National Rifle Association
The National Rifle Association of America (NRA) is an American non-profit 501(c)(4) lobbying group that advocates for the protection of the Second Amendment of the United States Bill of Rights, and the promotion of firearm ownership rights as well as marksmanship, firearm safety, and the protection of hunting and self-defense in the United States.
The NRA sponsors firearm safety training courses, as well as marksmanship events featuring shooting skill and sports. According to a 1999 Fortune survey, lawmakers and congressional staffers considered NRA the most influential lobbying group. Its political activity is based on the principle that gun ownership is a civil liberty protected by the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights, and is the oldest continuously operating civil rights organization in the United States. According to its website, the NRA has 4.3 million members.
Read more about National Rifle Association: History, Political Activity, Publications, Current Leadership and Policies, Finances, Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the words national, rifle and/or association:
“...America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind. We are able to accommodate, at a time, only one national hero; and we demand that that hero shall be uniform and invincible. As a literate people we are preoccupied, neither with the race nor the individual, but with the type. Yesterday, we romanticized the tough guy; today, we are romanticizing the underprivileged, tough or tender; tomorrow, we shall begin to romanticize the pure primitive.”
—Ellen Glasgow (18731945)
“Truth is his inspirer, and earnestness the polisher of his sentences. He could afford to lose his Sharps rifles, while he retained his faculty of speech,a Sharps rifle of infinitely surer and longer range.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“An association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which has never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting or a vestry.”
—Thomas Jefferson (17431826)