I just received my annual request from Wayne LaPierre to renew my membership in the Golden Eagles program, which means I’m expected to send him a nice, big check. I’m already a Patriot Life Member – Benefactor Level and a Defender of Freedom, two other accolades which demonstrate that I send them big bucks.

              Why do I keep shelling out dough for my friends in Fairfax to piss away on various pro-gun schemes? Because I’m a gun nut, remember?  That’s what gun nuts do. They go to gun shows. They hang out with other gun nuts. They get letters from Wayne-o asking for more dough.

              I also give the Brady Campaign and Everytown $1,200 a year each and donate that much or more to the Wilderness Fund, the National Parks Conservancy and a couple of other tree-hugging outfits as well. I like to be inside the tent pissing out – on both sides. Anyway, back to Wayne-o and the NRA.

              So, Wayne’s put up a statement on the NRA website to let all the members know that he’s not going away or backing down – at least as of today. It’s a typical effort to remind the faithful that ol’ Wayne-o’s out there doing everything he can to protect our ‘rights’ to own and even walk around with our guns.

              There’s only one little problem with what he says, namely, it’s what he didn’t say which is more important than what he actually said. Because although Judge Hale gave the NRA another shot at bringing a Chapter 11 filing into his courtroom, contrary to what Wayne-o says, the judge threatened to appoint a court trustee to manage the filing. And Wayne-o needs a court-appointed trustee to take over his organization like he needs a hole in his head.

              Want to read a remarkable document about this case?  Try the 700 paragraph-long complaint filed by New York State’s Attorney General which found that Wayne-o and other NRA executives engaged in what is referred to as ‘pass-through’ financial transactions, which is a polite way of accusing the Fairfax bunch of money laundering, which is a not-so-polite way of saying that organizational money (e.g., member dues) were used in ways it shouldn’t have been used.

              How did this little scheme work? Wayne-o and other NRA managers would go out to dinner, sometimes also taking along the wives. And sometimes these fancy dinners, which could roll up a thousand-dollar tab or more, took place at fancy hotels where they were all staying for the night, or maybe a couple of nights.

              When the bill had to be paid, someone pulled out a corporate credit card issued to them by the NRA’s public-relations firm, Ackerman-McQueen. So, an NRA employee paid for a non-business activity with a credit card issued not by his employer, but by a vendor to the NRA who would then include this charge in the monthly invoice submitted to the NRA. Cute, isn’t it?

              Here’s what Wayne-o says about the New York AG’s suit: “Her subsequent pursuit of the NRA has been characterized by many legal experts and constitutional scholars as a gross weaponization of legal and regulatory power.” These must be the same ‘legal experts’ whose attempts to overturn the 2020 election results were thrown out by more than 60 courts. 

              Notwithstanding what I have just said, in my book about the NRA I actually conclude that the organization needs to remain in business and that Wayne-o should also be kept on board. Why do I say this?  Because if you think the NRA is some kind of crazy, misinformed, and extreme gun-rights organization, you haven’t met the competition, okay?

              For example, check out the Virginia Citizens Defense League. They don’t believe in any kind of background checks because they can’t find the phrase ‘background checks’ in the Constitution, so obviously background checks shouldn’t exist. Then there’s Larry Pratt, who runs Gun Owners of America, and believes that we need to be armed until Jesus Christ returns because “until Christ comes again, people will be sinful.”

              Want to deal with those schmucks? Like many of my Gun-control Nation friends, they’re just waiting and hoping the NRA will disappear.

Welcome To The NRA – Kindle edition by Weisser, Michael. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

              This morning I am pleased to announce the publication of the tenth book I have written about guns since I published the first volume in 2013. All my gun books are contributions to the ongoing argument about guns in American society, and I hope they contribute some reality to both sides of the debate.

              The latest volume deals with a topic which has probably been the most contentious of all topics in that debate, namely, the role and activities of America’s ‘oldest civil rights organization,’ a.k.a, the NRA.

              I have been a member of the NRA since 1955 when I joined the NRA-sponsored rifle team which practiced in the shooting range in McFarland Junior High School in – ready? – Washington, D.C. The NRA was then located in downtown DC, and I spent many an afternoon wandering around the gun displays on the group’s first floor of its headquarters building.

