I was sitting in the living room when my father tossed a copy of the NRA magazine “American Rifleman” towards me and said definitively “You need to apply for this.”
When the magazine landed in my lap, I saw an article about the Youth Education Summit (Y.E.S). It detailed an opportunity for students to spend a week with the National Rifle Association in Washington, D.C. learning about their programs while growing the organization’s leadership skills. My dad was insistent that this was going to be a formative experience that I would appreciate and cherish for the rest of my life. It would turn out that, as much as people my age often don’t want our parents to always be right, he was that time. My father had been a long-time member of the NRA, and prior to my experience at the Y.E.S, it was a passion we had not had an opportunity to bond over. The more I continued to investigate the program, the more I saw that it would both align with and challenge beliefs that I had, and I was excited by the opportunity.
