The NRA: The Unauthorized History

By Frank Smyth

For the first time, the definitive account of America’s most powerful, most secretive, and most controversial nonprofit, and how far it has strayed from its origins.

The National Rifle Association is unique in American life. Few other civic organizations are as old or as large. None is as controversial. It is largely due to the NRA that the U.S. gun policy differs so extremely — some would say so tragically — from that of every other developed nation. But, as Frank Smyth shows, the NRA has evolved from an organization concerned above all with marksmanship — and which supported most government efforts around gun control for a hundred years — to one that resists all attempts to restrict guns in any way. At the same time, the organization has also buried its own remarkable history.

Here is that story, from the NRA’s surprising roots in post-Civil War New York City to the defining event that changed its culture forever — the so called “Cincinnati Revolt” of 1977 — to the present day, where President Donald Trump is the most ardent champion in the White House the NRA has ever had. For anyone who has looked at access to guns in our society and asked “Why?”, this is an unmatched account of how we got here, and who got us here.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Mar 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781250210296

Frank Smyth

Frank Smyth is an independent, award-winning investigative journalist specializing in armed conflicts, organized crime and human rights overseas, and on the gun movement and its influence at home. He is a former arms trafficking investigator for Human Rights Watch breaking the role of France in arming Rwanda before its genocide. Smyth is a global authority on journalist security and press freedom testifying to Congress and member states of several multilateral organizations. Frank is founder and CEO of the leading U.S.-based hostile environments training firm.

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The Nra by Frank Smyth

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For Peter L. Mazzarella

INTRODUCTION

The National Rifle Association of America has an exquisite heritage. It could be argued that the NRA is America’s strongest civic organization, if not also its most enigmatic. Few other nonprofit groups in the United States have lasted as long. Few founded before or since are so large in membership: today the NRA claims over 5 million members. And no other nonprofit group in the United States has wielded comparable influence on so many levels or enjoyed such extraordinary success in its aims.

The NRA is as old as Major League baseball, older than the American Red Cross, older than the Boy Scouts. It was founded in New York during Reconstruction, on the eve of America’s Gilded Age, with the mission to improve military preparedness in anticipation of future wars. For much of the twentieth century, the NRA’s primary activity was hosting competitive shooting matches for National Guard, military, and civilian shooters, financed by government money and run by the NRA on its ranges. For decades the NRA also supported the regulation of firearms, from the first major federal gun law in 1934 to the second in 1968.

A few years later the NRA shifted [its] focus, to borrow the words of David Keene, who in 2013 became the first NRA president to give a speech in a major foreign power’s capital, in Moscow. This shift, whose implications would have profound consequences in American life, can in fact be dated to the NRA’s 1977 annual meeting in Cincinnati—an event still known in NRA lore as the Cincinnati Revolt. Before Cincinnati, the nonprofit Association had a basic transparency to both the public and its membership. After Cincinnati, it became an organization of secrecy, where information is shared on a need-to-know basis and is concentrated at the top.

This closed culture has led the modern Association’s leadership to rewrite the NRA’s own history, crafting a new narrative that has served the organization’s shifted focus. Many groups, like many people, tweak their past to polish their image in the present. But the NRA does this to an unusual degree. The Association’s modern leaders have buried the very same history that their predecessors used to celebrate. The NRA’s own two founding fathers, both famous men in their day (each of whom, as it happens, left a permanent stamp on New York City), are little celebrated by the group now, their accomplishments rarely evoked. To take another example from its forgotten history: just six years after the organization was chartered, the NRA became rifle champions of the world, beating the Irish champions on its home range outside New York City. The NRA’s legacy, as will be seen in these pages, is rich in events that one might think it would burnish. But it doesn’t.

Why wouldn’t the modern NRA want to celebrate all those things? Why would the modern Association wish to leave buried so much of the treasure of its own rich history? Is it because to do so would be to say too much about the many leaders who helped shape the Association and lead to uncomfortable questions about what those leaders would think of today’s NRA? Perhaps the NRA cannot afford the risk of opening the door to its own past lest the exhumation reveal how far the modern NRA has strayed from its origins.

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One prominent NRA leader in the twentieth century was a man named Milton A. Reckord. A lieutenant general and a highly decorated veteran of three foreign wars, Reckord lived a long life. He served as executive vice president of the NRA, a title even more impressive than it sounds, as traditionally the EVP has essentially been the CEO of the Association. For a span of more than twenty-three years—apart from a five-year leave of absence to serve during World War II—he stood at the Association’s helm. In fact, General Reckord’s tenure leading the NRA was surpassed only in 2014 by the Association’s current CEO, Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre.

