After the National Rifle Association spent a record $30m plus to help elect Donald Trump president it had high hopes for its gun rights agenda, but Trump’s victory has been a mixed blessing, with the NRA currently facing a bevy of political, regulatory and financial headaches, say gun analysts and NRA veterans.
The problems for the 5 million member NRA range from an emboldened pro-gun control Democrat-controlled House to state and federal regulatory fights, and from better financed groups seeking to curb gun deaths to internal criticism of NRA leadership.
Gun issue lobbyists, both pro and con, and firearms experts say the group’s legendary clout is being challenged on multiple fronts and its longstanding image of invulnerability and power is encountering tougher opposition.
“I think it’s a very serious confluence of issues that the NRA is facing,” said Richard Feldman the president of the Independent Firearm Owners Association, and a longtime NRA member. “They’re facing a growing storm.”
Robert Spitzer, the author of five books on guns and a politics professor at Cortland SUNY, added: “The NRA is facing some pretty hard times these days with a heavy legal, political and financial cloud over them.”
“Their reputation has suffered in the public mind – especially in the outrage cycle following Parkland,” the Florida school where last February 17 people died in a mass shooting.
In the year since Parkland there were almost 350 mass shootings including one this month at an Illinois factory where an employee with a criminal record owned an illegal gun that killed five people. Overall, the death toll from such mass shootings has been rising for almost two decades.
Which helps explain why the NRA’s big stable of lobbyists and lawyers is – yet again – battling new gun control measures in Congress and state legislatures, plus regulatory legal skirmishes.
One key example: a bipartisan bill to expand background checks to include almost all gun purchases was approved this month by the House judiciary committee, the first such action since the 1990s. The bill was passed by the full House this Wednesday.
But NRA allies predict that with the Senate remaining in GOP hands, the odds are that gun owners have “little to worry about gun control legislation in the current Congress”, Feldman of the independent gun owners said.
But that may not be the end of the story.
“Their eyes need to stay peeled to what happens after the 2020 elections,’’ if Democrats take back the Senate and the White House where Trump has not always been as solid an ally as the NRA hoped, Feldman said.
Many gun rights champions were dismayed when the administration last December banned bump stocks, the devices that can modify semi-automatic weapons to make them more lethal and which were used by the Las Vegas shooter in October 2017 who killed 59 people.
That ban didn’t sit well with NRA activists given the group’s 2016 record spending to help Trump with TV and digital ad blitzes, which made the NRA his biggest outside ally, and provided badly needed early ad support in summer 2016.
Trump did show his gratitude in early 2017 when he became the first sitting president since Ronald Reagan to attend an NRA convention where he offered his full support. “I will never let you down,” he told the NRA faithful in Atlanta.
But on the financial front, the Trump presidency has contributed to leaner times for the NRA than hoped: revenues in the last two years declined, contributing to a notable drop in NRA political spending in the 2018 midterms.
NRA spending on the 2018 elections totaled $9.4m, roughly a third of the $27.0m it poured into the 2014 midterms, according to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics. The NRA was even outspent by pro-gun control groups, a seismic shift that was fueled in part by millions of dollars from billionaire Michael Bloomberg, the former New York mayor and gun control backer behind Everytown for Gun Safety.
NRA loyalists note that when the Republicans control the White House and Congress fundraising and membership revenues often drop. NRA revenues from membership dues fell since 2016 from $163m to $128m, according to CRP.
“The membership becomes complacent because there’s less a threat to the second amendment,” said a former NRA employee adding that he expects fundraising “will take off” with Democrats pushing for more gun control.
But Spitzer said a key lesson of the 2018 elections was that candidates – including some Republicans – could advocate tougher gun control and “not only not be penalized, but ride those issues to victory”.
The NRA’s other political and regulatory troubles at the federal and state levels became palpable last year too.
Last December two watchdog groups filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging the NRA illegally coordinated a $25m television ad campaign in 2016 with the Trump campaign, enabling them to “advance a unified, coordinated election strategy”.
Election law bars independent political groups like the NRA from coordinating their ad efforts with candidate campaign committees.
The complaint by the Campaign Legal Center and the Giffords Law Center to prevent Gun Violence charges that the NRA and the Trump campaign used the same four executives at two firms located at the same address to buy their ads.
The FEC permits outside groups and campaigns to use the same vendor, but they must create “Chinese walls” between their clients to prevent coordination.
The NRA denies there was any coordination.
“The NRA complies with all election laws and any suggestion to the contrary is false” said Jennifer Baker, an NRA spokeswoman.
Last May, the NRA suffered a different regulatory blow when a fledgling gun insurance program, dubbed Carry Guard, was banned by New York state regulators who ruled it “unlawfully provided liability insurance to gun owners for certain acts of intentional wrongdoing”.
The NRA website has touted Carry Guard insurance as a way “to avoid and de-escalate conflict situations” and boasted that Carry Guard provides “important access to financial resources”, if someone is charged with a criminal act.
But the New York department of financial services ruled that the NRA did not obtain a proper state license. The insurance brokerage that sold Carry Guard terminated its New York policies and agreed to pay the state $7m in penalties.
The New York regulatory action prompted the NRA last summer to sue the state, a move that has turned into a costly and lengthy legal battle for the NRA which argues that if New York succeeds the NRA may be “unable to exist”.
Likewise, Washington state also banned Carry Guard and levied about $175,000 in fines against two insurers that sold it.
Separately, the NRA has faced some internal criticism from longtime members who fault the leadership for not pushing hard for less gun control – such as a bill that would have expanded nationwide concealed carry gun privileges – before the last elections.
“They squandered a golden opportunity to enact some pro-gun reforms,” , said Feldman.
