Referencing the announcement, I would like to offer a few salient comments:
1. I'm glad to see something being put forth from this group of Constitutional advocates. As of this moment, roughly 40 members are online, more than a NASA-sponsored "citizen science" message forum of which I am a member, despite the fact they have 160,000+ members, roughly four times our ranks. By comparison, we're at least five times more active, per capita, than them. I've been significantly involved in commenting on most 2A matters to my Congressman, particularly with respect to the difference between what the supreme law of the says and what 240 years of nonsense has whittled down. I am aware of several others who are active in politics, and thank God for them. If everyone who owns a firearm were on the phone with their Congressman's office once a month, our Second Amendment would have retained a far higher percentage of its former glory than it has. Thus, it's good to see that John and Mike of OpenCarry.org have put together their NFCES proposal.
2. I would have liked to see John and Mike float the initial proposal in segmented or line-numbered form, much like a bill before Congress, here on the forum, open for debate. Contrary to popular misconception, people are only motivated by incentives in simple, algorithmic (rule-following) tasks like you might find on an assembly line. The more work they produce with the fewer mistakes, the more income they make. In these kinds of environments, it works very well.
When tasks become more complicated, requiring conceptual, creative thinking, money is no longer a motivator. It is merely a means to an end.
Rather, there are three things that drives people to dive in and work together on a project involving many complex and interrelated variables such as tackling the social, cultural, economic and legal aspects of maintaining our Constitutional rights in the midst of well-organized efforts to the contrary by national and international media and legal bodies of authority, along with not so well-organized and largely emotionally-driven efforts of various special interest groups.
Those three factors that lead people to better performance and personal satisfaction are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Once people are making enough money to take care of most of their needs (food, clothing shelter, transportation, vacations, saving for the future, etc.), they often wind up doing amazing, sometimes brilliant things, even without being asked, and let's face it, given the great complexity surrounding the issue of how to convince the antis that supporting the Constitution as it's written is actually in their best interests, it behooves all of us to avail ourselves of every resource we can acquire.
To that end, I have spent more than a thousand hours reading others opinions on this forum, and I've often floated ideas here before writing my Congressman, because I am but a single individual. It does not matter how bright, well-educated, and experienced I am. There will always be ideas I haven't considered, complementary perspectives held by those with different education and experience than I.
Now, perhaps I missed it, but I would have liked to been a part of this proposal, particularly given the fact that my current part-time profession is writing business proposals.
Put another way, traditional, hierarchical management works ok if all you want is compliance. But if you want engagement, self-directed involvement of others is better. To do that, to create a cadre of bright, well-educated, highly experienced, and highly motivated individuals, well, you just need to watch
this ten-minute video. It explains it far better than I can.
Bottom line, if you want a proposal that works, one that appeals to the widely diverse crowd, all of whom have their fingers in the pot known as "state and federal legislation," you're going to have to give up the notion that any single individual, or even two individuals, are going to be able to nail it. Do a good job? Yes. Great job? Possibly. Good enough to make some serious headway back to the original intent of our Second Amendment? Unless you're both certifiable geniuses on the order of Dickens, Raphael, Faraday, Spinoza, Michelangelo, Erasmus, Descartes, Galilei, Mill, Leibnitz, Newton, da Vinci, and Goethe, probably not.
Hence my appeal for a group effort.
3. I was going to comment on several key points of the proposal which I would have approached differently, and why. However, in light of my "group effort" comments, above, I'll abstain until the discussion gets rolling, and I'm sincerely hoping that it does!
Sincerely,
since9
Ph.D. Computer Science (work in progress)
M.S. Management (Project Management) - Summa Cum Laude
MBA (Technology Management) - Summa Cum Laude
B.S. Finance, Insurance, and Business Law