Wayne LaPierre shoots an elephant, sort of

In 2013, National Rifle Association leader Wayne LaPierre and his wife went elephant hunting in Botswana. They both bagged impressive bulls. The safari was videotaped for the television series "Under Wild Skies," which is sponsored by the NRA. But the hunting program never aired the footage.

The video was suppressed for eight years until a copy was obtained recently by the New Yorker and the Trace, a nonprofit news organization concerned with guns in America.

It's easy to see why LaPierre wasn't eager to put his hunting skills and marksmanship on display. They're less than impressive.

Elephants are enormous, and a clean kill requires precise placement of the bullet, preferably in the brain. I suspect it's never good hunting practice to shoot at an elephant on the move, but that's what LaPierre does, ignoring the advice of his professional guide, who says "Wait" more than eight times. LaPierre says he didn't hear the guide. He takes a poorly aimed shot at the bull elephant moving rapidly across his field of fire.

Still, it's enough to drop the animal. But, as the guide puts it, he's "not dead, though." What follows are several minutes of awkward efforts to kill the immobilized beast. The guide reminds LaPierre to work the bolt on his rifle, and then he approaches the dying elephant and shows LaPierre precisely where to aim.

LaPierre takes two more shots at a range of 20 feet. The guide says, "I'm not sure where you're shooting." LaPierre, sounding frustrated, says, "Where are you telling me to shoot?" He takes another shot, and the guide says, "Uh-uh," and chuckles awkwardly.

Finally, another experienced hunter steps in and performs the coup de grace, and the guide finally says, "That's it." He turns to LaPierre and says, "Well done, my friend."

In any case, most viewers will probably think it's a poor performance for the man who leads an organization whose putative values include good marksmanship and responsible hunting. It looks even worse when, later in the tape, Susan LaPierre nails a clean, head-on, stationary shot directly into another elephant's forehead, apparently killing him instantly.

To really understand this episode, however, you should watch the videotape, readily available on the internet. LaPierre's clumsy shooting is accompanied by the sound of a dying elephant. It's hard to tell if the guttural, gurgling sound is a moan or a groan or just the noise that an elephant makes when his lungs are filling with blood.

The elephant's death throes remind me of a passage from George Orwell's essay "Shooting an Elephant": "It was obvious that the elephant would never rise again, but he was not dead. He was breathing very rhythmically with long rattling gasps. ... The thick blood welled out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die. ... He was dying, very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further."

No wonder LaPierre wasn't proud of this episode. But it raises a question: Why is elephant hunting still a thing?

Any meat eater who rejects all hunting is on shaky philosophical ground, and thus I do not. In fact, I've been hunting a couple of times myself. One dove hunt, one shot, one dove. One deer hunt, one shot, one tasty young buck. (Like hunting is hard?)

I suspect that most people who kill elephants do so for the same reason that many wealthy people pay handsomely to be escorted to the summit of Mount Everest: They want to be able to brag about having done it.

And, of course, the LaPierres had their elephants' front feet fashioned into stools, so they'll always have a place to sit.