Opinion: For NRA to Live, LaPierre Needs to Resign ~ LISTEN

Opinion by Gun Talk Radio’s Tom Gresham

USA – -(AmmoLand.com)- In Case You Missed It: Tom Gresham addresses some of the rumors and stories you’ve heard lately about the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, Ackerman McQueen, and the inner workings of the NRA Board. Tom calls for LaPierre to resign so that the NRA has a chance of survival, and can get back to their main cause – preserving the Second Amendment.

Tom Gresham’s Gun Talk® airs live on Sundays from 2PM-5PM Eastern, and runs on hundreds of radio stations nationwide. This gun-centric show features everything from new products to politics. Listen live on a radio station near you or via streaming. Listen to past shows now on Gun Talk’s channels on YouTube, Roku, Amazon Fire, and Apple TV, and at guntalk.libsyn.com, Apple iTunes, i-Heart, Stitcher, the GunDealio app for iPhone or Android, and at guntalk.com. (Note: machine transcript follows, please excuse punctuation and grammar.)

People keep asking me about what’s going on at the NRA. Well, first of all, if you don’t know what is going on around there.I almost don’t know what to say because it’s big news.

It’s important news, and what it tells me is you’re not plugged in. You’ve got to. You have to make it seriously. You got to make it part of your regular routine to check on the stories. And I don’t care if you’re following me on Twitter where you will find out what’s going on. Which is a really good place to find out what’s going on. People say I don’t do Twitter, well, there is no doing it. You just go sign up for Twitter, get an account, and then you follow me. I’m @guntalk, and you will know what’s going on. Or if you’re reading AmmoLand.com and the reports that they’re doing, it’s all over the Web. You will not find out what’s going on at the NRA from the NRA because they’re lying. OK? They’re not telling you the truth. They’re telling you that there’s a “coup attempt” to remove Wayne LaPierre and you must send money to them to help them fight this coup attempt. It’s ludicrous. It’s not true. It’s a mess of their own making, and it may end up destroying the entire organization.

I’m not exaggerating. I don’t know, and people say, well, it’ll survive. Well, it might. You know, there’s a good chance it won’t be the same. It’ll be considerably smaller it will be much reduced. It’s certainly under attack from the New York attorney general’s office and now the attorney general of Washington, D.C., he was attorney general, has subpoenaed records from the NRA. So whether or not they can actually do anything, D.C. can’t. I don’t know? But they can harass. And then you kind of go back to when the cities. U.S. cities were suing gun makers. I think we got up to 30 lawsuits at one time. What was interesting is they say we’re going to hold you responsible for the misuse of your guns. And they said out loud, they said, we don’t really care if we win. Just the weight of the lawsuits, the cost of doing it will bankrupt gun companies, and that’s really our goal. What we can’t get done through the legislative process. We will do with harassment lawsuits.

Let’s go out to the NRA. So what’s happened here? Well, a lot of us have known for a while. I mean, for a long while.

They had a goofy relationship with this P.R. firm, the Mercury Group, and their ad firm, Ackerman McQueen. And we knew that Angus McQueen, head of Ackerman McQueen, pretty much wrote everything that Wayne LaPierre ever said. Least that was my impression. It is that basically, Angus MacQueen was essentially running the NRA? Through some form. But a lot of people said, look, this, you know, it’s not that bad. Don’t make a big deal out of it. Well, it turns out it was a lot worse than we thought, a lot worse than any of us knew. And the information is coming out. I mean, Ackerman McQueen is being paid 40 million dollars. That’s 40 million dollars that could’ve gone into gun rights work. Forty million dollars NRAtv. I would offer that much of that is a waste of money. Much of it is misdirected. Much of it is actually harmful to the Second Amendment fight. At a certain point, you start to think, looking at all this you go let’s see LaPierre is getting one point four million a year. Chris Cox is getting almost a million a year. A whole bunch of people, staff members are getting 1/2 million a year or more. Board members are being paid. Marion Hammer is getting a quarter-million bucks from the NRA. Really? Are you kidding me? What’s going on here?

LaPierre spent a quarter million dollars on his suits. Custom suits from a boutique tailor.

Really?

