The NRA: Birth of a Lobby

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the public face of the National Rifle Association was the gun-loving hobbyist who collected, restored, lovingly oiled, and would not shut up about his beautiful guns. Multiply him by a couple of thousand, and you have a pretty clear picture of what the organization looked like at first. Rather than insisting that every man, woman, and child (yes, child!) should own a gun—as it would nearly a century later—the NRA of our great-great-grandparents wanted to make sure that people who owned guns knew how to use them.

The NRA was established in 1871 in the aftermath of the Civil War, when technological innovation—particularly breech-loading guns and metal cartridge ammunition—allowed shooters, for the very first time, to aim and actually hit a desired target. American men needed to be trained to use the new technology, and the founders, Colonel William C. Church and General George Wingate, set out to improve American marksmanship. They envisioned the National Guard running a get-better-at-shooting association but realized that private enterprise could support the effort more quickly.

Still, those early years involved lots and lots of government assistance. Church and Wingate gratefully accepted New York’s offer to host shooting contests at its rifle range at a place called Creedmoor, in Queens in New York City, now the site of a psychiatric hospital for severely mentally ill patients. Once New York withdrew its support—the state’s optimistic governor, Alonzo Cornell, believed that “there will be no war in my time or in the time of my children”—the federal government aided the NRA by giving away hundreds of thousands of surplus guns to its clubs at cost and partnered with the association on marksmanship training and competitions.

These recreational gun enthusiasts did not see the Second Amendment as the bedrock of the entire American experiment, as their successors do. The NRA of your grandparents’ childhood privately urged its members to oppose many gun restrictions, but it publicly sought to present itself as a willing partner in limiting crimes through firearm regulation. While it would shed this compromising attitude in the years ahead, its messaging to its members has been remarkably consistent from the very beginning, even though it did not initially cite the Second Amendment.

In 1911, the NRA opined on a state regulation in New York that required police licenses for firearms. Writing in its magazine to members, the lobby complained that additional licensing and other restrictions “make it very difficult for an honest man and a good citizen to obtain them,” arguing that “such laws have the effect of arming the bad man and disarming the good one.”¹ Sound familiar?

In the 1920s, just as automobiles began to populate our streets, the NRA weighed in on another growing phenomenon: criminals with guns using cars to commit crimes and then quickly flee the scene. An article published in the organization’s magazine, American Rifleman, argued that cars were to blame for increasing rates of gun violence. “It’s the automobile that’s making the going tough for the police—not the one-hand gun.” These examples demonstrate the early use of two modern-day NRA tactics: insist that gun regulations will disarm only law-abiding individuals to the advantage of criminals, and then blame anything but the prevalence of guns for the violence, no matter how ridiculous the argument. In the 1920s, it was the car. Today it’s video games and Ritalin.

Nevertheless, this younger NRA did wear a far gentler and agreeable face in public than it does today. When three-time sport-shooting Olympic gold medalist Karl T. Frederick appeared before Congress to testify about the 1934 National Firearms Act, a measure that severely restricted access to machine guns and sawed-off shotguns, he bragged about how the NRA was already working to make it harder for Americans to purchase firearms.

He said, “I have been giving this subject of firearms regulations study and consideration over a period of 15 years, and my suggestions … have resulted in the adoption in many States of regulatory provisions.” Some of those provisions—adopted at the time in Washington, DC, and in several states—now read like a gun-safety advocate’s agenda. Gun dealers could be licensed only at the discretion of police; they were required to keep detailed records of all transactions and provide, within hours of the purchase, a buyer’s personal information to the authorities.

Frederick did not enthusiastically support the 1934 federal law; he told Congress that states would probably be best equipped to implement these regulations. But he did offer lawmakers constructive criticism for how to improve the federal bill, and he endorsed the general notion of gun safety.

“I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns,” Frederick said. “I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.” The NRA head reviewed the bill with lawmakers almost line by line, and when a representative asked him if the proposed law “interferes in any way with the right of a person to keep and bear arms” or violates any part of the Constitution, he responded, “I have not given it any study from that point of view.” NRA executive vice president Milton Reckford was even more direct about the need to restrict the ownership of certain kinds of firearms, telling Congress, “We believe that the machine gun, submachine gun, sawed-off shotgun, and dangerous and deadly weapons could all be included in any kind of a bill, and no matter how drastic, we will support it.”²

However, the NRA’s public remarks bore little resemblance to the way it portrayed the bill to its members. It wouldn’t discover the power of Second Amendment fundamentalism until the 1970s, but its antipathy to most gun restrictions was never too far below the surface. In a May 1934 publication, the organization warned that the National Firearms Act’s “viciousness lies in the opportunity for disarmament by subterfuge” and ran editorials with titles like “Keep Those Letters and Telegrams Coming,” urging its eighty thousand or so members to “communicate [their opposition] at once by telegram and special-delivery letter with both their Representatives and their Senators in Washington.”³ So many members responded that Assistant Attorney General Joseph Keenan claimed that lawmakers felt “emasculated” by the reaction.