At age ninety-four Reckord was interviewed in his home in Maryland over two days for an official NRA oral history. In it, the general explained many things he’d seen and been involved in, including how the NRA had negotiated a compromise with lawmakers to establish the nation’s first sane, reasonable and effective gun control law.

This NRA oral history was never published. And the NRA—which today runs a multimillion-dollar multimedia empire—has in fact never digitized its storied flagship magazine, the American Rifleman. However, back issues of this and other NRA monthly magazines—once also available in optional leather binders—are traded on eBay. Large collections spanning decades are rare, but some date back over a century.

Thumbing through the American Rifleman’s pages is illuminating. Take two ongoing columns, launched sixty-nine years apart.

The Dope Bag is a regular column nearly a century old. To this day, this column still answers members’ questions about target and hunting small arms, hunting licenses, game guides, and kindred subjects, as it said upon the column’s launch in 1922. The Fox gun you mention is one of the best duck guns made, began one early reply to a reader’s query. Today vintage issues of NRA magazines, especially with articles like Backwoods Gunsmithing and Handloading Ammunition, are coveted by collectors.

Standing Guard is a very different column. It has been penned by current NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre in the American Rifleman since 1991, when LaPierre—after a long, stormy voyage—finally secured the helm of the organization, which he had quietly sought for some time. In this column LaPierre has offered such views as There is no difference between Democrats and Socialists any longer. The same Democrats are threatening the bedrock values of our society, so to preserve our values and protect our freedom, America needs the good guys to step up like never before. These are sentiments one would struggle to find in issues from a much earlier era.

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An aura of mystery surrounds the NRA and its leadership today. No other major nonprofit group in America is so cloaked in the dark. The modern NRA has long concealed its operations and spending, along with information about its bylaws and board. Its leaders have tightly managed the Association’s elections, much like a communist politburo, to choose who is eligible to appear on the ballot, preempting potential internal challenges for control.

And this penchant for secrecy is borne out in the literature about the NRA. While there are hundreds of books addressing gun violence, gun control, and gun rights in the United States, few have ever dealt directly with the NRA. The modern Association limits access for journalists and academics. In fact, there are only two book-length histories of the NRA that have been published to date. Each one happens to have been authorized by the NRA itself.

NRA: An American Legend is the most recent official account of the Association, published in 2002 in collaboration with the NRA and its staff. An oversized coffee-table book of 304 glossy pages, its foreword was written by the late spy thriller author Tom Clancy. The book is now out of print.

Americans and Their Guns: The National Rifle Association Story Through Nearly a Century of Service to the Nation was the organization’s first official history, published in 1967 with a copyright to the National Rifle Association of America (the group’s legal name since 1876). Today there is no sign of this NRA book on the Association’s website or among the displays at its Firearms Museum or annual meetings, and it too is out of print.

In the pages that follow, the story of this remarkable organization will be told, and it will be told for the first time by a writer unbeholden to the organization.

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I am a gun owner. And I don’t hunt. I keep a so-called assault weapon—a Glock 19, an Austrian-designed 9 mm semiautomatic pistol. This is a tactical, high-capacity weapon that has minimal recoil and rarely jams, and for these very same reasons it is now the sidearm of choice for most police and other law enforcement professionals across this country. I have long believed that the Second Amendment protects my right to keep arms in my home.

I have also long believed that having my weapon registered by its serial number under my name, in my home state of New Jersey, after I’d undergone not one but two criminal and mental health background checks along with being fingerprinted twice, is a reasonable requirement that does not infringe on my Second Amendment rights at all—a view that America’s courts have upheld, at least so far.

For decades now within American gun circles, gun activists who take what LaPierre has called an absolutist stand on gun rights have derided fellow gun owners who fail to share their views as Fudds, a smear derived from the name of the hapless hunter Elmer Fudd in the baby-boomer-era Bugs Bunny cartoons. A Fudd is a gun owner like me who supports gun regulations, especially when it comes to tactical, semiautomatic firearms. (I am a paradox because I am a Fudd who owns a signature non-Fudd gun.)

Guns have long been a part of my life. But I first became interested in the NRA more than a quarter of a century ago. It was the early 1990s, and Congress was debating the crime bill. Prison reform advocates warned that many nonviolent first-time drug offenders, instead of being offered a chance at rehabilitation, were already being sentenced to decades in jail.

