All posts tagged "nra"

Why we’re gaslit on guns and don’t know It

“Not again,” countless Americans have said for decades after another mass shooting like the one on Wednesday during a mass in church at a Catholic school in Minneapolis.

Some experts say we should focus more on the “red flags” that potential shooters may give off so authorities could have a better chance of stopping them. Others say we need to fortify schools and deploy more armed guards to deter them.

Hardly anyone has said, however, what would work, and has been proven to reduce gun violence in every other advanced nation: to license new gun buyers and require both criminal and mental health background checks, and a permit each time they want to purchase either a semiautomatic weapon or handgun. A handful of states like New Jersey have required all these measures for decades every time to buy a handgun, and no court has ruled these regulations violate the Second Amendment.

Back in 1959, the organization that became Gallup reported 75 percent of Americans would not oppose requiring a permit to buy a gun. Today, few Americans including even gun reform advocates talk about gun permits.

The reason is that Americans on both sides of our ongoing debate over guns have been gaslit and don’t know it.

The National Rifle Association (NRA), whose leadership has since been ousted over their embezzlements, and the gun industry, represented by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, have wielded tens of millions of dollars in election campaigns. But their donations explain only part of their influence. What has shaped how most Americans see guns is less their money than the ideology that they’ve been spreading for years.

“They call it the slippery slope, and all of a sudden everything gets taken away,” President Donald Trump told reporters during his first term, after a weekend of deadly shootings in a Walmart parking lot in El Paso and on a bar-lined street in Dayton, Ohio.

He said it after a phone conversation with the NRA’s now-disgraced leader, Wayne LaPierre. The phrase is based on the idea that gun control is just a step or two away from gun confiscation and then tyranny.

This view is taken like gospel truth among the ranks and leadership of today’s Republican Party, even though it’s a myth.

Gun control has never led to gun confiscation. Communist nations like the Soviet Union and Cuba declared firearms illegal under the threat of imprisonment to compel people to turn them in. Nazi Germany seized few usable firearms from Jews, as one NRA-funded author, Stephen P. Halbrook, admitted, but only in the back pages of his book, Gun Control in the Third Reich, published by a small California think tank.

Democratic countries like the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand have used buyback campaigns to voluntarily compel people to turn in semiautomatic weapons.

Democratic Party leaders and gun reform advocates are partly to blame. Despite their good intentions, they both chose to play it safe, while sidestepping the disinformation long peddled by the gun lobby. Reformers built the strongest movement for “gun sense” that this nation had ever seen after the 2018 Parkland high school shooting, which incorporated surviving students and parents from prior school shootings in Newtown (2012) and Columbine (1999). But what its advocates failed to realize is that the movement for gun rights was even stronger.

Money on its own rarely moves people for very long. But what people may believe tends to resonate more, whether even one word of it is true. There are few more powerful emotions to move groups of people at once like fear. This is where the movement for gun rights and the movement “to make America great again” meet.

Trump has flip-flopped over guns throughout his life, the last time in 2019 over better background checks after the El Paso and Dayton shootings. One doesn’t have to look back very far to find posters in online gun forums doubting his loyalty. But he seems to have proven himself to most pro-gun people today.

Trump along with allies and followers continue to claim that he is the only one keeping tyranny in America at bay — even as his followers, including paramilitaries like the Proud Boys and the National Front and the expanding ranks of federal immigration enforcement agents, gradually impose an armed presence loyal to the president across the land.

This is the kind of outcome that many gun rights activists have long said they feared. Considering how their alleged evidence has always been nothing more than a fairy tale may help explain why Trump and his armed allies and troops are the ones imposing what looks like an emerging tyranny today, while our daily violence from guns goes on.

Frank Smyth is the author of the book The NRA: The Unauthorized History (Flatiron Books).

One radical step will horrify most but it can end our national nightmare

Thursday was the 70th anniversary of the brutal murder of Emmett Till. This week also brought us another mass school shooting, this time in Minneapolis with two children dead and 17 people in the hospital.

There are lessons we must learn from both, as I’ll lay out in a moment.

Immediately following the Minneapolis shooting, another pathetic Republican congressman claimed that the slaughter wasn’t facilitated by guns but by “mental illness, including radical gender ideology.”

A community is grieving, school kids across America are terrified, and after 339 mass shootings since the start of this year you’d think average Americans would finally understand that the horrors of this gun violence have been intentionally inflicted on us by Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court in exchange for cash from the NRA and Russia.

This is a phenomenon as systemic and unique to the United States today as Jim Crow was in the 1950s. The gun control movement needs to learn from the Civil Rights movement.

Back in 1955, young Black people like 14-year-old Emmett Till were routinely murdered by white people all over America, usually with no consequence whatsoever.

Emmett Till was kidnapped by two Mississippi white men on Aug. 28, 1955, brutally tortured, murdered, and his mangled body thrown into the Tallahatchie River. (And the white men who did it, and the white woman who set it off with a lie, never suffered any meaningful consequence.)

His mother, Mamie Bradley, made the extraordinarily brave decision to show her child’s mutilated face with an open-coffin funeral in their hometown, Chicago.

Jet magazine ran a picture you can see here of Emmett, which went viral, invigorating the Civil Rights movement as it horrified the nation. As President Biden said two years ago, honoring the release of the movie Till:

“JET magazine, the Chicago Defender and other Black newspapers were unflinching and brave in sharing the story of Emmett Till and searing it into the nation’s consciousness.”

That picture made real the horrors of white violence against Black people in America for those who were unfamiliar, or just unwilling, to confront it.

