Wayne’s World— Bring lawyers, guns and money
As the CEO of the National Rifle Association steps down amid corruption charges, it's now time for the organisation to revisit America's gun laws
I’m hoping there’s a special place in hell for all the rich cretins who have taken high-powered weapons into the African bush to hunt and kill the indigenous wildlife for fun.
We had the unedifying sight of Donald Trump Jr. and his brother Eric gurning moronically in front of their slain trophies in 2012.
Now we have the astonishing footage (for a long time hidden from public view) of an even more egregious African expedition. It features Wayne LaPierre, the former CEO and executive vice president of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and one of America’s leading champions of Second Amendment gun rights, on a PR-fuelled “safari” in Africa.
Tough guy, eh? Er, no.
Despite his big guns, big money, big mouth and big lawyers, LaPierre has now been exposed for presiding over a “kingdom of corruption” while in charge at the NRA. Oh, and as it turns out, he can’t even shoot straight.
Last week, a civil case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James, found LaPierre liable for having misappropriated $5.4 million of NRA money during his tenure from 1991 until his resignation in January this year. He was found to have enriched himself and his wife by using NRA cash to fund the couple’s exotic super-yacht holidays and luxury LA haute couture.
As the New York Times’s Danny Hakim noted, LaPierre, until his resignation this past January, had long been a figurehead of the American gun rights movement, “a Beltway Clint Eastwood who insisted that ‘the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.’”
Embedded in Hakim’s article was a link to a New Yorker web-page from April 2021 which included a video of Wayne LaPierre and his wife Susan (an unpaid employee and activist for the NRA) on an NRA-sponsored elephant hunt in the Okavango Delta, Botswana in 2012.
The trip took place less than a year after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut that claimed the lives of 26 people, 20 of them children aged between six and seven. That tragedy elicited LaPierre’s now infamous “bad guy-good guy” defence of gun ownership. As Danny Hakim points out, “If the N.R.A. was once known for advocating for responsible gun ownership and training, Mr. LaPierre yielded to hard-line activists and successfully backed laws requiring no permit or training to carry a gun in public, now the norm in more than half of the states.” Hence the tragic mayhem that continues to unfold.
But wait, back to this jaw-dropping New Yorker video.
The footage — apparently kept under wraps for many years, doubtless to save LaPierre’s blushes — shows the perspiring CEO of the NRA picking his way through the scrub of the Okavango Delta accompanied by his African tracking team and a film crew. After locating a large bull elephant, the whispering group stops and LaPierre is encouraged to take the shot. Trembling, he aims and fires, hits the animal, but fails to kill it, at which point his guide advises him to try again and specifies the place on the animal’s body to aim at. LaPierre fires again, but misses again. Eventually another member of the party steps forward to deliver the coup-de-graçe.
A lot of back-slapping bonhomie ensues as the trembling LaPierre squints through his rimless spectacles, grateful for the unearned applause but clearly embarrassed at his manifest incompetence with a firearm. In 2019, he told the New York Times Magazine that he needed to shake off his image as a man of inaction, undertaking the safari to “show me out there walking the walk, talking the talk.”
How’d that go, Wayne?
Later in the footage we see LaPierre’s wife, Susan, walking the walk. She and her team track an ageing bull elephant that stops and stares at the group, clearly bewildered. Susan steadies her rifle on a tripod, takes aim and at point blank range hits the animal between the eyes, killing it instantly.
She is then advised to take an “insurance shot” to ensure the kill. She complies and is soon hugging her African trackers and bouncing around in celebration. In a ritual flourish, she hacks off the elephant’s tail with a knife and proudly brandishes the bloody stump for the cameras. I almost threw up into my Crunchy Nut Cornflakes.
These odious people should be publicly ridiculed. Thankfully Letitia James has found another way to hold them to account — by exposing their vicious greed and white collar corruption. I don’t care how it’s done, get these crapulous people out of the public square.
Having written in some depth in the past on the historical use of ivory in the decorative arts, I’ve come to hold the noble African elephant in affectionate regard, despite never having visited sub-Saharan Africa. However, I’ve occasionally contributed to reports on the endangerment of the elephant, including to a paper produced by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW.org) in March 2004 (below).
Anyone bothering to educate themselves on the plight of the elephant and other endangered species will look on the LaPierres and their breed with contempt.
Coincidentally, after gleefully digesting the culpability verdict in Wayne LaPierre’s New York civil case, the latest edition of The Atlantic popped through my letterbox. It included Jamie Thompson’s extraordinary long-form report of the fallout from the mass shooting that took place at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Miami, Florida on Valentine’s Day 2018. That was just four years after the LaPierres’ shameful Botswana expedition.
Ms Thompson presents deeply moving testimony from some of the families who lost loved ones that day in Florida. In total, 14 students and three staff members were killed in cold blood by a dysfunctional former student, one Nicholas Cruz. Seventeen others were injured, many seriously. Needless to say, the resulting outcry over the country’s excessively lax gun laws soon melted into thin air as Congress once again bowed to the NRA and the Second Amendment headbangers and refused to budge on the issue. The media cleared its throat and moved onto the next big thing.
Now that Wayne LaPierre has exited from the NRA, it’s time the organisation turned a page and listened to the families of the victims of these senseless killings.
Ask the parents of the innocent kids who perished at Columbine High in 1999 (13 dead); at Virginia Tech in 2007 (32 dead); at Sandy Hook in 2011 (27 dead); at Umpqua Community College, Oregon in 2015 (10 dead); at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High in 2018 (17 dead); at Santa Fe High School, Texas in 2018 (10 dead); at Robb Elementary School, Uvalde, Texas in 2022 (21 dead)…
…and the countless others yet to come.