DALLAS (AP) — The National Rifle Association opens its annual meeting in downtown Dallas on Friday, meeting for the first time in decades without Wayne LaPierre at the helm as board members prepare to choose his successor.
Although plagued by financial difficulties, LaPierre remains a political force after a trial in which a jury found that LaPierre misspent millions of NRA funds. More than 70,000 people are expected to attend the three-day event, which will feature a planned speech by former President Donald Trump, seminars, receptions and tons of weapons and equipment.
A board meeting Monday is expected to elect LaPierre’s successor and other officers.
“The immediate question is: Who is running the organization and what direction are they taking in the post-Wayne LaPierre NRA?” asked Robert Spitzer, a professor emeritus at the State University of New York-Cortland who has written several books on gun policy.
“They have suffered a number of setbacks, largely due to their own corruption,” Spitzer said.
Trump will address members on Saturday. At the organization’s Great American Outdoor Show earlier this year, he told those gathered that if he were re-elected, “no one is going to lay a finger on your firearms.”
Recent problems
A New York jury concluded in February that LaPierre improperly used millions of dollars of the organization’s money to finance an extravagant lifestyle that included exotic getaways and trips on private planes and superyachts. On the eve of the trial, LaPierre resigned as executive vice president and chief executive officer.
The jury said LaPierre must repay nearly $4.4 million to the NRA, while the organization’s retired chief financial officer, Wilson Phillips, owes $2 million. The NRA failed to properly manage its assets, omitted or misrepresented information on its tax returns and violated whistleblower protections under New York law, jurors found.
After reporting a $36 million deficit in 2018, largely due to misspending, the NRA cut longstanding programs that were core to its mission, including education and training, recreational shooting and law enforcement initiatives.
The NRA filed for bankruptcy in 2021, but a judge dismissed the case, saying it was not filed in good faith.
EXECUTIVE LIMB
LaPierre ran the NRA’s day-to-day operations since 1991, serving as its face and becoming one of the country’s most influential figures in shaping gun policy. A passionate supporter of gun rights, he once warned that “booted government thugs” were confiscating guns and denounced gun control advocates as “opportunists” who “exploit tragedies to make a profit.”
Andrew Arulanandam, a senior NRA lieutenant who served as LaPierre’s spokesman, has taken over his leadership duties on an interim basis.
Phillip Journey, a newly re-elected NRA board member, said he is among those trying to elect modern leadership in the hope that the organization will become more clear.
“I want to restore the trust that members have lost in the current leadership, and I think we need to make it clear to the board that they can express their opinions and not be punished,” Journey, a Kansas judge, said, adding adding that the organization is “at a major crossroads.”
REACTIONS TO MASS MURDERS
As the NRA meeting begins in Dallas, it will be a year since a neo-Nazi opened fire at a mall in the Dallas suburb of Allen, killing eight people before a police officer ended the rampage.
The organization’s annual meeting last year in Indianapolis fell on the second anniversary of the mass shooting at a FedEx facility in the same city that left nine people dead, just days after the mass shootings at a school in Nashville, Tennessee, and a bank in Louisville. Kentucky.
At the 2023 meeting, the main Republican candidates for the 2024 presidential election vowed to defend the Second Amendment at all costs.
In 2022, the NRA held its annual meeting in Texas, just days after a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers at a Uvalde elementary school. Those on stage in Houston this year condemned the massacre but stressed that further restrictions on access to firearms were not the solution.
A week after a gunman killed 26 people, mostly children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012, LaPierre gave a defiant speech declaring that more gun laws were not the solution and calling for armed guards at schools . “The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” he said.
