Rules don’t seem to apply all-powerful NRA bosses

Not that Wayne and Marion haven’t earned their scandalous perks and hinky loans and hefty salaries.

With ghastly brilliance, Wayne LaPierre and Marion Hammer have cowed lawmakers in Washington and Tallahassee into embracing utterly implausible explanations for America’s deadly epidemic of gun violence: That gun massacres would stop if the government would only do something about the mentally imbalanced. Or violent video games.

Accepting the Wayne/Marion theses requires political minions to forget that other industrialized nations suffer similar rates of mental illness and video game obsession yet suffer far lower gun homicide rates. But that’s the genius of the NRA’s two most intimidating operatives. They’ve cowed leading Republican politicians in Florida and the U.S. into embracing the gun lobby’s absurdities, even as their constituents are gunned down at schools, concerts, movie theaters, shopping centers, nightclubs, office buildings, on inner-city street corners.

They regard the mayhem and declare that it’s high time we did something about those damn crazy people playing video games. Or they regurgitate the NRA’s other favorite maxim: if more good guys packed heat in more places, they’d exterminate would-be killers with assault rifles and body armor and high capacity magazines.

After shocking mass murderers in Texas and Ohio last month, LaPierre only needed a 30-minute phone conversation with President Trump (Who knew Trump even had a 30-minute attention span?) to convince the president to abandon his promised support for universal background checks. Suddenly, Trump was channeling Wayne: “I have to tell you that it’s a mental problem.” (Presumably, he was referring to the killers’ states of mind, not his own caprice.)

It’s an astounding exercise in political influence; how LaPierre in Washington and Hammer in Tallahassee transform ludicrous NRA talking points into GOP gospel. (In Florida, Hammer turns them into actual laws.) Never mind that last week’s Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 89 percent of American voters support universal background checks before gun purchases. (A solid majority favors an assault weapon ban.) Never mind the chief executives of 145 U.S. companies on Thursday demanded that Congress approve background checks and red flag laws. GOP pols still dare not defy the NRA.

What awesome power. If the tobacco industry had their own LaPierre, surgeons would be smoking Camels in the operating theater. So, of course, Wayne figures he has a right the right to spend $270,000 of the NRA’s much-depleted treasury on high fashion apparel, and, according to the Wall Street Journal, $240,000 on travel to exotic overseas destinations. (The NRA also paid travel expenses for a pricey celebrity hairstylist to attend to his wife, Susan, during their various travels.)

Before an internecine feud divided the NRA hierarchy, Wayne and Susan were pushing for the nearly bankrupt non-profit to buy them a $6 million mansion safely ensconced in a Texas gated development. Apparently, the LaPierre couple feels vulnerable with all those video-game-playing gun-toting crazies on the loose.

Hammer, Wayne’s 80-year-old Florida Mini-Me, lacks such pomposity. Her hairstyle and wardrobe hardly suggest she’s wasting NRA money on high fashion. Nor has the former NRA president and longtime board member demanded that the non-profit buy her a gaudy mansion. She exploits the NRA and the local gun rights operation she runs, the Unified Sportsmen of Florida, for less flamboyant wants.

Unified Sportsmen, which receives most of its funding from the NRA, pays her a

$110,000 salary. Both the Washington Post and the Florida Bulldog, an investigative journalism non-profit, reported last week that Unified Sportsmen has also provided Hammer a series of questionable lowinterest loans. The Post cited tax records that indicate the loans financed the purchase of several relatively modest residential properties in Tallahassee. (None, anyway, that would wow the likes of LaPierre.)

Tax experts suggested that it’s unseemly and perhaps even illegal for a non-profit to dole out sweetheart loans to insiders like Hammer. The loan scandal follows an earlier report from the Florida Bulldog that Hammer had, for years, neglected to file lobbying compensation reports required by state law. This despite receiving

$1.6 million from the NRA between 2005 and 2017 for her lobbying work (in addition to her Unified Sportsmen’s director salary).

Of course, Marion’s sycophants in the Florida Legislature promised to forgive her transgressions if she amended her lobbying reports for last four years.

But you can understand Hammer’s disdain for lobbying regulations. Characterizing the most powerful woman in Tallahassee as a mere lobbyist is like calling an AR-15 a pop gun.

Fred Grimm (@grimm_fred or leogrimm@gmail.com), a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976.