NRA's LaPierre making himself right at home with Trump in the White House.
It turns out Donald Trump doesn't just turn to the NRA for his script on gun violence. The fear-mongering racist language he's been using, the language the El Paso killer used, has been pushed by the NRA for decades.
HuffPost's Jessica Schulberg goes all the way back to 1977, when a former Border Patrol chief called Harlon Carter took over the NRA at the head of a group of gun rights extremists. In 1981, reporters discovered Carter had murdered a 15-year-old Mexican boy in 1931 because he thought the boy had information about the theft of Carter’s family car. He got off the murder charge on a technicality, saying decades later that he regretted it, but not apologizing. From that point on, the message from the NRA was about foreign invasion that good (white) Americans needed to arm themselves against. Like the one in a 2006 brochure, featuring a racist image of young, threatening men throwing gang signs and the threat "To criminal aliens, America is a giant supermarket and nobody's minding the store."
It got worse under the Obama administration. An op-ed the Daily Caller published in 2013 written by NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre sounds an awful lot like what racially motivated, white supremacist killers—and Trump—have been saying. "Latin American drug gangs have invaded every city of significant size in the United States," LaPierre wrote, and the border "remains porous not only to people seeking jobs in the U.S., but to criminals whose jobs are murder, rape, robbery and kidnapping." He wrote another column for the NRA's magazine ahead of the midterms in 2014. That issue of the magazine was devoted to one theme: "CHAOS AT OUR DOOR? A DANGEROUS WORLD IS CLOSING IN." LaPierre wrote in his op-ed about "the waves of drug smugglers, kidnappers, sex-slave traffickers and criminals of all kinds who invade our country from the south every day."
Sounds familiar, huh? "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. […] They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists." Looks like the NRA scripted Trump's campaign announcement, too.
With the scope of the grift within the NRA now being exposed, including that Russian money, who knows how many more connections will be uncovered between the NRA and Trump?
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