This innovation, the direct-contact campaign, would prove pivotal to the lobby’s power over lawmakers. Around the same time, the NRA also transformed its recreational rifle clubs into political organizations to oppose gun restrictions, seeking to maximize public pressure.

Despite the NRA’s opposition, the measure passed. Five years later, the U.S. Supreme Court took up the question of the law’s constitutionality, which the lobby never questioned. The Supreme Court upheld the National Firearms Act, agreeing unanimously with the argument that the Constitution’s Second Amendment right to bear arms “is not one which may be utilized for private purposes, but only one which exists where the arms are borne in the militia or some other military organization provided for by law and intended for the protection of the state.” That view held for sixty-nine years, until the landmark District of Columbia v. Heller decision in 2008.

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the NRA operated as a quasi-governmental organization, and the federal government avoided any new gun restrictions. The lobby hired a former senior manager from the Internal Revenue Service, Franklin L. Orth, to represent its interests, organized government-sponsored national shooting matches, and helped run a federal program to promote firearm safety and training. Still, warnings about disarmament were never off the agenda.

In an April 1948 editorial published in the American Rifleman, the organization argued, “The pattern of Communist action is now well established.… [In Communist states], all shooting clubs were closed by legal decree. All privately-owned small arms were taken into ‘safekeeping’ by the police.… All patriotic citizens had been disarmed when the arms registration lists were seized by Hitler’s Fifth Column.… How can anyone, squarely facing the contemporary record, seek or support laws which would require American citizens to register their privately owned firearms with any municipal, state, or federal agency?”

The NRA would soon have to put the power of that argument to the test.

On November 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy using a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle he purchased for $19.95 through an ad in American Rifleman. The killing shocked the nation. It also spurred Congress to consider legislation banning mail-order firearms, which were easy to acquire and, as a result, were frequently used in crime. The NRA facilitated these purchases through its network of publications, but few know that it actually helped develop the ammunition that ultimately killed the president.

After World War II, as the United States began arming anti-Communist groups in Greece, it worked with the NRA to design and manufacture ammunition that would improve the accuracy of certain rifles. That ammunition eventually made its way into the U.S. domestic market and into the barrel of the Oswald gun. When Orth learned of the connection, he allegedly told a Senate staffer, “Please don’t tell anybody because we don’t want to be hung with having been involved in producing the ammunition that killed the President.”⁴

If the NRA felt any guilt for allowing Oswald to easily arm himself, it did not show it. For several years, the lobby urged its members to oppose multiple bills that sought to severely restrict the interstate sale of firearms. The NRA argued that such limits would ban “the private ownership of all guns,” and that lie successfully held off multiple federal gun restrictions.

I should note here that the politics of gun control in the 1960s cannot be divorced from the racism that pervaded American society. Many white leaders felt threatened by the social-justice movements of the era and sought to use gun restrictions as a way to prevent African Americans from acquiring firearms. For some white leaders, the justification for gun restrictions sounded like this quote from Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley: “You’ve got people out there, especially the nonwhites, are buying guns right and left. You got guns and rifles and pistols and everything else,” Daley said. “There’s no registration. There isn’t a damn thing.”⁵

But soon, several high-profile gun deaths proved that the power of the NRA and its members to defeat restrictive laws was not without limit.

First, Martin Luther King was gunned down in a Memphis, Tennessee, hotel in April 1968. Two months later, Robert F. Kennedy was killed with a .22 handgun in Los Angeles, California.

Thirteen days after that, on June 19, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law a bill to ban the interstate sale and shipment of handguns. He later expanded the ban to include rifles and shotguns and instituted prohibitions against most felons and people who were found to be mentally incompetent from purchasing firearms. Caving to public pressure, the NRA generally supported the Gun Control Act of 1968. “The measure as a whole appears to be one that sportsmen of America can live with,” the leadership said at the time.

That statement did not sit well with a small group of extremists inside the organization, and it would prove pivotal in transforming the NRA.

On May 21, 1977, a stout, bald man named Harlon Bronson Carter wrested control of the NRA from the so-called old guard that had supported the 1968 law. Carter’s gripe? The old leaders did not do enough to defend the Second Amendment. They had failed to stop the Gun Control Act of 1968. In 1975 in the NRA Fact Book on Firearms Control, they had written that the Second Amendment is “of limited practical utility” as an argument against gun restrictions.⁶ They were planning to move the NRA headquarters from Washington, DC, to Colorado Springs, Colorado, to focus more on sport shooting and hunting. They had even fired Carter and eighty-four other staff members in preparation for that move out west.

The disgruntled former employees soon formed the Federation of the NRA with the goal of ousting the old NRA leaders and taking over. At the organization’s annual convention a year later, the group succeeded. The old guard, who, in the view of Carter, had not worked hard enough to defeat gun regulations, was out.

