Why the NRA Is Successful

By almost any measure, the NRA is one of the most successful political lobbies the United States has ever seen. Its intense focus on a single issue energizes millions of Americans and transforms their enthusiasm into electoral victories, ensuring that lawmakers on state and federal levels continue to vote down restrictions against gun ownership and advance policies that make firearms more readily available.

Since 1911, the organization has hammered home one clear message: more guns will make you safer. Since the late 1970s, it has insisted that any tightening of gun laws violates the constitutional rights of responsible gun-owning Americans. Despite the lack of evidence for either claim, the lobby has repeated these messages incessantly and thereby transformed American law and public opinion.

On the federal level, the NRA defeated countless efforts to expand background checks to cover all gun sales and to ban military-style assault weapons. It has prevented the government from funding scientific research into gun violence, thwarted efforts by federal regulators to hold gun manufacturers and federally licensed dealers accountable, and even rammed through a federal law protecting both from most forms of liability. The lobby regularly pushes for measures that would allow convicted felons to access guns, opposes measures prohibiting domestic abusers from getting firearms, and advances measures to allow guns at schools, on college campuses, and even in churches and bars.

Conservative lawmakers—practically or literally—copy and paste their firearm policies from the NRA website and regularly consult its lobbyists before weighing in on gun issues. Republican politicians sound no different from NRA lobbyists because they are afraid to cross the organization and confront the wrath of its hardcore base of supporters, as well as millions of other Americans who may not subscribe fully to the organization’s political beliefs but see it as an ally that shares their worldview. Combined with the millions of dollars the NRA can throw into an electoral race and its habit of funding the opponents of lawmakers who do cross it, politicians see little incentive to take on the lobby.

Even some progressive lawmakers and advocates fear that too bold a position against guns could energize the NRA and its supporters. As a result, they tamp down their messages and policy proposals to appeal to “responsible” gun owners. That anxiety goes back to the 1994 midterm elections. The NRA energized its followers to vote against twenty-four members of Congress who supported an assault weapons ban and nineteen lost their seats. Twenty-five years later, it remains unclear how much the NRA’s campaign contributed to the massive electoral loss for Democrats; the party was also confronting a soft economy and the Clinton administration’s unsuccessful effort to reform the health care system. Clinton spoke in favor of gun safety during his 1996 reelection campaign, and in the 2004 election both major-party candidates supported an assault weapons ban. Nevertheless, fear of the NRA dampened enthusiasm for directly confronting the gun issue for decades to come.

On the state level, where nearly all gun policy is made, the lobby’s success is even more impressive.

As recently as 1981, nineteen states and the District of Columbia prohibited any form of concealed carry; twenty-nine states allowed officials to use their discretion in granting permits; two states required officials to green-light all applicants not barred by federal law from owning a firearm; just one—Vermont—had a permitless carry system. Today every single state in the union allows individuals to carry concealed weapons outside their homes. At least eight have even enacted permitless carry laws. Individuals who live in Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming do not have to meet any requirements for bringing a weapon into a public space.

The NRA also pushed states to adopt constitutional protections for gun owners. As a result, forty-four states now guarantee the individual the right to bear arms.

It lobbied for preemption laws to prevent cities and towns from adopting stricter gun restrictions, arguing that a state should have uniform gun laws throughout. As of 2018, only seven states allow local governments to regulate firearms and ammunition; in forty-three states, local laws about firearms can be preempted by weaker state laws.¹

Beginning in 2005, the lobby even sought to make it easier for individuals to shoot their guns and claim self-defense. That year, it convinced the Florida legislature and Governor Jeb Bush to sign a so-called stand-your-ground law, which allows individuals to use deadly force in self-defense beyond the home, in any place they have a legal right to be, without fear of prosecution. At least twenty-five states have adopted similar legislation, and the NRA continues to lobby on its behalf. Florida, meanwhile, is experiencing a higher rate of gun violence. Ten years after it enacted stand-your-ground, “justifiable homicides” have increased by 75 percent and one analysis found that “approximately 4,200 individuals were murdered with a gun in Florida whose lives may have been saved if stand your ground had not been enacted and previous trends had continued.” For the gun lobby, it is not enough for individuals to have easy access to firearms; they must be able to use them to kill with impunity too.

All of this success on the state level is essential for the NRA’s longevity. First, loosening restrictions on gun ownership and making firearms readily available shifts public opinion. In 1999, the year of the Columbine school shooting, 52 percent of Americans believed that gun ownership generally does more to reduce safety than to enhance it. Nineteen years and more than two hundred American school shootings later, 58 percent of respondents to an NBC News and Wall Street Journal poll agreed that “gun ownership does more to increase safety by allowing law-abiding citizens to protect themselves.” Just 38 percent believed the opposite. The trend flies in the face of countless academic studies that have found that having a gun in the home dramatically increases the chances of homicide, suicide, and accidental shootings.

Second, revising laws on the state level provides gun enthusiasts and supporters more opportunities to take part in the fight; it delivers many more victories for the lobby and its members. It creates a sense of momentum and encourages men and women dedicated to the issue to keep at it.

Third, and most important, state victories affect the development of federal constitutional law. In 2008, when the Supreme Court ruled on Heller, it did so against the backdrop of not only NRA-funded research, but also the presence of such individual rights in state constitutions. Ruling in favor of the gun lobby, therefore, allowed the Supreme Court to cause less disruption.

But all of this raises a key question: why is the NRA so successful?

The organization has a clear, tight message and a single focus. It distills its pitch into a single word—freedom—and, most importantly, builds a patriotic American identity and community around the emotion that word evokes.