We’ve all heard about Newtown and Stoneman Douglas and Las Vegas, but have you ever seen pictures of the bodies mutilated by the .223 caliber bullets that semi-automatic assault weapons like the AR15 fire?

The odds are pretty close to zero. Most Americans have no idea the kind of damage such weapons of war can do to people, particularly children.

But we need to learn. Because pictures really work when it comes to changing public opinion.

In the 1980s, egged on by partisans in the Reagan administration, America’s anti-abortion movement began the practice of holding up graphic, bloody pictures of aborted fetuses as part of their demonstrations and vigils.

Their literature and magazines, and even some of their advertisements, still often carry or allude to these graphic images.

Those in the movement will tell you that the decision in the 1990s to use these kinds of pictures was a turning point, when “abortion became real“ for many Americans, and even advocates of a woman’s right to choose an abortion started using phrases like “legal, safe, and rare.“

Similarly, when the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of 9-year-old “Napalm Girl” Phan Thị Kim Phúc running naked down a rural Vietnamese road after napalm caught her clothes on fire was published in 1972, it helped finally turned the tide on the Vietnam War.

Showing pictures in American media of the result of a mass shooter’s slaughter would be a controversial challenge.

There are legitimate concerns about sensationalizing violence, about morbid curiosity, about warping young minds and triggering PTSD for survivors of violence.

And yet, pictures convey reality in a way that words cannot. One of these days, the parents of children murdered in a school shooting may make the same decision Mamie Till did in 1955.

America’s era of mass shootings kicked off on Aug. 1, 1966 when Charles Whitman murdered his mother and then climbed to the top of the clock tower at the University of Texas and begin shooting.

The vast majority of our mass killings, however, began during the Reagan/Bush administrations following the 1984 San Ysidro, California McDonald’s massacre, the Edmond, Oklahoma Post Office shooting of 1986, and the Luby’s Cafeteria massacre in Killeen, Texas in 1991.

Ronald Reagan’s embrace of the gun lobby, his repeal of modest restrictions like the Brady Bill waiting period, and his rhetoric casting firearms as symbols of “freedom” helped unleash a flood of guns into American society, fueling the explosion of both gun ownership and gun violence that has scarred the nation ever since.

We’ve become familiar with the names of the places, and sometimes the dates, but the horror and pain of the torn and exploded bodies has escaped us.

It’s time for America to confront the reality of gun violence. And all my years working in the senior levels of the advertising industry tell me that a graphic portrayal of the consequences of their products is the greatest fear of America’s weapons manufacturers and the NRA.

We did it with tobacco and drunk driving back in the day, showing pictures of people missing half their jaw or mangled and bloody car wreckage, and it worked.

And now there’s a student-led movement asking states to put a check-box on driver’s licenses with the line:

“In the event that I die from gun violence please publicize the photo of my death. #MyLastShot.”

This isn’t, however, something that should just be tossed off, or thrown up on a webpage.

Leadership from multiple venues in American journalism — print, television, web-based publications — should get together and decide what photos to release with parental permission, how to release them, and under what circumstances it could be done to provide maximum impact and minimum trauma.

But Americans must understand what’s really going on.

A decade ago, President Barack Obama put then-VP Joe Biden in charge of his gun task force, and Biden saw the pictures from school shootings back then.

Here’s how The New York Times quoted Biden:

“‘Jill and I are devastated. The feeling — I just can’t imagine how the families are feeling,’ he said, at times struggling to find the right words.”

Obama himself, after seeing the photos, broke into tears on national television.

And we appear to be tiptoeing up to the edge of doing exactly this. The Washington Post featured an article about what happens when people are shot by assault weapons and included this commentary:

“A Texas Ranger speaks of bullets that ‘disintegrated’ a toddler’s skull.

“This explains the lead poisoning that plagues survivors of the shooting in Sutherland Springs, Tex.; David Colbath, 61, can scarcely stand or use his hands without pain, and 25-year-old Morgan Workman probably can’t have a baby. It explains the evisceration of small bodies such as that of Noah Pozner, 6, murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary, and Peter Wang, 15, killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High.

“The Post examined the way bullets broke inside of them — obliterating Noah’s jaw and Peter’s skull, filling their chests with blood and leaving behind gaping exit wounds.”

But we need to go the next step and show the actual pictures for this truth about the horror of gun violence to become widely known. Doing this will take leadership.

And, of course, there must be a Mamie Bradley: a parent, spouse or other relation willing to allow the photos of their loved one to be used in this way.

In 1996 there was a horrific slaughter in Tasmania, Australia, by a shooter using an AR15-style weapon, culminating a series of mass shootings that had plagued that nation for over a decade.

While the mainstream Australian media generally didn’t publish the photos, they were widely circulated.

As a result the Australian public was so repulsed that within a year semi-automatic weapons in civilian hands were outlawed altogether, strict gun control measures were put into place, and a gun-buyback program went into effect that voluntarily took over 700,000 weapons out of circulation.

And that was with John Howard as Prime Minister — a conservative who was as hard-right as Reagan!

In the first years after the laws took place, firearms-related deaths in Australia fell by well over 40 percent, with suicides dropping by 77 percent. There have only been two mass killings in the 29 years since then.

The year 1996 was Australia’s Emmett Till moment.

America needs ours.

NRA no longer 'human rights group' on Google

Google no longer lists the National Rifle Association as a "human rights group" following a Raw Story article last week that highlighted Google's own search description of the gun rights organization.