The fundamentalists, known as the new guard, quickly established defense of the Second Amendment as a guiding principle for the NRA and greatly increased funding to the organization’s lobbying arm. The NRA as we know it today was born.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that the organization’s new, more radical views were propagated by a radical man.

A native Texan, Harlon Carter had his first consequential experience with a firearm at age fourteen. In 1931, the Carter family lived in the border town of Laredo, Texas, home to a large Mexican population. One day, Carter’s mother suspected that a group of Mexican boys hanging around the house had stolen her car. Young Carter sprang into action. He grabbed his shotgun and went to look for the boys, finding them at a nearby swimming hole. He demanded they follow him back to his home. They refused, and fifteen-year-old Ramón Casiano pulled out a knife. In the skirmish that ensued, the future NRA leader—whose mentees would go on to develop the slogan “The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”—shot and killed Casiano. Carter was convicted of murder and sentenced to three years in prison, but he served only two.

As writer Laura Smith put it in a 2017 piece on Carter’s life, “The scene had everything that would come to define the organization: home and family, a fervent sense of self-protection, vigilantism, and standing your ground,” adding that the incident “exemplifies the association’s tacit approval of race-based violence and white impunity.”⁷

Carter’s embrace of violent racism defined his adult professional life, too, and set the course of the NRA for years to come. In 1950, Carter became chief of the U.S. Border Patrol and presided over Operation Wetback—the biggest mass deportation in American history.⁸ The operation, occasioned by a breakdown in negotiations over the legal sponsorship of Mexican workers in the United States, used military tactics to deport more than a million workers across the border. Carter described the effort to the Los Angeles Times as an “all-out war to hurl … Mexican wetbacks back into Mexico.”⁹

As you can tell, Carter was never subtle about his bigotry or his desire to oppress nonwhites by force, and he set out to remake the NRA in that image. Under his leadership, the NRA grew from 930,000 members to over 3 million, with an annual budget of $66 million, and became the lobbying juggernaut feared by politicians today. He accomplished this impressive feat with a combination of business savvy and the philosophical fervor of a barnstorming preacher. To attract members, Carter instituted giveaways and discounts—a practice still widely used by the organization to recruit and boost its membership numbers. He adopted a hardline “no compromises” philosophy that presented any effort to make guns harder to get as an infringement on Second Amendment rights.

Carter once told a congressional panel that he would rather allow violent convicted felons, drug addicts, and mentally “deranged” people to buy a gun than require any kind of screening. He described this attitude as “a price we pay for freedom.” Carter kept the NRA headquarters in the center of the political action—Washington, DC—and changed the organization’s motto from “Firearms Safety Education, Marksmanship Training, Shooting for Recreation” to “The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms Shall Not Be Infringed”—a purposely truncated version of the Second Amendment.

Throughout his tenure, the organization prioritized repealing Johnson’s Gun Control Act. The law had attracted significant bipartisan support in Congress, but Carter was determined to chip away at it, arguing that it undermined the Second Amendment. He was playing the long game, establishing a bold goal and strategically moving toward it. Twenty years later, the NRA succeeded, at least in part, by winning passage of the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act. This act repealed parts of the 1968 law by weakening the authority of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the federal entity responsible for regulating firearms, to oversee federally licensed gun dealers; it also loosened restrictions on interstate gun sales.

Upon signing the measure, President Ronald Reagan, who as governor of California actually had supported Johnson’s law, echoed the NRA’s newfound Second Amendment extremism. Six years earlier, he had benefited from the organization’s very first presidential endorsement and his reversal on guns typified the evolution of the Republican Party on the issue and highlighted the growing power and influence of the gun lobby.

In 1972 the Republican platform had stated, “We pledge to … intensify efforts to prevent criminal access to all weapons, including special emphasis on cheap, readily obtainable handguns, … with such federal law as necessary to enable the states to meet their responsibilities.” Eight years later, in 1980, the Republican platform said the opposite: “We believe the right of citizens to keep and bear arms must be preserved.”

The union between the NRA and the Republican Party was now stronger than ever; its strength lay in its mutual cultural and financial interests. The party’s opposition to gun regulations spoke to a growing fundamentalist white rural constituency, but it was particularly important to the industry dedicated to selling more arms.

Gunmakers benefit from the lobby’s legislative goals because they can sell more guns to more people. When Carter and his fundamentalists took over the NRA, gunmakers saw an opportunity to use the NRA to advance their interests. The industry has long advertised in NRA magazines and publications, where its products are favorably reviewed, and has stuffed NRA membership forms in product packaging. As the New York Times reported back in 1972, “Many firearms manufacturers have chosen to remain in the background of the raging debate over tighter restrictions on the sale and possession of guns, preferring to leave their public talking to the National Rifle Association.”¹⁰

Patriotism, after all, makes for far better rhetoric than messaging about increasing gun sales. In the years that followed, the relationship between the gun lobby, the gun industry, and the Republican Party became a marriage of love as well as convenience.