I wrote a piece for The New Republic about followers of the Grateful Dead—then the top-grossing live musical act in America, touring seasonally in venues around the nation—who were being arrested for trafficking LSD and being sentenced to long jail terms. In my reporting, I stumbled upon the fact that the NRA was quietly behind a number of TV ads in key districts across the country. These ads claimed that Congress was planning to let tens of thousands of drug dealers out of prison—without mentioning that they were nonviolent first-time offenders. The NRA-funded ads made no mention of guns either, and would seem at first glance to have little to do with the NRA’s stated aims. Why was the NRA quietly spending money on ads that never mentioned guns? I decided to begin examining this seemingly inscrutable organization.

In the mid-1990s, while writing for the Village Voice, I managed to gain access to an NRA board meeting, and I witnessed what, much to my surprise, was the start of an epochal struggle for power. I saw legendary NRA leaders in action, many of whom are septuagenarians or octogenarians by now but who remain redoubtable board directors. I watched as a few of these same leaders, including Wayne LaPierre, navigated shrewdly between competing sides. I also learned to expect the unexpected, as I personally went from being shunned by top NRA leaders for having documented the secrets of their internal power struggles to soon seeing the same leadership distribute to other reporters photocopies (in violation of my and the paper’s joint copyright) of my opinion piece from the The Washington Post—when it served their internal power machinations.

By the 2000s, that power struggle was finally brought to an end through the inspired decision by LaPierre to recruit the legendary Hollywood actor Charlton Heston for the post of NRA president. And I moved on to other matters in my reporting. Then Sandy Hook happened. In the wake of the unbearable carnage of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, before the winter holidays in 2012, I wondered how the NRA—which had remained silent after almost every other high-profile mass shooting—might respond.

Seven days later, Wayne LaPierre told the nation during a live, nationally televised press conference, The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. At this point I was surprised not that he said it, but only that he finally said it out loud to a national audience.

It was after Sandy Hook that I set out again to learn as much as I could about the NRA. A rich body of NRA materials, including the unpublished NRA oral history, the out-of-print first authorized history, and issues of the American Rifleman and its progenitors and sister publications, along with official NRA board, foundation, and financial documents found in university archives and tax records, leaves a long trail of trends, figures, and facts.

In 2018 I also joined the NRA myself as a regular member at the discounted rate of $30 for one year, and I renewed my membership for $35 the following year. Back during the rise of the Cold War, the NRA had a loyalty test, as prospective members were required to affirm that they were not anti-government subversives as a condition of membership. But the modern NRA—which has long been in endless fundraising mode—requires no loyalty pledge of any kind to join, just payment. I used my membership card to gain access to NRA conventions and events, including recent board meetings where the most contentious power struggle since the 1990s came to a head after breaking out in the press and on the convention floor.

I never quote here any members with whom I interacted. I have respected both their privacy and the presumption of privacy surrounding those same conversations. Nor do I rely on anonymous sources. Instead, as can be seen in my endnotes, I have obtained NRA documents and NRA official journals, as the organization has long called its own members-only magazines, and combined these with other archival material dating back more than a century and a half and with my first-person reporting.

Taken together, what I have found allows me to document a story that is not widely known—including by most members of the NRA. It will be told here in full.

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In learning about any organization, one of the crucial strands to follow is the money. As the NRA’s membership has risen from 3.3 million people in 1994 to a claimed more than 5 million people as of this writing, the NRA has steadily expanded its lobbying wing, and today has an army of paid representatives in Washington and in every state capital. Perhaps the most formidable of these is a petite great-grandmother in Florida, Marion P. Hammer. An octogenarian raised in South Carolina by a family of subsistence hunters and farmers after her father died serving in Okinawa during World War II, Hammer remains as pivotal to the NRA’s future today as she was more than a quarter century ago. With her profile rising again during the Association’s latest internecine war, Hammer is by any measure no Fudd.

The U.S. gun industry has sustained the organization’s growth since its founding, through ads in NRA magazines along with donations and other forms of support. Together, the gun industry and the NRA have produced the largest civilian gun market in the world. While, as will be seen, the NRA advances gun manufacturers’ aims, the industry’s direct lobby is the National Shooting Sports Foundation in Newtown, Connecticut, located three miles from Sandy Hook Elementary School. Also in Newtown lived an NRA board member and women’s smallbore shooting champion named Patti Clark. In a sign of how closely the NRA and the industry are tied, she chaired the NRA board’s Nominating Committee, which included George K. Kollitides II, the CEO of Freedom Group—the same firm that made the rifle the shooter used that day in Newtown.