Google did not return Raw Story requests for comments about the change, which affects the NRA's prominently placed "knowledge panel" — a Google-generated box containing descriptive and statistical information that appears when someone searches for the group.

"Human rights group” has been listed immediately below the NRA’s name and next to the organization’s logo.

Google spokesperson Colette Garcia previously declined to answer specific questions about her company's description of the NRA, which anti-gun advocates consider complicit in a sharp rise in firearms-related deaths throughout the United States.

Instead, Garcia emailed links to two Google primers on “knowledge panels,” including a 2020 blog item that explains how Google’s “knowledge graph” — a system that “understands facts and information about entities from materials shared across the web, as well as from open source and licensed databases” — populates knowledge panels on notable groups such as the NRA.

Google’s blog item notes that “inaccuracies in the knowledge graph can occasionally happen” and invites feedback from users who may consider something amiss.

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“We analyze feedback like this to understand how any actual inaccuracies got past our systems, so that we can make improvements generally across the knowledge graph overall,” Google’s blog item reads. “We also remove inaccurate facts that come to our attention for violating our policies, especially prioritizing issues relating to public interest topics such as civic, medical, scientific, and historical issues or where there’s a risk of serious and immediate harm.”

The NRA self-identifies in variety of ways: “America's longest-standing civil rights organization,” “foremost defender of Second Amendment rights,” “premier firearms education organization,” “major political force,” winner of “big battles for your gun rights.”

While the NRA occasionally has argued that “self-defense is a basic human right,” such as in a statement from 2008, it does not overtly advertise itself as a human rights group.

The NRA did not return Raw Story's requests for comment.

NRA on Google Google's "knowledge panel" for the National Rifle Association (right side) listed the organization as a "human rights group" until late last week. (Source: Google)

NRA on Google Current'y, Google's "knowledge panel" for the National Rifle Association (right side) does not list the organization as a "human rights group." (Source: Google)

Are gun rights human rights? Google has a surprising answer.

Google “National Rifle Association.”

Search returns describe the gun-rights behemoth in various ways.

“Gun rights advocacy group,” Wikipedia reads.

“An American nonprofit organization which advocates for gun rights,” writes the Library of Congress.

“The largest and most powerful gun rights organization in the United States” that “lobbies against gun control legislation and financially backs lawmakers who have historically not supported increased regulations,” USA Today reports.

None of them refer to the NRA as a “human rights” organization.

Except Google itself.

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There, prominently placed in the upper right corner of the search page, is a “knowledge panel” — a Google-generated box containing descriptive and statistical information about the NRA.

"Human rights group” is listed immediately below the NRA’s name and next to the organization’s logo.

Is this a mistake?

Raw Story asked Google.

Google describes the National Rifle Association as a "human rights group" in a "knowledge panel" is displays for the pro-gun organization. Source: Google

Google spokesperson Colette Garcia declined to answer specific questions, including why Google lists the NRA as a "human rights group” and whether Google, institutionally, considers the NRA to be a "human rights group.” She also did not say whether Google has a corporate position on whether gun rights, in general, are human rights.

Instead, she emailed links to two Google primers on “knowledge panels,” including a 2020 blog item that explains how Google’s “knowledge graph” — a system that “understands facts and information about entities from materials shared across the web, as well as from open source and licensed databases” — populates knowledge panels on notable groups such as the NRA.

Google’s blog item notes that “inaccuracies in the knowledge graph can occasionally happen” and invites feedback from users who may consider something amiss.

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Informed by Raw Story about Google’s knowledge panel for the NRA, representatives for two gun control organizations expressed dismay.

“In no world should the NRA be listed here as a human rights group. In fact, I’d argue they are in direct competition with the work actual human rights organizations are doing to protect the lives of our children and communities,” said Kris Brown, president of Brady, a nonprofit group that advocates against gun violence. “Given the NRA is directly responsible for so many unnecessary deaths, one option might be to list them as a ‘Mass Shooter Defense Fund’ or perhaps, ‘Pro-death advocates.’”

Protesters gather on Dec. 14, 2017, outside of the National Rifle Association headquarters in Fairfax, Va., for a vigil in remembrance of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Conn. Nicole Glass Photography / Shutterstock

Max Steele, a spokesperson for Everytown for Gun Safety, another anti-gun violence organization, accused the NRA of playing “a leading role in building an America where gun violence kills tens of thousands of people a year and is the number one cause of death for children and teens.

Calling the NRA a “human rights” group “is enough to make North Korean propagandists blush,” Steele added.

The NRA, which says it has about 5 million members, did not respond to messages seeking comment.

While the NRA occasionally has argued that “self-defense is a basic human right,” such as in a statement from 2008, it does not overtly advertise itself as a human rights group.

The NRA remains a force in American politics. In May, it endorsed former President Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, and Trump personally accepted the nomination.

“Gun owners must vote,” Trump told NRA members at the organization's annual convention in Dallas. “We want a landslide.”

But in recent years, the NRA’s political power has waned and federal lobbying expenditures have decreased as scandals rocked its leadership ranks and operations.

In February, a civil jury found the NRA and its longtime CEO, Wayne LaPierre, liable for gross financial mismanagement.

The NRA has also been accused of illegal political coordination and experienced high-profile infighting.

U.S. Surgeon General Vivak Murthy on Tuesday declared gun violence a public health emergency. He advocated for a suite of new gun laws and restrictions directly opposed to the NRA’s pro-gun agenda, including a ban on automatic rifles, universal background checks for people seeking to buy guns and tighter regulations for the gun manufacturing industry.

