With just 88 days before the 2020 Presidential election, New York Attorney General Letitia James has moved to dissolve the National Rifle Association as a result of numerous fraud charges.
Those charges are mostly nebulous assertions that the gun rights non-profit misused its charitable donations to enrich top executives, and they’re seemingly pinned on the fact that the NRA lost roughly $64 million over the last three years.
Of course, many – including the NRA’s nearly six million private members – view the move as a partisan attack, timed primarily to disrupt the November election and hurt Donald Trump’s reelection chances.
The NRA is universally reviled by the left, blamed for every single shooting reported by the mass media, and vilified as racist, terroristic, and worse.
Per AG James:
“The NRA’s influence has been so powerful that the organization went unchecked for decades while top executives funneled millions into their own pockets. The NRA is fraught with fraud and abuse, which is why, today, we seek to dissolve the NRA, because no organization is above the law.”
The NY AG also has a valuable ally in this case – someone who’s been in a similar situation before and reliably turned informant: Oliver North.
See, Ollie North, infamous international gun runner, just doesn’t see eye to eye with the NRA.
After bafflingly being installed as the gun rights group’s president in 2018, North immediately engaged in a dispute against NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre and the brand’s advertisers.
When LaPierre wouldn’t resign at North’s behest, North – famous for illegally diverting funds to Nicaragua’s Contra rebels from illegal arms sales to Iran (i.e. the “Iran-Contra Affair”) – is now claiming that the NRA has been illegally diverting funds.
The irony should be lost on nobody.
Of course, this isn’t about North’s allegations. This is about the state of New York, where the NRA was incorporated in 1871, making the unprecedented move – less than three months before the Presidential election – to completely dissolve the NRA altogether.
Naturally, the NRA denies the accusations, saying that the claims are a “baseless premeditated attack on our organization and the Second Amendment freedoms it fights to defend… [We] not only will not shrink from this fight – we will confront it and prevail.”
And truth be told, they probably will prevail.
But that’s hardly the point of the suit.
Instead, the case seems to be a gamble that smearing the lobbyist organization will help Joe Biden’s Vegas odds and assist congressional Democrats in the 2020 Presidential election. And it might indeed do just that.
Biden has not been shy about his plans to ban most modern sporting arms and standard-capacity magazines should he win the White House and the Senate flips blue.
Biden voted in favor of the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban, which reclassified commercial consumer firearms as “weapons of war” in order to ban them and promoted the misuse of the word “assault weapon” to define any firearm that shared aesthetic (and not functional) similarities to fully automatic firearms used in the military context.
This law led to a sustained increase in violent crime nationwide, and it was allowed to sunset after 10 years due to a lack of efficacy in combating said crime.
Now, Biden supports defunding police, banning all common sporting arms save for double-barreled shotguns and revolvers, and getting rid of the only voice gun owners have in Washington.
Here’s Uncle Joe’s advice on how to protect yourself and your family after the Second Amendment is almost completely gutted:
On the other hand, gun rights are a dangerous subject to broach in election years unless there’s a clear public mandate.
Given that the 1619 Riots and national calls to defund the police have led to record gun sales and retail background checks on first-time buyers in each of the past five months, more voters than ever – on both sides – might be slipping headlong into “single issue” territory.
Indeed, some Pennsylvania Democrats are afraid of exactly that, calling the NRA suit an “October Surprise” that could actually help Trump’s campaign and be a setback for Biden.
Obviously, none of this has had much of an immediate effect on the current Trump vs. Biden betting odds, which still favor the Democratic challenger by a wide margin at the Vegas election sportsbooks carrying odds for the race.
But it could have make waves over the next few days, and it’s something that you should keep an eye on if you’re looking for a little edge at the betting boards.
And, of course, given the prominence of the case, its results could very well be featured in the political props column at your betting site of choice.
Sources: NPR, The Guardian, Breitbart