The Trace exists not to cover gun news, as they claim, but to attack gun rights under the guise of unbiased journalism that simply focuses on guns. The fact that it’s run by a high-ranking Everytown official is plenty of reason to recognize that the guise is a lie, but the mainstream media has made it clear they don’t seem to care.
And that bothers me, but not quite as much as the organization’s latest attempt to demonize the NRA.
It’s one thing when the coverage is about mismanaging money by high-ranking officials. That’s a legitimate problem that’s of concern to anyone who has donated money to the group or been a member during the period of mismanagement. It’s quite another when they’re griping about a man’s final wishes being respected.
Yes, really.
See, they start off by telling you the story of a woman named Stormy and her son, Myles. Stormy’s first husband, Myles’s father, killed himself with a gun. Quite tragic, to say the least, especially since it looks like Myles witnessed enough of the suicide to have issues because of it.
Stormy then took up with another man, whose name was Lewis Tabler. According to Stormy, the couple bought a house that she used the life insurance from her first husband’s suicide to put the down payment on, and they moved in together. According to her, Tabler was violent and aggressive, and hated his job, but she insisted she stay at home. They didn’t marry, but agreed to live as man and wife, according to Stormy.
Tabler and Myles allegedly clashed, and Stormy claims Tabler shot at Myles, though he claimed it was just a plastic bullet that wouldn’t have injured him.
Then, sometime later, Tabler killed himself.
Stormy has a long story to tell, and The Trace is willing to listen, and it turns out that the reason they were willing to listen is that after Tabler’s suicide, she learned that he’d left his entire life savings to the NRA.
On January 11, the day after Tabler’s suicide, Stormy contacted Applied Industrial. There was a little more than $2,000 in Tabler’s checking account, and Stormy needed money to live on, to pay the mortgage, medical debts, and credit card bills. When she reached someone at the company, she learned that she would receive about $41,000 in life insurance money, but that the nearly half a million dollars in Tabler’s retirement account would go to the NRA. The irony that Tabler had died by gun suicide only deepened her devastation. “I just bawled,” Stormy said.
Still, she assumed that, given the circumstances, the NRA would refuse the money. She sent a handwritten fax to Applied Industrial, informing the company that she was contesting the beneficiary change. In the meantime, Myles moved home to be with his mom, and they began to sell everything of value.
But they didn’t refuse the money, and that of course means that the NRA is terrible.
Then again, why should they?
See, before this quoted section, we have this bit:
On the afternoon of August 31, Shields and his boss, Tim Fisher, the NRA’s director of planned giving, ate lunch with Tabler at a seafood restaurant in Frederick. “Lew told me how his girlfriend ‘Stormy’ was a ‘low-life’ and that her first husband committed suicide,” Shields recalled of their meeting in his affidavit. “He said that he would kick her out but she would end up on the street. He also joked that if something ever happened to him she was probably involved.” Fisher added, in an affidavit of his own, that during lunch Tabler was “adamant about who he did not want to benefit from his 401-K and that of course was Stormy.” He wrote that Tabler “expressed his dismay that Stormy did not work outside the home and did not contribute financially.”
Fisher later sent Tabler a handwritten note. “I want to thank you again for your passion for freedom and for the very significant gift you have made as evidence of that passion,” Fisher wrote. He informed Tabler that a gold “Benefactor ring” symbolizing his generosity was arriving soon.
Tabler checked in with Applied Industrial to make sure that the company had registered the change. “I’ve been in the hospital for my heart twice in the last two months,” he e-mailed. “My spirit will never rest if my girlfriend and her bumb [sic] son end up with all that money I’ve been saving for 30 years.”
So what we’ve got is a woman who claims she was the victim of a terrible relationship while doing everything right, but only her word and the word of her son for it, and we’ve got multiple sources expressly stating that Tabler did not want Stormy to have this money.
I mean, there’s no vagueness to it. He wanted the money to go to the NRA and not to Stormy and Myles.
Why, then, does it somehow matter to The Trace? Well, Stormy lost two partners to so-called gun violence and then everything else when the NRA collected what had been promised, especially in light of the fact that Tabler didn’t want Stormy to have it.
Does that make Tabler some kind of a jackass? Maybe. What we have are some documented comments from Tabler that don’t exactly make his relationship look like puppies and roses, and Stormy’s claims that he was all kinds of awful. We’re never going to know the truth.
Honestly, I know where I fall on this, all based on The Trace’s reporting, and it’s not a sympathetic view of Stormy or Myles, but that’s not relevant. What’s relevant is that the NRA did nothing wrong. They didn’t give up money to Stormy when asked, which they didn’t have to do, and the truth is that a man’s final wishes are supposed to mean something. Tabler didn’t want her having it, and that was that.
Of course, guns get demonized, too, even though it wasn’t the gun that drove either man to suicide. I could be snide about what may have, but I won’t be. It’s not relevant.
But overall, the idea that somehow the NRA owed an obligation to a woman they were told Tabler didn’t want to get his money is asinine. They’ve discredited their own argument via their own reporting.
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