When allegations of corruption, unchecked spending and self-dealing at the NRA finally broke into the open last year following the virtual street fight at the Indianapolis convention, we called the situation exactly what it has turned out to be; an existential threat to the organization. The situation was that serious because, due to inertia, inattention, negligence, or a mixture of the above, the NRA operated under a New York state charter.

That gave the elected officials of one of the most anti-gun states in the country control over the fate of the Association. Then the whole mess spilled out for all to see with the fight between the NRA and Ackerman McQueen, the resulting revelations of spending on clothes, travel, apartments, and more. It became clear that most of the NRA’s scores of Board Members had no input or oversight over that spending.

A few Board members tried to exercise the oversight the Association needed; people like Pete Brownell, Tim Knight, Esther Schneider, Allen West and a few others pushed Wayne LaPierre for information and a say in the Association’s operations. You know, the functions board members are supposed to actually perform.

All who dared to challenge the NRA’s top management were frozen out or exiled in a Stalin-like purge.

The drama in Indianapolis and the resulting media reports gave New York’s Attorney General, Letitia James, who’d campaigned on a promise of taking on the NRA, exactly the excuse she needed to begin a wide-ranging investigation into the NRA’s operations, an investigation that was always headed in one direction.

That process reached its predetermined destination when the Attorney General announced that she’s suing the NRA, seeking to dissolve the Association and put it out of business.

The NRA handed New York Attorney General Letitia James a pistol and stood right in front her. Yesterday, she pulled the trigger. 

How can she do that? Well, as the New Yorker noted last April, under the state’s non-profit laws, board members have a fiduciary duty to the membership…one that few if any of them actually seemed able to or interested in performing.

James Fishman, a co-author of “New York Nonprofit Law and Practice: With Tax Analysis,” a leading text on nonprofit law, told me, “There is no such thing as a director who doesn’t direct. You’re responsible to make yourself aware of what’s going on. If the board doesn’t know, they’ve breached their duty of care, which is against the law in New York,” where the N.R.A. is chartered. According to [Marc] Owens, the former I.R.S. official, New York State “could sanction board members, remove board members, disband the board, or close down the organization entirely.”

And here we are.

The news of the New York AG’s move to chloroform the NRA was met with predictable reactions from gun owners and Second Amendment supporters. Plenty were outraged at the attack on the nation’s oldest civil rights organization. They called it a blatantly political move, and there’s little doubt that’s exactly what it is.

James had obviously coordinated her lawsuit …