Lorie Shaull
NRA’s nightmare: Students participate in National Walkout Day at the Capitol, Washington D.C. March, 2018.
The nationwide marches for gun reform pose an unprecedented challenge to the National Rifle Association. The NRA is resisting by pegging its future to the fate of President Trump.
NRA leaders have long cried wolf, claiming that gun rights are under siege every time a Democrat gets elected or any politician (including Trump) even talks about gun regulation. But now the NRA faces its first real test in decades to its monopoly of the nation’s gun debate.
Edward Kimmel
It’s true that many, if not most, gun owners disagree with the NRA and support reasonable gun regulations. But the NRA has long been sustained by a small cadre of gun owners who continuously buy the latest innovations in semi-automatic firearms, and who help sustain both the NRA’s coffers and gun industry profits.
NRA leaders need to show their base they are fighting back against the Parkland students, lest hardline gun activists abandon the NRA for more openly radical groups like Gun Owners of America.
NRA leaders need to show their base they are fighting back against the Parkland students, lest hardline gun activists abandon them for even more radical groups.
It is telling that the NRA used social media like Facebook to organize small counter-protests in more than a dozen cities last Saturday, when an unprecedented number of people across the nation marched for gun reform. That the pro-gun rallies dwarfed in comparison to the student-led marches mattered less than showing the NRA’s not backing down.
The NRA is using support for Trump as a way to mute the calls for gun reform. This is consistent with the NRA’s early embrace of Trump’s campaign, but it represents a change for an organization that has long distrusted even conservative Republican politicians.
The NRA remembers being betrayed by Republican elders. Former President Ronald Reagan came out against high-capacity, semi-automatic rifles after he left office. Then, former President George H. W. Bush rebuked NRA Executive Director Wayne LaPierre saying his comparison of federal law enforcement agents to Nazi “jack-booted thugs” was a “viscous slander on good people.”
The NRA still supported Republican Presidential candidates George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. But none of them got the bear-hugging embrace with which the NRA endorsed Donald Trump in 2016.
More than perhaps any other politician, Trump played to the concerns of gun activists. The themes of fear of government, rejection of immigrants, distance from minority concerns, and distrust of the press fed Trump supporters and gun activists alike.
Many gun activists espouse a paranoid, anti-government ideology that also resonates through Trump’s base. It should be little surprise then that the NRA spent a record $55 million for ads in the 2016 elections targeting the same voters who drove Trump to victory.
The GOP invited the NRA’s chief lobbyist, Chris Cox, to speak from the stage of a major political party event for the first time at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. The NRA’s alliance with Trump remains historic.
Today, Trump is under siege on multiple fronts. Special Counsel Robert Mueller continues the criminal investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections. Three different women in civil courts are suing the President related to matters involving alleged sexual improprieties before he took office.
While the NRA sharpened its rhetoric during Trump’s first year in office, it has become even shriller since the Parkland shooting.
The cacophony of investigations and allegations is just white noise to the 32 or so percent of the electorate who still support President Trump and blame most of his problems on the so-called liberal media. But many of these same individuals know the movement for gun reform led by the Parkland students is real.
While the NRA sharpened its rhetoric during Trump’s first year in office, it has become even shriller since the Parkland shooting. LaPierre warned of a coming liberal-led “Socialist wave” threatening to impose not just gun control but tyranny across the country. Many gun activists posting in online forums say they are prepared, if necessary, to take their guns to the streets to keep Trump in office.
The NRA knows it cannot win a fair and open debate over gun policy, and that its best chance of keeping gun reform at bay is by backing President Trump. A war or Constitutional crisis would help get the student-led protests off of cable news.
Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who has covered the NRA for more than twenty years, writing for The Village Voice, The Washington Post, MSNBC.com and The Progressive.