Your message points to another angle to strengthening public support for our shooting activities: trust no organization. You've mentioned other worthy organizations than NRA that concern themselves with our interests. The NRA and our comparatively minuscule National Firearms Association are needed national voices, all equally trustworthy as representing our particular interests.

What I learned from the campaign to rid Canada of its long gun registry---which may be unprecedented anywhere in turning back federal firearms legislation---is that our National Firearms Association of extremely limited financial and organizational resources made a quietly strategic appeal to Reason over the widest public fronts, an appeal to responsible citizenship more than a need of those who wanted to preserve their traditional pursuits.

I have to declare an interest here as president of the most powerful and influential and fastest growing private woodlot owner organization in Canada, and possibly anywhere. Our organization went down the wrong path several times during 50 years I've been a founder, evangelist and leader. Loyal to its membership always but responding democratically the wrong way by not seeing a bigger picture.

It's absolutely critical to support and contribute to "our" organizations national, state and provincial---and the local level particularly because that's where we're judged by all the other publics, of which there are more of them than us. Canada, not the NFA by itself, overturned the registry when its citizens saw it as inimical to its public interests, wasteful and diminishing Canadian values. A cocky, divisive them-and-us will get us nowhere.