At The New Yorker, Mike Spies writes that the NRA is not quite the vigorous pressure group under regulatory siege that it portrays itself as. It is a fundraising scheme being looted by its own leadership.
Even as the association has reduced spending on its avowed core mission—gun education, safety, and training—to less than ten per cent of its total budget, it has substantially increased its spending on messaging. The N.R.A. is now mainly a media company, promoting a life style built around loving guns and hating anyone who might take them away. … Marc Owens, who served for ten years as the head of the Internal Revenue Service division that oversees tax-exempt enterprises, recently reviewed these records. “The litany of red flags is just extraordinary,” he said. “The materials reflect one of the broadest arrays of likely transgressions that I’ve ever seen. There is a tremendous range of what appears to be the misuse of assets for the benefit of certain venders and people in control.” Owens added, “Those facts, if confirmed, could lead to the revocation of the N.R.A.’s tax-exempt status”—without which the organization could likely not survive.
As privacy is to Facebook, gun rights are the NRA: never not for sale.
It’s the most systematic of the grifts being run on conservatives and that context defines everything it does. For example, its been rumored that Dana Loesch and Oliver North are actually working for a PR consultancy with long ties to the NRA; Spies has the receipts.