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The high crime rates of the early 1990s and a string of sensational crimes from coast to coast set the stage in 1994 for the most extensive and costly federal anticrime bill ever. Bill Clinton had made crime fighting a top priority, particularly after his health care reform bill had faltered. Congress had taken the initiative, led by Democrats Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware and Representative Charles Schumer of New York. The Democrats came up with a way to put $30 billion for anticrime programs into a ‘trust fund’ created by a reduction in the federal bureaucracy. Soon it seemed that Clinton's 100,000 community police officers, a Republican demand for more prisons, and various other programs to combat violence against women and other crime problems all could be funded. Republicans backed off support of big allocations for crime prevention ideas like ‘midnight basketball’ for teens, and the National Rifle Association fought against a proposed ban on assault‐style weapons. The result was a donnybrook that kept Congress in session through most of the summer. Republicans eventually won a series of concessions on funding, although the assault weapon provision survived and the law was passed. In the process, Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill was seen as so flawed that the crime law played a significant part in the Republicans’ seizing control of the House of Representatives in the 1994 elections. Five years later, the crime law's impact on crime rates was uncertain; in fact, crime had begun to fall long before many of its provisions could have had much effect.

Gun control has stirred intense emotions in the war on crime, even though many controls have only a marginal impact on firearms violence. Laws and their enforcement have been influenced most dramatically by assassinations and mass killings rather than by careful study. The first major modern federal gun regulations were approved by Congress in 1968 after the Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., assassinations. The National Rifle Association (NRA) worked hard to ease what it considered overly aggressive enforcement, finally succeeding with a 1986 law known as McClure‐Volkmer. The NRA offended many law enforcement leaders in the process. The combination of police support and a federal executive branch and Congress, both controlled by Democrats, helped enact two major gun control measures in 1993 and 1994: the Brady Act, which required a waiting period for handgun purchasers to enable checks of potential buyers’ records, and a ban on assault‐style weapons blamed in the deaths of police officers and others. Yet “copycat” assault weapons were manufactured, blunting the law's impact. Congress failed to enact proposed laws that would require trigger locks on handguns or to regulate gun shows, where firearms were sold with minimal regulation. The NRA argued for more enforcement of existing antigun laws, pointing to a federal program in Richmond, VA, called ‘Project Exile’.

This chapter chronicles the party–group alignment of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the GOP, detailing the constellation of factors that collectively facilitated this alignment, which began in the 1960s, culminated during the 1980 election, and has deepened in the decades since. It reveals how the NRA's cultivation of a group social identity and gun-centric political ideology made its supporters an attractive demographic group to conservative politicians, and laid the foundation for the group's eventual incorporation into the Republican coalition. The chapter also delves into the NRA's motivations for entering the realm of partisan politics, showing how funding challenges and internal conflicts led to the 1977 “Revolt at Cincinnati,” after which the NRA quickly became an active player in GOP politics. Ultimately, the chapter analyzes public opinion polls to document gun owners' increasing close relationship with the Republican Party — especially following the election of President Donald Trump.

Conventional wisdom claims that the Trump 2016 campaign was “disorganized,” but this judgment overlooks bargains with leaders of preexisting federated networks connected to millions of voters in pivotal states. Newly found data about the Fraternal Order of Police, the white police union, show that lodge and membership locations help predict Trump margins beyond other pro-GOP variables. Trump deliberately appealed to white police anger at the Black Lives Matter movement and (in a departure from his typical mass rallies) spoke in front of law-enforcement audiences. Similarly, Trump and his top lieutenants courted Christian right pastors and National Rifle Association leaders willing to disseminate campaign messages and mobilize followers in exchange for Trump’s promise to nominate right-wing Supreme Court justices. Many voters outside of big cities were receptive because they are embedded in evangelical and gun-friendly social networks and believe their lifeways are threatened by outside, liberal forces.

This chapter uses a case study approach to explore the political choice phase of the political communication cycle (PCC) over time. Focusing on interest groups and detailing the long history of these organizations in America, the chapter primarily examines innovations made by four of the largest interest groups in American history: AARP, the Sierra Club, the National Rifle Association (NRA), and MoveOn.org. These four interest groups have spanned multiple political communication orders (PCOs) and their overall lack of innovativeness until recent years is tied to the distinct nature of their shared political communication goals. These goals are far narrower than campaigns or social movements and therefore are much less likely to motivate innovative efforts. These trends have started to change in the internet-based era as new organizational and communication strategies have opened up interest groups to greater innovation along the lines of MoveOn.org.