Flying private jets everywhere. And as a person told me who has spent a lot of time doing high-level protective work, a former cabinet member, she said look we move them on commercial airlines all the time. Because that’s one of the things, they say, well, we have to go by private jets because of security. Baloney. No, you don’t.

Certainly, don’t have to take private jets down to your home in Eleuthera. As it’s been done.

So now we have Oliver North, was the president, actually put in by, Akerman McQueen hired by Akerman McQueen, being paid more than a million dollars a year.

To be the president of a nonprofit. Really? That’s just weird.

And now we have some people on the board of directors, 75 or 78 members, which is unworkable. But anyway, that’s the board of directors at the NRA. Some people there are saying, hey, wait a minute, guys. And they’re asking questions. They’re asking hard questions. And as soon as they do, the purge starts. They’re being removed from key committees, they’re being removed from the committees where the real work is done. Because the committees are where it all is really happening.

And the people who support Wayne LaPierre and the people who are going along with this fiction are being rewarded by being put on the good committees. The people who are saying we want to see the finances. We want to see the records. We want to see the numbers. They’re being purged.

Okay, here it is. People have been asking me, I’m just gonna say it’s time for Wayne LaPierre to go. Good, bad, or indifferent?

He’s a problem. Him being there is a problem. Him leaving doesn’t fix everything, but it’s going to help. Come on, Wayne, you’ve been making millions. Your wife has been making millions off of her connections with the NRA over the years. You have to have enough money now. It’s time for you to go just if you care about the Second Amendment. If you care at all, about the movement, if you care at all about the cause.

It’s time.

It will help. It will not solve everything. Because this is going to be an unbelievable mess no matter what, but it’s one thing it can be done. I cannot tell you, cannot even begin to tell you how many people told me. I am so done. I am never sending them another dollar as long as Wayne is there. I’m just saying I’m out, but I get it. I support the NRA, and I do, personally. I want them to succeed. We need them. We need them there for the 2020 election. We need them there to get Donald Trump re-elected because all the Democrats are gun banners and confiscation advocates.

But I’m not sure how effective that can be right now.

Chris Cox was removed, was sidelined or suspended, and then he quit as head of the ILA. What happens to the ILA’s functions at the state level, which is where all the work’s getting done? I don’t know, but that’s where it’s all happening, and we need. We cannot afford this. We cannot afford this. There are a lot of people now who are saying, all right. Then let the NRA know. Not another dime. Put the pressure on them, cutting off funds. Fix it. Get rid of Wayne. Get this thing fixed. I am of the personal opinion. That an awful lot of what we’ve been getting from them is lip service, and I will tell you; it’s one of the reasons that for the past three years I haven’t recruited for the NRA. I was a top recruiter for the NRA. I have recruited at all. We took our link off our Web site.

For people to be able to join the NRA.

I mean, we may make money. Of course, the money I made from recruiting NRA, I turned around and just signed the checks and sent it to the Second Amendment Foundation. Which, by the way, is my choice, people say. GOA I don’t think so. I much prefer the Second Amendment Foundation. I think you’re doing great work in the courts. So, yeah, it’s messy, and yes, it’s ugly, and you need to be plugged in, and you need to be following this story. The mainstream media has it, and generally I know it’s anti-gun, but generally, they have it right.

Maybe they’re getting a story right. You’re getting the facts. So that’s that’s kind of where I come down on it. It’s uncomfortable. I don’t like it. I wish we weren’t here, but this is just what it is. The push to have people send the money to fight this, what they’re calling a “coup”. I’m not sure that that would be a correct term for it. Is disturbing. There you go. It’s just as simple as that. I don’t know what your take is, but I will certainly listen to it. You heard mine. There’s my line in the sand.

In its 23rd year of national syndication, Tom Gresham’s Gun Talk® radio show airs live on Sundays from 2PM-5PM Eastern, and runs on more than 255 stations every week. Listen on a radio station near you (http://bit.ly/GTRstation) or via live streaming (http://bit.ly/GTRstream). All Gun Talk shows can also be downloaded as podcasts at http://bit.ly/GTRpodcast, Apple iTunes, and i-Heart radio, or through one of the available Apps: GunDealio on iPhone, GunDealio on Android, and the Gun Talk App on Stitcher. Gun Talk is also available on YouTube, (http://bit.ly/GTRYT), Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, and https://guntalk.com.

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