AP Photo/Seth Perlman, File

All over the country, county sheriffs have decided that their states can pass all the gun control they want, but they don’t matter. As I’ve said before, if a law is unenforced, it might as well not exist.

The Second Amendment sanctuary movement has spread like wildfire. Multiple states have communities that have declared themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries.

Unsurprisingly, anti-gun groups opted to blame the National Rifle Association for this.

At the time, I figured there was either no involvement or minimal involvement. According to Brady, it’s a whole lot more than that.

Brady said it received 1,600 documents under New Mexico’s public records act, including 24 email correspondences between the NRA and Tony Mace, the Cibola County sheriff and chairman of the New Mexico Sheriffs Association (NMSA), a group that both promoted the sanctuary resolutions and lobbied against gun-control bills in the state legislature.

“The documents Brady acquired reveal that the NRA was actively involved in the NMSA’s efforts in drafting the (sanctuary) Declaration; recruiting sheriffs to lobby state and political politicians to oppose the GVP (gun-violence prevention) bills and to adopt so-called Second Amendment Sanctuary Resolutions; and encouraging sheriffs to not enforce state laws,” Brady said.

…

Brady provided Reuters a sampling of the emails which showed three conversations between the NRA and the New Mexico Sheriffs Association about how to defeat gun-control legislation. The emails provided did not explicitly tie the NRA to the sanctuary movement.

Mace on Monday denied any NRA involvement in promoting the sanctuary movement but said he openly coordinated with the NRA in fighting gun-control legislation.

It is a fine distinction. The sheriffs association was fighting against the laws with the NRA’s help. At the same time, the sheriffs were vowing not to enforce the laws.

Now, it seems to me that Brady would want to provide the most damning information outright. In other words, if it had a slam-dunk email, it’d have provided it.

Instead, what Brady’s seeing is the communication of a public servant trying to combat the spread of anti-Second Amendment legislation and reaching out to the nation’s oldest civil rights organization for help, and that group responding to that plea.

While I don’t doubt there may be some emails lobbying sheriffs and politicians to oppose gun control legislation, I’m forced to look in askance and say, “So the hell what?” That’s part of what the NRA does, for crying out loud. It reaches out to elected officials in various roles to combat the gun control infection that has been sweeping the nation.

Finding out that the NRA, indeed, do what it tells everyone it usually does is hardly a revelation.

No, the most damning emails would be those that prove or even suggest that the National Rifle Association triggered the sanctuary movement. If Brady has those, it needs to release that information immediately. Otherwise, we’ll all know the gun control group is full of it.

Brady underwent a fishing expedition under the guise of transparency, but if it can’t provide evidence that supports its claims–claims that go well beyond the normal operations of the NRA, I might add–then it has accomplished nothing, nothing at all, kind of like what Brady has accomplished for its entire existence when you get down to it.

What this is about is that Brady thinks it senses blood in the water.

A lot of people are taking shots at the NRA for various reasons, and Brady thinks this is the time. Brady wants so desperately to dig up some dirt on the NRA so it can rid the nation of its biggest opposition. It dived into this hoping to find something, anything, that would put the NRA out of Brady’s misery forever.

I can’t help but feel like if Brady had found a smoking gun, it would have handed it to Reuters.

It didn’t.

Kind of makes you think it doesn’t exist, doesn’t it?