In the United States, deaths by firearms have risen sharply during the past decade, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data compiled by nonpartisan research organization USA Facts.

Children are among those most adversely affected, with gun deaths rising 50 percent between 2019 and 2021, the Pew Research Center reported.

Clarence Thomas has a bump-stock death wish for Americans

In 2017, a man with bump stock-enhanced rifles perched himself at a Las Vegas hotel window, trained his crosshairs on thousands of concert-goers below and murdered 60 people. He permanently maimed hundreds more, concluding his carnage within a matter of minutes.

After the slaughter, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives issued a rule classifying bump stocks as “machine guns” under 26 U.S.C. § 5845(b), and banned their sale.

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Last week, Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the radicalized 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, overturned the ban, claiming that, “a semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock is not a machine gun,” given that “it cannot fire more than one shot by a single function of the trigger.”

Thomas substituted the specialized expertise of the federal agency with his own personal opinion, deciding that a bump stock leaves the trigger finger in place after the shooter fires, but then the gun’s recoil continues to hammer the trigger so it’s not technically “a single function of the trigger,” even though the rapid-fire deadly results are the same.

Thomas sentences Americans to mass slaughter

Thomas’ callous disregard for life — playing word games to legalize bump stocks that function like machine guns — is hard to stomach. As the ATF argued, legalizing bump stocks simply because the trigger moves back and forth “exalts artifice above reality” to evade one of the few still-standing gun regulations under the 1934 National Firearms Act.

Thomas needs to tell the families who have lost loved ones to mass shootings — so many are children — how an automatic recoil hammering the trigger makes any difference to the permanent, gaping hole left in their lives.

AR-15 AR-15 with bump stock recovered by NYPD (Photo: NYPD)

Thomas is presumably safe from his own death warrant, because, unlike most Americans, he travels in the rarefied safety of a billionaire’s private jet.

When he’s not on Harlan Crow’s aircraft, Thomas and his insurrectionist wife, Virginia, travel in a tricked out RV — complete with a bulletproof Detroit diesel engine financed by another wealthy patron.

NRA-backed Republicans bastardize the 2nd Amendment

The 2nd Amendment does not say what the NRA, Thomas, and right wing radicals on the Supreme Court claim it does. The 2nd Amendment states, in its entirety:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

This Amendment was ratified in 1791 following a Constitutional Convention four years earlier, over which then-General George Washington presided as Convention president.

Washington had just lived and fought through the British occupation, and the colonies’ need to form a defensive militia was fresh in his mind. The right to bear arms was a grave matter of collective defense.

But nowhere does the 2nd Amendment state that citizens have the right to bear arms against each other or their neighbors.

Many Constitutional scholars, including the former Chief Justice Warren Burger, interpret the right to bear arms as written, i.e., as part and parcel of a well regulated militia — no more, no less. However, putative originalists on the Court, who otherwise claim to honor the original language of the Constitution, have all but deleted the “well regulated militia” language right out of existence.

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In 2008, in Heller, conservatives on the Supreme Court declared for the first time that the Second Amendment “protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.” Conservatives on the Court decided that the militia language in the 2nd Amendment may have announced a purpose for the 2nd Amendment, but that the right of individual gun ownership was not limited to that purpose.

In 2022, expanding Heller further, Justice Thomas wrote the shameful Bruen decision to overturn New York’s concealed carry law. In Thomas’ view, an individual’s interest in carrying a concealed gun outweighs the government’s interest in reducing gun deaths.

Thomas held that New York state’s concealed carry law, requiring a person to “demonstrate a special need for self-protection” in order to carry a gun into public arenas, public transit, churches and concerts, prevented “law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms in public.”

Shady pro-gun results driven by shady pro-gun ‘research’

Turns out that multiple, federal pro-gun decisions have relied on “independent” gun research collected and presented by a single researcher, William English, who is anything but independent.

The New York Times recently reported that Dr. English, an economist at Georgetown University, has peddled NRA-backed research while refusing to disclose who funds his work. English’s research ostensibly backs conservatives’ claim that most gun owners don’t use their guns offensively; rather, most gun owners use them in self-defense.

Reviewing his survey instruments, however, other researchers say English’s surveys employ deliberately ambiguous wording, written to elicit answers that overstate the degree to which guns are used in self-defense. Equally problematic, his research results lack formal peer review.

There’s nothing independent about English’s questionable “research” — the New York Times reports that it has been mostly driven by litigation “backed with millions of dollars in dark money flowing through nonprofits that often exist only on paper.”

Clarence Thomas’ gun fetish: comical if it weren’t so dangerous

Justice Thomas paved the way for last week’s bump stock endorsement with his ridiculous 2022 Bruen opinion.

In Bruen, Thomas swept away all modern gun restrictions that cannot be tied to an “historical antecedent,” meaning, if a similar gun law like concealed carry didn’t exist hundreds of years ago, we can’t have it now. Never mind that in 1790 it was physically impossible to shove a bayonet, infantry rifle or musket down one’s pants and still walk.

Striking modern gun restrictions because they didn’t exist 250 years ago is as logical as outlawing electric cars because the founders didn’t drive them. Like the Dobbs decision overturning constitutional protection for abortion, Bruen and the bump stock ruling represent dangerous sleights of hand by conservatives to support their desired legal outcome. Dobbs left women dying in parking lots, just as the bump stock ruling will lead to more deaths caused by a most lethal kind of firearm — one capable of killing and wounding hundreds of people in a matter of minutes.

