The attorney general for Washington, DC has issued subpoenas for the National Rifle Association and its charitable foundation. The gun rights organization is in the sights of nonprofit regulators, and under fire separately for connections to convicted Russian military intelligence agent Maria Butina -- not to mention the NRA's own internal power struggles, interpersonal petty drama, and financial ruin. Read the rest
The NRA announced that it is firing its longtime advertising firm and spokesperson Dana Loesch. It's the latest episode in the grifter civil war that's engulfed the gun lobby group.
The N.R.A. on Tuesday also severed all business with its estranged advertising firm, Ackerman McQueen, which operates NRATV, the N.R.A.’s live broadcasting media arm, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The New York Times.
While NRATV may continue to air past content, its live broadcasting will end and its on-air personalities — Ackerman employees including Dana Loesch — will no longer be the public faces of the N.R.A. It remained unclear whether the N.R.A. might try to hire some of those employees, but there was no indication it was negotiating to do so.
Earlier reports claimed that Ackerman McQueen had effectively overtaken the NRA, with media provocateurs such as Loesch more prominent than its official leadership despite not even being employed by the organization. Ackerman transformed the lobby group into a highly-optimized grift on gun nuts, who eventually decided they'd had enough of the bullshit.
The Times cites one episode in particular as a wake-up call to NRA leaders about where they'd been led: NRATV and Loesch's portrayal of Thomas the Tank Engine in Klan hoods:
Despite all they've achieved for Trump and Putin, it really does seem like The End is beginning for the National Russian Association. Read the rest
Despite heavy backing from the big gun manufacturers, the NRA is absolutely dependent on small-money donations from ammosexuals and musketfuckers across America, who donate to fund the political operations of the nonprofit. Read the rest
While speaking at the National Rifle Association convention in Indianapolis, Indiana just now, President Donald Trump spoke to pro-weapons advocates about a failed coup against him. Read the rest
As Donald Trump spoke at today's National Rifle Association convention in Indianapolis, someone threw an object on stage.
Also at the NRA convention today, Trump went on a bananas rant about a failed “coup,” and told the audience at the NRA’s “leadership forum” he will “never, ever let [them] down.”
Oh. And Trump also announced the U.S. is withdrawing from a global arms treaty. Read the rest
NRA training instructor and program coordinator Mark Richardson is a veteran of the organization, having worked there since at least 2006; in the immediate aftermath of the Parkland shooting, Richardson used his NRA email account to correspond with Infowars correspondent Wolfgang Halbig, a Sandy Hook denier who has pursued a career of harassing the grieving parents of the children murdered there and accusing them of being "crisis actors" in a "false flag operation" whose children were either imaginary or unharmed. Read the rest
Australian Al Jazeera reporter Rodger Muller infiltrated a meeting between the US National Rifle Association and Australia's far-right/white nationalist party One Nation, where the NRA gave party bosses advice on how to reverse Australia's tough anti-automatic/semi-automatic gun laws (passed after a 1996 mass shooting that killed 35 people) and what to do to deflect public calls for gun control when the next mass shooting happens. Read the rest
While mass-shootings are the most visible and spectacular consequence of America's love affair with guns, the person most likely to shoot you is you (either accidentally or deliberately), with a loved one or a friend (again, either accidentally or deliberately) close behind. Read the rest
Another story came out this week about gun owners letting their NRA memberships lapse.
My gun-owning family — admittedly more my husband than me — falls into that middle ground. He chose to drop his NRA affiliation and his favored gun range when its mandatory NRA membership tipped from practical tips into political advocacy.
Apparently, he is not alone.
The National Rifle Association of America reported $98 million in contributions in 2017, down from nearly $125 million in 2016, according to The Daily Beast, even though it has in President Donald Trump a champion it helped elect. The NRA’s more than $128 million in dues last year was a drop from the $163 million it took in the year before, the report said.
Moreover, there's growing dismay at the decadent lifestyles of NRA leaders amid belt-tightening and layoffs.
The National Rifle Association paid more than $100,000 in personal expenses for an official who is now leading an austerity campaign within the organization, new tax filings show.
The official, Josh Powell, is the NRA’s executive director for general operations. The Trace and Mother Jones reported two weeks ago that Powell, along with the NRA’s new treasurer, Craig Spray, is seeking to impose steep cuts to the gun group’s budget. The effort is so stringent that the NRA did away with free coffee and water coolers in its Fairfax headquarters, causing consternation among NRA staffers.
Even conservative gun owners are getting tired of the NRA's political bullshit and lavish expenses, all paid for on their dime. Read the rest
Cindy Hyde-Smith is a Mississipi GOP Senator is going into a runoff election against her Democratic opponent, Black man named Mike Espy who might end up the first Black Mississipi Senator since 1883; she made headlines last week with a joke about attending a "public hanging." Read the rest
The record on "active shooter" fatalities is fragmented; as a result, the AMA researchers who published Lethality of Civilian Active Shooter Incidents With and Without Semiautomatic Rifles in the United States in JAMA (Sci-Hub Mirror) had to piece together their own data from disparate sources. Read the rest
After decades of Thomas the Tank Engine having female and international characters (typically represented by an actual train design from their home countries) conservatives have finally noticed and gotten angry about it. This is because the latest one is from Kenya.
In response, the NRA posted pictures of the show's trains in Klan hoods.
Dana Loesch: "Nia, will be from Kenya to add ethnic diversity to the show. And -- which that by the way, that’s Where it gets really strange to me because I’ve looked at Thomas and Friends, at their pictures, and I see gray and blue. Am I to understand this entire time that Thomas and his trains were white? Because they all have gray faces."
Forget, for a moment, that Thomas has been coding non-UK nationality into characters since at least the 1980s. What's funny about Loesch's rant here is the Kenyan train is, in fact, the same color as all the others:
Loesch hasn't actually seen what she's mad about. She's imagining a black train and getting frightened and angry.
“Putin’s Russia,” as ABC News reports today, would have featured the Russian President hunting, fishing, and generally being a very macho man outdoors. Read the rest
This is the story that may unravel the presidency of Donald Trump. Read the rest
Politifact ran the math on Gwen Graham's Washington Post story comparing numbers of 2018 US school shooting deaths vs 2018 US armed service combat deaths to-date. Schools have seen more deaths than combat this year. Politifact, however, reminds us that combat-zones should be be more dangerous than public school.
Combat zones should be more dangerous, but are not. How incredibly we are failing.
Graham wrote, "So far this year, more students have been killed in schools than soldiers in combat zones."
On the numbers, she is right. This year at least, within Graham’s stated parameters, exactly twice as many students have died in school shootings than military personnel have died in combat zones.
It is important to know, however, the likelihood of being killed in a combat zone is still vastly higher than it is in a school.
The statement is accurate but needs additional information. That meets our definition of Mostly True.
Earlier this month my daughter, aged 11, spent an afternoon sheltering-in-place at her school. There was an unrelated-to-school incident of domestic violence a block or two away. The sound of shots appropriately sent the school into 'save the kids' mode. My daughter huddled in a corner for 3.5 hours. This is not the school experience our kids should have: wondering when it will be their turn to die. Read the rest
