Tombstone, Arizona – -(Ammoland.com)- NRA’s America’s First Freedom magazine for August 2023 featured stories on efforts to “Silence the NRA.”
They made a lot of good points, but there’s more to the story. Of course, in the NRA version, the New York Attorney General’s lawsuit against the NRA and four of its top executives is all just one facet of the wider political attacks on gun rights and gun owners. There is some truth to that position, but it is not the whole truth. Without question the NY AG Letitia James targeted the NRA for political reasons.
What the NRA article doesn’t mention though, is that when James and company started their politically-motivated investigation, they found very real, very serious problems with the way the Association had been doing business. Had the NRA been squeaky clean, as its members have every right to expect them to be, the AG’s investigation would have come up empty, with nothing but specious, unsupportable accusations to show for it. That’s not what happened. Instead of finding a well-run organization with exceptional financial controls and transparency, the NY investigators found a chaotic mess of greed, nepotism, cronyism, and subterfuge.
The fact that the NRA turned out to be a den of self-serving elitists, putting their own desires over the needs of the Association, seriously undermined the Association’s very valid First Amendment case in their suit against Governor Cuomo and NY bureaucrats. The fact that the NRA’s CEO was flying around on private jets (with friends and family – for luxury vacations) at Association expense and spending hundreds of thousands of NRA members’ dollars on his personal wardrobe, unilaterally making multi-million-dollar agreements with good-buddy vendors, while accepting expensive, personal gifts, going on NRA-paid junkets, vacations, and safaris with his wife and other friends and family in tow, all while sidestepping Association Bylaws and policies designed to act as checks on such behaviors, and while being paid millions of dollars a year, totally destroyed his credibility and the credibility of the Association.
For over 30 years, the NRA’s PR firm actively promoted a cult of personality around Wayne LaPierre, effectively making him the face and voice of the NRA. Meanwhile, the same PR company, with a lot of help from legacy media and proponents of gun control, painted the NRA as “the gun lobby,” the representative of all gun owners.
Click the link to read the whole article: Forces Working to Silence Rights Advocates
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