Our friends at The Trace have just published a second article on the doings of Wayne LaPierre which may be the final straw that will break America’s ‘first civil rights’ organization’s back. It’s actually a video of Wayne-o and his wife bagging two elephants in a Botswana preserve during an African safari they took back in 2013.

              The video was produced but never released for a segment of a TV series called ‘Under Wild Skies,’ which was being peddled to various video channels by the same company, Ackerman-McQueen, who did all the PR work for the NRA. 

              The video is disturbing because here’s this poor elephant who walks up to about 50 yards from Wayne-o and after he’s gunned down by a single round, the animal’s still alive because the great white hunter then stands right next to the poor creature and misses several more shots.

              I’m not sure if this video demonstrates anything at all about the issues that are being argued in a Texas bankruptcy court. You can follow the daily proceedings on a website that has been posted courtesy of our friends at Everytown, but I’m not even sure that the testimony being given by various NRA operatives, including Wayne-o himself, changes things all that much.

              What has changed is the degree to which the NRA can count on its membership to continue supporting gun ‘rights’ with their wallets and their bank checks.  In 2018, which was before the veritable sh*t hit the veritable fan, the NRA collected $170,391,374 in membership dues. In 2019, this number dropped to $112,969,564.  How do you stay in business when you are a membership organization, and the members decide to stop sending you money by as much as one-third? Duhhh, you don’t.

              The NRA wouldn’t be having a problem in bankruptcy court if it was financially on the ropes because revenues showed such a big drop. Companies go bankrupt all the time when they lose customers and hence, lose sales. The 45^Th President of the United States is an expert at starting ventures which don’t maintain initial revenues and then go bust.

              The NRA’s bankruptcy, on the other hand, is not so much a function of diminishing revenue as it’s the result of all kinds of questionable expenditures, in particular, annual compensation for the organization’s top dogs. The last year that the NRA operated in the black was 2015. Since then, from 2016 through 2019, they have lost nearly 80 million bucks.

              Meanwhile, in 2016, the total compensation for what the IRS refers to as: “current officers, directors, trustees and key employees” was $10.3 million, in 2019 after losing 80 million over the previous four years, total payments made to the top dogs was $15 million, an increase of 50 percent!

              Over that same four-year period, Wayne-o’s cash compensations went up from $1,422,339 to $1,884,707. So, membership revenues dropped by one-third over the same period that Wayne-o’s salary increased by the same amount. That’s how you compensate a CEO? The more the company loses, the more he gets paid?

              I’m not sure, by the way, how much of this entire mess at the NRA is or isn’t due to the superb reportage by The Trace’s Mike Spies, whose initial article on all the financial goings-on and flimflams appeared the exact, same week that Oliver North announced he was stepping down as NRA President, having only served for one year.

              What evidently caused this shakeup was a conflict between Wayne-o and the PR firm that produced the African safari video, a conflict which has resulted in not one, but two messy lawsuits between the NRA and Ackerman-McQueen.

              I’m not saying that the reportage by Mike Spies is what brought the issues of financial management and all kinds of crazy expenditures (like Wayne-o’s $40,000 Zegna wardrobe) to a head. I’m saying that Mike’s 2019 story was so well done that it was co-published in The New Yorker Magazine.

              Remember Frances Fitzgerald’s ‘Fire in the Lake’ New Yorker article which set off the national debate about Viet Nam? Maybe the work by Mike Spies on the NRA will set off the national debate about guns.