The National Rifle Association remains a powerful organization that holds sway among millions of voters, inspires loyalty among most Republican politicians, and for liberals, is synonymous with the scourge of gun violence in America. But the organization isn’t what it used to be. Mismanagement and infighting have hollowed it out from the inside; a lawsuit from New York Attorney General Letitia James surfaced embarrassing revelations about its leadership. And in an era of mass shootings and changing politics around guns, most Democrats no longer fear risking its ire. But what does the NRA’s diminished state actually mean for the state of gun violence in America? For some perspective on that question, I spoke with Stephen Gutowski, a longtime firearms reporter who runs the well-respected site The Reload.
In February, a New York jury found the NRA and former CEO Wayne LaPierre liable for corruption and ordered him to pay millions of dollars back to the organization. That was just the latest in a long series of blows to the NRA that have mostly been a result of mismanagement and alleged corruption. You’ve reported on a lot of this. How do you view the state of the NRA today? Is it like a completely broken organization or is it more resilient than it looks from the recent headlines about it?
They’re still larger than all the other gun-rights groups put together, pretty much however you measure those things. They’re still the biggest, they’re still the most famous, and they still have the most political influence, at least in the gun-rights sphere of the Republican Party. Donald Trump still clearly views them as a very important part of his coalition. He spoke at their event in February right before this verdict was handed down, and he’s said he’s going to speak again in May at their annual meeting. Nothing on that front seems to have changed at all. So they’re still, for instance, ahead in the fundraising race — the money they’ve raised to this point is still greater than the money raised by all of the gun control groups combined or any gun rights group by several orders of magnitude.
At the same time, they are much smaller and less powerful than they were even just a few years ago. As of their last filing, I think they only had about $11 million in reserves in their PAC and Super PAC, which puts them well below the rate they need to raise to get even back to just their 2020 levels, which of course was an election in which the candidate they backed lost. They spent $50 million in 2016, and the hopes of getting back to that are non-existent at this point.
What about the effects on the organization’s rank and file?
It’s not entirely clear how many dues-paying members they currently have, but one of the major differences between them and all the other gun groups is that they have a lot of people who will pay them money to be a member, not just a list of email addresses or likes on social media, and they can also activate those people with their get-out-the-vote campaigns, their orange postcards that they send out to members.
The number of NRA members has always been kind of impossible to know for sure beyond what they say. We published some leaked documents a while back, which were their internal estimates of membership. We know that they’ve lost at least a million members. According to some of the board members that have spoken out recently, it could be close to 2 million. There’s some dispute over exactly how many are left, but that’s hugely significant. It’s cut their revenue by more than half at this point. They’ve had to slash spending on most of their programs, especially the bread-and-butter programs like gun- safety training and education, things like that — the less politicized stuff, which a lot of NRA members really like.
I would say it’s unlikely that they’re going to go away altogether. This scandal has been going on for five years in public, really six years; the first story was in the Wall Street Journal in mid-2018. And then it blew up in 2019, especially at the NRA annual meeting, where members started getting really upset about what was going on and not getting the answers they wanted. And it’s now 2024. Wayne LaPierre is not in charge, but his allies still are, even after this verdict. They’ve lost a lot of members and a lot of money, and they’re still around. The bigger risk for the gun-rights movement, I think, is an NRA that’s not very effective, but still eats up a lot of the oxygen in the room. That’s kind of what you’ve seen over these last couple of years. And I think that’s a more realistic scenario than them just ceasing to exist. So they’re certainly not gone by any means yet, but it’s hard to imagine how much longer they continue down this particular path without righting the ship. I don’t know how much longer they can be a really salient national force, the way they’ve been for a very long time.
For a long time, the NRA has been a boogeyman in the liberal imagination. A lot of people think they simply buy off GOP politicians, who then do their bidding.
That was never true.
You wrote a good piece on this in 2021, where you argued that the NRA’s power is driven mostly by its members and their passion about gun rights. Do you think the fact that the group is now losing members and stature, not just money, changes their influence in a significant way?
