Democrats Will Miss the NRA When It’s Gone

T hough liberals like to pretend that hostility to gun control rests solely on the influence of a single gun-rights group propped up by “dark money,” if the NRA disappeared tomorrow, almost nothing would change in Washington.

Indeed, one of the most vacuous declarations of courage in American politics is promising to “stand up to the NRA.” For decades, liberals have been demonizing and scapegoating the group — blaming it for gun deaths, for rewriting history, and for radicalizing the gun debate — while also mythologizing its power. One recent poll found that 43 percent of Americans believe it’s accurate to refer to the NRA as a “domestic terror organization.”

The NRA has become an expedient punching bag for politicians and activists unwilling to condemn gun owners themselves. But if the NRA, now struggling with serious internal and legal problems, were truly as mighty and influential as its enemies contend, why aren’t gun controllers making any headway now that the organization is at its weakest?

It’s likely, as Varad Mehta recently pointed out, that many liberals misunderstand gun politics. “Gun control advocates were confident in David Chipman’s nomination to lead the ATF,” notes Huffington Post’s Kevin Robillard, “in part because of the weakened state of the NRA.” Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, told The Guardian that “the NRA have taken so many body blows and yet their political voice appears to still be intact.”

For one thing, most of the NRA’s funding comes from small donors — illustrating that, despite caricatures, its success has been grounded in grassroots support. A 2015 analysis by CNN, of all places, found that only a single NRA member had donated anything close to the maximum amount allowed by federal law, $5,000 per year. If the NRA departs this world, support for gun ownership — which is likely to grow in the midst of a historic gun-buying binge — will merely be redirected somewhere else.

There aren’t any powerful corporate interests propping up the Second Amendment cause, either. In the big picture, gun lobbyists are pikers. The NRA is already likely being outspent by gun controllers — Everytown for Gun Safety alone expended $60 million in the 2020 election. To put it in context, anti-gun candidate Mike Bloomberg dropped $200 million in the Democratic Party primary last year — approximately $194 million more than the NRA spends in an average year lobbying Congress and approximately $100 million more than the NRA spent on the entire 2016 and 2020 elections.

The NRA has also been an expedient boogeyman for revisionists who concocted a “collective right theory” in recent decades. Numerous ideologically motivated historians — some now disgraced and some still celebrated — have accused the NRA of misrepresenting history. When Josh Marshall spuriously claimed that “the individual right to own and use firearms is completely made up and the product of NRA funded activism,” he was merely aping this myth.

Nearly every intellectual, political, and military leader of the Founding generation stressed the importance of self-defense as an inalienable right. Surely, not a single person of the provisional government or at the Second Continental Congress or any delegate at the Constitutional Convention — or anywhere else in the burgeoning nation — argued that individuals should be denied the right to own a firearm. In the pre-Internet age, the NRA did an admirable job of pushing back against the “completely made up” collective-rights theory and reasserting the proper framing of the Second Amendment.

But it should also be remembered that if it had been up to the NRA, there’s a not-small chance that District of Columbia v. Heller, the decision codifying the individual right to own firearms, would not have happened. In the early stages, it was the NRA that argued against bringing the case to higher courts, worrying that it could backfire. Idealistic libertarians — some of whom didn’t even own guns — were the ones who pushed the case forward over the objections of the NRA. If another gun-advocacy group rises to anywhere near NRA-level prominence, I suspect Democrats will be introduced to far more aggressive Second Amendment challenges.

If the NRA folds, it will be largely through its own mismanagement. The modern NRA was born out of necessity in 1977, when politically minded advocates wrested the organization from the sporting wing. Gun-control advocates like to claim that the “Cincinnati revolt” was the moment the extremists took over the movement, snatching it from real gun owners. In truth, the NRA evolved a political personality because of increasing criminality, draconian gun-control measures, and abuses by the ATF. (It should also be remembered that even as gun-control groups push to make ownership less safe, the NRA still runs an array of non-political programs that cultivate responsible gun ownership — which is probably the group’s greatest legacy.)

The NRA happened to be best positioned for the job. If the NRA hadn’t evolved, another advocacy group would have emerged to take its place — just as another group will take its place now should it disappear.