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The NRA at the center of this debate has long been a politically cautious organization, especially when it comes to choosing allies. For a long time it was loath to favor one party over another, supporting both Democrats and Republicans who embraced its point of view. But in recent years this too has changed. The NRA has never before so fully embraced any politician as it has President Donald J. Trump.

The NRA has been plagued by scandal, including allegations of financial impropriety and connections with Russian agents. The year 2019 saw an internecine war break out between CEO LaPierre and former NRA president Oliver North and spill into public view to an unusual degree. The NRA’s second-in-command, Chris Cox, the young gun from Tennessee who for the past seventeen years had been the NRA lobbying chief, was accused of conspiring with North and was forced out by LaPierre. Lately, too, more dues-paying NRA members are wondering how their dues are being spent. Wayne LaPierre, known jokingly throughout the Association as a lousy shot, was found to have billed the NRA for a private jet in the Bahamas, a rack of custom-tailored Italian suits, and a summer of rent for his intern. Meanwhile, nearly half of Americans now see the organization in a negative light.

The latest war for power at the top is the most tumultuous internal struggle the NRA has seen in more than forty years. But it resembles several previous leadership fights. Indeed, since the shift, NRA leaders have been slinging accusations at each other, sometimes embellishing if not inventing facts in order to more effectively smear their rivals for power.

The NRA since 1977 has rewritten the history of its own genesis and development and, as will be seen, has attempted to rewrite key periods of American and world history. Recently, the NRA has crafted and circulated fresh narratives about both Reconstruction and the Holocaust, which entire canons of historical scholarship had previously somehow missed. For decades the NRA has preserved its own historical treasures in a climate controlled room with restricted access logged to the central computer of its National Firearms Museum at its headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia, that no one—neither NRA members nor the public—has ever seen.

Today the NRA has its back against the wall for the first time since the Cincinnati Revolt, resulting from the combination of its own internecine wars and a rising tide of gun violence and corresponding outrage across the nation. Yet at the same time, never before has its fate been so entwined with a political party, and as of this writing, that party controls the presidency and the Senate. The NRA has embedded itself in the organization and planks of the Republican Party, and the NRA’s annual meetings have become one of the biggest annual forums for both current and emerging leaders within the GOP. From the late 2000s through the early 2010s, the erstwhile Fox News star Glenn Beck was the most frequent keynote speaker at the NRA’s annual conventions. In 2017 the convention was addressed by the sitting president of the United States for the first time since 1983, when President Ronald Reagan addressed it. And both President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have spoken at each NRA annual meeting since.

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The story of the NRA tracks the life of the nation over the past century and a half and provides a window on the American experience. The NRA has been a major actor through nearly every period of American history since Reconstruction. The NRA, not unlike organized baseball, has touched the lives of countless Americans over generations. Like baseball and its legends, the NRA and its legacies are woven deeply into the fabric of the nation. What that fact says about this country, and what it means for the people who live in it—who each day go to schools and workplaces, who attend religious services, who go to shopping malls, restaurants, movie theaters, and concerts with their families—are questions that this book will attempt to illuminate, but cannot answer.

PART ONE

A HUNDRED YEARS

The NRA does not advocate an ostrich attitude toward firearms legislation. We recognize that the dynamism and complexities of modern society create new problems which demand new solutions. Accordingly, the National Rifle Association has come forth with a positive, specific and practical program for reasonable and proper firearms controls. In this spirit, we offer them to the Congress and to the people of the United States.

—Franklin L. Orth, executive vice president, The National Rifle Association of America, Washington, D.C., April 10, 1967

One

WITH AN EYE TOWARD FUTURE WARS

The National Rifle Association was formed in New York City by a group of former Union Army officers six years after the end of the Civil War. Nearly all of these men were still on active duty in the New York National Guard. Most had commanded men in what remains America’s costliest war.

They met, crowded into the small office of a military journal in lower Manhattan, with an eye toward future wars. In Europe, Prussia, a small power, had recently defeated Austria and France, two larger empires, in no small part due to better rifles and better marksmanship. The men meeting in New York expected the United States to one day be drawn into wars involving Europe, and they felt compelled to act.

The year was 1871, the height of Reconstruction. The Civil War had drastically expanded the federal government and boosted industrial production. Over the thirty years to come, an economic boom would transform the nation. Railroads, banking, mining, agriculture, and steel would see massive growth. The Native American population would be decimated. Immigrants from Europe, Asia, and other regions would journey to America to work.

