Since I don’t get a ballot, I didn’t realize that Sandy Froman, current NRA President, was up for re-election this year. Yes, I read Dave Hardy’s post, but somehow I didn’t connect the dots at the time. I only picked it up when Sebastian said he was excited to read she is an NFA collection.

Let me sum up Sandy: She rocks. Yes, I could be a little more formal about my endorsement, but “rocks” really does the job just as well.

She is an NFA collector – a serious one. She grew up in the Bay Area – yes, the home of the San Fran Gun Ban – and went on to be one hell of a pro-gun force. Why was she drawn to this issue coming from such a liberal area with no exposure to guns growing up? Easy, it literally knocked on her door.

The noise was coming from downstairs—an indistinct scraping sound. Sandra Froman, startled awake, got out of bed to investigate.She was 32, recently divorced and living alone in the Hollywood Hills north of Los Angeles. An attorney at one of L.A.’s most prestigious law firms, Loeb and Loeb, she had risen quickly to partner on the strength of her trial work. She was confident, successful and financially secure. But she wasn’t prepared for what happened that summer night in 1981.

She followed the sound to the front door, stood on tiptoe and peered through the peephole. A man was bent over the doorknob, trying to jimmy the lock with a screwdriver. Heart racing, Froman banged on the door with both fists, screaming for him to leave. The man paused, straightened up, stooped again, and casually went back to work.

“I freaked out,” Froman, ’71, recalled in a recent interview. “I’m thinking, ‘He’s going to get in here and what am I going to do? What is he going to do?’”

She phoned her neighbors but nobody answered. She considered running out the back door, but realized she had no place to go. Panicked, she called the police. “The dispatcher told me to go upstairs and lock myself in the bedroom,” Froman says. “Problem was, I didn’t have a lock on the door.” She went upstairs anyway, turned on all the lights, blared the stereo, and opened the windows to attract as much attention as possible. When the police showed up a few minutes later, the would-be intruder was gone.

“I was scared and angry. And the more I thought about it, the angrier I got,” Froman says. “I had allowed myself to get into a situation without any good options, and that made me mad.”

The next day she drove to a gun shop in North Hollywood. “I went in and said, ‘I want to buy a gun.’ The guy behind the counter says, ‘What kind of a gun are you looking for?’ I said, ‘Any kind.’ He looked me over, this tiny little woman who obviously has no idea what she’s doing, and suggested I take a gun safety course.”

Near the end of the safety course that weekend at a local shooting range, Froman took her first pulls of a trigger—and filled the target with bullet holes. She smiles at the memory and hunches her shoulders in a “who knew?” gesture. “I was a good shot.”

Two weeks later, she was the proud owner of a Colt M 1911 pistol, and a new attitude. “Buying that gun and becoming competent with it gave me confidence that I could defend myself,” she says.

She has lived what we hope we never have to. She was lucky, no doubt. Thank goodness she came to our side instead of the other. Why is that you ask? Well, because she’s a Stanford and Harvard Law graduate. She’s an incredible representative for gun owners.

One of my favorite stories from her life is how she decided to go to law school.

In college her boyfriend broke a date to take the law school admissions test. She decided to give the test a try.”I said if he’s going to take it, I’m going to take it. I did really, really well,” Froman said with a smile. “He did OK. He went to UCLA; I went to Harvard.”

I LOVE that. That is so Sandy.

She has other connections to the gun issue that many may not realize.

Froman took a leave of absence from Loeb and Loeb in 1983 to teach at Santa Clara Law School. On a trip to the Bay Area for her first interview at the school, she had her first date with Bruce Nelson, an undercover narcotics officer and an accomplished pistol shooter. “Bruce used to tell people I was the only woman he’d ever met who bought more gun magazines than he did,” says Froman, chuckling. They married in 1984 and moved to a 16-acre property north of Tucson that abuts the Coronado National Forest.Nelson started a custom holster-making business and Froman went to work for Bilby & Shoenhair, which later merged with Arizona’s largest firm, Snell & Wilmer. Rusing, who was part of the hiring team at Bilby & Schoenhair, recalled that Froman’s résumé listed her hobbies: “weight lifting, wine collecting and shooting big-bore handguns. I remember thinking, ‘This is our gal.’”

She and Nelson became active NRA leaders, and Froman joined the NRA board of directors in 1992. “That was a great time in my life,” she recalls. And then one afternoon in 1995 it all changed. Fit and robust, Bruce Nelson collapsed on the living room floor, stricken by a massive blood clot in a lung. The rural home he and Froman had cherished suddenly became a liability—it took paramedics 30 minutes to arrive. By then, Nelson was dead. He was 47.

I just can’t even imagine that pain. But you know, I give her credit. Not only did she channel her energy and put it to great use helping us as an advocate, but she used that experience in her role as spokeswoman.

I don’t know how many of you watched the various debates in the media during the time of the sunset of the AWB. If you did, you may have seen Sandy. If you actually listened to the debates, you would notice that she used it as a credential to our advantage. See, they could bring on the politically appointed police chiefs of the big cities to talk about the law enforcement perspective, but Sandy shot back by prefacing her argument with, “As a law enforcement widow…”

I wish I had captured the debate I was watching on tape. They couldn’t come after her anymore as law enforcement’s foe. If she had just gotten up and said she knew rank and file cops didn’t support this, they would have argued with her until the end of the segment. But as a law enforcement widow, they couldn’t. My response was simple. “Damn. She’s good.”

I’ll admit, I actually have had the pleasure of meeting Sandy. She hands down deserves your vote. It’s not just that she’s a nice person, though she is. It’s not that she’s a hunter, though she does that quite well, too. It’s not that she’s a self defense advocate, though she did get that hard lesson as her kick in the rear to get a gun. It’s not that she’s a sport shooter, although she does that as well. It’s not even the fact that she’s unique in that even the EBR crowd can get behind her, though her collection probably puts yours to shame. It’s that she really is passionate and does more work for our cause than almost anyone else I know.

Sandy Froman is a voice and face on the NRA Board that we must keep on there. So go vote for her already.

UPDATE: Full endorsement list here.

No obviously related posts.