The NRA: A Journey From Incompetence To Irrelevance

I write this in London, but this blog post covers a criticism intertwined with the recent history of the NRA, or National Rifle Association, a membership advocacy group in the United States focusing on firearms. To clarify my position, I am an economic and legal scholar who consults on business strategy and who has written extensively on the relationship between registration and confiscation of firearms and I’m generally an advocate of increasing the civilian accessibility of firearms in the United States and elsewhere.

This blog post is a criticism of the NRA strategically, not politically. My view is that, regardless of your politics, this analysis of the NRA’s strategy holds. I assume the NRA is a business that wants to maximise three things: money, membership, and political power. I highlight five areas in which it has done a very poor job if it is truly maximising around these three vectors of performance. I make suggestions for improvements for future management.

This blog was inspired by a comment a friend made, which I feel I should credit. I was recently at the pistol range with a friend who is a consultant for a major global consultancy firm. He asked me, “So, what do you think of the NRA?” I paused and said, only somewhat joking, “I think they need to hire a decent strategy consultant, because they seem utterly lost.” He agreed and said, “I think they’d learn a lot from a memo on how they’ve screwed up so badly.”

This blog is written in the style of a hindsight review consultancy memo that consulting firms generate on a general review basis for clients – in other words, if the NRA asked me for an evaluation of their strategy, this is what I’d say.

In short, this is a blog post about the NRA’s inexcusably poor performance as an unimaginative, uninspired, and ineffective advocacy group and what it could do better. I truly hope, as a supporter of gun owners’ rights, that the NRA comes to these conclusions at some point – I suffer from no illusion that the organisation has any interest in taking my advice.

First, the NRA has done a very poor job in what it claims is its core mission: representing the interests of gun owners. This is entangled with my second contention, that the NRA retreated to a Constitutionally-indefensible argument in the 1960’s that threatened the rights of gun owners and insulted the intelligence of anyone listening. Around 1962, the NRA began making arguments that tied the Second Amendment to hunting. This is not only a bizarre piece of marketing, but a functional castration of the Amendment’s meaning. Unless the NRA was referring to hunting police officers in British-held Massachusetts and Virginia two centuries ago (which it almost certainly was not), then it’s difficult to conceive of what the Amendment – which scholars of all disciplines and backgrounds generally agree has to do with protecting the citizenry from the State – would have to do with killing deer. Saying the Second Amendment is about your right to kill ducks with scatterguns is like saying that the First Amendment is about your right to kill flies with newspapers – it misses the point entirely.

Time and again, the NRA has invented new marketing materials, decade after decade, that seem meticulously designed to repel intelligent people from the organisation. These efforts include engaging in the gun locks discussion in the 1990’s, making key state-by-state concesssions in the 1980’s, acknowledging in the 1970’s that urban and rural areas might need “special” regulatory structures, and so on. All of these were terrible mistakes that jeopardised the fundamental rights of millions of Americans and endangered the organisation’s already-wounded credibility as an advocacy group.

Hence, we turn to advocacy. Advocacy for the NRA has had two pieces, lobbying and the courts. Overall, the lobbying done by the NRA has not been particularly effective; gun manufacturers have generally done a better job than the NRA, though they tend to be represented by second-tier K Street firms. This is unsurprising, as manufacturers should (and probably do) have more leverage with Congress, as they are generally also arms suppliers to the Department of Defense or its contractors or subsidiaries. However, when one compares the volume of legislation drafted, edited, and pushed through by other major advocacy groups of similar budget, the NRA’s political efforts seem laughable. In the courts, the NRA has been even less competent. It has had little in-house legal firepower to stand up against the many threats to gun ownership and has chosen its battles poorly, taking a stand in unfriendly jurisdictions and then allowing anti-gun advocates to gain momentum through NRA losses in these cases (which tend to be losses with substantial media attention, and often in high-profile media markets like Chicago).

