MNGunTalk.com

Randygmn wrote:North wants the NRA to retreat from politics and focus on gun safety and hunting. In other words, the FUDD agenda. He got a few high profile board members to support him. The headlines made it seem like the majority of the board supported North. That was false as North just essentially resigned. Turns out the majority of the Board supports Wayne. Also turns out North was also being paid by Ackerman. That’s dirty. Anyway, now Wayne can return his focus on getting rid of Ackerman and the democrat terrorists who are trying to usurp, ignore and erase the Second Amendment.

Ghost wrote:The board has been set up for Wayne’s tenure. I’d love to see Wayne and Cox gone.

I want a pro-active NRA that makes expanding gun rights a top priority and not just political fodder of death of a thousand cuts.

Randygmn wrote:North wants the NRA to retreat from politics and focus on gun safety and hunting. In other words, the FUDD agenda. He got a few high profile board members to support him. The headlines made it seem like the majority of the board supported North. That was false as North just essentially resigned. Turns out the majority of the Board supports Wayne. Also turns out North was also being paid by Ackerman. That’s dirty. Anyway, now Wayne can return his focus on getting rid of Ackerman and the democrat terrorists who are trying to usurp, ignore and erase the Second Amendment.

He (North) was at odds with LaPierre and some board members who believe the group's media operation and messaging have strayed too far from the NRA's original mission of gun safety and the outdoors. Of particular concern to some board members and rank-and-file is the fiery tone of NRATV, the media arm of the NRA created and operated by Ackerman McQueen.

LarryFlew wrote:

Ghost wrote:The board has been set up for Wayne’s tenure. I’d love to see Wayne and Cox gone.

I want a pro-active NRA that makes expanding gun rights a top priority and not just political fodder of death of a thousand cuts.

Right now Wayne is the lessor of 2 evils but I agree we need someone in there with the right agenda and actually working on that agenda.

It’s all over the news; Oliver North is out. Effectively resigned by choosing not to seek a second term. Looks like in this internal struggle, Wayne LaPierre still has weight in the NRA. Friends in high and/or low places, and he has won this fight.

xd ED wrote:Surgery is never fun.

In late 1996, Knox came to LaPierre and told him to fire the NRA's influential consulting firm, Ackerman McQueen, whose staffers have high-level Republican Party connections and tend to oppose the gun fundamentalists. LaPierre said yes and did nothing. Six months later the lucrative contract was still in place. So Knox said: Wayne, I've warned you. Now I'm going to take your job.

It wasn't so easy. It turned out that LaPierre and his board allies and Ackerman McQueen had gone and changed the locks on the old revolutionary.

Finely oaked red wine and pungent cheese and Cuban cigars in the Hollywood Hills, and bull that flowed late into the evening. That's how NRA board member John Milius recalls plotting the counter-coup against Neal Knox. Milius has a broad belly and beard, and the look of a man always ready to be in on the next joke. He's a B-list movie director and an A-list screenwriter. A Zen anarchist with Republican libertarian tendencies. And he became a key agent of Knox's fall and the rise of today's NRA.

In early 1997, Knox had a majority on the board, and he had LaPierre and the consultant contract in his gun sights. Milius huddled with Col. Robert Brown, publisher of Soldier of Fortune magazine, and Anthony Makris, an NRA consultant from Ackerman McQueen. To describe these men as political moderates would be to insult them; but they were pragmatists.

Under Knox, they believed, the NRA had veered too far to the right, courting the militias and losing legislative battles. In 1995, a Republican House voted for the Brady Bill, which imposed background checks on gun purchases. Not to mention they realized that Ackerman McQueen's million-dollar contracts were at stake.

"We were facing a genuine and extremely well-organized coup d'etat." Milius pauses to cut, wet and light his Cohiba cigar, and wedge it between his teeth. "So we used our best techniques: lying, cheating and disinformation. I didn't tell the truth for weeks."

Makris and Milius invited a Knox loyalist to dinner in Los Angeles and seemingly conspired to bribe LaPierre into leaving. The loyalist got well-lubricated and so pumped; this plan was great! The next day Milius leaked the plot to LaPierre, who rose publicly and proclaimed himself shocked! -- shocked! -- that a Knox ally would try to buy him off.

LaPierre, in fact, gamed the moment perfectly. Privately, board members had for several years warned him about playing the dutiful son to Knox. The executive vice president knew just when to pull away from Knox's embrace.

The coup de grace was administered at the Seattle NRA convention in 1997. LaPierre needed a guardian angel; he got Moses. Charlton Heston (who is also represented by Makris) was elected to the board and then surprised many members by announcing he would run against Knox for first vice president. Heston beat Knox by four votes. LaPierre took the stage to cheer Heston and declare that he didn't intend "to stand by and let the NRA be turned into the John Birch Society."

For Knox, it was like storming the Winter Palace again only to find himself surrounded by the Russian army. "I had no idea there was a candidate out there with the horsepower to take me out. Then I get there and see Heston . . ."

Brown shrugs when asked about Knox's downfall. Brown's got a buzz cut, jutting chin and perpetual squint, and an I-gargle-with-rock-salt voice. He's a dead ringer for Gen. Buck Turgidson in "Dr. Strangelove." He's romantic only about shooting.

"Knox made his move a little too early, and, at risk of strategic oversimplification, he got his [expletive] ass kicked." Brown wags his eyebrows and snaps a salute. "That's war, buddy."

Ghost wrote:The board has been set up for Wayne’s tenure. I’d love to see Wayne and Cox gone.

I want a pro-active NRA that makes expanding gun rights a top priority and not just political fodder of death of a thousand cuts.