Guns, Lies, and Corruption: The Crazy Story of the National Rifle Association of America

Founded just six years after the end of the american civil war, the main objective of the NRA was “to better train soldiers for future war conflicts through competitions of skill in handling the rifle”, explains the journalist. Soon after it would become a club of gun lovers, later in a giant against regulation, and today this organization, closely linked to the Republican Party and known for having had the emblematic actor as president Charlton Heston, faces the most decisive moment of her career, after being accused of diverting 64 million dollars in three years.

Last January, the NRA tried to file for bankruptcy to re-found itself in the state of Texas, one of its bastions, something that justice has denied but that could still appeal. In any case, “it’s going to be a much weaker organization,” Smyth believes.

In a country where they are produced 106 daily deaths from firearms on averageWith 43,500 deaths (including suicides) and 611 mass shootings last year alone, the 2018 shooting at a Parkland school did not pass as just another. “The survivors and their families organized the campaign March for our lives, which started in Washington and spread to other states.

“The NRA had never faced so much support for gun control, so they decided they had to fight back, have more visibility,” says Symith. That was the reason why they asked Oliver North, former colonel indicted in the 1980s for selling weapons to Iran to finance the contras of Nicaragua, who assumed the presidency, an honorary position. “North is a controversial guy, he’s been in combat, he’s a strong voice, but he turns out to be a straight guy and in September 2018 he starts looking at the ledgers and sees things he doesn’t like and, for six months, asks what’s going on. In April 2019, the Wall Street Journal explained that North had denounced Wayne LaPierre (executive vice president) for embezzlement at a concert in Indianapolis, which serves as the starting point for their great annual meeting. That is what unleashes hell, “says the writer.

By then, New York Attorney General Letitia James, had already begun to seek documentation from the NRA, in which unexcused trips to the Bahamas on private jets worth $ 250,000, bills for $ 200,000 for suits and other questionable uses of funds were discovered. “With these documents a case for personal enrichment is built. The complaint also establishes that the NRA looked the other way,” adds Smyth.

It was in August 2020 when James filed the lawsuit with which he claims dissolve the organization for continued irregularities and fraud. It is estimated that 64 million dollars (53 million euros) were diverted in three years. Faced with this accusation, LaPierre has attempted to declare the NRA bankrupt, without the approval of its board, to re-found itself in Texas. However, federal judge Harlin Hale has rejected his request, assessing that he has financial possibilities and that LaPierre “has not requested bankruptcy in good faith”, a ruling that the group can still appeal. EL ESPAÑOL has contacted the National Rifle Association but has received no response.

Opposition to regulation

The NRA has entered a crisis at a time when the need to enforce certain regulations is also politically raised, after the high rates of violence in 2020. President Joe Biden has promoted six unambitious decrees to, among other reforms, limit the circulation of homemade weapons, and has announced the intention to approve in the Senate the ban on assault rifles, something that has been received as a real affront, although has not advanced.

However, despite popular belief stemming from his campaigns, in the NRA’s first fifty years there was no opposition to gun control. With the 1920s, “came the prohibition of alcohol, gangsters, bank robbers, and in 1934 the NRA supported the first law promoting control; in 1968 it passed a kind of balancing test that sought to balance the rights of those who had weapons and public safety. But in 1977, after the Cincinnati riots, he bet on something he called Unyielding & Absolutist: Basically, it stopped committing to any control, stating that what was being sought was disarmament and that disarmament led to genocide, which is a fabrication, “Smyth argues.

The pressure group is immersed in an attempt to rewrite that past in order to strengthen its narrative. In Smyth’s words, “The last eight years have also invented that they are the oldest civil rights organization in the US. They claim they supported the use of the Second amendment so that the slaves could access weapons and thus fight against the Ku Klux Klan. Not a word is true. They were busy with their rifle competitions in Queens. No white armed blacks against the KKK. What did happen is that General Grant sent troops south. The NRA supported the measure and its most prominent member wrote editorials in military magazines, but they had no other role in the matter. “

Five million members

The NRA currently claims to have more than five million members and in recent years has intensified its relationship with the Republican Party. Smyth explains that “no one from the NRA ever spoke at any convention until 2016 in Cleveland, where he appeared Chris Cox, Head of lobby. It is not that it was not part of all this, but it was not until the arrival of Trump that it has become something intimately linked to the Republicans, and It is not so much that the Republican Party has moved toward the NRA as that the NRA has moved toward the Party.. This is how they have been unable to act when demonstrating that other part of the Republicans, much more radical, in which they are – for example – the followers of Qanon “.

Reputation crisis

But today the right does not seem to need the organization, “in fact in the last elections you did not hear much about them,” Smyth points out. In this financial mess and reputation crisis, the NRA may not survive as we know it but, for the writer, “it has already achieved the important thing: it has changed the way in which American society looks at guns.”

Furthermore, “the opposition to gun control, through its propaganda, is the glue that binds the Republican Party: everyone agrees on total deregulation, be it Trump, Mitch McConnell o Ted Cruz, and the worst is the cowardice of the Democrats. There is no plan, nothing at all “, fires the writer, despite the timid reforms announced in recent months. It only remains to wait for the next movement for the survival of the great lobby after 150 years of defense of arms.

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