Well, another week, another school shooting: I tried to summon the rage that I felt after the Sandy Hook and Marjorie Stoneman Douglas massacres. Instead all I felt was hopeless. I was going to write another screed about shameless, gutless GOP politicians, but really, it’s been said before, and there is little point in belaboring it. That ultimate power couple, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, are set to speak shortly at the NRA convention in Houston. Irony is dead, and blasphemy has taken its place.
Then I remembered that as part of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, the FBI looked into whether the NRA had been used to dump Russian money into the election campaigns of prominent GOP candidates. The deputy governor of the Russian central bank and accused money launderer Alexander Torshin, was (is?) an active NRA member, and the NRA spent $30 million on Trump’s campaign alone. All told, the NRA donated $70 million in the 2016 election cycle, and among Democrats, only Bernie Sanders was a significant recipient of NRA money. The rest all went to either supporting GOP candidates or financing anti-Democratic ads in state races. By the way, that money flowed through an arm of the NRA that does not have to disclose donors. I had to go back to news reports from 2019 to get this information, but it is all out there if you care to look. 2020 was more subdued, but the NRA still managed to spend about $30M. Not bad for a bankrupt organization.
More overt was the infiltration of the NRA by convicted Russian agent Maria Butina. Mother Jones did an in-depth analysis of that relationship in March, not long after the invasion of Ukraine. Here is the link if you are interested: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/03/nra-maria-butina-ukraine-putin-war-crimea-republicans-trump-guns/.
I have always assumed that the GOP politicians who vote against gun control measures were simply scared of the NRA’s political clout. But the links between Russia and the NRA, and the dark money that can flow through that mechanism, now suggests that the GOP has become, by and large, a foreign entity. Their actions (or rather, inaction) in recent years do not reflect the will of a majority of U.S. citizens in almost any respect.
But what is in it for Russia, or more specifically, Putin? Why arm Americans with automatic weapons, suitable for war? How does this fit into the maskirovka? A major reason that the January 6th insurrection did not result in more deaths was the strict gun control measures that are in place in Washington, D.C. The ringleaders, otherwise prepared for a military action, left guns and ammo outside the city. If that had not been the case, the siege of the Capitol could have been a bloodbath. Instead of a guarded (but peaceful) inauguration of the next President, martial law would have been the least of the responses, with rioting and chaos erupting as sides were chosen in a prelude to civil war, a war in which only one side would be heavily armed. With the United States fractured and distracted, Putin would have had free rein to do what he would in eastern Europe and the Middle East. Instead of a re-invigorated NATO and a Western-supported Ukraine resistance, Soviet Union 2.0.
I am not sure how to end this piece without sounding like a conspiracy theorist. But the links between Russia, the NRA and GOP are overt and well documented for anybody who cares to look. I can only hope that somebody else besides me is looking. In the meantime, I will grieve with everybody else on the lives lost to evil, and look to the future with fear and misgivings.