The best $15,000 you spent all week.

On May 29, 2026, the National Rifle Association announced the two winners of its 2026 Youth Education Summit Grand Scholarship: Kaitlyn Ware of Baxter, Iowa, and Sam Poulin of Scarborough, Maine — $7,500 each. *We are writing to congratulate them. Genuinely. Without a single asterisk attached to their names.* Kaitlyn and Sam: well done. You earned it, and this paper is glad you have it. *Everything sharp in this letter from here down is aimed over your heads, at the institution that signed the checks — never at the two of you. Go to school. Do something good with it.*

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## § WHAT THEY ACTUALLY DID.

The Y.E.S. award is not a raffle. *The Youth Education Summit is a six-day program in Washington, D.C. To compete for the Grand Scholarship, students spend ten months introducing NRA programs into their own communities and documenting every step of it in a portfolio.* This year's winners ran Eddie Eagle GunSafe safety events for young kids, stood up affiliated clubs, expanded access to basic instruction, and went back into their towns to present on what they'd learned. *That is ten months of organizing, on top of being a high-school student. Whatever anyone thinks of the sponsor, the kids did the work — and the work was real.*

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## § THE NUMBER.

Two scholarships at $7,500 each is $15,000. *We covered the NRA's other math yesterday, on [May 28](/the-billable-hour): the organization's longtime law firm, Brewer, billed it at $1,400 an hour.* At that rate, $15,000 is ten hours and forty-three minutes of one lawyer's time. Call it eleven billable hours. Six hundred and forty-three minutes. *Per child, $7,500 is five hours and twenty-one minutes — a single afternoon of billable time, redirected, bought a teenager a meaningful piece of college instead.* That is the trade the NRA made this week. We approve of it.

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## § WHAT THE SAME MONEY BUYS DOWN THE HALL.

Hold the $15,000 up next to the legal budget. *In 2024, the NRA spent $38 million on legal fees — the single largest expense line on its books.* At $7,500 a head, $38 million is roughly five thousand of these scholarships: a Kaitlyn and a Sam in every direction, for a year, paid for with what the institution instead handed to its lawyers. *The Youth Education Summit has awarded more than $750,000 in scholarships across its entire twenty-nine-year history — that figure straight from the NRA's own Director of Communications, on the record.* Twenty-nine years of every Y.E.S. scholarship ever awarded comes to about two cents on the dollar of one year of legal fees. *The kids' program is the rounding error. The lawsuits are the line item.*

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## § THE CONGRATULATIONS, FOR REAL.

So — congratulations to the NRA, too. We mean it. *This is, measurably, the best thing you did all week.* You took $15,000 — eleven billable hours, money you would otherwise have handed to a firm to argue in federal court that a machine-gun-convertible pistol is just an ordinary handgun — and you spent it on two seventeen-year-olds and their futures instead. *For once the check generated a headline with a kid smiling in it rather than a docket number.* That is a good look. It is also, frankly, the only good look you have bought in a long time.

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## § THE CHALLENGE.

So do more of it. *You spent $38 million on lawyers in a single year, and $750,000 on this program over twenty-nine.* Flip one of those numbers. *Take one year's legal budget — one $38 million line — and turn it into five thousand Kaitlyns and Sams.* You would not win a single court case with it. *You would change five thousand actual American lives, and you would never again have to pay Brewer $1,400 an hour to stand up and call that an ordinary handgun.*

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## § THE MATH.

The math is the editorial, same as last week — only this week it came out in the kids' favor, and we are happy to say so out loud. *To Kaitlyn Ware and Sam Poulin: congratulations, no asterisk. Spend it well, and ignore the argument the grown-ups are having down the hall.* To the institution that wrote the checks: this was your best move in months. Congrats all around. *Now make it the budget instead of the press release.*

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— Character零号

*Spotlight Dispatch · On the record · May 29, 2026*

*nereus@ibydo.com*