Atlanta, Georgia — For the first time in years, NRA members managed to pass a resolution on to their board.

On Saturday, hundreds of NRA members gathered in a conference room at the National Rifle Association’s 2025 Annual Meeting. They spent the next several hours listening to speeches from the group’s leaders and debating proposals that condemned corruption or demanded more transparency.

That was nothing new. The members’ meeting has featured similar proposals in the seven years since news of former-leader Wayne LaPierre’s misdirection of NRA funds first broke.

What was news is how long it went and what the outcome ended up being.

Last year, leadership cut debate short because they argued everyone needed time to go over and see Donald Trump’s convention speech. This year, Trump declined to speak to the group for the first time in a decade. Despite NRA President Bob Barr implying that was due to a conflict over President Trump’s trip to Rome for the Pope’s funeral, the group actually confirmed Trump wouldn’t be speaking several days before Pope Francis passed.

Either way, Trump did send a video message assuring NRA members he would still deliver for them, which garnered healthy applause in the room.

Plus, nobody attempted to impose a time limit on debate at this year’s meeting. The result was a four-hour affair with a spirited back-and-forth that was well-attended compared to previous years. It was one with a lot more energy than most of the post-pandemic meetings, which benefited NRA reformers.

While most of the people who spoke for and against resolutions were board members themselves, this meeting saw the most regular members stand up to speak since at least the 2019 Indianapolis blow-up. And this meeting had more consequential outcomes than that one, at least as far as resolutions go.

It was the first time in my years covering the meeting that there was enough of a dispute over one resolution that the members ended up needing a tabulated vote, rather than just a voice vote, to see which side won. It’s also the first where a substantive resolution was adopted rather than referred to the board for further deliberation. Even the resolution members referred to the board, a tactic that has nearly always ended in the death of the idea, was only sent that direction after a significant compromise on the details.

All in all, the NRA members considered four resolutions. They voted down two, passed one, and referred another to the board. There seemed to be something of a theme in why members went in the direction they did.

The two resolutions that failed were argued against primarily because opponents viewed them as focused on the past failings of the NRA and its board. One would have expressed condemnation of board members who allegedly colluded with LaPierre to fix who would be on the board. The other called on David Coy, a longtime LaPierre supporter at the center of the controversy over last year’s time-limited meeting, to resign over a long list of grievances.

Meanwhile, the resolutions that made it through the meeting were more forward-looking and focused on reforming the group’s operations. The one that was referred to the board after a roll-call vote sought to implement a strict conflict-of-interest policy. Members sent it to the board because some had concerns that the policy was too strict, but they also asked the board to make the author of the resolution a member of the committee assigned to review the idea.

The resolution that was adopted dealt with future transparency efforts. It told the board to create a website for NRA members that expands access to basic financial and governance reports, such as meeting minutes and the non-profit’s tax filings. It also asked them to figure out how to live-stream board meetings to all NRA members.

That resolution was by far the most popular. It was adopted nearly unanimously, with just six or so members voting against it.

Overall, this was good news for NRA reformers. Just as they’ve likely tipped the balance on the board in their favor after the most recent election, they’ve finally put a transparency resolution over the hump in a members’ meeting.

That’s progress. It’s incremental, but it’s progress. The board meeting on Monday may well deliver more forward movement for reformers, too.

The question remains whether this is all moving fast enough to convince the many defunct members to return to the fold, though.