The National Rifle Association: an overdue day of reckoning?
The National Rifle Association is facing “its worst nightmare: accountability”, said Shannon Watts in USA Today. New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, has just filed a lawsuit to dissolve the non-profit gun rights organisation, branding it “a breeding ground for greed, abuse, and brazen illegality”. The move follows an 18-month investigation that revealed how the NRA’s leaders, especially CEO Wayne LaPierre, had turned the 150-year-old organisation into what James called a “personal piggy bank” while spending less than a tenth of funds on gun safety and training. The New York state-registered charity allegedly used donated money for private jets, Italian suits, African safaris, lavish European holidays, luxury limousine services and family wedding expenses. All told, executives allegedly squandered $64m over three years. The NRA is “perhaps more responsible than any other group or individual for America’s deadly gun-violence epidemic”. It “had this reckoning coming”.
LaPierre’s “rock-star-style” spending looks decidedly “fishy”, said Kevin Williamson in National Review, but the attempt to break up the NRA itself is a “political jihad”. James once called the NRA a “terrorist organisation”, and her lawsuit is “a clear abuse of prosecutorial power”. As much as I “loathe” the NRA, dissolving it would be a mistake, agreed Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post. While states have the right to shut down charities and often do so in the case of “cancer scams and the like”, forcing an established group with an estimated five million members out of business is a different matter. James surely wouldn’t attempt to disband a major pro-choice or civil rights charity over similar financial mismanagement. By all means let’s get rid of LaPierre and his cronies, but let’s stop short of dissolution. In America, “we don’t go after entities because of what they advocate”.
Liberals give the NRA too much credit anyway, said Bill Scher on Politico. We think of the group as the sole obstacle to sensible reform. Yet however the lawsuit turns out, “about 43% of Americans will still live in gun-owning households”. With or without the NRA, a fervent “gun-rights culture” will persist. If Democrats want more stringent gun control, they’ll have to explicitly run on that issue, persuade a critical mass of voters, and get “a mandate for action”.