From time to time in the pages of Mensa 76's local newsletter, the Spirit of 76, you'll see an expanded, full-column invitation (with photos) from our Shoot SIG. SIG participants get together the Sunday following each local group monthly meeting, drive way out to a member's ranch, and blast away there for hours, with everything from a potato gun to a H&K M5. A .50-caliber Thompson shows up occasionally. Some SIG members swap, buy and sell shooting irons, and they often help newbies shoot better.
This perfectly legal SIG was organized by several Concealed Handgun Licensing instructors and two or three gun and/or liberty "nuts"; appropriate safety gear is required. Gun safety instruction is also offered — rather forcibly, if you act like you need it. Well-behaved kids are welcome with parent or guardian. And the only owwies recorded are from falling down (but not going "boom" first), twin blisters from having a hot shell eject and land in a (too low) bodice, and taking a bad grip on an S&W 9mm. Nobody sued; interestingly, several shooters promptly offered first-aid kits with which one could have performed surgery in the field. One of the impromptu `paramedics' may have been our RVC, who is a fine shot. It's a blast, literally and figuratively; yet, if the current American Mensa Committee goes any farther down the road it is taking, the Shoot SIG (and any other in which participants might possibly be hurt) will soon be just an exciting, loud and pleasant memory of Mensa.
In her February '04 Bulletin column, current AMC Chairman Jean Becker relates that the recent risk management assessment that AML underwent by an outside agency "identified many serious liability risks that exposed AM to possible catastrophic losses.
| If it "saves" Mensa this way, the current AMC will save a withered husk. |
More than 100 items, big and small, were identified." She mentions SIGs specifically.
I don't see how SIGs can hold any inherent liability for American Mensa. Their meetings and activities aren't official Mensa functions, and no dues money goes to them. With only a few grandfathered exceptions, they aren't allowed to use "Mensa" or the Mensa logo in their names. And you don't have to get Mensa's permission to form one: The only reason you write to the national SIG coordinator is to make sure your SIG gets listed in the Bulletin's Directory issues. However, by having created a National SIGs Liaison Officer, Mensa appears to have arrogated responsibility or authority, by virtue of its assumed oversight — authority it has never had and never will, I hope. All that should be necessary to eliminate any risk that might occur within a SIG's activities is to drop the apparent control function, take nominal payment for advertising it twice a year, exclude official sponsorship of SIG activities at gatherings and, once again, disclaim all responsibility.
SIGs are not, as I said, an official Mensa activity; they're way too freewheeling! They're just loose agglutinations of people with similar interests (or obsessions), who happen to have met through Mensa. They might, however, just as easily have met while indulging their interests outside Mensa. If AMC goes any further toward trying to limit, control or authorize what happens outside Mensa's official purview or toward widening said purview, I'm prepared to view that all squinty-eyed — as I might an approaching, spreading-out gang, or a sloop flying the Jolly Roger. Neither destructive gangstas nor pirates could do a more effective job of plundering the fun out of Mensa than control freaks, elected to a position in which they can "prevent any future problems they perceive."
If AMC continues on its present course, I can see it creating a brand-new Memabership/Renewal Application Form. One agreement new or renewing members would be forced to sign might be a blood oath: "I will not start any SIGs that might even remotely possibly tend to bring harm to participants, property or spectators. I will not join or participate in any such rowdy dinosaur SIGs as may still be hanging on."
If it "saves" Mensa this way, the current AMC will save a withered husk: It will have destroyed what was rich, juicy and full of life and potential, inside. To switch metaphors, it's true that we'll have allowed a wall to be built around us, putatively against all damage and harm. However, simultaneously, we will also have allowed the erection of barriers between our society and our differently adventurous members' natures — our willingness to explore as far as we dare, and afterward to discuss the trek over a drink and a nosh. I am afraid that such construction work would only create a lovely home which, after renting it for a week, creative people leave for a trailer park with less tight-assed neighbors.
To paraphrase Pink Floyd, surely a gifted and talented group of musicians, "Hey — Mensa: Leave those SIGs alone!" More control + more regulation = less freedom to be the protean organization our promotional brochures once proudly — and verifiably — claimed we were.
And how will you ever market the resulting group as "geniuses"?
— Angie Richardson
Fort Worth, Texas