In the past the NRA has given out membership cards to people who have subscriptions to gun and knife magazines and these are free cards. These cards are not worth anything but being able to count it as a new member. My husband has received 2 of these over the years that he subscribed to some knife magazines. I'm sure that they count these memberships as active members. What is stopping them from doing this again now and saying that they have all these new members, nothing is stopping them. So when they say we have added large numbers of members how many of these are really free memberships. This way they can say, our membership has expanded in a short amount of time. So I take anything the NRA says with a grain of salt. I had my husband look at membership card it was issued in 2000 during the Bush v Gore election year when they were claiming lots of new members. All we can figure is that they bought the mailing list of this magazine and sent out free cards. Then we received another one in 2002. These were plastic with my husbands name and membership number. We subscribed to these magazines before 2000 and for years after 2002.