I was thinking a little bit about the NRA, and some of it's initiatives. While there is a some level of defense at the national level for legislative action there is limited protection for individuals that have actually been in self-defense situations. Generally these folks are on their own.

What I would like to see is a national effort to provide legal counsel and/or funds to help defend the good people who have acted within the law. The reason I believe this to be important is that we need to change the general perception of self-defense from some fringe corner case, to a mainstream, business as usual, normal practice.

Obviously there would need to be some review process for choosing which cases would be good candidates for representation. It seems that everyone claims self-defense when charged with anything related to use of force, and it would not do to be defending criminals.

I have looked around and I have seen a few organizations that purport to extend some legal defense to their members, but this strikes me as more of a marketing ploy rather than an activist movement. The people who would join an organization for some sort of self-defense legal insurance are probably the least likely to need it.

I am not sure if this is something that NRA should consider being involved with. The are benefits to a separation between legislative action and legal defense. Depending upon the case and jurisdiction any level of NRA sponsorship might bring some negative bias from a jury. Additionally an NRA endorsement of an individual case might have negative repercussions on future legislative initiatives.

Ideally this would be some kind of 2A/self-defense ACLU. I would imagine that much of the legal research for any given self-defense case would be common across a number of cases there might be economies of scale to a certain extent.

Depending upon funding, such an organization could occupy any part of the spectrum from simply providing funds to aid in the defense, or perhaps actually providing the legal representation. It would also be worthwhile to have some level of public relations capability to counter the negative media bias.

I would welcome any thoughts or comments on this idea.