Jeff Knox on the NRA, Neal Knox and the Power of Members

Jeff Knox is a second-generation Second Amendment activist and director of The Firearms Coalition, the grassroots network founded by his father, Neal Knox, in 1984. Recorded in April 2019, just days before that year’s NRA annual meeting in Indianapolis, this Minuteman University interview takes an unfiltered look at the NRA’s internal troubles at the time. More lasting than the headlines are the lessons: member power, principle over pragmatism, and how gun rights organizations work.

A 40-Year Life Member Speaks Up

Knox opens by saying he is heartbroken. He started paying for his NRA life membership with his first paycheck out of basic training, when he was barely 18, and by 2019 he had been a life member for 40 years. That spring the NRA had sued its longtime public relations firm, Ackerman McQueen, and a magazine exposé built on information from NRA whistleblowers had just been published.

Knox urged gun owners to look past the messenger and examine the facts. In his view, the reports described the same kind of problems his father had warned about in the mid-1990s: sweetheart deals and money flowing from member donations to contractors, vendors and executive staff. He also warned that because the NRA is chartered in New York, financial problems gave a hostile state attorney general an opening against the organization. He described the board’s choice at that moment in stark terms: remove those responsible and repair the ship, or go down with it.

Knox was candid about where he stood. He admitted he has personal history and biases, and he told viewers not to take his word for it. Follow the leads, dig in and verify, he said. That is good advice for any advocate reading coverage of any organization.

How the NRA Is Structured, and Who Funds It

For viewers who wanted to understand the machinery, Knox laid out the basics as they stood in 2019. The NRA had a 76-member board of directors meant to set policy, with an executive director hired to carry it out. In practice, he explained, a small executive committee handled business between board meetings and sat on the most critical committees, such as finance and audit, so a core group held most of the real control.

He also corrected a common anti-gun talking point. The NRA is not primarily funded by the firearms industry. By his estimate, roughly 80 percent of its funding came from members through dues and small donations. Industry support goes more heavily to the NRA Foundation, a separate 501(c)(3) that funds education and range programs through Friends of NRA banquets, with half of the money raised staying in the state where it was raised. The Institute for Legislative Action (ILA) handles lobbying and raises much of its own money, and the political action committee is a separate entity again.

The point for members is simple. The organization runs on their money, which gives them real leverage over how it behaves.

Neal Knox and the 1977 Cincinnati Revolt

Much of the conversation turns to history. In 1977, NRA leadership planned to move the organization out of Washington and turn it into what Knox calls a Sierra Club with guns, focused on shooting and conservation and away from politics. At the annual meeting in Cincinnati, Neal Knox and fellow members organized a floor revolt. Wearing blaze orange hunter caps, they passed bylaw changes, removed the executive vice president, and installed Harlon Carter, whom Neal Knox nominated.

Neal Knox then went to Washington to lead the new Institute for Legislative Action and stayed for four years. He was the primary author of the Firearm Owners Protection Act, aimed at reforming the Gun Control Act of 1968. By the time it passed in 1986, years after he had been pushed out, it had been watered down and carried the Hughes Amendment. Jeff Knox says the NRA largely stopped pushing his father’s more aggressive agenda after that.

He gives another example of why his father founded The Firearms Coalition. In 1984, during the fight over so-called cop-killer bullets, Neal Knox warned that defining armor-piercing ammunition by the metals it contains would come back to hurt gun owners. Jeff Knox ties the later green tip ammunition fight directly to that language. To tell members what was really happening, Neal Knox used newsletters, mailing lists, phone trees, a daily recorded hotline and what Jeff describes as the first gun rights computer bulletin board, all before the World Wide Web existed.

“The gun lobby isn’t the NRA, it’s the NRA members and tens of millions of dedicated patriots just like you.”

Neal Knox

Start From Principle, Not Pragmatism

Asked whether the NRA could get back to fighting harder, Knox said yes, and that moments of crisis are opportunities. His core criticism was about strategy. An organization that starts every fight from political pragmatism gives away its principles before negotiations even begin. He compares it to selling a car: you do not open by offering a price below what the buyer was ready to pay.

“You start from principle and you push principle, and you have to be moving on the offensive at all times.”

Jeff Knox

Whoever sets the tone for a national gun rights group, he argues, must be dedicated first to the idea that every person has an inalienable right to self-defense and to the tools needed for it. Membership always matters, but so does leadership with the courage to act.

Different Groups, Different Strengths

Viewers asked whether the NRA, Gun Owners of America and the Second Amendment Foundation could ever work together. Knox says they already have. His father quietly strategized with GOA in a good-cop, bad-cop approach and later acted as an intermediary between the two groups. SAF, as a 501(c)(3), cannot lobby but does strong work in education and litigation. In Knox’s summary, SAF leads in the courts, the NRA has led on legislation, and GOA holds the no-compromise line. The movement is strongest when those roles are coordinated instead of competing for credit.

As a campaign consultant in Arizona, Knox also offered a practical idea: dedicated volunteers using modern calling tools could do the outreach that organizations often pay outside vendors to do. He makes his own columns free to republish with a link back, because getting the information out comes first. His columns and the coalition’s work are collected at The Firearms Coalition.

Watch the full interview

Video: Chating about NRA, with Jeff Knox LIVE – Director of The Firearms Coalition on the Gun Websites YouTube channel.