The men who met in New York City had seen almost unimaginable carnage. At least 360,000 Union and 258,000 Confederate men fell over five years in battle. Far more died of disease. An unrecorded number survived as amputees. No other war since has claimed so many American lives, and its toll on American forces remained more than that of all other wars combined until World War II.

It had been a long war. In the words of William Conant Church, a special correspondent for The New York Times who was embedded with Union commanders during the Peninsula Campaign in southeastern Virginia, Each day has been an era; each hour an epoch.

The battle for Gettysburg was the war’s costliest for both sides. A Union private deployed there with the 22nd Regiment of the New York National Guard, George W. Wingate, was promoted to sergeant during the fighting in Carlisle nearby. He would later write down his observations of that day:

At times it seemed doubtful whether the incessant uproar was really the bombardment of a quiet village; for, during the momentary pauses of the cannonade, the chirp of the katydid, and the other peaceful sounds of a country summer night, were heard as though nature could not realize that human beings had sought that quiet spot to destroy each other.

By 1871, George Wood Wingate and William Conant Church were in their thirties and living in Brooklyn, New York, when together they founded the National Rifle Association at Church’s offices across the East River at 192 Broadway.

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These two New Yorkers brought complementary skills to the fledgling organization. Wingate by this point was an expert marksman, a rifle trainer, and a writer without peer. Church was the most respected military writer of his age, as well as one of the top newspaper and literary editors and publishers of his generation.

Neither of these is a name that elicits recognition today. Nor are they featured much at all in materials produced by today’s NRA. But once they were famous men. William Church was a lifetime member and director of the New York Zoological Society, and a founding fellow in perpetuity of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. George Wingate left an even deeper mark on New York City. To this day, Wingate is a neighborhood in Brooklyn near Crown Heights. At its center is Wingate Park, a six-acre recreation and sporting complex. There was until recently a George W. Wingate High School in Brooklyn. Wingate also served as cofounder and first president of the New York Public Schools Athletic League. In addition to the muscular development coming from its athletic exercises, the League endeavors in every way to inculcate good habits, he wrote, and in particular ‘square dealing.’ Today the league still has an award in his name, honoring the top athlete in each sport for boys as well as girls in New York City every year. The PSAL under Wingate began offering sports to girls in 1905.

Wingate was born in 1840 in New York. Little is known about his father, Charles Wingate, except that he was from rural Vermont. George Wingate’s mother, Mary Phelps Robinson, was born in Ireland. Wingate studied law at the New York Free Academy, which later became the City University of New York, and was admitted to the New York bar. But he soon responded, as so many others did, to President Abraham Lincoln’s call for able-bodied men to join the Union cause. Enlisting in the New York guard’s 22nd Regiment, Wingate soon proved to be the best shot in his company. The 22nd was deployed in Pennsylvania and helped defend Harrisburg before engaging Confederate troops in Carlisle during the Gettysburg campaign.

Wingate returned to New York months later, and the year before the war ended he cofounded a law firm, Wingate & Cullen, in Brooklyn. Over one hundred and fifty years later, after a modern merger, the firm still bears his name as Wingate, Kearney & Cullen, LLP.

George Wingate taught countless men and boys how to shoot. He would eventually author The Manual for Rifle Practice, which went through multiple editions. The first was commissioned by William Conant Church to run in the Army and Navy Journal and Gazette of the Regular and Volunteer Forces, which Church edited and owned with his brother.

Wingate was a hunter too. He embodied a conservationist ethic and respect for wildlife that would remain strong within the NRA over the ensuing century:

I jumped off my horse and got my rifle ready, but [four antelope] were then six hundred yards off and going like swallows through the air, and it was useless to shoot. I have heard friends describe how they kill running antelope at six hundred yards, but I know I cannot perform such a feat, and therefore prefer to save my ammunition for something I feel I have a reasonable chance of hitting.

It was beautiful, however, to watch these graceful creatures as they sailed along over fallen trees and scarcely seemed to touch the earth in their flight.

Of the two NRA cofounders, Wingate was the man of action, and Church the public intellectual. Church was born in 1836 in Rochester, New York, along Lake Ontario, the eldest surviving son of a Baptist preacher who teetered between prosperity and poverty. Billy, as his family called him, had an itinerant childhood and never finished high school. But he still benefited from having been raised within a literary family, who had