AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
During another heated presidential election, Gore versus Bush back in 2000, the National Rifle Association held its convention, where NRA president, the actor Charlton Heston, raised a musket and proclaimed...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
CHARLTON HESTON: From my cold, dead hands.
(CHEERING)
RASCOE: For decades, the NRA has been a driving force in American politics. In recent years, though, the gun lobby has had bankruptcy and scandal. Its longtime chief Wayne LaPierre resigned earlier this year and was found liable in a corruption trial. Given all that turmoil, has its influence diminished? Stephen Gutowski covers firearm policy and gun ownership for his publication, The Reload. Welcome to the program.
STEPHEN GUTOWSKI: Hi, thanks for having me.
RASCOE: Is the NRA as powerful as it once was when it comes to endorsing candidates and swaying voters?
GUTOWSKI: I would say it's not as powerful as it was at its peak in 2016 or 2018. This corruption scandal has really taken a lot of wind out of their sales. They've lost over a million members, and their revenue is way down from what it used to be.
RASCOE: In 2020, the NRA spent more than $29 million on the general election, according to opensecrets.org. But you reported last week that it just had its first major ad buy of the 2024 season, and that's $2 million for a TV ad against Montana Democrat Senator Jon Tester. How is the NRA spending its money now that it has less money to spend?
GUTOWSKI: Yeah, clearly, that Montana race is going to be one of their key races. They aren't going to be able to spend nearly as much as they did in 2020. And frankly, that was down significantly from what they spent in 2016. They really are diminished, but they are still active. They're still certainly the largest progun group out there spending in the election.
RASCOE: Are other new gun lobby groups forming to compete with the NRA?
GUTOWSKI: Well, they're not necessarily new groups forming, but there are groups that have been around for a little while - The Firearms Policy Coalition, the Second Amendment Foundation, Gun Owners of America. There's quite a few of them out there. And they have benefited, I would say, in terms of fundraising, at the very least, from the NRA's struggles. However, they haven't collectively matched what the NRA used to be capable of. And especially, these other groups tend to focus on areas outside of political spending. Usually, legal spending is a big part of what a lot of these other groups have been working on.
RASCOE: Just trying to get lawsuits and things like that to expand...
GUTOWSKI: Right.
RASCOE: ...Gun rights?
GUTOWSKI: Yes.
RASCOE: At the debate last week, former President Donald Trump accused Vice President Harris, basically saying, she wants to confiscate your guns. Harris later responded, Tim Walz and I are both gun owners. We're not taking anybody's guns away. What do you hear from gun owners? Are they concerned that Democrats are going to take their guns away?
GUTOWSKI: I think a lot of activists are certainly concerned. People inside of the gun rights movement share that concern, certainly, mainly because Kamala Harris has previously supported a mandatory buyback of AR-15s and firearms along those lines. She has since walked back her support for that. It is something that the NRA, for instance, has played up as its main concern.
Of course, not every gun owner is a gun rights activist, and there's plenty of Democrats who also own firearms, like Harris and Walz themselves, and are more open to additional restrictions on firearm sales in the United States. So once you get a group this size of gun owners in the United States, which - that's a lot of people, and their opinions are going to vary quite a bit.
RASCOE: Well, what about gun safety as an issue, especially after shootings like the recent one at the high school in Georgia? Are politics around guns and gun policies still as entrenched as they have been in the past?
GUTOWSKI: Probably the biggest sign that there's at least some potential for room is the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which did a number of more moderate changes to the federal gun law - adding funding for school safety programs, new gun restrictions for people who have been convicted of misdemeanor violence against a dating partner, for instance, or adding more requirements to the background check process for 18- to 20-year-olds.
Things like that, that are a bit outside of our traditional fight over guns at the national level, which tends to focus on those policies that Harris has supported - universal background checks, red flag laws and an assault weapons ban. There may be some areas of agreement outside of those three things, but those three things tend to dominate the entire national political discussion around firearms, and I don't see a lot of movement there.
RASCOE: That's journalist Stephen Gutowski. He's the founder of the publication, The Reload. Thank you so much for joining us.
GUTOWSKI: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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