              My book, like all my books, is not designed to promote one or the other side of the gun debate. I’ll leave advocacy about guns and gun violence to the advocates. All I’m trying to do in this hundred-page account is explain how and why the NRA found itself in its current legal and financial state, how and why it may not be able to dig itself out of its current hole, and how and why it might try to survive the current storm.

              Why should the NRA try to survive? Because if you think the NRA is extreme, you haven’t met up with the competition that wants to lead the gun ‘rights’ fight. Take the pro-gun group in Virginia, for example, which is pushing a ‘sanctuary city’ movement to prevent the state’s new gun-control rules from taking effect. The group has found a willing ally in Sheriff Scott Jenkins of Culpeper County, who says he will ‘deputize’ any County resident who wants to be exempt from having to obey all state gun laws.

              What if the Proud Boys or the Boogaloo bunch were to start promoting gun ‘rights’ because, after all, the country is on the verge of another civil war? Want to try and sit down with those morons and have an open and honest discussion about guns? Go right ahead.

              I’m not saying that the NRA’s malfeasance should be excused or exonerated in any way. Much of the Trumpian rhetoric about ‘fake news’ and ‘deep state’ conspiracies was first broadcast and spread around by media hucksters like Dana Loesch and Grant Stinchfield on NRA-TV. For that matter, the NRA is certainly not blameless for how the GOP continues to foster the racism, stupidity, and hate-filled rhetoric of people like Majorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz.

              Until the Pandemic shut down public gatherings, the fairgrounds across the Connecticut River from Springfield, MA was the site of a gun show every three months. The show, like most gun shows, is sponsored by the NRA which always has a booth near the entrance so that new people can join.  If I walked up to somebody who had just paid NRA dues, tapped them on the shoulder and asked them if they realized that their newly-joined organization was responsible for a level of gun violence across the river which exceeded gun violence rates in Honduras or South Africa, they would stare at me in disbelief.

              And well they should. The fact that incontrovertible research proves that a gun in the home is much more of a risk than a benefit is all fine and well if you develop or firm up your beliefs about public health by reading the latest evidence-based, scientific research. How many American adults still haven’t been vaccinated against Covid-19?

              The NRA, like the industry it represents, develops its messaging through a very conservative lens. What the organization says about guns is what it believes a majority of Americans also believe. It follows public opinion, not the other way around.

              Too bad that when it came to Trump, the boys from Fairfax got it all wrong.

Kindle Edition: Welcome To The NRA – Kindle edition by Weisser, Michael. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

Print edition coming shortly.

              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.

              Last week the Wall Street Journal ran a story about NRA finances based on the publication of the organization’s 2018 tax return. If this story had appeared before the impeachment thing heated up, it would have been big news. But right now media click-bait is based overwhelmingly on the contest between Schiff and Trump, with an occasional aside about how yet another member of the MAGA team can’t keep his you-know-what in his pants. Anyway, back to the fiscal and financial doings at the home office in Fairfax, VA.

              The headline of the story was what has become the standard gotcha’ narrative employed by Gun-control Nation to throw a little dirt on America’s ‘first civil rights organization,’ namely, that while everything the NRA touches these days seems to  be going to Hell in a handbasket, Wayne LaPierre’s salary and benefits keep going up. Putting together his salary and some other financial perks, Wayne-o’s compensation package increased by 55%. Not bad for a guy who looked like he was going to be jettisoned from the top position earlier this year.

              The WSJ article went on at length about how Wayne-o continues to draw support from the group’s major donors, but the reporter who did the story happened to miss the most important news of all; namely, that revenue from membership dues also went up by more than 30% last year. In 2017 the revenue from dues was $128 million, last year the annual members kicked  in $170 million. Remember when everyone was predicting that the NRA was going down the tubes? Yea, right.

              I have been involved with various advocacy organizations for years, including the usual conservation, wilderness and outdoor groups. All of these organizations play an important role in promoting what I believe to be a public narrative which needs to be heard. Lately I have become invested in supporting the Boone & Crockett Club because they are becoming a strong voice in conservation and the protection of wildlife.

              That being said, most not-for-profit advocacy organizations tend to spend much of the money they receive from donations on themselves. Between salaries, perks and other staff benefits, the average dollar received by these organizations is usually split about 50-50 between the costs of getting their message out to the general public and the costs of standing around the water cooler comparing who got the best Black Friday deal.

