Sometime early next week I am going to publish the first chapter of a new book entitled Boom to Bust – The NRA Faces an Uncertain Future. It’s going to come out first in serialized form on the new Kindle-Vella platform which is due to go live perhaps as early as today. I’m going to do a chapter each week and when the entire book is available, I’ll move it as well to a print edition for those who (like me) want to hold books in their hands.

              I started thinking about this book when the NRA found itself in turmoil after Ollie North was dumped as the organization’s President back in 2019. When he was first named President the previous year, I thought the NRA was just hitting a new stride. Between North’s fundraising prowess and Trump’s constant blathering about 2^nd-Amendment ‘rights,’ you would have thought that the NRA and Gun-nut Nation in general were going to hit a new high.

              Except it didn’t turn out that way. Not at all. North lasted just one year as NRA President – he was deposed as part of a nasty fight between the organization and its long-time PR firm, Ackerman-McQueen. Wayne LaPierre is facing his own set of nasty allegations about spending all kinds of money on personal expenses which have nothing to with his work for the NRA. And worst of all, America’s ‘first civil rights organization’ is trying to escape from New York State where the Governor just happens to be the single, most anti-gun Governor in all of the 50 states.

              Worst of all, the gun-rights group is broke. Which means that all the money they used to hand out to compliant members of the GOP Senate and House caucuses isn’t there anymore. In 2019, the group spent $3.2 million on lobbying. In 2020 that amount fell to just over $2 million bucks. No money, no honey.

              My book is going to cover all these issues, as well as some of the other messy things that have involved the NRA over the past couple of years, in particular the crazy attempt to form a subsidiary organization in Russia, of all places, which happens to be a country where almost nobody owns a gun.

              All of that said and done, however, there’s another, much more important reason why I am writing this book. Because notwithstanding all the strurm und drang over the spike of gun sales during the Pandemic, a spike which, by the way, seems to have run its course, what I will talk about is my sense that maybe, just maybe the love affair between America and guns is coming to an end.

              To begin with, guns are a very old technology. Other than substituting polymer for carbon steel, the way guns work hasn’t changed one bit in more than a hundred years. And if there’s one thing which is different about the under-30 population, it’s the fact that they are all enamored of technology, particularly in a handheld device.

              Next time you’re in a shopping mall, take a look at the size of the crowd in the Apple store. You will never (read: never) see multitudes like that in any store which sells guns. And even though the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says that the percentage of Americans who hold hunting licenses has increased from 7% to 10% between 1960 and 2020, these folks sure aren’t buying any guns. The number of shotguns made in the United States in 2018, was exactly the same number manufactured in 1986.

              Know what self-defense weapon has seen a remarkable surge in sales since the “Chinese flu” arrived.  Try stun guns, a.k.a., tasers, with manufacturers reporting recent sales increases of 300%!  And you don’t need to pass a background check or get a gun license in order to buy, own and carry one of these little devices around. It goes without saying that you can buy a taser online.

              The price of Axon stock, a company that manufactures stun guns, has moved up 70% since August 1^st of last year. Over the same  9 months, the price of Smith&Wesson stock hasn’t budged one inch. Okay?