Rolling Stone reports:

On the third floor of Houston’s massive convention center, far above the noise and rabble of the gun show at the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting, a luxury hospitality suite was closed to normal NRA members. It was reserved instead for the gun lobby’s biggest donors, who belong to its “Ring of Freedom.” Here, grandees could escape from the masses, sink into plush leather couches, belly up to the refreshment tables, and marvel at a surreal pair of massive taxidermy installations, including one of a grizzly bear felling a moose.

The NRA loves to bash “the elites” — in Hollywood and the media — whom they blame for whipping the nation into what they describe as gun-grabbing hysteria after a mass shooting like the one that left 19 elementary school children dead in Uvalde, Texas. The organization holds itself out as a stalwart defender of the everyman against “the world’s most powerful, deceitful and ruthless opponents,” as NRA honcho Wayne LaPierre put it in a Saturday address to NRA members.

But at its annual meeting in Houston, the NRA hosted a high-end shadow convention for its own elite members and backers — many of them executives of gun manufacturers and sellers. These “Ring of Freedom” events underscore how the NRA has transformed itself from a pro-second amendment organization, focused on the liberty interests of its members, into a front group for gun industry itself. [Continue reading…]