when I think shooting sport I think more IDPA/IPSC/2 Gun and less High Power or 25m Pistol. with things like high power or some of the older style of target sports still requires great skill but I feel like as with most things the zeitgeist of shooting sports has been shifting since the mid 80s and I think its better that there are multiple competing shooting orgs because it allows for more variety.No, they don't. But they're the only folks who support the, for lack of a better word, traditional target sports. USA Shooting will never take up the mantle of American bullseye, for example. If the NRA goes under without spinning off an organization that supports those things, many shooting sports (that are, I admit, stereotypes of what non-shooters think shooting sports are) would die. I'd hate to see them go.
That's one of the most irritating things to me because it's not true across multiple disciplines. Everybody reinvents the wheel over and over again. Sure, there's always a set of disciplines that share some infrastructure but it's never a majority.
I once read (and I believe it) that shooting is the second most popular participatory sport in the USA after running. The reason shooting isn't thought of that way by the general public is that it's so incredibly varied, fractured, and decentralized. There are people passionately devoted to formal shooting sports that exist at only one club. There are so many different minor disciplines that no one of them achieves the critical mass necessary to be visible to the general public. That means that the uneducated public thinks of shooting as something related to crime, exclusively, and are often shocked when it's reported as part of sports coverage. And that only happens every 4 years at the Olympics.
There was a time when the NRA national championships in particular disciplines actually made the sports pages nationwide. Only centralization under NRA sanction made that possible.
But that hasn't been true for decades so perhaps nothing would be lost if the competitions administration functions of the NRA went away. I would still grieve for the loss of what was, once, a generally acknowledged place where good shooters gather, a place recognized not just by the participants but by the public at large.
Of course, if that happened it might open other opportunities. I actually believe that I can (actually, have) designed a shooting sport for both rifle and pistol that could combine all the skills required in NRA traditional rifle and pistol sport as well as the International disciplines and do it in a fun, easy-to-administer way. I've never bothered to so much as make up a single prototype target because I know that even if the sport I designed caught on, that standard for "catching on" in the shooting world is so low that it would most likely become just another minor oddity in the sport as a whole.
The NRA made it possible, 70 years ago, for almost all formal shooting competitions to be administered by a single entity that could actually make those sports visible to the public. Then that began to fade, they gave up administering the International sports (major mistake, imo), and things have gone downhill from there.
Something of real value was lost.