6 Insights into the NRA-Russia Relationship

1) Alexander Torshin is no low-level Russian bureaucrat. The man that Russian president Vladimir Putin sent to the United States nearly a decade ago to broker a relationship with the National Rifle Association is no average government official. Since 2001, Alexander Torshin has been one of Putin’s most loyal lieutenants; a man Putin trusts with the most politically sensitive of tasks.

Now the deputy governor of the central bank of Russia, Torshin started out as a legislator in Putin’s United Russia party. He served in the upper house of the Russian parliament from 2001 to 2015…