Wait a second, it just occurred to me that all of you who are dismissing NRA membership numbers due to it being required for an activity are making an error that's
entirely relevant to the actual discussion:
Oh, yeah, let's say you join the NRA because of that, it was certainly true for the first and penultimate times I joined it. But even if this is a politically neutral decision, and/or the gun owner is relatively neutral on the issue of gun control (rather unlikely for serious target shooters, I'd say, due to the patchwork of flypaper laws that will throw them in prison if they make a mistake while traveling to a match), they'll automatically get their choice of membership magazines (American Rifleman, American Hunter, and there's at least one more).
Which will expose them to the government's atrocities, and politicize all but the most callous of them. And then they're also in the net of Institute for Legislative Action, the NRA's lobbying arm that also runs their PAC (although PACs are small potatoes, more valuable to signaling than anything else). And they'll get alerts about legislation, scoring of their politicians, sometimes a major campaign for one as I noted WRT to Roy Blunt, and of course at least post-Carter a major effort every Presidential election (Carter was anti-handgun, but he and his southerners were not in a bubble and too smart to mess with gun control (it was discussed and quickly shot down, you might say)).
E.g. if I hadn't already read of the atrocities in other gun magazines, joining the NRA as a sophomore on my high school JROTC rifle team would have started me down my RKBA activist path.
So, no, "not [joining] necessarily because they agree with the NRA" (I don't and don't belong to it, although I re-joined for a year after Sandy Hook), but by definition these guys and gals are gun owners, and can't ignore politics if they want to continue to be so.
Anyway, why don't we put this slagging of the NRA, which is only responsible for a fraction of our success; for example, not Heller and McDonald, nor most of the nationwide sweep of shall issue or better concealed carry regimes, to the side in favor of, you know, trying to apply the lessons learned from the general gun owners' wildly successful efforts to this surveillance problem.
E.g. am I wrong about atrocities being committed with it that would play well to the public?
On the other hand, the flip side of the "join because you have to"m if you truly believe it's so big, is that that isn't an obvious way to bring people into the fold, I don't see us being in a position to require stuff of normal folks. But that's not so true of FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google) and company, is it?