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.
Look, if someone is pro-gun just because of the Constitution, then they are a stupid person incapable of independent thought. One sentence written 200+ years ago doesn’t help us understand how things work in the real world. Justifications for modern lax gun laws need real arguments, not deferment to code or self-aggrandizing anecdotes.
If someone says that guns make us safer because of the constitution, then they have made no actual argument and are essentially expressing a religious belief about guns. These kinds of arguments are devoid of critical thinking. They aren’t serious arguments, it’s essentially just virtue signalling.
I have absolutely zero interest in pretending that these people’s ideas are ideas worth considering. Sometimes you just have to learn to recognize bullshit and refuse to give it any power. If that makes people feel bad, okay, but I don’t see how that’s my problem. I have a standard not to legitimize intellectually bankrupt arguments, and I’m not lowering that standard because someone else feels judged.
FWIW, I’d generally agree that I hate when people on either side parrot the party line and have no ability to debate their own positions other than spouting talking points.
However I think the Constitution is an exception to that-- someone can be ‘I support guns because the Constitution’ and be meaning ‘we should follow the Constitution as written and intended by the Framers’ (which I think is a valid and learned POV) rather than ‘I blindly follow whatever the old document says and I don’t think for myself why it’s good or bad’.
The Constitution is the law of the land, period. You can disagree with it- you can say it’s wrong, that its ideals no longer serve modern society, etc.
But simply ignoring it or ‘interpreting’ it to mean whatever we want it to mean in that moment is a VERY slippery and dangerous slope. That’s how you get warrantless wiretapping, torture memos, extraordinary rendition, civil asset forfeiture, and a whole host of other awful things.
If you disagree with the Constitution, there’s a process to change it. But until it gets changed, we MUST follow it as it was written and intended by the Framers.
If we don’t do that, then we go down a very dark path- free speech only applies to things said in person and paper printed publications (not the Internet as it wasn’t around in the 1700s), the 4th amendment only applies to hardcopy files and not computer files or cloud storage as those are new inventions not envisioned by the Framers, etc etc, It’s really NOT a good direction for us to go.
I’d also like to point out for just because something is a law doesn’t mean it is just or correct. I would also like to point out that just because there’s a process. That does not mean it is adequate or usable.
While I fall into the camp of people who would be more favorable to actually following the text of the second amendment. And for all the second amendment people to learn basic English grammar. That a comma separates two parts of a connected thought and not two separate thoughts.
The facts are, guns have only made us less safe. Most other countries in the world can go years, decades even between mass shootings. Even longer between school shootings. We are the only country in the world where such things happen on a nearly daily basis. And that has to do with our sorely outdated and outmoded second amendment.