Buzz Mills: It’s Time to Unseat the NRA’s Old Guard Cabal and Establish NRA 2.0

NRA 2.0 board candidates
The two-page ad shown here will bookend the NRA official ballot to let voting members know the reform candidates that want to move forward for NRA 2.0. 

Sometime in the next few days, NRA members will receive magazine editions that contain one of the most important pieces of communications in recent years…the official ballots for the Board of Directors election. This year, however, the centerfold ballot will be bracketed by two pages that prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the civil war that has divided the organization through trials, chicanery and some shaky lawyering, is neither over, nor civil.

Shortly before leaving Las Vegas last week, I met with Buz Mills, owner of Gunsite Academy and longtime opposition member of the NRA board. Since the resignation of former longtime strongman Wayne LaPierre, Mills has continuously worked to reform the organization he believes is essential to protecting our Second Amendment rights.

During our conversation, Mills showed me the ads that will appear on either side of the ballots in American Rifleman, American Hunter, America’s 1st Freedom, and Shooting Illustrated. The ads call for the endorsement of candidates that have pledged to operate what Mills and supporters call NRA 2.0 with three core operating standards: integrity, accountability, and transparency.

As Mills says, these are standards that weren’t even options under LaPierre’s “leadership” or, he adds, the leadership of what he calls the cabal that exemplifies the cronyism, waste, and corruption that New York Superior Judge Joel M. Cohen addressed last year when he mandated corrective measures the NRA needed to implement.

For Mills, this election represents the chance to actually purge LaPierre’s supporters from the board of directors. He and his supporters aren’t pulling any punches in opposing the old guard. In addition to the magazine ads, fliers, and informational pieces have been sent to NRA members. And they’re considerably less diplomatic than the magazine ads.

One piece actually uses bright red type to respond to a piece asking members to vote for a slate of “strong effective leadership” that Mills calls the remaining members of the “LaPierre cabal.” His edited piece describes the board members asking for reelection the people that spent “years defending Wayne LaPierre.”

nra old guard LaPierre cabal candidates
A flyer from the old guard “strong NRA” board candidates who make up what Mills calls the LePierre cabal

Instead, Mills encourages members to cast ballots for 26 reform candidates, effectively voting against candidates Bob Barr, Sharon Callan, Larry E. Craig, Isaac Demarest, Lawrence Finder, Jeff Fleetham, Carol Frampton, Joel Friedman, Sandra S. Froman, Tom King, Charles Rowe, Ronald L. Schmaltz, John C. Sigler, Danny Stowers, Dwight D. Van Horn and Blaine Wade.

In fact, Mills says Barr, Frampton, Friedman, Froman, King, and Wade represent the “heart of the cabal” and reminds members they’re also the group that wanted to retain the Special Litigation Committee which wanted to continue paying the Brewer Law Firm. That firm, Mills has maintained for years, not only failed to effectively represent the organization and its millions of members, but billed hundreds of millions of member dollars for what was essentially a long-form defense of LaPierre and “his cabal.”

Today, Mills says, the NRA exists at a crossroads between danger and opportunity and it’s up to the members to finally “erase the last vestiges of Wayne LaPierre and his corrupt ways from the Association.”

Having covered the New York trial, read countless pages of internal NRA documents, depositions, transcripts and met and spoken with numbers of “involved parties” either currently or formerly involved in the National Rifle Association, it is inarguable that things were out of kilter well ahead of LaPierre’s surprise resignation as the New York trial got underway.

Subsequent to the trial, there have been some essential changes. And, despite attempts to categorize them otherwise, the majority of those changes were direct results of New York Attorney General Letitia James’ failed attempt to dissolve the National Rifle Association.

While she might not have achieved her ultimate goal of destroying the organization, she did what numerous reform movements had failed to do…oust the corrupt LaPierre and bring some much-needed oversight to a management that had treated member dollars like unlimited expense accounts.

Not every member of the 75-member NRA board was corrupt, coopted, or otherwise self-dealing during the LaPierre years. Court testimony, however, made it obvious that the members of the cabal Mills wants to excise from the board of directors isolated dissidents, meaning anyone who disagreed with or challenged LaPierre, to the point that any reform efforts were ineffective or impossible.

Today, Mills reminds me, there’s an opportunity to return the NRA management and decision-making to the place it should have rested all along: the members and their duly elected representatives.

If you’re one of those qualified to vote in this year’s election, Mills doesn’t suggest you go strictly on his word. In fact, he wants voting members to learn more about candidates rather than than simply voting for the ones they know or recognize. Instead, he suggests you go to the website ElectANewNRA.com and learn more about the twenty-six reform candidates before marking and submitting ballots.

As Mills says, the decisions regarding who sits on the board and helps decide the future of the NRA resides squarely where it should: in the hands of the membership.

As always, we’ll keep you posted.

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5 thoughts on “Buzz Mills: It’s Time to Unseat the NRA’s Old Guard Cabal and Establish NRA 2.0”

  1. I will join again if the NRA gets rid of corrupt officials. I was a member for decades until I found out what WL represented.

  2. I Haz A Question

    Meh. I was a (yearly, not lifetime) member for a long time, but they lost me a few years ago and I don’t see any reason to go back. Sometimes, you just hafta say, “He’s dead, Jim.”

  3. I wonder if W.L. and his cabal was just another branch of the anti liberal left. Half of the Rep. party are Dems in sheep’s clothing. One cannot even trust people anymore. Wherever there’s money, there’s corruption. Sad. I don’t think I’ll be renewing.

  4. As a Benefactor member, I am very supportive of the NRA 2.0 initiative, however the ElectANewNRA website has no means to contact, and can’t even spell “transparency” correctly. Not encouraging.

  5. Buz Mills and his candidates are trying to mislead you. The leaders of this group, Buz Mills, Jim Porter, and Willes Lee were Wayne LaPierre’s biggest supporters. In fact, Jim Porter praised Wayne LaPierre the day he resigned!

    What Buz doesn’t tell you is that he holds a grudge against certain people at NRA because NRA wouldn’t support him when he tried to run for governor against the incumbent, pro-gun republican governor of Arizona a decade ago.

    What Buz doesn’t tell you is:

    The NRA Board of Directors discovered and stopped the financial fraud way back in 2018 and it hasn’t recurred since then.

    There are no corrupt officials at NRA. If there were, the NY AG would have charged them and they would be removed.

    The current Board of Directors has already made numerous reforms over the past several years that the Judge in the New York case has acknowledged when he dismissed the NY AG’s demand to dissolve NRA and to appoint a monitor to oversee NRA

    The Judge has approved and even adopted the NRA Board of Directors recently implemented reforms

    So, the necessary reforms have been completed to the satisfaction of the New York Judge. There are no corrupt officials at NRA.

    Buz Mills is lying to you. He expects you to believe that the Judge would allow the New York case against NRA to end while there were corrupt officials operating at NRA.

    Buz mills just wants power. He doesn’t care about NRA.

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