Although the court just upheld a gun restriction to protect victims of domestic violence — with Thomas dissenting — NRA-backed justices have been lying about the 2nd Amendment, putting all of us at risk, since at least 2008.

May bump stocks be the decision that puts SCOTUS in the crosshairs of American voters, upsetting them enough — to vote! — and make court reform an election priority this November.

Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25 year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.

NRA slashed spending on federal lobbying amid legal troubles

This article originally appeared in OpenSecrets. Sign up for their weekly newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Following years of legal setbacks, internal strife and declining revenue, the National Rifle Association reported spending $540,000 in federal lobbying spending during the first quarter of 2024 — the least amount of money the group has spent at the start of a year since 2009, according to lobbying disclosures reviewed by OpenSecrets. Last year, the preeminent gun rights group spent $2.3 million, a near-record low.

In February, a New York jury found former NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre liable in a civil trial for misusing millions of dollars of the organization’s money to pay for his lavish lifestyle, including exotic getaways and trips on private planes. LaPierre resigned as executive vice president and CEO on the eve of the trial.

Five years ago, the New York State Attorney General’s office launched a probe into the nonprofit after an investigation by The Trace, a newsroom that reports on gun issues, exposed self-dealing at the organization.

As the NRA’s legal troubles mounted, NRA revenue fell 40% from $352.6 million in 2018 to $211.3 million in 2022, the lowest in ten years, tax records show. At the same time, the organization nearly doubled the amount of money it spent on legal expenses.

The NRA’s federal lobbying spending peaked at $5.1 million in 2017 but then dropped off to $2.2 million in 2020, a 10-year low as the COVID-19 pandemic brought Washington to a standstill. When President Joe Biden entered office in 2021, the NRA ramped up spending to $4.9 million but quickly cut back to $2.6 million in 2022.

That year, Congress passed the most significant federal gun safety legislation in decades after a gunman killed 19 fourth-graders and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Signed into law on June 25, 2022, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act expanded background checks, closed loopholes in federal gun laws and funded community-based violence prevention programs and mental health services. Twenty-nine congressional Republicans backed the bill, defying the NRA and other gun advocates.

The NRA also cut back on lobbying in state capitols, OpenSecrets found. Spending by the organization fell nearly 65% from a record-high of $1.3 million in 2020 to $458,000 in 2023 across the 19 states that release meaningful data on lobbying expenditures.

What all this means for the organization as it emerges from the scandals of the last few years remains unclear. The NRA did not respond to requests for comment but longtime watchers of the organization told OpenSecrets that the nonprofit will likely remain a powerful force in American politics, at least in the near future.

Though the NRA is losing revenue, shedding members and spending far less to influence federal policy than in previous years, the NRA remains one of the most powerful and well-funded groups within the gun rights movement. The National Shooting Sports Foundation, the firearm industry’s largest trade association, and the Gun Owners of America are the only gun rights groups that have spent more than the NRA on federal lobbying since 2021. But these groups represent smaller and more niche factions than the 150-year-old NRA, experts said.

“I don’t think there are any groups that are in a position to really build a level of relevance that would rival that of the NRA,” Matt LaCombe, a politics professor at Case Western Reserve University, told OpenSecret. LaCombe is the author of Firepower: How the NRA Turned Gun Owners into a Political Force. “These groups have had opportunities to grow during this period, and they probably have grown at the margins. But the NRA is just so much bigger.”

Robert Spitzer, a political scientist and the author of six books on gun policy, said no other group has managed to attract the same level of support.

“The single most important thing to understand about the NRA in terms of its influence politically is its grassroots base of support,” Spitzer told OpenSecrets. “Its membership is highly motivated and mobilizable, and they will do things in politics to a degree of activism that the typical American does not.”

The NRA also continues to spend about as much on lobbying as all gun control advocates combined, OpenSecrets found. Groups including Everytown for Gun Safety, Sandy Hook Promise, Giffords and the Brady Campaign collectively spent about $2.3 million on federal lobbying in 2023 — roughly as much as the NRA. In the first three months of 2024, gun control advocates outspent the gun rights organization by just $40,000.

Protecting gun rights is to some degree “baked into Republican politics,” LaCombe added. The NRA has been closely aligned with the GOP for nearly 50 years, and it has successfully made opposing and even loosening restrictions on gun ownership a linchpin issue within the party, even though public opinion polls show a majority of Americans support stricter firearm regulations.

Ian Vandewalker, a senior counsel for the Brennan Center’s Elections and Government Program, told OpenSecrets that issues are “so well sorted from a polarization perspective” that the gun lobby doesn’t have to endorse or back a Republican candidate financially to know that they will be reliable on gun rights.

Despite some recent setbacks at the federal level and in left-leaning states, the gun rights movement has been largely successful at loosening state restrictions on gun ownership in most of the Deep South and Midwest. Since Biden entered office in 2021, 13 states have enacted NRA-backed measures eliminating the need to obtain a license to carry a concealed firearm. Earlier this year, Louisiana and South Carolina became the 28th and 29th states, respectively, to repeal permit requirements.

Gun advocates also stymied efforts by Uvalde families last year to raise the minimum age to buy a semi-automatic assault rifle in Texas from 18 to 21 years old. Instead, Texas state lawmakers approved a safety bill requiring an armed guard at every school. They also passed three NRA-backed bills, including a measure to prohibit local governments from requiring gun owners to purchase liability insurance.