For hardcore members, that identity is rooted in white privilege and anxiety over the changing demographics of America. Others see the NRA and guns generally as representative of an outdoor lifestyle defined by social and cultural bonding activities like hunting and sport shooting. Still others hope to preserve a constitutional principle they believe would be threatened by restrictions on firearms. Some simply want to be able to arm themselves should the need arise.

But even individuals whose relationship with the NRA begins with self-defense are exposed to its political philosophies and social identities. The organization injects its training and safety programs with political ideology and Second Amendment fundamentalism. The gun training course I took had all the trappings of a conservative political convention and the NRA’s concealed-carry courses are no different. Jennifer Carlson, who studies American gun culture as assistant professor of sociology and of government and public policy at the University of Arizona, has observed, “Rather than prioritize hands-on defensive training, these courses teach gun carriers that they are a particular kind of person—a law-abiding person willing to use lethal force to protect innocent life.”

Whatever their reason for joining the organization, NRA members are also motivated by the threat that they could lose something, and the lobby stokes those fears every chance it gets, framing even the smallest reform as a slippery slope to gun confiscation. Every mass shooting is a chance to warn members that their guns could be taken away and that fear-based messaging breeds loyalty. Polls show that one-fourth of voters who prioritize gun rights have contributed to a gun rights organization, and 45 percent are involved in activism; just 6 percent of gun control supporters have contributed to a gun control group, and only 26 percent have been activists.² Another survey found that 71 percent of gun control opponents say they would never support a candidate who wants to restrict gun ownership; only 34 percent of gun control supporters pledged to never back a candidate who does not share their view.

Half of gun owners tell pollsters that owning a firearm is very or somewhat important to their identities. Political scientist Matthew Lacombe argues that this is no accident. He contends that gun owners are politically dedicated to the NRA because it successfully created a social identity related to gun ownership. “Rather than arguing that gun control laws should be opposed because a particular law is flawed in a technical way,” Lacombe explains, “the NRA is more likely to say that that gun control provision should be opposed because it represents an attack on who gun owners are and what they stand for.” Gun owners, in other words, hold a politically meaningful identity that the NRA constantly depicts as being under threat. Taking political action becomes a means of protecting that identity. Even hunting and target practice are fetishized as political acts that show one’s patriotism and macho strength. As one Depression-era Rifleman editorial put it, “By your attendance at those regional shoots … by your fighting support of your National Association … you are showing the nation as you have shown it often in the past that you are its most courageous sons. That from your ranks spring leaders, not followers!” By picking up a firearm, gun owners are not merely taking part in a fun social activity; they are becoming rugged individualists and great American patriots!

The NRA built this identity through its publications and communications with members. Lacombe analyzed seventy-nine years of the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine and, separately, letters to the editors of four major U.S. newspapers. He wanted to see if gun owners who read the magazine mirrored its arguments in their own public communications.

Lacombe discovered that two-thirds of Rifleman editorials portrayed gun rights as being under threat; 80 percent used identity-stroking language that portrayed gun owners in a positive light or described gun regulations and their proponents negatively. The NRA magazine used at least one of the following adjectives to describe gun owners in the majority of its editorials: “law-abiding, peaceable, patriotic, courageous, honest, average citizens, ordinary citizens, brave, freedom-loving, and reputable.” Its members consistently echoed the language and internalized the identity.

Of the pro-gun letters to the editor Lacombe analyzed, 64 percent relied on identity language, and almost all used at least one of the honorifics from Rifleman editorials. Conversely, the NRA magazine consistently portrayed individuals and institutions it perceives as promoting gun control in a negative light, and the pro-gun letters to the editor echoed that language, too, though at a lower rate. Both the NRA magazine and the pro-gun letter writers have routinely characterized the news media as liars, cowards, and elitists, and gun control proponents as communists, tyrants, and foes of liberty.

“The NRA is able to mobilize large numbers of people in ways that are difficult to do if you just make technical policy-based appeals,” Lacombe told me. Seventy-four percent of the NRA’s policy editorials framed their arguments in terms of identity. Fifty-four percent of pro-gun editorial writers did the same, focusing on how the proposed policy would affect the lives of gun owners. Gun control advocates, on the other hand, focused their editorials on projections of crime reduction and rarely used personal terms, a losing strategy as facts mean less and less to more and more people.

The lobby uses the same language and techniques today.

In 2018, the NRA’s top priority was concealed-carry reciprocity, which if enacted into law would require every state in the nation to allow concealed carry within its borders—even if the carriers have no training. It is seeking to make silencers readily available to gun owners and is pushing more states to allow permitless carry.

In laying out this agenda to members on the NRA website, chief lobbyist Chris Cox spends multiple paragraphs describing gun owners as “law-abiding Americans” and reminding them of the role firearms play in their lives. “Hunting contributes to the sound management of natural resources, strengthens ties within families and between friends, and instills a love of nature and the outdoors,” he writes. “The shooting sports build character, awareness, and the competency necessary for responsible gun ownership.”³

Even the policies themselves are framed in personal terms. Concealed-carry reciprocity would allow a “mild-mannered tailor or grocer” to carry a concealed weapon in public. Making silencers readily available “protects the health of shooters and results in a substantially better shooting experience.” The article lacks any statistics or policy analysis; it simply panders to the members’ social identities as responsible gun owners.⁴

As former NRA president David Keene explained, “The difference between the NRA and other groups is that we’ve developed a community [and] when they see Second Amendment rights threatened they vote. They do whatever they need to do.”