To gun-control campaigners the head of America’s most powerful firearms lobby group is a monster with the blood of thousands on his hands.
To prosecutors from the New York attorney-general’s office he is a criminal who diverted millions of dollars from his non-profit organisation for his personal gain including lavish spending on Italian suits, private jets and fine dining. But to those who know him personally, a new book says, Wayne LaPierre, head of the National Rifle Association (NRA), is a self-pitying, socially awkward, easily manipulated pawn with “the backbone of a chocolate éclair”.
While defending the weapons that bring death to the streets, he dreams of a quiet retirement running an ice-cream shop and does not even much like guns. Time and again, as Americans have counted the cost of LaPierre’s gun advocacy in mass shootings and dead children, his first sorrow has been for himself. “Oh God, poor me, here we go again,” he would tell colleagues.
“In his self-pity he had come to the conclusion that he had earned the gadgets and meals and shiny jets, because the suffering that had come from his anxieties around his job had been such a burden,” wrote Tim Mak, author of Misfire: Inside the Downfall of the NRA. The book lays bare the rot and turmoil that has unfolded during LaPierre’s nearly 30-year tenure at the helm of the NRA, based on interviews with employees, leaked documents and depositions.
LaPierre, 71, turned the firearms group, which was founded in 1871, into one of the most powerful forces driving the country’s culture wars over “freedom” and patriotic identity. Yet now with the organisation deep in legal and financial trouble and at risk of dissolution, years of excess have come back to haunt him, his lieutenants and his wife Susan — described by associates as pretentious, manipulative and devoid of humility.
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Known among staff as the NRA’s first lady, she would pester her husband and, though not on the payroll, win perks that included her own staff and, when not driving her own Mercedes, a chauffeur.
She spent tens of thousands of dollars on events. When staff booked her at a Sheraton, she made them switch. “We stay at the Ritz,” she sniffed.
Members of her Women’s Leadership Forum, an elite NRA fundraising tier, received sapphire, emerald, ruby or diamond brooches in return for donations. Those who left compared the forum to an abusive relationship “in which you could rationalise a situation while you were in it but it became repulsive once you put a little distance in between”, wrote Mak, a reporter for National Public Radio.
Mrs LaPierre’s bills, including for gifts she bought for Christmas, baby showers and wedding anniversaries, were charged to the NRA.
It was Wayne Anthony Ross, a former NRA board member, who said that LaPierre had the “backbone of a chocolate éclair”. His wife is different.
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“Susan is as pushy as Wayne is a pushover,” Mak noted.
When the organisation funnelled $30 million to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, Mrs LaPierre expected him to grant her the ambassadorship to Slovenia as reward. “She got an assignment to the National Park Foundation board instead,” the book notes.
After shooting an elephant in Botswana, she laughed, sliced off the end of its tail and held it aloft crying: “Victory!” Her husband was a clumsy shot with little interest in guns.
“The safest place you could be when Wayne had a gun was between Wayne and the target,” staff joked.
Claims of financial corruption, first made in 2019, led to an investigation by New York’s attorney-general, Letitia James, and a lawsuit last year against LaPierre and three executives. It alleges that the NRA lost $64 million as they “overrode and evaded internal controls”.
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LaPierre spent $274,000 on designer suits over 13 years, it is alleged, took private jets to destinations including Italy and Hungary and rented a $4,500-a-month luxury apartment for a young NRA intern to whose father he owed a favour. Investigators also claimed that LaPierre, who has often told friends that his greatest wish is to retire and run an ice-cream parlour in New England, spent his non-profit organisation’s money sending ice cream to friends for Christmas.
James’s lawsuit seeks the NRA’s dissolution. LaPierre called it “unconstitutional.” The NRA did not respond to a request for comment.
The main scandal around LaPierre, however, is the legacy that his leadership of the NRA and its slide to the far right has wrought. Deaths in America from guns average more than 90 a day and school shootings such as Sandy Hook in 2012 and Parkland in 2018 are seared into the nation’s consciousness.
While LaPierre hid on a friend’s private yacht off the Bahamas after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, Manuel and Patricia Oliver buried their son, Joaquin, 17, who was among the 17 killed.
“What the NRA has done for decades, that’s the real scandal, political campaigns, putting money into the gun industry and not giving a shit about people dying,” Manuel Oliver said. “What killed my son, besides the shooter, is the whole gun culture.”
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As the gun control group Giffords filed another lawsuit against the NRA last week, accusing it of violating campaign finance laws by using shell companies to fund Trump’s campaign, the Olivers were in Switzerland receiving awards for their activism against the association.
Their campaign group, Change the Ref, sent 1,700 biscuits to the NRA shaped as children riddled with bullet holes — one for every child killed by a gun last year. It became the most viral anti-gun campaign on TikTok of 2020, registering 65 million views and was in response to a tweet by the NRA showing Santa Claus reading a Christmas list that demanded ammunition in exchange for cookies.
The US Supreme Court heard a case last week that could broaden gun rights.
Alexis Confer, executive director of March For Our Lives, a youth-led gun reform group born from the Parkland shooting, called it “deeply concerning”.
“At NRA conventions they have shooting booths inviting you to ‘shoot your ex-girlfriend’ and pistols in blue and pink to give your child.
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“The NRA encouraged violence and corruption.
“Now guns are the No 1 killer of young people in the US and it has to own that as a uniquely American problem.”
