The NRA Has Been Financing Their Death Cult By Cheating On Their Taxes

This weekend there has been rampant speculation about whether President Obama will advance a gun safety agenda via executive orders. Most of the talk suggests that he will expand background checks to include gun shows where weapons are often sold without any inquiry into the legal status of the buyer. They could be felons, or mentally ill, or under a restraining order, or linked to terrorism, or Ted Nugent. But under the current laws regarding gun shows, they could all acquire deadly armories.

NRA Problem Solver

The National Rifle Association is firmly in favor of the status quo. They have been working hard to prevent any reform that might make a dent in the 30,000+ gun deaths every year. And their efforts are in direct contradiction to the will of the American people who broadly favor common sense reforms like closing the gun show loophole (89%) and banning assault weapons (58%). These numbers include many gun owners.

Now, in addition to supporting gun rights for people on the Terrorist Watch List, news reports have revealed that the NRA has been lying on their tax returns for years. Their filings have asserted ridiculously false claims such as that they do not receive membership dues or engage in political activity. And that’s not all:

“For seven years, the NRA also skipped a key question on its tax form — whether or not it engaged in lobbying. Asked to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ it simply left the space blank. […] Asked to detail expenses on its tax form, the NRA told the IRS it spent nothing on lobbying each year from 2008 to 2013.

“In 2014, it finally recorded $1 million in lobbying expenses. But even that figure is at odds with the amount reported to Congress of $3.4 million, according to data on the OpenSecrets Web site. It also recorded spending $23 million on unspecified ‘legislative programs.'”

Those are some pretty significant discrepancies that cannot plausibly be explained away as inadvertent. The NRA is, at its core, a political lobbying organization that receives millions of dollars in membership dues. It would be like Pepsi accidentally failing to report any income from selling beverages. Most of the NRA’s funding comes from firearms manufacturers and dealers seeking to expand their businesses. Lobbying on their behalf is why the NRA exists.

Before all the right-wing ammosexuals out there start whining that this must be a liberal conspiracy by the lamestream media attacking the NRA and its holy crusade to defend the Second Amendment, it was the conservative New York Post, owned by Rupert Murdoch of Fox News, that published the results of their investigation of the NRA-theists and their apparent tax filing perjury.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
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In a just world the NRA and its executives should be indicted for tax fraud and punished accordingly if found guilty. However, according to the NYPost, the New York Attorney General’s office would not comment on whether there is an investigation in progress. That often means that there isn’t, but they are rushing to put one together to avoid being embarrassed by the disclosures in the press. Time will tell. In the meantime the NRA has been exposed as a dishonest enterprise that is not only making the nation a more dangerous place to live, but rips off the American people while doing it.

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9 thoughts on “The NRA Has Been Financing Their Death Cult By Cheating On Their Taxes

  1. F&*%k the NRA and the horse they rode in on!

  2. I wish I could express surprise, but these SOBs are evil to the core. And if the IRS jumps into this, I can just hear the outrage and screaming from Fox “See, targeting conservatives!!” No, jerks, targeting tax frauds. You ought to be thankful. But that would require a soul.

  3. First “assault weapons” is a completely made up term put into place by the “assault weapons ban” law In the Clinton era, bans guns that look like military firearms, and was a truely awful and totally ineffective piece of regulation. Second over 20,000 of the gun deaths you mention are suicides, the vast majority of the rest are gang involved shootings. “Assault weapons” are used to kill approximately 300 people a year, not 30,000 as the article implies. Banning “assault weapons” wouldn’t even make a noticeable dent in the gun related death total at all, even if you took every assault weapon in the U.S. From gun owners. The vast majority of gun deaths come from hand guns, and again most of those are suicides. If we banned guns today we’ed be in the same spot as the U.K. which has 6 to 10 times the knife deaths. The U.K. Is considering banning pointed knives. By the way the majority of assaults in the U.S. Come from baseball bats, f.y.i..

    What we really need is to remove the stigma from receiving mental health care so people with suicidal depression feel they can receive mental health care. We also need to make sure insurance companies make it easy to receive the care. Those two measures would do more to reduce gun deaths of than every gun law I’ve ever seen proposed. Second police need to crack down on gangs, the number one cause of criminal gun deaths. Third people in America, need to make gangs culturally unacceptable instead of glorifying them. Lastly, we need a cultural shift that says guns are the last choice to solve a problem not the first choice, pre-teens should not be playing Call of Duty. Which is now jokingly called “Children’s Online Daycare”.

    As a P.S. Police need to forget the last 15 years of training making them treat every person they encounter as a terrorist. Police kill over a thousand people a year, three times what they killed only five years ago. Something is wrong with society when a police officer sees a gun as his first tool to solve a problem. Many of the recent deaths could have been prevented with tazers, but officers either refused to use them or didn’t have them.

    • First of all, the gun industry (and the NRA) used the term “assault weapon” routinely until they decided it to rebrand it as something more friendly sounding around 2009. Also, suicides with guns are “deaths,” which is exactly what I wrote above. And some of the most horrific mass killings in the U.S. involve assault weapons.

      On the other matters regarding mental health and law enforcement, I agree, but the NRA (and Republicans) still won’t even do anything about those problems. Consequently, the NRA is still a major part of the problem.

    • you are one sick mother fucker

    • I agree with you about the cultural shift and the Police training. I feel we always have the wrong discussion about guns. We always argue about gun control when we should really be talking about why people have less value for life and why they think it’s ok to kill. If we always talked about that and also talked about how wrong it is to kill, which is a much more important discussion I think over time we would be better off. Immediately going to the gun-control discussion makes the conversation too easy, all you have to be is against or for guns. The why is more important than the how.

      Also, probably the biggest single factor in all this is the economy. The more affluent a society is, the less strife. If we really want to do anything about killing we need to raise the standard of living for everyone. Since the 80’s our standard of living has actually decreased per capita. The rich have gotten richer and the rest of us have lost income or not gained. Any sociologist will tell you that study after study shows that standard of living has a lot to do with satisfaction and of course the more unsatisfied there are the more chances for violence there will be.

  4. This doesnt make sense to me. The article at the Post (linked above) says they paid 16 million in taxes last year on the politics. Obviously they did not “cheat on the taxes.” Cheating means you pay LESS tax not MORE.

    • Actually, the article says that the NRA paid $1.6 million last year (not $16) on its political activity. But the larger point is that they denied engaging in ANY political activity in its previous six IRS filings. They only started reporting it after it was revealed in the press. So they cheated for years before reporting anything, and then what they reported was conspicuously little.

      • Thanks. See what you mean about $1.6 not $16 million. That still seems like a lot of political taxes that paid. There is no “cheating on taxes” when taxes are being paid.

        Maybe the recent change was for legal reasons related to the structuring of the business. Those things change all the time year to year at my family’s company.

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