NRA Boots USCCA From Annual Meeting
BY Herschel Smith
7 years, 7 months ago
… enough clues exist to speculate that banishing USCCA may have something to do with NRA recently launching very similar insurance products competing with those offered by USCCA. Bearing in mind that USCCA acknowledges meeting with NRA over “shared goals,” it’s fair to note how similar NRA’s new Carry Guard service is to USCCA’s established program. Both offer three levels of services with similar price points (named after metals), and both offer magazines and memberships.
It goes without saying that if the NRA could find the balls to cooperate with other likeminded organizations, its effectiveness would be the beneficiary. You understand that, right? I don’t even have to say it, or I shouldn’t have to say it.
So I’m glad David brought this up. Let me turn to the comments for a moment.
He who represents himself in court is a fool.
Kansas or not your self defense shooting will not be as cut and dried as it is in your mind. If you are so up on the law you should know that you are entering a system that is set up for obtaining your conviction. Police and prosecutors make a living and a name convicting people (not looking for the truth).
Could you post bail today? Could you afford to miss work. Do you own a home? If your shooting is at all questionable you may lose everything.
Many people only think of the scenario where there door gets kicked in in the middle of the night. Go ahead and shoot.
Let’s say that your are in a parking garage in Vegas and three scary thugs start talking nasty trash to your girlfriend. You lift your shirt as a warning to scare them away. You just committed assault because you scared the idiots and in theory you could do 10 years.
How will you afford the professional witnesses that will testify on your behalf? They don’t work for free and airline tickets and hotels aren’t free. Then the trial may be delayed and you have to fly them back to court all over again.
Statistics say that a proper defense is about $50,000 minimum. The USCCA will cover you up to $300,000 for under $20.00 dollars a month. Do you have car insurance? Homeowners insurance? By the way homeowners insurance probably won’t even cover your bail.
The USCCA gives you one number to call from jail and the operator/councilor stays with you from bail until the trial is over.
Think hard on it.
Las Vegas Craig
Stay Safe
And then there is this.
I got 13 emails in 7 days from USCCA. Few have any valuable information. Some rehash the same old cases about somebody who needed the insurance. They are all just trying to sell the insurance or get me to visit the web site to sign up for the daily drawing. If they can give away $1000 a day to purchase a handgun, it suggests to me that they have a very high profit margin.
I don’t know what the truth is. I do know that we live in perilous times, with the entirety of the legal system tilted against gun owners.
So how about my readers weigh in on this. Do you have such insurance? Do you think you need it? Are you prepared to finance your defense? Have you compared plans out there to see which one is the best?
On April 24, 2017 at 5:56 am, Tom said:
I have two of these things, 1) Armed Citizen’s Legal Defense Network (ACLDN) and 2) the USCCA one mentioned above.
I learned about ACLDN while taking Massad Ayoob’s MAG-40 class. The USCCA one was kind of accidental, in that I had been a USCCA member mostly for the magazine for years. USCCA several years ago changed their membership to where you had to buy the insurance thing to be a member with the magazine.
I find the USCCA advertising off-putting- it has the feel of a used-car salesman that doesn’t go away even after you buy it. It seems like it’d be good to have, so I keep my USCCA membership half for the magazine and half for the insurance.
However, if this insurance thing seems like a good idea to you, I really recommend that you check out the ACLDN. ACLDN is not an insurance product, it is instead a defense network that includes financial support but also access to other things like private investigators and expert assistance.
I trust Mas Ayoob (he is or was on the ACLDN board) and I also trust the sober and professional tone that I consistently get from ACLDN.
I intend to keep my ACLDN membership as long as possible. I’ll probably keep the USCCA too, and would use both if needed. But, the ACLDN is the one that I really go by.
Something to think about – is an actual insurance product really what you need for self-defense “insurance”? Some of these products are insurance, many are similar to but are not insurance. It’s not a stretch to realize that, following a self-defense incident, your best interests may not align with the insurance company’s, for instance, in a civil case, settling out of court may appear better to the insurance company, or pleading to a lesser charge in a criminal matter may appear that way. This is one of the reasons why ACLDN at least isn’t set up as insurance.
On April 24, 2017 at 12:41 pm, Archer said:
@Tom: I suspect the USCCA “insurance” is not actually insurance; they wouldn’t be able to guarantee coverage if a third-party were providing it.
I believe it’s more of a “cost-sharing” arrangement, like a community “medi-share” plan for medical “insurance”. They look at how many members they have buying in, what their average expenses are, how likely they are to need catastrophic coverage, etc., and divvy up the expense (including building up a “catastrophic” fund, just in case) among everyone accordingly.
I had a friend a while back trying to get a “pre-paid legal” start-up off the ground. Basically the same thing: $20 per month or $200 per year (at the time) and your smaller legal bills are covered and larger ones are split … but it’s not “insurance”, just cost-sharing.
In either case, because it’s not working through a third-party insurance provider, the organization is able to decide exactly what they’re willing to cover and exactly what they’ll charge for it (and generally, as more people buy in, the cost gets more distributed and everyone either pays less or gets more per person).
Without more information, I believe that’s the basic set-up USCCA has going.
On April 24, 2017 at 6:38 pm, Thomas J Crowley said:
My wife’s argument is that if you have insurance covering just a shooting the you may have planned the shooting.
On April 25, 2017 at 11:13 am, Archer said:
@Thomas J Crowley: I hear that argument a lot.
Unfortunately, it’s weak tea. It’s similar to saying that having car insurance — especially full coverage — means you’re planning to drive dangerously and take unnecessary risks on the road. After all, the car is covered, right? And if you were a safe driver, you wouldn’t ever need insurance, right?
Or that having fire coverage on your homeowner’s insurance policy means you’re a closet arsonist.
Or that having a term life insurance policy on yourself and/or your wife (especially your wife) means that you’re suicidal and/or homicidal.
Buying an insurance policy means none of these things, of course. It just means you’re paying a little now to help cover a large, though unlikely, expense that may or may not come at some future time.
I can see where your wife is coming from; an anti-self-defense prosecutor could bring it up as “evidence” against you. But I still think it’s a weak argument, and not difficult to refute in terms a jury will relate to.