Did you know that the “Founding Fathers” of the United States believed in the necessity for legislation on gun control? Did you know that incidents of massacres involving assault rifles have increased by 183 percent—and massacre deaths by 239 percent—since the ten-year ban on these weapons lapsed in 2004? Did you know that a man named Harlan (or Harlon) Carter, who held leadership roles in the National Rifle Association and guided the group toward its current national role, was convicted as a teenager of killing a fifteen-year-old Mexican immigrant, changing the spelling of his name post-prison in an attempt to avoid his past?
“You need to be doing something around the issue. There are different ways to approach this and to take a stand, but it’s something we all need to address.”
Judd Ehrlich’s riveting new documentary, The Price of Freedom, which premiered at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival and is now in theaters, is named for the phrase the NRA uses to gloss over this country’s wretched record on mass shootings and gun deaths. With interviews, archival footage, and some jaw-dropping revelations, it explores the organization’s complex history, showing how a group originally focused on marksmanship and gun-related training ended up adopting its politically charged identity.
The film features interviews with activists, political scientists, and politicians—including President Bill Clinton, Senator Chris Murphy, and Representative Lucy McBath. Murphy gives a history lesson that’s powerfully illuminating.
“The NRA wants you to believe a fantasy about our founding,” he says, “in which our Founding Fathers believed there should be no regulation of firearms. That could not be farther from the truth.”
He goes on to cite multiple regulations that were passed and adhered to in this country’s first 100 years. In fact, he points out, legislation in Delaware prohibiting the carrying of arms at election sites dates to 1776.
Asked about his goals for the project, Ehrlich expands on this point. “My hope for the film is a reframing of the discussion,” he says. “Things weren’t always this way! Even in ‘the Wild West,’ there was regulation. Now it’s framed as if getting rid of all regulations is the way to return to where we were. It’s all a myth.”
For that matter, Ehrlich continues, any remaining idealized notions of “the Frontier” must be dismantled: “We know there was genocide, enslavement. The people who had the power were white men. Not only were there gun regulations, but there were gun laws that were fundamentally racist. Clearly that was to maintain a power structure.”
Not enough has changed. “The NRA understands, still, that that is a motivator,” Ehrlich says. “That’s why the other side needs to have the same kind of vigor for gun safety and gun reform.”
Clinton’s interview in the film focuses on the assault-rifle ban he managed to pass in 1994—and how Democrats were punished for it in the midterm elections that year, driven largely by NRA advocacy.
“The NRA beat the Speaker of the House,” he says ruefully. “There’s a difference between having popular support and voting support. The NRA made guns a voting issue.”
He says he asks himself to this day what he could have done to help secure a different outcome for the country—and recalls with weary astonishment seeing assault rifles advertised as Christmas gifts when the ban on the weapons expired.
McBath is the mother of Jordan Davis—a Black teenager who, in 2012, was shot dead in a friend’s car at a Florida gas station by a man in a nearby vehicle who claimed he felt threatened by Davis’s group. No gun was found in the teen’s car, and the shooter was ultimately sentenced to life without parole.
“That man was using his implicit bias and his racism as a means to act out his violent tendencies toward my son and his friends,” she says. With Florida’s notorious “Stand Your Ground” law, she adds, “you can shoot to kill and ask questions later.” Though Davis’s killer was convicted, the law has shielded others from punishment. In fact, McBath mentions speaking with Davis about Trayvon Martin, killed earlier in 2012, whose killer successfully used the Stand Your Ground defense.
Davis’s murder led McBath to gun-control advocacy and then to politics; she was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018.
Ehrlich has optimism, he says, because, following the 2018 mass shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, “voters said ‘We’re gonna take a page out of [the NRA’s] playbook’” and make gun control an issue that guides their election choices.
The film makes the bold decision to feature advocates for what is termed “gun rights,” including Robert Pincus, executive director of a group called the Personal Defense Network, and David Keene, a former NRA president. They are allowed to make their points with conviction and eloquence. We may be disturbed by their defenses of the NRA, and indeed by their versions of history, but the film suggests that hearing them is part of what progress will require.
Ehrlich is quick to point out that, certainly, not all NRA members are extremists. “A small number are vocal and political,” he says. “Many other members are not like this. Most are not radical. They got a membership to join a range, or for a discount. It’s a small group taking up all the oxygen—and showing up, at the polls, in the streets. There has to be an answer on the other side.”
“As Clinton says in the film,” Ehrlich recounts, “opinion polls don’t matter—it’s how you vote. It doesn’t matter unless you act. It’s a simple lesson but one we all need to hear: You need to be doing something around the issue. There are different ways to approach this and to take a stand, but it’s something we all need to address.”
The director was surprised by some of what he learned in making the film. “Harlan Carter was a revelation to me,” he says. “This country is so enmeshed and entangled with race, and it was important to look at that personal history. He was someone who murdered a fifteen-year-old. It’s important to understand those roots.”
Ehrlich, an Emmy award winner who has built his career around social justice, is clear-eyed but hopeful about the potential effects of films like the one he’s just made.
“The reason I make films is the idea that they can be powerful and have an impact,” he says. “There are films that have changed the way I think, and I believe films can spark change. We know that issues such as racism are deeply entrenched. It would be naive to say a film will solve them. But I hope it will begin to spark dialog and a reframing of the conversation.”