The NRA Doesn't Scare Anyone Right Now—Except the President*
You say you want a cultural shift. How about this? You still can't spell NASCAR without N-R-A, but the NRA is going to have to get along without one of NASCAR's trademark brands. From the Washington Post:
The departure of Richard Childress, a well-known NASCAR team owner based in North Carolina, came after he and then-NRA President Oliver North privately urged the group’s leaders in a letter this year to more carefully review spending decisions under chief executive Wayne LaPierre, particularly legal fees totaling tens of millions of dollars.
In his resignation letter Monday, Childress made no mention of those issues and emphasized that he had chosen to leave the NRA board to focus on his private business.
He said he was resigning from the board and all NRA committees he served on effective immediately, “with great regret and a heavy heart.” Childress wrote that he had “reached the point” where he could no longer fully commit his time to the organization.
The NRA is marinating in its own juices. It turns out that Wayne LaPierre liked to live like an Ottoman emperor on the contributions of the NRA's many sucke...er...members. Oliver North, of all people, got forced out because he tried to rein in LaPierre's extravagance. Board members are quitting right and left. (Childress is the sixth one to quit in the wake of the intramural bloodletting.) NRATV augured in. In addition, in the wake of the El Paso and Dayton massacres, the usual NRA okey-doke isn't working as well as it used to out in the country at large.
At the moment, and this is not to say that the moment may not pass, the NRA can't scare anyone except, apparently, the President* of the United States. From The New York Times:
But after discussions with gun rights advocates during his two-week working vacation in Bedminster, N.J. — including talks with Wayne LaPierre, the chief executive of the National Rifle Association — Mr. Trump’s resolve appears to have substantially softened, and he has reverted to reiterating the conservative positions on the gun issue he has espoused since the 2016 campaign.
Speaking to reporters on Sunday as he departed from New Jersey and returned to Washington, Mr. Trump said he was “very, very concerned with the Second Amendment, more so than most presidents would be,” and added that “people don’t realize we have very strong background checks right now.”
A pillar of custard, this guy.
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