The NRA rolled out its “Carry Guard” insurance program in 2017 with great fanfare. Now, a mere two years later, not only has Josh Powell’s brainstorm ceased accepting new customers, but existing participants have received notices of cancellation.

Andrew Branca over at The Law of Self-Defense reports on the death rattle of the NRA’s supposedly premier legal self-defense program.

I received two notices today regarding the NRA. One notice was forwarded to me by a member of the NRA Carry Guard program, notifying them that their Carry Guard coverage had been cancelled. The other notice was received by me personally, directly from the NRA, and suggesting the organization is badly in need of re-alignment and lacks capable leadership.

Yes, the cancellation notification came poorly worded, too. Here it is:

Your current Carry Guard policy is being non-renewed. Chubb, the carrier for Carry Guard insurance will no longer be writing policies for this program. Below is a cancellation endorsement for your policy. If you have already cancelled your policy, please disregard this notice. We appreciate your business.

Non-renewed? An interesting choice of words.

The second notice that Mr. Branca alluded to is both sad and pathetic. Again, from the Law of Self-Defense:

Separately, and coincidentally, today I received an email from the NRA, addressed to me personally. Was it about NRA Carry Guard, and the steps that are being taken to make sure that something like this never happens again? Of course not. It’s an invitation to join the NRA wine club. I kid you not…

Branca goes on to savage NRA’s leadership for its apparent priorities.

The priorities of any organization, however, are set and maintained and pursued by leaders. When I see the NRA effectively manage a wine club, and disastrously mismanage a program like Carry Guard, I see an organization plagued with unforgivably bad leadership.

It looks like training encompasses the remaining content on today’s NRA Carry Guard’s website. But even that information seems terribly dated.

In fact, at their “NRA Carry Guard Daily,” the last post comes from nearly a year ago on November 18, 2018. In the story about small guns, it discusses, among others, a “Kel-Tek P32.“

As for the “best on the planet” training they tout…their website doesn’t show a calendar of classes or a way to sign up for them.

Indeed, it looks like my advice for gun owners offered shortly after the NRA announced their new “best on the planet” Carry Guard training proved valuable.

My advice to The People of The Gun: before succumbing to the marketing pitch of this brand new program, sit this one out for a while. Read reviews of Carry Guard’s training here and elsewhere to see if the course merits your time and hard-earned cash. If Carry Guard training proves itself worthy of the title “best on the planet,” word will travel fast. If it turns out to be like the NRA’s “blended learning” debacle introduced a couple of years ago, word of that will travel just as fast.

Interestingly, in the headline article at the NRA’s Carry Guard website Evolution Of NRA Carry Guard Training: An Interview With Jack Carr, published in September 2018, closes with this:

I want to again preface that there are a lot of very experienced instructors out there and we encourage our students to do their research and train with various instructors and schools. We want NRA Carry Guard to be the start of, or a part of, their journey in personal protection and self-reliance. If NRA Carry Guard can help people along that path, then we’ve succeeded.

Sadly, it looks like NRA Carry Guard failed a lot of folks in a variety of ways. At the same time, it shows why doing some due diligence in researching a training company before spending your hard-earned dollars to enroll can prove very worthwhile.