Having apparently decided that their usual schtick was, if anything, to subtle, the National Rifle Association recently chose an actual, bonafide criminal arms smuggler to be their organization's new president.
That's not a refutable charge, by the way; Iran-Contra figure Oliver North may have had his convictions reversed due to the technicality of having been granted wide-ranging immunity from prosecution in exchange for his congressional testimony admitting those things, but there has never been any question that he did, in fact, illegally help smuggle arms to an American enemy. While this act of high treason ended his government career, it did get him a puffy Fox News show so you can't say conservatives don't treat their criminals well.
But while we all knew he was a traitor and arms smuggler, we weren't sure if he had devolved into the sort of truly repulsive creature that would thrive as an NRA president. Fear not, he has that covered as well; his first act was to light into the survivors of the Parkland, Florida mass shooting for having the gall to keep speaking up after their classmates were murdered.
“They’re not activists—this is civil terrorism. This is the kind of thing that’s never been seen against a civil rights organization in America,” Oliver North told the Washington Times. “You go back to the terrible days of Jim Crow and those kinds of things—even there you didn’t have this kind of thing.” [...]
“They can do all the cyberwar against us—they’re doing it,” North said. “They can use the media against us—they are. They’ve gone after our bank accounts, our finances, our donors and obviously individual members. “It’s got to stop.”
Oh you poor damn babies. For decades, the NRA has threatened anyone and everyone unwilling to advance their militia-backed visions of "justified" murders and potential government overthrow. They devoted themselves to making or breaking political careers, and would do so loudly and with enormous sums of money. They attack companies they feel who have done them wrong constantly; they attack individuals who speak out against them, often in videos and newsletters directed at the most unstable members of society; they pride themselves on being able to ruining careers, and on gleefully doing so.
But now the international arms smuggler and his collection of aspiring murderers and would-be patriotic traitors is chewing the scenery over … a group of shooting survivors fighting back? Oh, the drama. Oh, the repression. This is worse than how black Americans were treated during Jim Crow, back when civil rights activists were being murdered and bombs were being set off in churches—but even then nobody was so uncouth as to go after bank accounts.
Honestly? Get bent, traitor-boy. I suppose there's probably some more poetic way of putting that, but it isn't worth the effort.
The National Rifle Association sure has been making some curious moves of late, though. Between the huge Russia-linked donations, the NRA tour of a facility making one of the most notorious foreign guns used against America's own military troops, and putting the whole thing under the direction of Oliver Actual High Treason North, this is all probably prelude to the NRA abandoning shop in America and just turning itself into an underground gun-running organization. The heart wants what the heart wants, I suppose.