And efforts are underway to undercut the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. On May 15, Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) — who helped negotiate the landmark bill — joined 43 of their Republican colleagues on a resolution to strike down a regulation created under the law. The new rule, which Cornyn called a “flagrant distortion of congressional intent,” would expand the number of gun sellers required to run background checks, closing a loophole that allowed tens of thousands of weapons to be sold by unlicensed dealers to buyers who may not have been legally permitted to purchase a firearm.

Days later at its annual convention in Dallas, the NRA endorsed former President Donald Trump, no stranger himself to legal troubles. During his convention speech, Trump vowed to roll back gun safety regulations enacted under Biden.

Ex-NRA head found liable for $5.4 million in civil corruption case: report

The National Rifle Organization and its former head, Wayne LaPierre, have been found liable for mismanagement in a civil corruption case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James, reported ABC News on Friday.

The jury recommended that LaPierre be held for $5.4 million in damages; he has already repaid $1 million in the wake of the corruption scandal, according to reports.

"The New York Attorney General's Office sued the NRA and its senior management in 2020, claiming they misappropriated millions of dollars to fund personal benefits — including private jets, family vacations and luxury goods," reported Meredith Deliso, Aaron Katersky, and Peter Charalambous. "The accusations came at the end of a three-year investigation into the NRA, which is registered in New York as a nonprofit charitable corporation."

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Former NRA president Oliver North, who was most famous for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal in the Reagan administration, testified in the trial, turning on the organization and saying that James' financial allegations against them were accurate.

This comes at a time when the NRA, infamous for its militant organizing on gun policy in the United States, is reportedly already in a state of decline, with membership and funds drying up.

James' victory follows her role in another nationally-watched civil case, where she secured a more than $350 million judgment against former President Donald Trump and his adult sons for business fraud. Trump is still challenging that court judgment.

Busted: Secret recording shows NRA treasurer plotting to conceal Wayne LaPierre's expenses

This story was originally published by ProPublica in partnership with The Trace, a nonprofit news organization covering guns in America.

At a meeting in June 2009, the treasurer of the National Rifle Association worked out a plan to conceal luxury expenses involving its chief executive, Wayne LaPierre, according to audio of the meeting obtained by The Trace and ProPublica. The recording was unknown to New York’s attorney general, who is pursuing the NRA and LaPierre over a range of alleged financial misdeeds. It shows, in real time, the NRA’s treasurer enlisting the group’s longtime public relations firm to obfuscate the extravagant costs.

Captured on tape is talk of LaPierre’s desire to avoid public disclosure of his use of private jets as well as concern about persistent spending at the Beverly Hills Hotel by a PR executive and close LaPierre adviser.

During the meeting, which took place in the Alexandria, Virginia, office of PR firm Ackerman McQueen, executives agreed that Ackerman would issue a Platinum American Express card to Tyler Schropp, the new head of the NRA’s nascent advancement division, which was responsible for bringing in high-dollar contributions from wealthy donors. Ackerman would then cover the card’s charges and bill them back to the NRA under nondescript invoices.

“It’s really the limo services and the hotels that I worry about,” William Winkler, Ackerman’s chief financial officer, said. “He’s going to need it for the hotels especially.”

The use of the Ackerman American Express card, according to a report by New York Attorney General Letitia James’ expert witness on nonprofits, skirted internal controls that existed to ensure proper disclosure and regulatory compliance and to prevent “fraud and abuse” at the nonprofit. As a result, outside of a tiny group of NRA insiders, everyone was in the dark about years of charges by Schropp — who is still the head of the nonprofit’s advancement division — for luxury accommodations, including regular sojourns to the Four Seasons and the Ritz-Carlton. The NRA, in response, said the report was “rife with inadmissible factual narratives, impermissible interpretations and inferences, and improper factual and legal conclusions.”

James’ investigation into the NRA began in 2019, after The Trace, in partnership with The New Yorker, and later with ProPublica, reported on internal accounting documents that indicated a culture of self-dealing at the gun-rights group. In 2020, James sued the NRA and LaPierre, who presided over the organization for three decades, over claims of using nonprofit resources for personal enrichment, luxury travel and bloated contracts for insiders, allegations that the parties deny. The attorney general is seeking financial restitution from the defendants and was until last week petitioning for LaPierre’s removal, which was preempted on Friday when LaPierre announced he would resign at the end of January.

The attorney general’s office was unaware of the audio until it was contacted by The Trace and ProPublica and did not respond to a request for comment.

Ackerman McQueen and Winkler declined to comment. None of the other individuals mentioned in this story responded to requests for comment. The gun-rights group’s attorney, William A. Brewer III, said in an email: “The tape has not been authenticated by the NRA but, if real, we are shocked by its content. The suggested contents would confirm what the NRA has said all along: there were certain ‘insiders’ and vendors who took advantage of the Association. If true, it is an example of a shadowy business arrangement — one that was not brought to the attention of the NRA board.”

In the recording, Woody Phillips, who was the NRA’s top financial official from 1993 to 2018 and is also a defendant in James’ suit, did not say why the unusual credit card arrangement was necessary. But at one point, he indicated that LaPierre — whose public persona was that of a populist firebrand — had concerns about the optics of using NRA funds for travel on a private jet.

“We just have to be careful because Wayne wants to get through this whole year saying he hasn’t used private aircraft,” Phillips said. In that year’s tax filings, he explained, nonprofits, for the first time, would be required to disclose whether they paid for chartered flights for any of the numerous executives and officials listed in the documents. LaPierre, Phillips explained, “just doesn’t want to be seen getting off the plane — anywhere.”

