If It Wants To Survive, The NRA Needs To Change

In the mid-1970s the NRA had to make a choice. As crime continued to spike across the nation, and politicians increasingly embraced gun control measures, an internal debate broke out about the future of the organization.

Initially, the NRA’s more passionate Second Amendment advocates were purged. NRA leadership would fire more than 70 activists during the early part of the decade. By 1976, the organization’s board decided to relocate its headquarters from Washington to Colorado to extract itself from political debate altogether. It wasn’t until a 1977 NRA convention in Cincinnati that politically minded members pulled off something of a coup, wresting the organization from the nonpolitical wing.

Many of today’s gun control advocates like to claim the “Cincinnati revolt” was the moment extremists took over the organization, undermining average gun owners who were merely interested in hunting and skeet shooting — which is, needless to say, a simplistic understanding of both the NRA’s history and gun owners. The reality is that the shift was an organic one, reflecting the mounting anxieties among members who felt increasingly under political attack. The NRA was best positioned to take the lead. If it hadn’t, another advocacy group would have emerged to take its place.

The gun control debate had changed, and the NRA changed with it. And the more gun controllers pushed, the more popular the NRA became, doubling its membership from 1977 to 1983. With every concerted effort to enact gun restrictions, the organization grew.

What is the point of the NRA now? Is it to be one of the thousand partisan outfits in D.C. helping elect Republicans, or is it to make compelling and effective arguments about the virtues and necessity of the Second Amendment? For someone looking in from the outside, it seems the past few years have been mostly about the former.