Now, granted, this comes from the New York Times, which we know would love to see the NRA evaporate into nothingness. They'd prefer it to be wiped just not from existence, but from ever having existed in the first place, but they're not Thanos with the Infinity Stones, much less God, so there's no chance of that happening.

But there is a chance of killing it now. They have a reason to manipulate the facts.

Yet what they present also makes sense.

The National Rifle Association’s new chief executive, Doug Hamlin, was elected only in mid-May, but he is already confronting a monumental obstacle.

The threat does not come from a gun control group or any pending left-wing legislation. Rather, one of his biggest challenges is the president of the N.R.A.’s board, former Representative Bob Barr of Georgia, who was also elected in May.

Dissent between the two surfaced during a trial this month in Manhattan, in which the N.R.A. was trying to persuade a New York judge not to appoint a monitor to oversee the embattled gun rights organization and its finances.

But the association’s top two leaders have not put forward a unified front, underscoring the management disarray that persists after more than a half decade of corruption scandals and leadership turmoil.

...

But the N.R.A.’s new leaders appear to be moving in opposite directions. The clash comes down to a battle between the old guard and the new.

Mr. Barr is a longtime board member who described himself in his testimony as a friend of Mr. LaPierre. He also said he thought that Mr. LaPierre had acted in good faith.

Mr. Hamlin, by contrast, previously ran the N.R.A.’s publications division and was among a group of insider candidates, mostly for open board seats, who billed themselves as reformers and were not stalwart LaPierre loyalists. Mr. Hamlin said in his testimony that he and other like-minded candidates ran because they had lost faith in N.R.A. leadership, including Mr. LaPierre and Mr. Barr, and thought the group had lost the trust of its members.

“My frustration was due to a lot of various factors that had been building over many years,” he said.

The two leaders, who gave back-to-back testimony in State Supreme Court this month, have many areas of disagreement.

I was willing to give Barr a lot of leeway on this, in part because I know he's someone who values our right to keep and bear arms. He's spoken about it in his weekly columns throughout the years since he left Congress. However, if he's trying to claim LaPierre acted in good faith, that's kind of hard for me to swallow.

While some of LaPierre's controversial efforts could potentially be explained away, the fact that there was so much of it and it was largely kept from the membership means he knew damn good and well what he was doing. He was living the good life while our right to keep and bear arms was under assault.

Hamlin wants more control over the litigation currently facing the NRA, where being able to react quickly might be of some benefit, but might also put him or someone who comes after him to become another LaPierre. Barr and his allies want to keep control of it with the board, which would potentially prevent that, but to me, that's somewhat irrelevant.

The idea that there are people still in the organization and in leadership roles that think Wayne LaPierre did anything but hurt the NRA and gun rights as a whole with his crap is why there won't be the "homecoming" that Hamlin wants.

Is Hamlin better than Barr? I honestly don't know. 

What I do know is that a lot of your average gun rights supporters have been viewing the NRA with skepticism. While the litigation is a problem, the bigger issue is that few within the organization's leadership seem to get that trust has been betrayed with the members and potential members. That is where at least some attention needs to be paid and anyone saying LaPierre meant well isn't doing that.