I will say that when I wrote that piece for The Atlantic, things were looking a lot more difficult for gun-control advocates, because they controlled Congress and the presidency, but weren’t making any progress despite what was going on with the NRA. Obviously, there’s been a little bit of progress on the national level. They did pass a gun-control bill that includes new restrictions on ownership for certain groups. It’s certainly not what the president or most gun-control advocates wanted out of a deal like that, but it’s not nothing. And the NRA couldn’t stop it from happening by then.
To play out a scenario here: Let’s just assume things do continue to go downhill for the NRA, to the point that they cease to exist. It’s not like new gun restrictions would suddenly go into place across the land. People would still be buying guns, sometimes in surges, like in 2020. The NRA may have laid the groundwork for current American gun culture, but how important are they to the actual cause that they helped create at this point?
If the NRA just went away tomorrow, something else would come up to replace them, because there are millions of people who believe in the mission of the NRA, regardless of the specific institution itself. This is just an ingrained values thing, especially in the American context of armed revolution being the foundation of our country. The NRA didn’t invent people caring about gun rights. And so if the NRA goes away, you still have something like 46, 47% of the country who report having a gun in the home.
But at the same time, I think it certainly does help to have a professional operation that is lobbying for your interests. One of the big value-adds for the NRA over the years was the fact that they employed some of the best lobbyists in the country, people who knew how to cultivate relationships with politicians, who understood how to help win elections and to exert influence to their members’ benefit. And if you don’t have that professional operation, you probably aren’t going to have the degree of success that the NRA had over the years, at least in blocking legislation. The NRA didn’t have all that much success in passing federal legislation.
Though the real action regarding legislation is in the states, and to focus only on the national government is to miss how dramatically things have changed there, on both sides of this issue.
Yeah. They’ve had a lot more success at the state level, with concealed carry in particular. And I think that’s another way the NRA works — having that professional nationwide operation that is extremely well-known. It’s a really valuable thing to have that national brand and to be able to go into a state and say, our five million members want you to do this or that. As polarization crept up in the United States in recent years, that probably became less and less effective. If you just look at how gun policy has gone in the states, it’s pretty much blue states do new gun restrictions, and red states do new gun-rights bills.
If you’re running one of these single-issue groups in a highly polarized atmosphere where each party lays claim to one side of every issue, that means your most engaged donors are probably going to be people who fit a specific identity. For the NRA, it’s going to be conservative Republicans and for the ACLU, it’s going to be liberal Democrats. And so even though you’re supposed to be an organization focused on gun rights or civil rights, you can raise more money from some of those most highly engaged people if you turn yourself more into an identity group. Being a conservative Republican also means being an NRA supporter and vice versa with the ACLU. Obviously, the whole NRA TV thing ended up diving heavily into that — they did ads about immigration and vaccine mandates and all kinds of stuff that has nothing to do with guns. I do think they’ve maybe leaned a little bit away from it the last couple of years.
Given its current battered state, how powerful a force do you think the NRA will be for Trump in 2024?
In 2020 they spent about $40 million, and they lost. So they’ve got six months to raise more than $20 million to just get back to the year that they lost the election. And Trump is going to be much more cash-strapped than he was in 2020 himself for a lot of the same reasons. So he’s going to need to rely on outside groups more than ever, I would think. That’s very similar to what happened in 2016. But in 2016, there was that NRA, a lot of groups that were reluctant to give money to Trump that gave it to the NRA instead.
This is going to be a campaign about trying to convince everybody that the other guy’s worse than they are, it seems like. And so if you have a lot more money to do that, maybe you’d make a little more progress than the other guy. And that’s where I think there’s a lot of risk for Republicans and the NRA and its supporters because they’ve got this verdict hanging over them that says, this place is corrupt, and the people running it are corrupt. And those people are still in charge. So you’re going to have a hard time, I think, convincing those members who left to come back in this atmosphere. And therefore it’s going to make it really hard for them to raise money the way they have in the past to have an impact in this election, where their money is probably going to be more needed than before.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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