Why the actual fuck is the NRA tax exempt in the place?!?!
Despite all the fervent worship by many, it’s not a fucking religion…
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I think you mean Ackerman & McQueen. I once applied for an internship for them in college. I’m glad I didn’t end up going there!
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If Al Capone had figured out a way to make his “perfectly legitimate business ventures” tax-exempt, he might have never been arrested…
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I don’t know how smart it is to embezzle from a group of gun owners with itchy trigger fingers. Looters will be shot.
I just finished reading the article and one of my takeaways is that promoting paranoia is not actually where the money is.
It seems like leadership is fairly transparently looting the organization. When asked to justify the way they are spending the money they say that promoting paranoia works, but that’s just a cover story. The reality is that promoting paranoia brings is less money than it costs. But the goal of the leadership is to spend the money, because they it is all going to their friends and family members.
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Their ad agency is referred to as Ackerman McQuinn throughout all the stories I’ve read, but it looks like they’re actually called Ackerman McQueen … and are being sued by the NRA!
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You’d think so, and yet I suspect that there’s more than enough supporters of the cause that will simply shrug and give this whole thing a pass, assuming they hear about it in the first place. I mean, it’s not like Fox News is going to report on this.
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That’s not even how most of their recruitment takes place. You look into getting a firearms permit, and in many places it requires safety training. Who provides that training? The NRA. You’re involved in a shooting competition, like say in scouting? NRA runs that. Need to join to get access. Want to go to the range? Lot of places they’re NRA associated and only open to members.
The NRA has a near lock on the apparatus for safe sporting use of firearms and are tied into a lot of regulatory requirements. So a lot of people join to get access to that stuff, or as kids and just sort of stay. Think my brother’s membership came unasked for when he joined the VFW. The day to day experience is so insulated from the overall organization it doesn’t even look like a club. You send in dues, you take a hunters safety course so you can get deer tags, a magazine shows up, you flash a card and get a discount at Field and Stream. There’s no meetings or anything.
That’s when the crazy shit kicks in. They get a lot of their members by basically backing them into it. Then work really hard to politicize them. And market specific fire arms to them.
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Wait, wasn’t the NRA established by the 2nd amendment? /s
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More than 50 years ago, a friend of my dad’s told me all about the government conspiracy to take our guns away. Of course, anyone with half a brain can see that all those decades of fear mongering were fake. It still works, though, doesn’t it? It’s as evergreen as the shell game. Bilking rubes is always profitable.
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Trying to figure out which I have less of, surprise or given fucks. Oh, wait, no, it’s zero on both. Phew.
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What about the “ammo shortage”? Won’t somebody please think of the ammo shortage!!!
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That’s the one that protects our right to sign minors up for political activist groups without their consent or their parents knowledge right?
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So, wait a second, you mean that hiring good ol’ Olie North, a convicted criminal, to lead the organization may not have been such a good idea?
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They will either furiously rationalize/handwave it away because those are the RIGHT kinds of bigwigs doing it for the RIGHT reasons, or they will studiously ignore it (or attempt to disbelieve it).
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I’d think that along with direct-from-NRA damage/message control, they will gobble on what ever phlegm gets hawked up from pro-NRA stooge lawmakers.
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That’s next week. 
I’m going to start calling them a gun union.
No offence of any kind meant to other unions, of course.
But I think that if it catches on, and people just casually call them a gun union in normal conversation, then right wing people will feel their anti-union prejudices flare up when they hear about the NRA, in that knee-jerk self-defeating way they currently have for other unions.
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