OSD 296: NRA! They expect one of us in the wreckage, brother.
The NRA is irrelevant in the same way that jazz is irrelevant.
Analysis about the NRA’s decline usually tries to declare a firm yes-or-no on whether the group is irrelevant. But neither stance is really tenable. If you think they’re relevant, people will point out their lack of pull on social media and with young people. If you think they’re irrelevant, people will point out that they still have good relationships with hundreds of members of Congress and just scored a major Supreme Court victory a few months ago in NRA v. Vullo.
Really, the NRA is irrelevant in the same way that jazz is irrelevant. Super influential in the 20th century, and it helped shape the way that modern practitioners do their thing — but it is no longer a major influence on the way things go forward from here.
You can break the organization’s history down into four eras:
Pre gun control. From its founding in 1871 until the passage of the National Firearms Act in 1934, the NRA was essentially a network of shooting clubs. Gun control laws weren’t really a thing (with a couple exceptions, like niche carry bans in some small towns and, most notably, New York’s Sullivan Act), so anti-gun-control wasn’t really a thing.
Intermittent collaboration. There’s a popular narrative that the NRA supported the NFA (in 1934) and the Gun Control Act (in 1968) wholesale. It’s true that the NRA was ambivalent about the final versions of those bills. But they also cut the bills back from what they were originally going to be. The group viewed themselves as subject matter experts to partner with legislators on gun laws. Why so conciliatory? Four reasons. First, it wasn’t clear that the gun control movement would eventually push for outright bans of common firearms. Second, the NRA leadership was itself divided on gun control laws. Third, they thought they could change the system from the inside, and that if they weren’t involved, the results would be even worse. Fourth, they were divided about whether to get involved in politics at all.
Gun rights juggernaut. At the NRA’s 1977 convention, Harlon Carter (an NRA exec unhappy with the group’s disinterest in politics) and Neal Knox (editor of Rifle magazine) staged a successful coup against the leadership. The members voted Carter in as the new boss, and the NRA pivoted hard into politics. Over the next few decades, they became the face of gun rights. Nobody else was close.
Social media era. Long before Letitia James’ lawsuit and the internal boondoggles, two events started the NRA’s current decline. The first was the rise of social media. The group just couldn’t adapt to a world where information doesn’t spread via people standing at podiums. The second event was the Sandy Hook shooting. The NRA’s out-of-touch response blamed violent video games, and while they did block any new federal gun control laws, the general sense was that the group just couldn’t rise to the occasion.
That’s how we got to where we are today. There are a bunch of gun rights groups who know how to use social media, and they’re helping drive the conversation. But what’s even more important is the hundreds of major influencers in the space. That’s no one group and no central organization, just hundreds of people building big audiences of gun rights fans. Today that is what is accelerating the popularity of gun rights. Gun rights groups help, and are critical in the courts, but culture is upstream of politics and technology is upstream of culture. Gun rights groups work on politics, and influencers and companies work on culture and technology.
Stephen Gutowski and Jake Fogleman over at The Reload have been covering the NRA’s recent activity. The group’s revenues and lobbying spend are down, and they’re working through the fallout from New York’s lawsuit against them.
The NRA’s trend right now is a slow slide into irrelevance. That outcome is not guaranteed, but it will be the default. The alternative is that somebody with a strong vision takes over. The group still has a lot going for it. The brand is one of the most recognizable in the world. It has history and a deep network. Those things matter and could be a strong foundation for the future.
But even if no turnaround happens, the NRA has been valuable in the social media era. It has been a sacrificial baffle for the gun rights movement. It has absorbed attacks and drawn fire (albeit often needlessly so), leaving other groups mostly free to do their thing. If that’s its major final act, that’s not nothing. But it could do so much more.
This week’s links
NBC News piece on YouTube’s ever-tightening gun rules
They spoke with a number of big guntubers for the piece.
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This makes sense if you conceptualize the NRA simply or mostly as a gun rights political activist organization, which is a mistake that I think the NRA leadership itself made along the way (taking that to an extreme and making itself into a culture warrior organization). I would love to see this debacle lead the organization to refocus on what it contributes to gun safety as a service organization (it can also still do necessary political work, of course, as it always did). I'm not an expert on the NRA but have reflected on this some in the past: https://gunculture2point0.com/2015/10/01/the-national-rifle-association-as-thousands-of-spider-monkeys-not-an-800-pound-gorilla/
A useful article that hits the nail pretty squarely. I wish you’d mentioned how corruption by Wayne and his cronies did so much to damage the organization. And it would gave been useful to point out that the NRA for generations provided most of the non-military shooting instruction available in this country. Also, Carter’s first name was *Harlon*, not Hanlon. All those are minor points, though, and I thank you for this piece.