In the opening statement by Phillips’ attorney on Jan. 9, he said that the NRA’s political activities caused “real and serious” security concerns. To that end, his client always “acted in good faith,” he said, and the questionable arrangements Phillips helped devise were not due to “a desire for secrecy” or “to keep information from the NRA and its board. But for confidentiality.”

LaPierre’s attorney spoke of his client’s unflagging devotion to the NRA and dedication to his job. “Was his thinking always right?” he asked. “No. Is perfection a standard for leading a not-for-profit? No.”

James’ complaint states that LaPierre “spent millions of dollars of the NRA’s charitable assets for private plane trips for himself and his family.” In a 2021 deposition, LaPierre said that “NRA security has a policy against me flying commercial because of threats,” and that the requirement had been in place for a decade or more.

In 2009, the NRA did indeed check the box on its tax filing indicating it had used “first-class or chartered travel.” The NRA’s explanation, which the Internal Revenue Service requires nonprofits to provide, was that “charter travel was used on occasions involving multiple events when reduced airline schedules precluded other options.” The description became the NRA’s standard template going forward. Other nonprofits, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, disclose the names of executives who use the luxury service.

At the meeting, according to a source who asked not to be named for fear of professional retribution, Phillips, the NRA’s sole representative in attendance, was joined by Melanie Montgomery, an executive vice president at Ackerman McQueen, and Hillary Farrell, then the company’s chief operating officer. Winkler, from Ackerman, attended via videoconference.

The recording shows how the NRA used Ackerman, which devised the nonprofit’s most prominent messaging campaigns, as an extension of itself. The decadeslong relationship ended in acrimony and lawsuits. After evidence of the NRA’s self-dealing became public in 2019, the NRA and Ackerman accused each other of financial misconduct, with the gun-rights group claiming that the firm filed fraudulent invoices. In 2022, the two entities reached a settlement in which the NRA paid Ackerman $12 million.

In the recording of the 2009 meeting, Winkler said he was told that Phillips wanted to route Schropp’s pricey expenses through Ackerman McQueen, filing them as a “travel job,” which was billed to clients with an invoice that was devoid of detail.

“Well that’s easy,” Winkler announced. “As far as I’m concerned, we can give Tyler an Ackerman Amex. And do it that way.”

“Oh well that’s the way to do it then,” Montgomery replied.

“Yeah,” Phillips agreed. “That’s the easiest way to do it, and for the most part, it’s going to be stuff that Gayle books because it’s stuff with Wayne.” (Gayle Stanford was a consultant who handled LaPierre’s travel.)

“That aspect of it’s very easy,” Winkler said.

Phillips later said of Schropp, “Most of what he’ll do, he’ll do like he does here, where it’ll just be he’ll fill out an expense report for us, he’ll have cards for that too.”

Montgomery responded: “Woody just asked him, ‘Can you do some, you know, that goes through the NRA system, then just your high, well, the stuff you do with Wayne, do through Ackerman.’”

Before Schropp took over the NRA’s advancement division in 2009, he was a vice president at Ackerman, where he worked directly with LaPierre, who recruited him to the NRA. “We were great, great friends and spent a lot of time together,” Schropp later said in a deposition. “And I think we had a mutual respect for each other.”

At the meeting, there was some confusion about whether Schropp already had an Ackerman American Express card. Winkler settled the matter by calling a colleague.

“Does Tyler Schropp have an Amex?” Winkler asked. “Get him one.” He added that it should be a “Platinum.”

Schropp would use the card extensively in the years to come. The lawsuit alleges, “He routinely stayed in suites costing over $1,500 a night.” In addition to the Four Seasons and the Ritz-Carlton, he was partial to the Beverly Hills Hotel and the St. Regis.

In a 2021 deposition, Schropp said that he had the card for “donor privacy reasons, and Wayne LaPierre privacy and security reasons.” Phillips has not addressed the matter in unsealed testimony, while LaPierre, for his part, said in a 2019 deposition, “I was aware that — from our treasurer’s office that the advancement expenses, some of them, were — were under Ackerman McQueen,” a practice that was stopped a decade later, when, he said, the NRA “self-corrected under New York state law.”

At another point during the 2009 meeting, Phillips brought up Tony Makris, an Ackerman executive who worked closely with LaPierre as an adviser. The two were good friends. Makris had served as the actor Charlton Heston’s personal and political adviser while Heston was president of the NRA in the late ’90s and early 2000s.

“In the case of Tony, now that he’s married, does anyone know what he’s doing about the Beverly Hills Hotel?” asked Phillips, who was looking for ways to save cash. “Because that would cut out a lot of this cost if he’s not doing that. I think without it being a special occasion, we’d have a hard time paying for that.”

Makris was responsible for recruiting conservative celebrities, like Tom Selleck, into the NRA’s fold.

Phillips then mentioned Rick Tedrick, the NRA’s managing director of finance, a job he still holds.

“And I know Rick’s going to be watching that,” Phillips continued, “not that he’d say anything or do anything.”

Winkler chimed in: “What you guys need to do is give me the guidance with Tony. Because you know what will happen. It will go full circle, right back to Wayne.”

Gun magazine slams NRA for its financial woes as firearm foes celebrate decline of ‘paper tiger’

The National Rifle Association (NRA) endured a withering attack recently from an unlikely source – the Firearms News – in an opinion piece bashing the organization as “running on empty” as it convenes its annual meeting this weekend in Indianapolis.

The magazine is chock full of ads selling firearms. But that didn’t prevent it from giving voice to Rocky Marshall, a Texas trucking executive and former NRA board director, who warned that the meeting “ironically corresponds to a financial tipping point when the NRA’s cash meter drops to empty.”

