How the NRA Channels Hatred into Political Success

In its appeals to gun owners’ social identity, the NRA exploits people’s fears about the country’s changing demographics. Thus it openly courts extremists to advance its agenda and engage its followers. The most visible manifestation of this approach began in the 1990s, as the NRA orchestrated increasingly harsh rhetorical attacks against the Clinton administration’s laws instituting background checks and banning assault weapons.

Jim Brady, a former press secretary to Ronald Reagan, was paralyzed when a would-be assassin’s bullet intended for the president struck him in the head instead. In 1993, he helped secure passage of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act. The law required background checks for anyone who purchased a firearm from federally licensed gun dealers. It’s still the foundation of the background-check system. The NRA argued that the law was “the first step” toward gun confiscation and immediately challenged its constitutionality in court. It suffered another defeat a year later, when it failed to prevent passage of a measure outlawing military-style assault weapons for civilian use.

The lobby responded to the losses by courting extremists. As one former NRA board member told the Boston Globe in 1995, the NRA launched a campaign to openly recruit antigovernment activists and began sending members fund-raising emails and writing articles claiming that the government was coming for their guns and possibly even their lives. The NRA figured the fringe movement could help build its membership, increase revenue, and generate more foot soldiers for the coming political fights. It proved to be a dangerous gamble.

During this period, the NRA started recruiting at gun shows attended by antigovernment militia members, giving away free hats, and publicizing their events in the Rifleman. Sister publications featured militia members in cover stories and profiles. NRA leaders openly compared FBI agents to Nazis, claiming that Clinton’s ban on assault weapons gave “jack-booted government thugs more power to take away our Constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property and even injure or kill us.” Tanya Metaksa, then the executive director of the NRA’s lobbying army, even called for and attended a meeting with two leaders of the largest and best-organized antigovernment groups. As militia commander Ken Adams later described it, Metaksa was hoping to “formalize how we would work together.”

That meeting took place just two months before Timothy McVeigh, who had been an NRA member for at least four years, carried out his bomb attack in Oklahoma City. The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building housed an office of the agency responsible for overseeing the gun industry. Three years earlier, McVeigh had sent a letter to Congress that read like an NRA manifesto. “I strongly believe in a God-given right to self defense,” he wrote. “Should any other person or a governing body be able to tell another person that he/she cannot save their own life?” Attached to the back of that envelope was a decal that read, “I’m the NRA.”

In validating and amplifying the antigovernment message of the fringe and actively recruiting from within it, the NRA gambled that nobody would act on its rhetoric. After McVeigh did, killing 168 people in the worst act of terror by an American in America, the organization came under fire.

President George H.W. Bush resigned from the organization in protest, and articles began popping up drawing connections between the terror in Oklahoma and the NRA’s mailings and recruitment efforts.

The New York Times editorialized in May of 1995, “With his ferocious resignation letter, Mr. Bush dealt a disabling blow to the N.R.A.’s prestige and to Mr. LaPierre’s standing as a public figure.… It now looks as if his action will become a watershed moment in the N.R.A.’s history and deprive it of its last claims to respectability. The outfit is reeling.”¹

Only when he felt forced to do so did NRA president Wayne LaPierre offer a rare apology for the “jack-booted government thugs” fund-raising letter. Metaksa repeatedly denied that she had courted militia members, even though multiple NRA board members with strong ties to the “patriot movement” remained on the board.

The outfit was, in fact, in trouble. It needed a reboot, a more media-friendly face to stop the bleeding and hold back the backlash. It had just the man for the job: Moses.

Charlton Heston was an Oscar-winning actor who had appeared in blockbuster films, including The Ten Commandments and Planet of the Apes. Once a supporter of the civil rights movement and the Gun Control Act of 1968, Heston, by the 1980s, had associated himself with the conservative social politics of Ronald Reagan. In the eyes of the NRA, he was the perfect man to put a holy face on the lobby’s extremist rhetoric.

Everything became culture war as the NRA saddled up to the reactionary religious right. The war pitted, and still pits, privileged straight white men like Heston against everyone else. Gay men, lesbians, feminists, African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Latin American Americans, communists, liberals, atheists, progressives of every stripe, and the media were on one side. “Manly” white men, their women, and their allegedly Christian family values were on the other.

