Given the usual flood of news, on everything from vaccinations to WaterGaetz, it’s easy to overlook what’s happening right now in federal bankruptcy court, where the nation’s top gun-fetishist group has taken refuge in a desperate bid to stay in business.
Seriously, have you heard what’s going on with the NRA? How humiliating it must be to have its veneer of invincibility stripped away, to be exposed (big surprise) as a font of corruption run by grifters who use the so-called sainted Second Amendment as their personal ATM. The NRA has been incorporated in New York since its founding 140 years ago, but now that the state’s Attorney General is alleging massive fraud and seeking to sue it out of existence, the group wants bankruptcy protection and the right to incorporate itself anew down in Texas.
It was just four years ago when the NRA was riding high, having just spent $50 million to get its puppet elected president, and its leader, Wayne LaPierre, was boasting that the bull market for weaponry was better than ever: “This is our historic moment to go on offense and to defeat the forces that have aligned against our freedom once and for all.” Yes indeed. In the summer of 2009, after mass shootings in Ohio and Texas killed 31 people (many mass shootings ago), Trump tweeted: “Republicans and Democrats must come together and get background checks,” but after his puppeteer yanked his strings, he dumped that bright idea.
But today, a new president is going on offense against guns (to the extent that he can, via executive orders), at a time when the NRA is massively distracted by its bid to stay alive. Granted, substantive gun reform still faces high hurdles – as we know, gun-loving red rural states are preposterously over-represented in the U.S. Senate – but it’s great to see the NRA in disarray, after all the damage it has inflicted. And the stuff that’s surfacing during the bankruptcy trial would be hilarious if it were not so contemptible.
There must be an invisible codicil in the Second Amendment which decrees that dues money designed to buttress our “well-Regulated militia” shall be spent instead on big and small personal pleasures – lavish gifts from Neiman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman; Italian Zegna suits for LaPierre; luxurious family trips to places like Lake Como, Reno, Palm Beach and the Bahamas; eight nights at a Four Seasons Hotel for $12,000; chartered private flights; a personal travel consultant, whose price tag was $13.5 million; a $40,000 nest egg for LaPierre’s personal assistant, who used the dues money to pay for (among other fun things) her son’s wedding; and the use of a grateful NRA contractor’s two yachts, named Illusions and Grand Illusion.
LaPierre, as he confessed in a trial deposition, was particularly fond of the yachts. Right after the 20 Sandy Hook schoolchildren were gunned down in 2012, and right after the 14 Parkland high-schoolers were gunned down in 2018, LaPierre fled the country and sailed the seas. He said the yachts were his “security retreat,” and he explained it this way: “I was basically under presidential threat without presidential security in terms of the number of threats I was getting. And this (yacht scene) was the one place that I hope could feel safe, where I remember getting there going, ‘Thank God I’m safe, nobody can get me there.'”
Aw. Where’s my violin?
Or as gun reform leader Shannon Watts tweeted the other day, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good friend with a yacht?”
Even NRA lawyer Gregory Garman knew that the yacht info would look bad; at the start of the bankruptcy trial, he’d warned that some of the stuff coming out in court would be “moderately cringe-worthy.” Indeed, at the very minimum, LaPierre was required to disclose those trips on NRA conflict-of-interest forms. He did not. So, in his deposition, he ate crow: “I believe now that it should have been disclosed. It’s one of the mistakes I’ve made.”
You are welcome to offer your thoughts ‘n’ prayers for the future of the NRA, which may not be well positioned to carry the Second Amendment banner much longer. Perhaps the everyday NRA dues-payers, having been bilked by the NRA’s grifters, will decide that their money is best spent elsewhere; perhaps the bankruptcy court judge will appoint a trustee to run the group’s day-to-day operations, a scenario that Garman calls “a death sentence.”
The big question is whether the NRA’s fate even matters. This is America, after all, and guns are intrinsic to our hyper-violent culture. In December 2012, on the morning after the Sandy Hook massacre, I predicted (an easy prediction) that gun reform would fail in Congress even with 20 kids dead. I wrote, “Dialing back on our gun fetish would be out of character.” And, as the saying goes, character is destiny.