And Marshall didn’t stop there with his not-so-friendly fire:

“The annual meeting should be a highlight for all members as a celebration of the second amendment and of the NRA’s long history of supporting firearm programs,” the opinion piece stated. “However, the greatest spectacle will be when the NRA’s financials are reviewed by the Board of Directors (BOD) with the possible anecdote ‘Indy We Have A Problem!’”

“The NRA’s financials are more than just a problem; the actual numbers reflect how the ongoing corruption scandal has decimated the organization,” it continued. “In reviewing the current balance sheet through November 30, 2022, the pending disaster is easy to predict.”

The NRA failed to respond to a request for comment from Raw Story about the Firearms News column. Marshall also couldn’t be reached for comment, and his scathing commentary, replete with data detailing the NRA’s financial condition that he said is extracted from the NRA’s balance-sheet metrics, could not be independently verified.

But the NRA’s financial challenges have been widely confirmed. And advocates in the gun-violence prevention (nee “gun control”) movement are delighting in the NRA’s plight, no longer considering it the existential threat they once did.

“The NRA leadership has been operating so far from its membership that it’s really one of the reasons that the gun-violence prevention has been so successful in the last decade,” Christian Heyne, vice president of policy and programs for Brady, a nonprofit gun violence prevention organization, told Raw Story. “Folks who are members of the NRA know how corrupt and extreme the leaders are and they’re beginning to pressure politicians for action. They’re sick and tired of the violence, too.”

Heyne added that the NRA has become overrated as a force in American politics, focusing its campaign spending on easy red-state races to run up its winning percentage, while losing an increasing number of key races around the nation.

Heyne also noted how Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin distanced himself from the NRA during his 2021 race despite the NRA’s headquarters location in that state.

“For a lot of years, the NRA has been a paper tiger,” Heyne said.

Indeed, the NRA’s federal lobbying expenditures, as well as the overall number of lobbyists it employs, have trended downward of late, according to federal lobbying data compiled by nonpartisan research organization OpenSecrets.

The NRA’s super PAC spent more than $15 million to advocate for or against federal candidates running during the 2022 midterms, but it made many of its biggest bets on losers — U.S. Senate candidates Herschel Walker of Georgia, Mehmet Oz of Pennsylvania, Blake Masters of Arizona and Adam Laxalt of Nevada.

Meanwhile, its direct political action committee contributions to federal political candidates, like its lobbying expenditures, is declining.

Bloomberg reported in November that, “the National Rifle Association’s revenue is continuing to slide as record legal bills consume a growing share of its budget.

“The gun-rights group generated $139.7 million in the first eight months of the year, an internal NRA document reviewed by Bloomberg shows,” the publication wrote. “During the same time period, the NRA’s office of the general counsel spent more than $40 million, the documents showed. The organization’s annual revenue is on track to be the lowest in more than a decade as legal costs for 2022 approach $60 million, set to exceed previous records.”

Peter Ambler, executive director and co-founder of Giffords, another anti-gun violence organization, said the NRA’s financial woes were not a surprise.

“I would not want to be the one holding the gavel at the start of the NRA meeting this year,” Ambler told Raw Story. “The organization is a shell of its former self and a lot of that has to do with its strained credibility with its base.

“There are the perks that the executives there have rewarded themselves with and the obsession with lobbying and influence over the interests of regular gun owners,” Ambler continued. “Consequently, [NRA leaders] have come to rely all the more on their far-right base which is a tiny sliver of the population but has some very extreme views. The NRA has left behind the millions upon millions of Americans who understand that with rights come responsibilities and that firearms ownership and the Second Amendment are not invitations to insurrection.”

Ambler doesn’t have a any further insight into the financial meltdown predicted in Firearms News for the NRA. But he didn’t doubt that the organization’s annual confab would be a colorful scene. It’s a prediction in part made true by the crowd’s booing of former Vice President Mike Pence and the appearance of former President Donald Trump, who on Friday called for arming schoolteachers and promised to be a “loyal friend” to the NRA if he’s once again elected commander-in-chief.

“Walking through an NRA convention these days is an extraterrestrial experience,” Ambler said. “It is a theme park of every right-wing grievance and conspiracy theory that you could concoct, with racism and extremism on display everywhere. You’ve got companies marketing weapons like the AR-15. Whatever happened to responsibility?”

In the Firearms News, it’s hard to imagine a publication less in step with the philosophies of Brady and Giffords, yet the two sides found common ground – for different reasons – with their criticism of NRA leadership.

On April 4, Giffords updated its assessment of the NRA’s “disarray” that it has published since 2019. It now states that “the NRA seems to be teetering on the brink, hemorrhaging both money and support.”

At Firearms News, Marshall was more blunt:

“Insolvency is the last warning sign on the financial road which drives most organizations into bankruptcy.”

Citing calculations from the NRA balance sheet data he obtained, Marshall predicted the NRA could be expected to run out of cash right around the start of today’s meeting.

“Financial planning is never this precise; however, observing a financial wreck approaching and not attempting to avoid the disaster is unfathomable,” Marshall wrote. “The Board of Directors has been warned REPEATEDLY by former Directors, industry advocates, and industry reporters without taking the necessary action to avoid the coming calamity.

He added: “I spoke to a few of the current NRA BOD members who attended the January 2023 meeting, and once again the BOD was not informed of the current financial crisis. With the Indy-23 meeting looming, the NRA is running on fumes and will not finish this race!”

Let's stop pretending like gun advocates care about the Constitution

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