Jay Mechling

Opinion contributor

I have been a Boy Scout most of my life, from joining the Cub Scouts at age 8 in 1953 to my last summer at a Boy Scout camp on Catalina Island with my younger grandson in the summer of 2010. I love Scouting, but I have not always liked the policies of the Boy Scouts of America.

It was during my first summer at the South Florida Council Boy Scout Camp that I first fired a rifle. I was 13. It was a .22 short caliber, single-shot bolt action rifle, and I was shooting at targets toward earning the Marksmanship merit badge. Today, that merit badge is discontinued, but scouts can earn rifle shooting and shotgun shooting merit badges instead.

On the Boy Scout Camp rifle range, I first learned about the National Rifle Association. The NRA provided the targets, the gun safety materials on the range and marksmanship accomplishment patches apart from the merit badge. An NRA expert also substantially contributed to the Marksmanship merit badge pamphlet I bought and studied toward meeting the requirements for the badge.

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I enjoyed earning that merit badge, and I always enjoyed shooting .22 rifles over subsequent summers as a teen at that Boy Scout camp and many years later accompanying my younger grandson to two different Boy Scout camps in California. I am a pretty good marksman still. There are hunters in my family and, although I am not interested in hunting, I do not oppose the ownership of firearms for recreation and hunting.

I do believe that Scouting should sever its relationship with the NRA, however.

Get NRA lobbying out of Scouting

Since its founding in 1910, the Boy Scouts of America has occupied one side of an iron triangle, with the NRA and the firearms and ammunition industry occupying the other two sides.

The earliest Official Handbook for Boys (1911) had an advertisement by a rifle and ammunition manufacturer, and from the outset the NRA provided the expertise for the firearm safety program within the BSA.

The cozy relationship between the BSA and the NRA continues today, as the firearm use and safety materials for the merit badges at Boy Scout camps still bear the NRA’s fingerprints.

Over the years, with renewed focus on the NRA every time there is a mass shooting, especially school shootings, it is clear to many of us that the NRA is foremost a lobby for the firearms and ammunition industry, using firearms safety as an educational cover for its real mission.

The NRA needs the BSA more than the BSA needs the NRA. The BSA is perfectly capable of creating a firearms safety program of its own without the NRA participation.

I have no doubt that most of the BSA volunteer adult leaders and many of the professional Scouters do care about the character education of the young men and now young women in the organization, but a great many of the decisions are business decisions made by professional Scouters whose livelihood comes from the organization and by those who have some responsibility for the fiscal health of the organization.

I realize that there would likely be a fiscal impact on the BSA as a result of a friendly divorce from the NRA. The creation of a BSA firearm safety program would surely not cost much. What the move puts in jeopardy is the advertising income from the firearms and ammunition industry and the substantial grants the NRA makes to BSA troops.

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The NRA Foundation’s 2016 report does not list the dollar amounts granted to each BSA council, district, troop, school and other non-BSA recipients of their educational grants program, but the total awarded for that year was nearly $335 million.

I have been encouraged that, in the wake of the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, many businesses have concluded that it is bad business to affiliate with the NRA and firearm manufacturers. My hope is that the business-minded leadership of the BSA will see that it is “bad business” for the Scouts to be affiliated with the NRA.

Of course, there is a powerful moral argument for this change in policy. There should be no price on the moral integrity and moral leadership of the BSA when it comes to protecting American young people. I love Scouting. It breaks my heart to know that the BSA in any way empowers an organization that has made the world less safe, not more safe, for the young men and women that Scouting is meant to serve and protect.

I would ask the leadership of the BSA reflect on the 10th point of the Scout Law: “A Scout is Brave.” Be brave and do the right thing.

Jay Mechling is an Eagle Scout (1959) and the author of "On My Honor: The Boy Scouts and the Making of American Youth." He is also a professor emeritus of American Studies at the University of California-Davis.