The National Rifle Association is facing collapse. Membership is plummeting. Investigations are opening. And victims of gun violence are holding the organization accountable for deaths all across the country.
All of this came to a head on Saturday during the NRA convention in Indianapolis, where a comedy of errors eventually led to the announcement that the gun groups president, Oliver North, would not seek reelection .
Heres how the NRA got to that point:
A Lack Of Fear Leads To A Lack Of Money
In the immediate aftermath of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting that left 20 children and six adults dead, the NRAs then-president, Wayne LaPierre, blamed violent video games for the shooting and had the gall to suggest that more guns in school would have stopped the shooter.
In the years following, the NRA pushed hard against President Barack Obama s ultimately failed plan to pass meaningful gun legislation. Barack Obama Wants To Unilaterally Strip Your Gun Rights read a threatening headline from an article by the NRAs legal arm in 2016.
Framing Obama as an existential threat to gun rights worked for the NRA. Gun advocates who feared Obama was actively trying to disarm them gave the group enough money to spend more than $400 million to get President Donald Trump elected in 2016 as much as the NRA had spent in every prior election combined going back to 1992, according to the Center for Responsive Politics .
But with Trump elected, there wasnt the same manufactured fear for the NRA to exploit. As Vox pointed out, the group became a victim of its own success: In 2017, it reported a loss of $55 million in income as membership plummeted .
And Trump has not been an especially intelligent ally for the organization, at times openly defying the once-unstoppable lobbying group.
The NRAs slowly declining income, along with the steady increase of mass shootings, led gun control groups to outspend the NRA in the 2018 midterm elections in which Democrats took control of the House.
A Sandy Hook Conspiracist Hidden In The Ranks
After the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 people dead, an NRA official emailed a prominent Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist to call the shooting into question, a HuffPost investigation found .
NRA officer Mark Richardson emailed Wolfgang Halbig, a notorious harasser of Sandy Hook victims parents, a day after the Parkland shooting to falsely suggest there was a second shooter.
Just like [Sandy Hook], there is so much more to this story, Richardson said in an email obtained by HuffPost. Twenty children and six adults were killed during the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. [The Parkland shooter] was not alone. He sent the email from his official NRA email address.
When HuffPost confronted him, Richardson doubled down, calling the possibility of a second shooter a legitimate question.
And while the NRA released a statement calling the conspiracies insane, the group stopped short of saying it would fire Richardson (his work email and phone number are no longer active).
A Massive Report Shows Financial Misdeeds
In a report released by The Trace in conjunction with The New Yorker earlier this month, reporter Mike Spies detailed internal documents and state filings from the NRA that illustrate the depth of the financial chasm its in.
Hundreds of millions of dollars were siphoned off to top executives and vendors, according to the report. And public relations firm Ackerman McQueen, which has worked with the NRA since the 1970s, appears to have its hands tight around the groups neck. Tax filings for 2017 reveal that the NRA paid Ackerman McQueen more than $40 million that year.
The NRA took steps to cut down on spending in 2018 by doing away with free coffee and water coolers for employees at its Virginia headquarters. That was apparently not enough to stop the bleeding.
The groups shady business practices led Marc Owens, former head of the Internal Revenue Service division that oversees tax-exempt enterprises, to tell The Trace that the litany of red flags is just extraordinary and added that without its tax-exempt status, the NRA would likely not survive.
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