This chapter focuses on the political power of the National Rifle Association (NRA), and asks the questions: What is the source of its power? How does it operate? How has it shaped gun policy and the broader political system? It looks beyond the NRA's use of financial resources and turns instead to what the chapter describes as ideational resources: the identity and ideology it cultivates among its members, which have enabled it to build an active, engaged, and powerful constituency. The chapter contends that the NRA has played a central role in driving the political outlooks and political activity of its supporters — activity that has had both direct and indirect influence on federal gun policy in the United States. Even from its earliest days as a relatively small organization dedicated to marksmanship, competitive shooting, and military preparedness, the NRA cultivated a distinct worldview around guns — framing gun ownership as an identity that was tied to a broader, gun-centric political ideology — and mobilized its members into political action on behalf of its agenda. The chapter analyzes how a group can construct an identity and an ideology, and what happens when it aligns these behind a single party.

This chapter shows how the Million Mom March helped parents, especially mothers, heal from the loss of a loved one to gun violence. It compares past maternalist movements to this one and shows the uneasy coexistence of feminism and maternalism. It explores how suburban mothers who were mostly white and urban mothers who were mostly black and Hispanic, came to believe that American society was sick, that all mothers were the antidote, and that together they could get gun control adopted and stop gun violence. While demonstrating the possibilities for coalition this chapter argues that the color-blind approach failed against the National Rifle Association, which evoked images negligent mothers, over-indulgent mothers, bad black mothers and criminal black beast rapists to defeat the anti- gun crusaders.

This chapter looks back to the beginning of the National Rifle Association's (NRA) partisan phase in order to explore the effects of this position on the group's ability to influence gun policy outcomes. The chapter — examining a number of gun policy cases from the 1980s through the 2010s — questions how would NRA's efforts to advance its agenda — and the effectiveness of those efforts — shift in light of its new place in the political system. It also investigates how would the ideational resources it had used in previous gun control battles come into play. Ultimately, the chapter displays how NRA's relationship with the GOP has opened up new avenues, including influence over both the contents and timing of the legislative agenda.

This chapter employs the same American Rifleman editorials and gun control-related letters to explain how the National Rifle Association (NRA) has created a gun-centric political ideology, in which gun rights are central to a broader set of issue positions, and thus how gun rights became so closely related to contemporary conservatism in the United States. For many gun owners, gun rights stand at the center of a broader political ideology that embraces liberty, nationalism, limited government, and law and order. The chapter addresses the roots of this ideology and its relation to the gun owner identity by examining NRA's decades-long efforts to build an ideology around gun rights. Working in conjunction with its group identity, the NRA's ideology comprises the second stream of the gun-centric worldview it has used to advance gun rights. This group ideology increases the political unity of gun rights supporters — they are similar not just in their shared support for gun rights, but also along a broader range of issue positions and values. In connecting gun rights to other issues, the chapter unveils how ideology linked the gun owner identity to other politically relevant identities, strengthening each.

This chapter examines the extent to which conservative women use gendered appeals to fight for gun rights, including portraying guns as an “equalizer” against men who may attack their families. Conservative women also oppose efforts to control access to certain types of weapon and ammunition, calling them paternalistic, arguing instead that women’s right to bear arms is an important feminist principle that allows women to protect themselves and their families.

This chapter analyzes the editorials (1930–2008) from the National Rifle Association's (NRA) American Rifleman magazine, along with gun-related letters to the editor of four major newspapers covering that same period, to document how the NRA created a distinct social identity built around gun ownership, charting the NRA's assiduous, long-term efforts — through not just its membership communications but also its popular firearms programs — to cultivate such an identity and to connect it to politics. The chapter uses the American Rifleman as a measure of the organization's views and priorities and treat pro-gun letters to newspaper editors as a measure of the attitudes and views of NRA supporters. It also utilizes the letters from gun owners to measure their feelings about guns over time. The chapter demonstrates how the NRA has used this identity to mobilize its supporters into politics by portraying gun owners' ways of life as under threat from gun control proposals and imploring its members to take action in defense of it.

