What’s going on at the NRA?

HOW SERIOUS is the mess at the National Rifle Association? Wayne LaPierre, who has led the outfit since 1991, said earlier this year that it might be forced to shut “forever” because of gun-shy banks and business owners. That might sound hyperbolic. After all, NRA propagandists routinely claim some bogeyman—communists, zombies, “violent anti-second-amendment extremists” or New York’s governor—threaten NRA members and their constitutional rights. Scaremongering drums up the dues that pay its boss lavishly.

Yet this time the lobby seems most intent on self-harm. A clash of personalities is partly to blame. Its ceremonial president Oliver North (of Iran-Contra fame), said last week that a “clear crisis” besets the group. He then bungled an effort to topple Mr LaPierre. As recently as last week the NRA had gushed over Mr North as “a rock-solid purveyor of truth and defender of justice, relentless in the face of wrongful criticism.” But that was before he reportedly told Mr LaPierre to quit or suffer a public letter about the organisation’s leaders and financial practices. Mr LaPierre says he stared down the lieutenant-colonel, who has now been replaced as president.

That showdown took place in Indianapolis, where NRA members had flocked for their annual convention. Among the worried supporters was President Donald Trump, who tweeted that the lobby risks being destroyed if squabbling leaders fail to circle their wagons against a serious external threat. He meant a legal push by New York state (where the lobby has been registered since 1871), whose attorney-general, Letitia James, is dishing out subpoenas while asking if there was financial malpractice at the NRA. No friend of the lobby, she once called it a “terrorist” group.

At stake is whether the legal case, if it goes against the NRA, eventually leads the gun group to lose its designation as a charity and thus its tax-free status. Without those advantages the NRA, which is secretive about its finances but seems to be in ever more serious debt, could go broke. No one is sure whether it really has the 5m members it claims. Survey data suggest that the share of Americans who own guns is declining, although people who do possess them own more than they used to. But one measure of the NRA’S straitened condition is that, in the mid-terms, gun-control groups outspent it in an election for the first time. That was quite a turnaround: the gun lobby dished up $30m to help get Mr Trump elected in 2016.

The greatest problem for the lobby may thus prove to be financial. An investigation by the Trace, which studies the firearms industry, and the New Yorker recently provided evidence of questionable practices involving NRA bosses and Ackerman McQueen, an advertising agency in Oklahoma. The firm takes a hefty $40m a year from the NRA for marketing and more, and is behind some big and costly efforts to expand its media presence, for example with a TV channel. The NRA’s recent decision to sue its agency seems to have triggered Mr North’s putsch against Mr LaPierre.

No wonder that opponents of the NRA sound gleeful over its mishaps. Andrew Cuomo, New York’s governor, crowed that “the gig is up for the NRA because people now know the truth.” As more members learn that the boss reportedly takes home $5m each year, their enthusiasm might wane. But don’t write him off yet. In the 1990s Mr LaPierre made an enemy of a sitting Republican president, George H.W. Bush, and the NRA was said to be insolvent. He and the gun lobby bounced back from that. They could do so again.