Wayne LaPierre has resigned as the executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, effective at the end of this month (January 2024). He has held that position since 1991 and has been for gun control advocates the public face of the gun rights movement over these last three decades.
I am careful there in my phrasing as I do not acknowledge the NRA as leaders in said movement. I am not even all that willing to recognize them as supporters of gun rights, given their considerable absence in court cases against gun control laws and their ham-handed approach at public relations. Some measure of the allegations of corruption against the organization will be adjudicated soon, and to what degree they are true is beyond what I am concerned about here. My interest is in what sort of person ought to be his replacement.
First a clarification. The president of the NRA is a figurehead, a sort of honorary position, an office given originally to persons who achieved high office in politics or the military. In more recent years, the organization’s president has often been someone who has been an activist for gun rights, though notably famous people whose political positions lie in the right wing—Charlton Heston and Oliver North being the examples I have in mind—have filled the role. But as much attention as Heston’s reciting of the “from my cold, dead hands” line earned, for good or for ill, the real power in the NRA is with the executive vice president.
Who should LaPierre’s replacement be? I do not have anyone specific to nominate, but instead wish to lay out what should be the qualifications for that office.
At the top of the page listing these qualifications would be a statement that money donated to the NRA is given for the purpose of protecting gun rights and that while top-ranking employees will be compensated well for their work, they should not see their jobs as an unrestricted cash machine. LaPierre’s annual takings for some time have been more than a million dollars. This is not in keeping with the official function of the NRA—or at least with what it declares itself to be on tax forms, a 501(c)(4) organization whose mission is to promote civil rights and social welfare. Anyone who wants LaPierre’s old job needs to accept this.
In the same vein, the executive vice president must commit to absolute honesty about where money is coming from and going to. I say this in excess of what the law requires. Legal or not, money is a corrupting influence in politics, and while that is a much larger problem than the NRA’s share in it, the NRA has achieved infamy here. Openness is a necessary step both to clean up politics generally and to rehabilitate the NRA’s reputation.
The next requirement would be to understand that the NRA and the Republican Party are not one in the same, however much that fact may have been obscured for decades. The temptation to blend the two is strong and does in fact have some tactical sense to it, given the reality that support for gun rights is much higher among Republican voters, but that needs to change if we are to preserve the exercise of those rights. And in any case, as a political advocacy organization, the NRA needs to stand outside of the parties, able to criticize or to praise any of them as is appropriate. In the same way that journalists should be cautious about having too close relationships with the people they are reporting on, the NRA ought to maintain enough distance to make it clear that support for a politician or a party is conditioned on working for gun rights and can be withdrawn without any worries that doing so will ruin friendships.
One particular benefit from creating this distance would be to create the possibility of appealing to groups that have not traditionally been gun owners in this country. When Dana Loesch complained about the “Godless Left” in a commentary on behalf of the NRA, for example, she was not working to bring atheists and leftists into the fold of gun rights supporter. And she was hardly alone in the ranks of people speaking for the organization. If gun rights are seen as something that white, male right wingers exercise, how long will it be until that exercise is gone? Republicans give the impression of a constant state of anxiety over the existence of Americans whose ancestors were not predominantly European, who may be attracted to persons of the same sex or whose gender identity is not what the party approves of, who believe that society exists for the betterment of all rather than the few, who believe in different gods or in no gods at all. I have no wish to be their therapist, and I do not want them to hold political office. But I do want gun rights to be protected, and achieving that goal requires appealing to those very same groups. Regardless of how many fantasies Republicans may entertain of dragging the country back to some purified past, diversity will be a fact of life—unless society collapses, at which point any discussion of rights will be so much hot air.
These are the qualifications that I would recommend for the next president of the NRA, along with a good measure of political savvy and organizational skill. Wayne LaPierre’s resignation provides the NRA the opportunity actually to support gun rights and to support them for all Americans.
Or to continue fighting the dreary culture war, a conflict that can only be concluded by destroying all the combatants.
Hear, hear!
Although as a southern/eastern European old male, I barely qualify as white by some standards, I fall into that traditional gun owner category to some degree. Albeit I am center-left and somewhat educated. Anyway, I found Ms. Loesch and the NRA drift to the Right exasperating. But the Democratic Party has made gun ownership and gun rights a litmus test for failure, so who speaks for me? Certainly not the Democrats who crawled over each other's heads to be gun grabbers.
We are increasingly a nation of red or blue tribes where one has to pick one's location based on what rights one thinks are important rather than looking at the big picture as increasingly, there is no big picture. The NRA has alienated a lot of potential allies. Hell, my dad, a Life Benefactor member, seeths at current NRA leadership. And who speaks for the Liberal Gun Club, Liberal Gun owners, Blacks, LGBTQ folks, etc. They need to be inside the tent with the rest of us, not shaking their fists at our foolishness.