              In that regard, the NRA’s balance sheet doesn’t look all that bad. Given the fact that next year’s financials will not contain the hefty $30 million they were spending every year on NRA-TV, if anything, they will probably be back to operating in the black. Where they are still legally vulnerable is the continuing New York State investigation concerning how Wayne, Ollie and a couple of others were double-dipping by drawing paychecks from both the NRA and Ackerman-McQueen. Know what will happen if it turns out that this behavior violated New York State not-for-profit rules?  The NRA will be assessed a financial penalty, the lawyers will negotiate over the amount for a couple of years, and then  they will pay a fine. As my grandfather would say, “det’s det.”

              I was never impressed by the NRA‘s attempt to become yet another alt-right media presence via NRA-TV. Never mind the attempt to promote a political line right out of Breitbart and Alex Jones, the one-minute spiels by Dana Loesch and Grant Stinchfield, along with Colion Noir’s prancing around were just boring to the extreme.

              People join the AAA because it’s something which just goes with owning a car, and it’s not like the annual dues make such a dent out of the household budget each year. I have renewed my AAA membership at least 20 times, I have used their emergency towing service exactly twice.

              It’s not protecting the 2^nd Amendment or the fear of losing their guns which keeps NRA members in the fold. If you’re a gun owner, it’s simply something you do. Think this habit can be broken by digging up some dirt on Wayne LaPierre? Think again.

High Five to Margaret Ayers for sending me the WSJ article.

Along with fundraising appeals from Kamala, Bernie and the Wilderness Fund, yesterday’s mail also included a lovely letter from Wayne-o asking me to join a very exclusive NRA club – the Golden Eagles.  In fact, I have been pre-selected for membership by the NRA Honors Committee, and all I have to do is send back my acceptance form and I’m in. It’s really a great honor and I can’t turn them down.

Oh, I forgot. I also have to send a check or credit card payment for $250.

Now considering the fact that yesterday I walked into Dick’s and Titleist has the nerve to want almost $500 for a new driver which won’t get my tee shot any further down the fairway than the driver I have been using for the last ten years, I can hardly be upset that the boys from Fairfax want half that much to induct me into the Golden Eagles club.

But what I found most interesting about this appeal was how it seems to me that the Fairfax bunch may have actually decided to go back to being what they have always been before a combination of phony Trump flattery, candy-ass video personalities and cockamamie marketing schemes got them to briefly lose their minds.

Let’s start with Trump. No other Presidential candidate had ever made gun ‘rights’ the centerpiece of a national campaign. Schmuck-o Trump never made a speech without reminding everyone that he was infatuated with guns. Now the fact that he never even owned a gun or used a gun – so what?

As for NRA-TV, it was one thing to have bores like Grant Stinchfield droning on and on about the Socialist threat to gun ‘rights,’ but spicing up the video airwaves with Colion Noir prancing around or Dana Loesch giving us the tough, ‘f-me’ look? If that was the best idea cooked up by Ackerman-McQueen to promote gun sales, the agency should have been canned long before they got into a fight with the NRA Home Office over who was going to pay Wayne-o’s clothing bills.

The dumbest move made in Fairfax was when they tried to replace their traditional training approach (and the 100,000+ certified instructors) with an online training and insurance program which went nowhere fast. The trainers (I having been one of them) were the organization’s shock troops. Most trainers engaged in little actual training activities, but they were always the roots which held the grass together and could be counted on to show up in large and noisy numbers every time gun ‘rights’ faced any kind of threat.

Here’s where things stand now. Trump has stopped pushing the 2^nd Amendment at his Nuremburg rallies; NRA-TV is temporarily shut down (although you can watch reruns which are even more boring than the original shows) and last month Wayne-o sent out a letter to all the trainers telling them that he was grateful for their continued support.  This was the very first communication I ever received from the NRA which didn’t ask me to respond by enclosing a credit card number or a check.

When the annual meeting turned into an exercise in the veritable sh*t hitting the veritable fan, I assumed the NRA would respond by ramping up the volume, becoming even more extreme and using the bad news about its management practices as proof that the anti-gun campaign had reached a new and dangerous pitch. But it’s pretty tough to accuse someone like Ollie North of being opposed to private ownership of guns.

On the other hand, North and his supporters may have done the NRA a great service because perhaps without realizing it, their attacks have forced Wayne-o and the remaining leadership to stop pretending that every anti-NRA message is somehow the handiwork of Mike Blomberg, George Soros and their Socialist pals. Nothing would make me happier than to see the NRA get back to its traditional role as a supporter of using guns the way they should be used.