If the NRA goes away, who will frighten Americans into wasting money?
The National Rifle Association is facing an existential threat from the attorney general of New York, potentially jeopardizing the group’s ability to scare gullible people into giving it money.
This is bad news for any American who cares about seeing other Americans irrationally scared into handing cash over to a group that will use that money to pay for flights on private jets and vacations that give them a break from fearmongering.
On Thursday, the presumably tyrannical attorney general, Letitia James, sued the NRA and sought to have the group dissolved following an 18-month investigation that found NRA executives used millions of dollars “from NRA reserves for personal use, including trips for them and their families to the Bahamas, private jets, expensive meals, and other private travel.”
The lawsuit claims that NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre “spent millions of dollars of the NRA’s charitable assets for private plane trips for himself and his family, including trips for his family when he was not present.”
Per the lawsuit: “In the last five years, LaPierre and his family have visited the Bahamas by private air charter on at least eight occasions, at a cost of more than $500,000 to the NRA. On many of those trips, LaPierre and his family were gifted the use of a 107-foot yacht owned by an NRA vendor.”
Now listen, when you’re running a massive organization that has to constantly find ways to say the best response to school shootings and church slaughters is to buy more guns, you need a little 107-foot yacht time to unwind. That’s just the cost of doing business.
But what matters here is not what LaPierre and others at the NRA did with the money they got by frightening Americans into believing former President Barack Obama was going to eat their children. What matters is this: If the New York lawsuit successfully does away with the NRA, who will Americans rely on to keep a subset of the population so swollen with fear of impending Marxism that money pops out of their pockets?
LaPierre and his NRA colleagues have been triggering spasms of paranoia through large swaths of the country for years, successfully driving home the idea that if you don’t own a gun, someone will kill you, and if you do own a gun, someone will take that gun from you, so you better have another gun to protect the first one, a third gun to protect the second, a fourth to protect the third, etc. … The logical outcome of that thinking is that you will only be safe if you own ALL the guns, which is fine with the NRA and something they probably enjoyed chatting about on the 107-foot yacht.
Without these expert gun peddlers, some of our fellow citizens might hold on to their money and do something ridiculous, like invest in a college fund for their children or donate it to a non-gun-related charity.
Consider the skill with which LaPierre and Co. have ginned up fear.
In 2013, LaPierre told supporters: “We, the American people, clearly see the daunting forces we will undoubtedly face: terrorists, crime, drug gangs, the possibility of Euro-style debt riots, civil unrest or natural disaster.”
Who can forget the Euro-style debt riots of ’13. Thank God I had a gun in my waistband, one in the car, five in the living room and another 17 hidden in strategic locations in the backyard, including one strapped to a squirrel.
Throughout Obama’s presidency, the NRA promised that Obama would take everyone’s guns, melt them down and turn them into bars that could be used to block church doorways during Satan’s return to earth. (Or something to that effect.)
In 2017, LaPierre said: “Right now, we face a gathering of forces that are willing to use violence against us. Think about it. The leftist movement in this country right now is enraged. Among them and behind them are some of the most radical political elements there are. Anarchists, Marxists, communists and the whole rest of the left-wing socialist brigade. For the first time, we also face an enemy utterly dedicated to destroy not just our country, but also Western civilization.”
None of that happened, of course, but a ton of people bought a ton of guns and LaPierre’s family members didn’t have to fly commercial. So everything was fine, except for America’s gun violence epidemic and all the people who got shot.
But now you’ve got some attorney general from New York saying the NRA should go away, seemingly unconcerned about how LaPierre and other executives will get the money they need to travel extensively and buy high-priced water to wash the blood from their hands.
Granted, the lawsuit threatening the NRA’s existence claims LaPierre, the ultimate tough guy with a gun, used NRA money to buy an armored car and a safe house for his family and spent “several million dollars each year” for personal and home security.
And yes, the attorney general’s investigation found that “LaPierre received hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts from another NRA vendor in the form of complimentary safaris in Africa and other world-wide locations for himself and his spouse.”
But somebody has to separate those fear-addicted Americans from their money, right? I suppose if the NRA has to go, I could step in and start concocting stories to scare the tuna salad out of paranoid people. Let’s give it a try.
Just send money. Lots of it.
I’ve got my eye on a 107-foot yacht in the Bahamas.