(Bloomberg Opinion) — It seemed, for a time, that the National Rifle Association’s unprecedented investment in Donald Trump might have purchased the kind of misfortune experienced by so many previous Trump investors. The arrival of a pandemic seems to have changed all that.
Consider where the NRA was just a few months ago. After spending more than $30 million to help make Trump president, the organization was caught up in a parallel Russia scandal when it was revealed that it had been actively courting agents of Russian President Vladimir Putin while also being infiltrated by a young Russian woman who promoted herself as a gun activist and took detailed direction from a close ally of the Kremlin. There was also a series of ugly financial scandals, highlighting how NRA leader Wayne LaPierre and others lavish benefits on themselves, and bitter infighting. Lawsuits, countersuits, layoffs and financial shortfalls ensued.
Worst of all, gun sales had plummeted. The transfer of presidential power from a black Democrat to a white nationalist who mimicked NRA rhetoric — “American carnage” — may have frightened and appalled tens of millions of Americans. But they generally weren’t the older, conservative, white males who keep the gun industry afloat. The Obama boom in gun sales was over. The Trump slump began.
With the arrival of Covid-19, however, panic is back, setting cash registers blazing in gunworld. Fear is the gun industry’s bread and butter. Gun background checks, a proxy for sales, have soared in tandem with the nation’s unchecked Covid-19 cases, while shares of gun and ammunition manufacturers have risen. After laying low in the scandal pit, the NRA is emboldened and back.
The organization recently sued New York State, among other entities, demanding that gun shops be deemed essential businesses allowed to remain open through state-ordered pandemic shutdowns. The suit quotably accuses state officials of “going out of their way to protect liquor stores and release criminals onto the streets.” In other words: Rampaging, liquored-up gangs of criminals will be descending on your home any moment. If that point is too subtle for you, the NRA website features a video of a disabled black woman holding a semi-automatic rifle as her last line of defense against the virus.
While the virus is new, the method is familiar. A few months after Hurricane Sandy inflicted tens of billions in damage along the Eastern Seaboard, LaPierre published an essay recalling “the hellish world” of New York City in the storm’s wake. “Looters ran wild in south Brooklyn,” he recollected.
Survivors of the city’s storm-ravaged hellscape included New York Police Department spokesman Paul Browne, who told New York’s Daily News that there had been no murders, shootings or rapes in South Brooklyn (to the extent such a neighborhood exists) after the hurricane. Actually, Browne said, overall crime in one of the nation’s safest cities was down about 25%.
LaPierre has long argued that government is a sham and that only guns can protect Americans from violence. “Do you trust this government really to protect you and your family?” LaPierre asked NRA convention-goers in 2014. “We’re on our own.”
The NRA has worked hard to make its peculiar vision of dystopia a reality. And now Trump, with his failure to marshal government to protect citizens or the economy, has created the chaos and fear on which the NRA thrives. Along with gun-friendly judicial appointments, Trump’s confidence-rattling incompetence, and the golden gun rush it has incited, is everything the NRA could have hoped for.
The Trump administration is the ultimate proof of the NRA thesis. Government can’t help you. Leadership is corrupt. The world is coming unraveled. Better get a gun — preferably one with a high profit margin.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Francis Wilkinson writes editorials on politics and U.S. domestic policy for Bloomberg Opinion. He was executive editor of the Week. He was previously a writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a political media strategist.
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