A year before he assumed the helm of the organization, Heston previewed this approach in a speech delivered to a conservative think tank. Its dog-whistle invocations of racism, homophobia, and good-ol’-boy white male supremacy were topped with a steaming pile of fear. After comparing the plight of straight white conservative men in America to that of Jews in the Third Reich, Heston cataloged the many ways “true” Americans are “oppressed”:

The gun issue clearly brings into focus the war that’s going on.…

Heaven help the God-fearing, law-abiding, Caucasian, middle-class, Protestant, or—even worse—Evangelical Christian, Midwest, or Southern, or—even worse—rural, apparently straight, or—even worse—admittedly heterosexual, gun-owning, or—even worse—NRA-card-carrying, average working stiff, or—even worse—male working stiff, because not only don’t you count, you’re a downright obstacle to social progress. Your tax dollars may be just as delightfully green as you hand them over, but your voice requires a lower decibel level, your opinion is less enlightened, your media access is insignificant, and frankly, mister, you need to wake up, wise up, and learn a little something about your new America, and until you do, would you mind shutting up?

Mainstream America is depending on you—counting on you—to draw your sword and fight for them. These people have precious little time or resources to battle misguided Cinderella attitudes, the fringe propaganda of the homosexual coalition, the feminists who preach that it’s a divine duty for women to hate men, blacks who raise a militant fist with one hand while they seek preference with the other, and all the New-Age apologists for juvenile crime, who see roving gangs as a means of youthful expression, sex as a means of adolescent merchandizing, violence as a form of entertainment for impressionable minds, and gun bans as a means to lord-knows-what. We have reached that point in time when our national social policy originates on Oprah. I say it’s time to pull the plug.²

Sound familiar? It should. The NRA still heaps praise on Heston—who remained with the organization until 2003—and it eagerly uses his strategy of pandering to the insecurities of white men by casting them as victims.

In 2004, the NRA launched an entire network, NRATV, dedicated to doing just that. Turn it on and you will hear how Muslim, black, brown, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, feminist, and Democratic people are undermining America’s culture and constitutional liberties.

President Barack Obama is a “demographically symbolic president,” LaPierre told NRA members. Black Lives Matter focuses too much on police brutality, they say. After all, “90 percent or more of the racial problems that we have in this country are manufactured by the left,” a host on NRATV has said. Trans women are just “pretending” to be women. “All radicalized terrorists are Muslims.” The list goes on and on.

Throughout the Obama years, the NRA sent out countless dire warnings about our nation’s first black president confiscating firearms. Those warnings pushed millions to buy more firearms and filled the NRA coffers with donations.

In a December 2009 direct-mail letter, LaPierre warned of “massive armies of anti-gun, anti-freedom radicals marshaling against us for an attack that could make every other battle we’ve ever fought look like a walk in the park.… And I can guarantee you that in this ‘new’ America—an America unlike anything you can even imagine—your firearms and your Second Amendment rights WON’T be welcome.”

Such messages are still the norm, and militaristic calls to violence are still part of the strategy. The following piece of direct mail is not much different from the kind of rhetoric you would expect to find in ISIS recruitment materials. Here, the NRA urges members to “sacrifice” themselves in the name of firearm freedom. “Our Constitution and our system of government guarantee that every American has the opportunity to write his or her name in the history books of tomorrow—to leave his or her imprint on the fabric of our nation. But in the end, history is always written only by a select few—the few who sacrifice of themselves to fight for the causes in which they believe.”³

For the Trump era, the lobby and its properties have transformed themselves into the kind of state media you found in my former and no longer existent home country, the Soviet Union. The NRA defends Trump at every turn and viciously attacks the mainstream media for accurately reporting on his administration. It is the ultimate us-versus-them dynamic. “The only way we save our country and our freedom is to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth,” spokesperson Dana Loesch told NRA members in one popular video, her eyes sternly and seriously staring into the camera. “I’m the National Rifle Association, and I’m freedom’s safest place.” These videos feature an absurd number of black-and-white images to visually communicate how the country is falling apart, its traditions and values under attack. Loesch threatens to burn copies of the New York Times and attacks other popular newspapers, pretending that they lie about freedom-loving NRA members; she shows fast images of landmarks in Washington, DC, and other cities, implying that they’re full of people intent on destroying all things American, beginning with the Second Amendment.⁴

The NRA reinforces the anxieties of a no longer all-powerful conservative minority in a way that interweaves conservative social intolerance with the politics of gun rights. The latter is at times indistinguishable from the former. In 2018, it is hitching itself to a particular president and his constituency, possibly alienating gun owners who do not subscribe to the president’s racism, sexism, and authoritarianism. Thus it risks losing power once the political winds change. Some gun owners are already objecting.