Wayne LaPierre, the leader of the National Rifle Association of America who served for decades as a fierce protector of the Second Amendment, advocating for firearms owners and manufacturers, is resigning days before his civil trial is set to begin.
The NRA announced Friday in a statement LaPierre is stepping down as executive vice president and chief executive officer, effective January 31.
Andrew Arulanandam, an NRA executive and head of general operations, will become the interim CEO and executive vice president of the organization, the NRA said on its website.
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New York Attorney General Letitia James in 2020 filed a lawsuit to dissolve the NRA, claiming the organization violated laws for non-profit groups and took millions for personal use and committed tax fraud. The case is set to go to trial on Monday.
A subjective perspective from outside the US:
If I follow your argument that illegal firearms are the problem, I still believe that the amount of illegal firearms in circulation is a direct function of the legal arms market’s size.
And as long as the threshold for acquiring a firearm is low, so is the threshold for injuring someone with one.
This goes for a criminal using an illegal one in a robbery, a frustrated teenager emptying their uncle’s poorly secured gun locker for a school schooting or even for suicides: An abundance of guns makes these things easier, so they happen more often.
Mandating stricter controls, safety training or weapon-lockup procedures can alleviate this some, but any process that relies on a lot of not strictly organized individuals to be applied will be fallible and permeable by nature.
Selling more weapons to private citizens will always lead to more gun-related deaths and injuries.
The only way to reliably reduce the amount of weapons in circulation is to sell less of them (and keep removing illegal ones).
Naturally, this is unpopular with an industry that relies on selling as many as possible.
(I’m also aware that something like this would have to be a very slow process. Even if the pool of legal weapons were drained overnight, all those illegal guns would still be around.)