competition entity in the United States – reflecting its founding to improve the marksmanship abilities of Union soldiers in the aftermath of the Civil War. History doesn’t mention much that Confederate troops regularly outmatched their Northern brethren. It is a gun rights organization with a longstanding civil rights component, which of course the media would never have you know. They don’t talk about the NRA defending the rights of former slaves to defend themselves with firearms very much either. Out of 45 U.S. presidents – Grover Cleveland and NRA life member Donald Trump – nine have belonged to the organization.
The NRA has achieved extraordinary and consistent victories in the fight to defend individual liberty. It’s come at a price, making the group controversial even while firearms safety and education has always remained at its core. The mass shooters who occupy so much space in the news cycle every time they strike are never NRA members and frankly one is hard pressed to find a firearms offender--violent or otherwise—who has been. Ever. The organization does not pat itself on the back over these stats, but I am doing so because I can and I think it speaks to what an NRA member is and is not.
No, the future of the NRA is no longer in question and probably never has been, despite what the New York Times and others have repeatedly reported. The recent lawfare onslaught (which will always be a factor to some degree) has largely been beaten back, and as previously mentioned, solid folks are at the helm. As we will undoubtedly see here in Atlanta in a few days, it can indeed be said that the NRA is operating, once again, on all cylinders. To wit, some recent news the media didn’t tell you about:
What the NRA has lost in the court of opinion it has more than made up for in victories on courts of law including: funding and overseeing the strategy of the landmark NYSRPA v. Bruen Supreme Court case that affirmed that the right to bear arms does not stop at a person’s front door (the most significant Second Amendment ruling in more than a decade); Winning a unanimous decision in a critical First Amendment case at the U.S. Supreme Court in NRA v. Vullo; Successfully resolving the litigation in New York brought by that state’s oppositional Attorney General; Consistently winning challenges to unconstitutional, anti-gun laws across the country in the courts.
While NRA Annual meetings have over the years grown into a national destination spectacle, there is a fundamental reason for them and the primary one has to do with board and key leadership elections. Sitting President Barr is seeking a second term, and few have been more worthy of one, considering what he has selflessly and devotedly led the organization through. A board member since 1998, Bob has seen a lot and as such is uniquely qualified to continue to lead the NRA in his Hestonesque fashion deeper into the nascent renaissance we are seeing today.
I’m rooting for Bob, and I’m rooting for the National Rifle Association. Anyone who cares about freedom and liberty should be rooting for them too and spreading the word that reports of the NRA’s demise have once again been sorely premature.
See you in Atlanta.