On the Canadian Broadcast Corporation’s The Current to discuss “Second Amendment supporters should be ‘deeply concerned’ about NRA infighting, says conservative pundit”

Dr. John Lott appeared with Charlie Sykes, the author of How the Right Lost its Mind, and the Washington Post’s Katie Zezima on the Canadian Broadcast Corporation’s The Current to discuss this past weekend’s events at the NRA between Wayne LaPierre and Oliver North.

Here is the Canadian Broadcast Corporation’s write up of our discussion.

Conservative pundit Charlie Sykes says that even ardent Second Amendment supporters should pay attention to internal turmoil in the National Rifle Association stemming from questions about its financial management.

“The NRA had a choice: it could have basically stepped back and said, ‘Okay, well we need to be more transparent we need to account for this money. Maybe we need to clean house here a little bit,'” Sykes, author of How the Right Lost its Mind, told The Current’s Anna Maria Tremonti.

“Instead, what they decided to do was circle the wagons [and] send out the shills to say ‘There’s nothing to look at here.'” . . .

John Lott, president of Crime Prevention Research Centre in Pennsylvania, argues that the controversy isn’t much of a controversy at all, and that people need to take the current news coverage of the story with a grain of salt.

“All of this is greatly exaggerated and I think a lot of the claims that have been made … are not quite accurate. [The NRA] have lost money for two years but in large part that’s due to other actions that New York State has taken,” Lott explained, saying the state of New York “forced” insurance companies to drop their coverage of NRA-related programs.

Lott, who is also the author of More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws, blamed “exaggerated” media coverage for painting the inner conflict lawsuit in a salacious light, and that the lawsuit and public disagreements are par for the course in an organization run by such “strong personalities” as North and LaPierre.

Sykes instead urged Americans — gun lobbyists and gun-control advocates alike — to take the allegations at hand seriously.

“The NRA has taken the issue of rational gun regulation out of the policy realm and they’ve they’ve made it the centre of these culture wars,” he explained. . . .

(Tuesday, April 30, 2019, from 8:30 to 8:52 AM, the discussion with Charlie Sykes and John Lott starts at 8 minutes and 48 seconds into the interview.)

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