Shall Not Be Questioned

Battleswarm Blog thinks:

The fact that the New Yorker is hostile to gun rights and the NRA shouldn’t blind us to the fact that there are very real financial oversight issues that need to be addressed, and the NRA audit committee isn’t far enough away from those problems to address them. The NRA board should bring an outside audit team from one of the big five accounting forms with expertise in nonprofits to do a full, forensic audit of NRA finances going back at least five years.

I would endorse that idea. I’d be wary of anyone in any kind of non-profit that balked at the idea of an independent auditor. But just because its sensible doesn’t mean it will happen. I’ve seen a lot of sensible things fall by the wayside in a non-profit and we don’t have to deal with paid staff who also have opinions, and have a lot more time and incentive to manipulate things to come out in their favor. I’m not holding my breath. Even if it does happen, it’ll probably be kept internal.

Wayne’s extravagance is the new story in the media after the Board members who had dealings with the PR firm were ousted. I don’t feel sorry for Wayne. He invited this on himself by doing stuff like this in the first place. Why were expenses being funneled through Ack-Mac? I can’t see any legit reason for that other than keeping them off NRA’s books. Lie with dogs and don’t be surprised when you get fleas.

But my overriding goal is getting through New York State’s assault on the NRA and excising the parasite PR firm. Everything else is small potatoes. If Wayne wants to say ten Hail Marys and agree to sin no more that’s fine. If Letitia James wants to remove him for his sins, the organization will go on. The great irony in that would be that she’d probably save us a lot of needless infighting. But the most important thing is that the organization go on.

It’s quite educational, and will help understand how things can happen in NRA. John Richardson doesn’t seem to believe the story that Wayne was re-elected unanimously. I agree it’s probably true only as a technicality, if it’s not just pure PR spin. That might be true only after it became apparent to the opposition they did not have the votes. It might have just been a procedural matter they are spinning as unanimity. But of course NRA is going to say that, because they don’t want to signal to the media that NRA is divided and weak, because that will become the narrative.

I’m wondering if the subpoenas issued by the New York Attorney General in her investigation are subject to a FOIA-like request. It would be interesting to know what they are demanding. I’ve suspected this might be a fishing expedition, as much as it is an attempt to find a reason to shut them down. I suspect they’d know they’d have an uphill fight in the courts with a shut down. But a symbolic fine after a fishing expedition where NRA’s dirty laundry can be leaked to Bloomberg’s people and the media? Keeping NRA distracted during the 2020 election cycle? That’s worth a lot to the Dems.

Here’s what we know from today’s Board meeting:

• Carolyn Medows is NRA President
• Charles Cotton, 1st Vice
• Willes Lee, 2nd Vice.
• Wayne is re-elected as EVP.
• John Frazer is re-elected Secretary and General Counsel.
• Craig Spray remains treasurer.
• Chris Cox remains head of ILA.
• Joe DeBergalis is head of General Operations.

I don’t know for sure if Ack-Mac is out, but the Board is still in Executive Session.

Just an aside, I don’t know what the terms of the contracts are, obviously, but while I think NRATV has a number of personalities that ought to be shit canned, and the rest refocused on gun rights, I wouldn’t throw out everything. I might be biased, but I’ve always liked Cam Edward’s show. While I’m no big fan of the Angry Dana strategy, I think it helps to have a woman spokesperson for NRA, and even Angry Dana could be an asset if she could be coached to be less angry and focused on NRA’s mission. So I would say if contracts permit, bring some of those assets in-house and turn them into what they should have been. But keep real metrics. Push what works and throw out what doesn’t work.

The NRA Board is currently handling everything in Executive Session (which means that anyone who isn’t a Board member is out of the room), and there’s little information coming out. People are asking me, with North’s resignation, and Wayne’s defiance in the face of accusations from some Board members, who we should want to come out on top. I don’t honestly know yet. I can say conclusively that I’m in favor of NRA ceasing its relationship with Ackerman-McQueen, and I’m hearing that will happen. Hopefully that will really happen, and Angus McQueen isn’t, as we speak, forming a new corporation (we’ll call it the Venus Group, keeping with the planetary theme, or maybe the Uranus Group would be more appropriate) to continue to relationship under subterfuge.

People keep sending me this entirely too long open letter from a former NRA employee. I always take complaints of former employees with a grain of salt, but there are accusations of behavior in here that no employer should subject their employees to. While I’ve never been one to complain about how much Wayne and Chris make, I don’t think it’s healthy for an organization to have huge disparities between the top salaries and the underlings. Also, when the organization is feeling financial pain, there needs to be the perception that the pain is being shared by those at the top.

