Gun shy

Let’s start with something we’re not supposed to talk about, shall we? The most recent* shootings in America: A 15-year-old boy with a handgun killed 2 students and wounded 17 others at a high school in Benton, Kentucky. One of the injured students willlikely need his arm amputated. The day before that, a 16-year-old boy with a handgun shot a 15-year-old girl at a high school in Texas.

*I put an asterisk next to “most recent” above, because in the time between me writing this and you reading this, it’s very likely that there will be more. At the time of writing, we’ve had 15 mass shootings—and 11 school shootings—since January 1, resulting in 15 deaths and 64 injuries.

Lots of people, though, think that those of us who insist on bringing up these killings again and again need to just move on. Their favorite response—the one that’s been most tested and proven to work by the NRA—is to say that since there’s no one single gun law that would stop all this needless killing and injuring and amputating, those of us outraged by it should just find something else to worry about. What they’re saying is that we should give up. As I’ve said before on this page: That’s anti-American. Americans don’t give up.

The NRA, though, does. Anyone paying attention to their response after the hundreds of mass shootings and mass killings in recent years will notice what the NRA does in the wake of them: Nothing. No comment. Their whole “when you pry this gun from my cold, dead hands” tough-guy routine shuts up when they realize it’s going to cost them memberships, and money. You might say that they’re hiding behind political correctness.

In recent days, there’s something else the NRA has been too timid to speak about: The recent blockbuster report that basically shows them accepting a ton of Russian money, which the NRA then used to boost Donald Trump’s run for President. (Among so-called “dark money” contributors to Trump’s campaign, the NRA was the biggest, giving him tens of millions of dollars—and that’s just the money we know about.) It’s a long and fairly complex relationship, but it centers around a Russian banker, Alexander Torshin, who has close ties to both Vladimir Putin and a man named Alexander Romanov. Romanov, who called Torshin “the godfather,” is connected with Russian organized crime and was convicted of money laundering a few years ago—but then went on, with Putin’s blessing, to oversee a Russian front group called The Right To Bear Arms, ostensibly supporting gun rights in Russia. (The cover story of this group is almost hilarious: At Putin’s urging, gun ownership in Russia—generally restricted to hunting rifles—is tightly controlled, monitored, and restricted.)

Both Torshin and his hand-picked “personal executive assistant,” Maria Butina, are already on the record as having near-constant communication with the NRA and its executive leadership, along with certain Russian-friendly Republican members of Congress—and various members of the Trump family. The Right To Bear Arms also paid for a handful of prominent NRA members to travel to Russia for five days of meetings with Torshin and Butina, along with Russia’s foreign minister and deputy prime minister. Not long after this—just about the time when Trump was gearing up to announce his candidacy for President—Butina wrote to her boss Torshin that “D. Trump (NRA member) really is for cooperation with Russia.”

Of course, the notion that the Trump campaign had yet more secret ties to Russia barely qualifies as news anymore. But various members of the press have been calling and emailing the press-relations people at the NRA again and again since this story first broke, asking for a comment, a retraction, any response whatsoever. The NRA—while, again, uncharacteristically sheepish in the days after mass shootings—has a robust history of responding virtually immediately when they feel they’ve been slighted.

They’re not saying anything this time. Why not?