The legal momentum has shifted in the NRA’s favour in recent years, but this has been more a matter of luck than skill and has largely happened despite the NRA's disastrous legal work in the area. The heavy lifting in this area was really, in my view, done by the ACLU in the 1960’s, which solidified the individual rights interpretations that the NRA’s present-day (and finally legally-coherent) arguments depend upon. In fact, the NRA would have been made irrelevant in the 1970’s and 1980’s if the ACLU had simply turned its attention to also working on the Second Amendment along with the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth. Instead, the NRA staggered back on its feet during this period doing essentially no important appellate federal advocacy for two decades. The issue finally “turned the corner” with very little help from the NRA thanks to veteran appellate advocate and brilliant attorney Alan Gura with a decisive victory for gun rights in District of Columbia v. Heller. Though the decision is interesting, I highly recommend also reading Gura’s own account of the arguments made in the case, which he eloquently and simply explains in his article, “Briefing the Second Amendment Before the Supreme Court,” which appears at 47 Duq. L. Rev. 225 (Duquesne Law Review 2009). This article is a rare opportunity to hear one of America’s finest appellate advocates explain the how and why of one of the most important briefs written in this area of Constitutional thought. Gura came to the case of his own accord and ran an appellate team that had a level of Constitutional understanding and argumentative fluency that the NRA had failed to put forth in any of its efforts at high-stakes litigation.

Finally, the NRA has done an awful job courting the support of urban and minority populations. This is an especially conspicuous failure, as these are arguably the people who would benefit most from being protected from the State or, protected from nefarious trespassers from whom the State is unwilling to offer protection. Indeed, if there is someone who has the Hobbesian initiative to reclaim a right to violence, it is surely the person on the West Side of Chicago or central postcodes of Detroit whose local police are too cowardly, too poorly-paid, or too busy to provide even the illusion of protection. And there are plenty of communities where people – particularly people of colour – are either not adequately protected by the police force or engaged in a protracted, sometimes violent, irreconcilably difficult relationship with the police force. In cities like Washington, D.C. and Chicago – two of the most anti-gun political climates in America – a publicity campaign explaining that more guns make for safer neighbourhoods might have done wonders for not only the group’s membership, but also its more general ideological penetration. By equating Second Amendment rights with other fundamental rights, the NRA could have cheaply courted these new communities. Had I worked on policy advocacy around these issues, I would have considered giving away guns at rallies for new immigrants and running large campaigns to increase the number of concealed carry permits among the urban African-American and African populations and both rural and urban Spanglophone populations, much as AT&T did for cell phones in the early 1990’s and Toyota did with its marketing push of 1996-99. But, as in the past, the NRA stayed in its mostly-white, mostly-confused, mostly-ineffective bubble of internal debate rather than appealing to parts of society that had not historically been its audience. It isn’t that these people weren’t – or didn’t want to be – the NRA’s audience. They weren’t in the audience because they weren’t invited to take part, which is a terrible failure on the NRA’s part.

In sum, for a firearms advocacy organisation to be relevant in the contemporary American context, that organisation must be comfortable pushing, drawing, and expanding boundaries. The goals of such an organisation must be ambitious: insuring the Second Amendment rights of both citizens and resident aliens are respected, repealing magazine capacity limits, challenging the National Firearms Act as an arbitrary and overbroad restraint on a fundamental right, and – perhaps most importantly – increasing rates of lawful gun ownership in minority, urban, and impoverished communities. The agenda of the organisation must be ethnically-diverse, cross-class, and international; it should address every transactional aspect of the arms market, including increasing the volume of the international arms trade, increasing the accessibility of safe and reliable firearms for everyone, and increasing the production of small arms as a step toward industrialisation much as lobbyists for cotton have made open-weave textile manufacturing a required rest stop on the highway to development. It should push for the important case studies in the arms industry – from the Singer 1911 to the modern firm management questions of a firm like Bushmaster (and its ownership by investment group Cerberus) – to be taught at the nation’s top business schools and should build financial products that make it easier for Americans to invest in the arms trade and have a financial interest in the industry’s success. It should push for pension funds and other key pieces of the national and global financial infrastructure to become more reliant on the arms industry’s revenues and should work to dismantle embargoes, tariffs, and bill-of-lading restrictions on the movement of arms.

It is unclear what organisation will fill that role but, with over a century’s worth of opportunities, the NRA has utterly failed. Without wholesale changes to its level of organisational ambition, quality of operations, ability of personnel, and ongoing programmes, I have grave concerns for this particular organisation’s relevance and effectiveness in the coming years and decades.