I would strongly encourage everyone to read this open letter from Tiffany Johnson. I would put my name on that too. I agree with its sentiment completely. In my mind the most important thing is for NRA to remove the parasite, start getting its house in order, and for the Audit Committee to do its job. I am far less enthusiastic about settling old scores, or refighting old fights. Especially with what’s coming.

Yes, the investigation by the State of New York into NRA’s non-profit status is an existential threat to the NRA. Whatever happens with Wayne, the Board, and Ack-Mac needs to happen quickly, and then we need to start moving forward and putting the past behind us. Things never should have been allowed to get this bad. But I know from serving on elected decision making bodies that change is a difficult thing, and there’s a strong tendency to let lying dogs lie, especially when you know fixing a problem will put the organization through hell and you’re just one of many votes. But NRA’s Board has to overcome that, and start doing its job. A Board position shouldn’t be a reward for loyalty. In fact, if it’s a healthy Board, it’s almost a punishment.

I share the frustrations of the hardline crowd that the GOP is feckless and not willing or able to accomplish anything for us. But what got us here isn’t that we didn’t shout “no” loud enough. We didn’t end up here because we’re not pure enough. That’s always what religious zealots turn to when disaster strikes. It’s a natural human reaction. But it usually leads to doing the wrong thing.

Our opponents are very wealthy and effectively have unlimited monetary resources at their disposal. A commenter pointed out, “Personally I think that anti-gun groups are going for small wedge issues like bump stocks and ghost guns, precisely to drive a wedge into the gun rights movement.”

That’s exactly what they are doing, and they are doing it very well. The trick to quashing gun culture is to extinguish new trends before they have a chance to take hold. This is basically what they did with Machine Guns back in the 30s. If you want to understand why I’m not big on fighting tooth and nail for bump stocks, it’s because it’s an extension of a fight we lost almost a century ago. If we’re honest with ourselves, bump stocks were a way to say, “Ha, ha, your machine gun restrictions are now meaningless.” Well, the powers that be decided they wouldn’t be, and started to take action that would put whole new classes of firearms that were not previously under regulatory threat under regulatory threat.

Ghost guns are another thing entirely. The law has usually (foreign parts counts, etc aside) not touched on people working on their own guns and making their own guns. This has long been something dedicated hobbyists have done. But while 3D printing and computer-controlled milling are not all that new, the technology being within reach of casual hobbyists is new. They need to kill that before it takes hold, and before the more casual gun owners start seeing it as territory that needs to be defended at all cost. Your average person’s rights calculation is, “I don’t do that, don’t know anyone else who does it, so it must not be important.”

If they successfully ended up squashing every new trend, they’d succeed in making the gun culture moribund, which eventually would kill it. That’s exactly what they were doing with machine guns, and I’m sorry my great-grandparents didn’t fight it back then.

We’re here now because Mike Bloomberg dumped more money into the gun control movement than it’s ever seen, and he has been rallying other super-rich to his cause. His people are using that money very intelligently, and understand their own (and our) strengths and weaknesses better than any of our previous opponents.

Here’s an unpleasant truth: when monied elites decide they want something, they usually get their way.

The problem with NRA right now is they are largely stuck on what “worked” before that pressure came to bear. I used worked in quotes because a lot of NRA’s game the past decade or so are probably more like someone wearing garlic around their neck, and convinced it works because they’ve never seen a vampire.

I would also argue that NRA has, for a long time, been withdrawing from a bank that was filled up by a strong grassroots game before Ack-Mac really got their hooks in and convinced the powers that be that overpaying them for video content no one would watch was as good a strategy as any. That bank is now empty, and they need to go in a new direction. I’m sure Ack-Mac will be happy to overcharge NRA for more Angry Dana videos in order to goose membership. But if the membership is disengaged, uninterested, and disorganized it won’t matter. You’d be better off with 3 million passionate, engaged, and organized members than with 5.5 million who are happy to watch Angry Dana, yell at clouds, and otherwise do nothing.

Strong grassroots are the only way NRA is going to defeat Bloomberg. It’s something money won’t buy him. Passionate grass roots will self-organize, but they have to understand how to do it. NRA will not succeeded in outspending Bloomberg. They will not succeed trying to outcompete him in top-down strategies. NRA need to play to our strengths, and our strength is in honest-to-god motivated, passionate grass roots. Even the slickest of PR firms can’t deliver that.