Traditionally, the Network’s biggest new member recruitment expenditure is exhibiting at the National Rifle Association’s Annual Meeting, where according to the NRA, we enjoyed access to upwards of 85,000 armed citizens who attend. If you are one of the many members we first met at an NRA Annual Meeting, you can attest that it has been a good opportunity to meet like-minded men and women, hear about your concerns and those of other armed citizens and talk about what the Network does to alleviate member troubles after use of force in self defense.
Despite the considerable issues and problems of the NRA management, the rank and file members remain our friends, our peers and in the vernacular, our people. We’re going back to Dallas May 17-19, 2024 to talk face to face with our people, the men, women and families trundling up and down the long aisles in the exhibit hall. The Network team will be in booth 8247, which the exhibit hall map indicates is across the aisle from Dillon Precision and CrossBreed Holsters. The NRA posts details at https://www.nraam.org/ .
In a fit of nostalgia, I looked up the report from the first time the Network exhibited at an NRA Annual meeting in May 2009 (https://armedcitizensnetwork.org/our-journal/2009-journals/936-june-2009-network-journal#nra). While much has changed, one thing has not. Relating his experience as a first-time exhibitor at the 2009 Annual Meeting, Marty wrote: “The highlight of the show was meeting our current members as they stopped by the booth to get acquainted. It was fun to put faces to names, and get to know our members a little.”
In the years to follow, we would connect with authors, podcasters, magazine editors and others who were interested in telling the Network’s story to their audiences, and our attendance at the Annual Meetings became broader than meeting and chatting with members, although that remains the most pleasant part of what is, frankly, a grueling three days.
Still, we look forward to the fellowship and visits with new and long-time Network members, with Advisory Board members John Farnam, Emanuel Kapelsohn, and Marie d’Amico, and other armed citizens who are in Dallas that weekend. If you’re there, please come by and reconnect with us. You’re the reason we go.
Photos: Top, early NRA events provided valuable publicity opportunities like a guest appearance on Tom Gresham’s Gun Talk Radio at 2010’s NRA Annual Meeting in Charlotte, NC. Below to the right, Network President Marty Hayes enjoyed meeting a lot of people he’d only known by name at the first NRA Annual Meeting he attended in 2009.