This chapter focuses on the National Rifle Association's (NRA) efforts during its quasi-governmental phase. Looking at the National Firearms Act and Federal Firearms Act from the 1930s, as well as the Gun Control Act of 1968, the chapter explores how the NRA used this worldview to influence gun policy outcomes during its quasi-governmental phase. The chapter also demonstrates how the NRA harnessed this worldview to advance its political agenda during a period in which it abstained from partisan politics. The chapter then shifts to investigate how these were intertwined with — and often went beyond — other potential sources of power, such as the NRA's financial resources. It digs into a wide range of archival materials to identify how the NRA mobilized gun owners to defeat or weaken gun control legislation in the 1930s through the 1960s. Ultimately, the chapter aims to show that the NRA's ideational resources had independent impacts on key policy outcomes — that they mattered above and beyond any other advantages and resources that the NRA may have had.

This chapter frames the discussion of the politics of firearms with an exploration of the gendered nature of domestic violence, firearm fatalities, and the firearms debate, including how women are portrayed and the gender identities of the most prominent voices for “gun rights” and gun control. Given the stark and brutal realities of firearms and family violence, politicians across the ideological spectrum should readily agree that people who violently attack or threaten family members should be subject to practical and measured restrictions on their access to firearms. Unfortunately, safety as related to firearms and family violence has become highly politicized. This chapter identifies measure that states can enact to address the loopholes that allow domestic abusers to acquire firearms even after they have been convicted of felony abuse, often to deadly effect.

This chapter lays out a framework for answering why supporters of gun rights are so dedicated to their cause and why the National Rifle Association (NRA) and its members have such an important place in the Republican Party. It discusses how the NRA has crafted a worldview around guns, consisting of both a gun owner social identity and a broader political ideology. The chapter then looks into greater detail about each of these central ideas: the ideational resources of identity and ideology, and the party–group alignment that has been so central to the NRA's more recent political power. The chapter ends by circling back to the previous chapter's discussion of political power, exploring what the NRA can teach us about how power is built and exercised.

This chapter considers the National Rifle Association (NRA) as not merely a lobbying outfit, trade association, or hobbyist group, but as a full-fledged mediasphere. Since the early 2000s, the NRA has aggressively expanded its footprint within the broader right-wing media environment—it publishes four print magazines and a highly integrated array of micro-targeted online print and video content, social media platforms, and original online television programming. Via a content analysis of NRA.org, a site that aggregates and prioritizes content from across the group’s multimedia platforms, this chapter employs critical discourse analysis to illuminate the site’s populist themes and rhetorical styles. It finds that the NRA combines the trappings of news genres and right-wing discourses with populist modes of expression to amplify and reinforce the deep affective ties between gun ownership and conservative political identity.

This chapter examines Justice Antonin Scalia’s highly controversial opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller construing the Second Amendment and holding that the U.S. Constitution establishes an individual right to possess firearms. Scalia held his opinion up as an example of constitutional originalism, and the chapter argues that it was indeed exemplary—but for reasons wholly contrary to those Scalia assumed. Rather than demonstrating the value of originalism, Heller shows that originalism is an inadequate and easily manipulable methodology. The chapter argues that Scalia’s opinion was arbitrary both in the source materials it cited and those it ignored and that it was based not on history but in Scalia’s personal love of guns and hunting. More broadly, the chapter argues that Scalia’s opinion shows that originalism is a rhetoric of constitutional change and that the Court’s decision in the case was the result of the half-century campaign of the National Rifle Association to work through the Republican Party to create an individual right to possess firearms based on the Second Amendment.

This chapter describes the mourning dove's funerary dirge. For the first time in nearly a century, open season has been declared on the dove. Amendments fail to outlaw the lead bullet or set the kill zone back from homes. The chief executive signs the bill in the company of lobbyists from the National Rifle Association. These five ounces of meat with wings are purported to bring seven million dollars into governmental coffers. Ultimately, forty-one of fifty states favor open season on the dove of mourning, making them, in effect, sitting ducks. The chapter then explores how the debate over open season on the mourning dove heralds the coming of the culture wars.

This chapter looks toward the future of both the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the gun debate more broadly. It discusses potential threats to the NRA's political influence, including its own internal struggles, the rise of more effective gun control advocacy organizations, and the potential downsides of its close relationship with the Republican Party. The chapter also talks about the potential generalizability of the book's findings to other groups and policy areas. It considers the lessons that other groups might learn from the NRA in terms of cultivating and using ideational power. Ultimately, the chapter notes its implications for our understanding of interest groups and political parties, and reflects on the NRA's place in American democracy.