The NRA Foundation holds fundraising programs across the country. This is not surprising, considering that the NRA is technically a nonprofit organization. But some people are wondering about the Second Amendment cheerleaders’ choices to hold a gun raffle in a Kentucky high school gym. The Washington Post reports that Muhlenberg County High School in Greenville, Kentucky, was the site of a September NRA gun raffle that included handguns, semiautomatic rifles, pump-action shotguns, and guns with high-capacity magazine capability. All things you usually learn about after a mass shooting in a high school.
According to the report, this was the first time in the last three years that the NRA didn’t actually display real guns along the bleachers during the raffle, opting under pressure from parents, to only show printed images of the guns. A parent from the school told the Post she thought it was “obscene,” and had not realized that this kind of NRA gun raffle was going on in schools across the country. A grandmother of one of the students at the school said the whole thing made no sense: “They are selling guns on school property. Where we have active-shooter drills.”
The NRA told the Post that NRA fundraisers on school grounds are a small fraction of their fundraising efforts and usually done as philanthropic endeavors. Explaining that the schools appreciate the “supplement” to their “limited budgets.” Of course, the fact that schools are underfunded for extra curricular activities and enrichment programs is a problem no one should have to fundraise for. You can see some images of the event on the Friends of the NRA-Paradise Committee, Kentucky Facebook page.
The NRA has been facing internal lawsuits, investigations into their accounting, and clear financial issues. After years of toothless regulations on their products and lazy regulations on their ability to fundraise off those products, questions have begun to get asked. The standard refrain of Second Amendment chanting no longer holds the same immunity it once did for legislators, as the public has become sick and tired of worthless political hacks and the blood money the NRA puts into school teams and law enforcement.
The Second Amendment cult in our country has one fundamental flaw at its root: they believe that guns can solve the issues that guns and economic inequality create. Whether trying to get guns allowed onto grade school parking lots, or trying to press teachers—most of whom have zero interest in carrying a gun on school grounds—to bring guns to school, the NRA and its shills are singleminded in their pursuit. The NRA and similar groups make money off of guns and the culture related to guns. They will bring those guns anywhere they believe they can make a buck.