This afternoon, the National Rifle Association announced that its executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, is stepping down at the end of the month.
“With pride in all that we have accomplished, I am announcing my resignation from the NRA,” LaPierre said in a statement released by the organization. “I’ve been a card-carrying member of this organization for most of my adult life, and I will never stop supporting the NRA and its fight to defend Second Amendment freedom. My passion for our cause burns as deeply as ever.”
During an NRA Board of Directors meeting today in Irving, Texas, NRA President Charles Cotton reported that he accepted LaPierre’s resignation. According to the NRA, LaPierre cited health reasons as a reason for his decision.
Long-time NRA executive and Head of General Operations Andrew Arulanandam will become the interim CEO & EVP of the NRA.
Had the 74-year-old LaPierre stepped down from the NRA in early 2017, shortly after Donald Trump had beaten Hillary Clinton and helped assure a pro-Second Amendment majority on the Supreme Court, LaPierre would be universally hailed as a hero among gun owners everywhere. But the last seven years or so have been some of the most tumultuous and most difficult in the NRA’s history, and LaPierre’s intractable control over the organization, aided by a loyal majority on the NRA’s board of directors, was a major factor in the organization’s difficulties.
Starting at the NRA’s annual meeting in Indianapolis in 2019, the organization has faced a cavalcade of credible allegations of self-dealing and egregious wastes of donor money — with some allegations coming from former leaders of the group like Oliver North. LaPierre reportedly made suit purchases from the Zegna store in Beverly Hills between 2004 and 2017 that totaled $274,695.03, and sent the bills to the NRA’s former PR firm, Ackerman McQueen.
The NRA has admitted some benefits paid to top executives were excessive; in 2020, executive vice president Wayne LaPierre received $1.7 million in compensation, the filing said, including a $455,000 bonus. He was paid $1.9 million the year before. Legal fights with Ackerman McQueen and the state attorney general of New York generated gargantuan legal fees; from 2018 to 2020, the NRA paid its top lawyer, William A. Brewer III and his firm, more than $54 million.
In a heavy-handed metaphor, the NRA’s headquarters building in Fairfax started falling apart during the pandemic. (The organization’s expected relocation to North Texas is moving quite slowly.)
Today, while the NRA is still well-funded and has many dues-paying members compared to most politically active organizations, it is a shadow of its former self. About a year ago, Stephen Gutowski reported that organization is down to 4.3 million members, representing a loss of about one million members since 2019. Gutowski noted the group’s financial resources were shrinking as well:
The drop in membership has driven a stark decline in the NRA’s revenue over the same period. The presentation shows revenues were down nearly $24 million, or 11 percent, between 2021 and 2022, while expenses grew by more than $11.5 million, or 5.5 percent. A $37.4 million, or 32 percent, shortfall in membership dues was behind the revenue collapse. At the same time, a $16.4 million, or 47.4 percent, overrun in legal expenses led the group to finish in the red for the year.
As the organization saw its members and donations shrink, it became a smaller player in national elections. In the 2022 election cycle, the NRA Super PAC spent a bit less than $16 million. Back in 2014 the group spent $27 million; in 2016 it spent more than $54 million.
One bright spot is that attendance at the NRA’s annual meeting bounced back some last year, rising to about 77,000 after only 61,000 attended the 2022 annual meeting in Houston, Texas. (For many years, the convention featuring speeches from politicians and a massive gun show attracted more than 80,000 attendees.)
The last few years have also featured the gradual extinction of pro-gun Democrats, as well as fewer and fewer Republicans expressing support for gun control measures. There was a time, not quite so long ago, when the NRA was perceived as a bipartisan organization backing any politician in either major party who voted the right way. Georgia senator Zell Miller gave the keynote address at the 2002 NRA annual meeting, the NRA endorsed Nevada senator Harry Reid in 2004, and congressmen Heath Shuler of North Carolina and Dan Boren of Oklahoma addressed the 2010 annual meeting. The last few years of LaPierre’s time saw the NRA’s image overlapping a great deal with that of the Republican Party and the MAGA movement; with each passing year, the annual meeting looked a bit more like CPAC.
If this evolution ever bothered LaPierre, he hid it well.