Inside the National Rifle Association Convention: The Rise of Militancy
It’s not for defense, it's for offense
From May 16-19, GVPedia founder Devin Hughes visited the NRA’s annual meeting held at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas, Texas. This is his report.
(This piece contains descriptions of guns, ammunition, and specific cases of violence. Reader discretion is advised.)
By: Devin Hughes
As I approached a booth featuring ICC Ammo, my eyes were immediately drawn to the rows of ballistics gel — clear bricks of gelatin meant to simulate human tissue and show the impact of various bullets. These particular gelatin bricks had been shot with fragmentation rounds from both handguns and rifles.
As I got closer I could see the pathway of the bullet entering the brick from its left side, then bursting into more than a dozen brown and gold fragments spreading out from the entry wound. Most of the shards stopped before they made it halfway through the brick, but one metal chunk tore its way almost to the other end.
I beckoned to the enthusiastic salesman to explain what I was seeing here, and he assured me it was all part of the design for these ICC Ammo bullets. The metal shards were designed to maximize the size of the initial wound, while at least one piece of the bullet was supposed to achieve penetration in the all-important 12-18 inch range of gel, providing an incredibly lethal combination.
From my more than decade experience in gun violence prevention, I knew survivors often carried bullet fragments in their bodies even after numerous surgeries, as removing fragments could result in even further damage. Those wounds are frequently from bullets that weren’t built with fragmentation in mind.
These are explicitly designed in a fashion to make it impossible for a surgeon to be able to remove them all, and to maximize internal bleeding minutes or even hours after the shooting is over.
I asked the salesman why I should prefer this round for self-defense versus a more traditional hollow-point, or even hydra-shok or fluted round. He gestured at the spray of metal shards and the size of the wound cavity, indicating that this was larger than I would obtain with other choices. His next response though would haunt me for the rest of the convention. He cheerfully explained that these rounds were perfect for "a high-stress environment like an inner city or courthouse."
Bullets designed for an INNER CITY or COURTHOUSE. A perfectly chilling encapsulation of the general theme emerging from the National Rifle Association’s “14 acres of guns & gear.”
But allow me to rewind a day…
As I was driving down to the NRA Convention on Thursday, news broke that Texas Governor Greg Abbott pardoned Daniel Perry. On July 25th, 2020, Daniel Perry was working as an Uber driver in Austin, Texas when he ran a red light and drove into a Black Lives Matter protest. After he stopped, a group of protestors approached his car, concerned by how close he had come to the protest. One of the protestors, Garrett Foster, was carrying an AK-47 style rifle. Perry drew his own revolver, and fired on Foster, killing him. Perry’s lawyers argued that he feared for his life, that Foster raised his rifle towards Perry, and that the killing was a case of self-defense.
The prosecution argued that because Perry instigated the altercation by driving at the protestors, and there were multiple witnesses who swore Foster never raised his rifle, the self-defense argument failed. The prosecution also noted that before the shooting, Perry posted multiple racist and inflammatory social media posts and sent text messages about the protests, stating in one that he “might go to Dallas to shoot looters;” and in others that he could get away with killing a protester if it was seen as self-defense. Finally, Perry himself stated to investigators in the immediate aftermath of the shooting that, “I believe he was going to aim at me; I didn’t want to give him a chance to aim at me” — revealing that Foster had not yet actually raised his rifle.
In April of last year, the jury reached a guilty verdict that caused outrage in pro-gun circles, with former Fox News star Tucker Carlson and others calling it a miscarriage of justice. Governor Abbott quickly seized on the news, and in an unprecedented move, announced he would pardon Daniel Perry, before the verdict even had a chance to be appealed.
On the day the NRA convention officially began, Abbott kept his pardon promise, sending a clear signal that as long as you had the right political views in Texas, murder would be considered acceptable. And that 2nd Amendment rights, such as those of Foster, only existed for those with the correct politics.
On Friday I arrived bright and early at the sprawling Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, where a decently sized crowd had already assembled waiting for the exhibit doors to open. Once I got my licensing and registration sorted out to be able to see the exhibits, I blended right into the crowd.
The demographics would barely budge throughout the convention, unofficially being approximately 90-95% white and 65% male based on what I could see, though there were more families as the weekend came. Interestingly, concealed and open carry would remain relatively rare, even on the days and areas where the Secret Service wasn’t banning weapons.
I spotted John Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center booth to the right of the main doors. The unintentional symbolism was striking: the disinformation churned out by Lott (and Project 2025 right next to him) served as a gateway to the products inside, an area the vast majority of attendees passed through to get to the exhibits. Lott’s disinformation and data fraud is fundamental to the gun lobby’s Firehose of Falsehood, with ideas essential to the Defensive Gun Use industrial complex in addition to the lobby’s law-dismantling apparatus.
Yet it was one small booth, near the main entrance. Easy to miss, particularly given the impossible-to-miss “NRA WALL OF GUNS” next door blaring out announcements every few minutes, with red and blue lights on top of the wall just in case the man with the microphone didn’t suffice.
Inside the “14 acres of guns & gear” was a menagerie, ranging from standard hunting equipment and revolvers to assault-style rifles, bullpups, and handguns that had no pretensions of ever being used for hunting anything that had more than two legs. There were booths featuring the profoundly bizarre and morbidly amusing, while others catered to an arms race in lethality. And, somewhat surprisingly, there was a good idea on display: a device you can put on your gun that will send you an alert if it is moved.
I’ll start with the bizarre. In no particular order, and by no means a comprehensive list:
The “Mantle Concealment Clock” for those who want to hide their handguns in a clock. Truly a missed opportunity to use “Glock in a Clock” as their marketing slogan.
The “Liberty Pen Gun” that serves as, you guessed it, both a pen and a gun. One end writes, the other goes boom. Where the end that goes boom points while you’re writing may be one reason why the U.S. patent is still pending. You can also buy a belt with it in which the buckle stores the tiny bullets, making it the “first belt fed pen gun” as the salesman gleefully proclaimed.
A pissed-off, heavily armed platypus mascot for “Stealth Arms.” Not sure how a pissed-off platypus conveys “stealth,” but there it was.
The G-Spot Fire Starting Kit, which as the name suggests, clearly refers to a small fire starting kit that you can fit in the grip of your Glock. And yes, “G-Spot” has been trademarked.
One of the most flagrant copyright infringements I’ve ever seen — a Barbie Kalashnikov 9, which is an AK-style pistol with the Barbie logo plastered all over it. The entire gun is painted pink, and is indistinguishable from a toy when looking at it. It’s currently sold by Outlaw Ordnance for $1,299. Mattel has been notified. The Barbie gun was nestled right in between two other assault rifles and a tactical vest.
The same booth with the Barbie gun also sold “MAGA-ZINE” ammunition magazines, emblazoned with “Sleazy Joe and his Hoe” featuring likenesses of the current President and Vice President. There were also handguns engraved with Trump’s mugshot (but as a heroic thing), Trump Force One (the plane with Trump’s brand), and Mount Trumpmore.
An ad featuring two attractive women holding guns that was for Liberty Lubricant. This lube is allegedly for guns.
A double-barreled AR-15 style rifle. When I asked why two barrels, the response was, “Because we can.”
Bullet Splat Jewelry.
A shirt featuring Jesus, but with a handgun in each hand — answering the age old question, Who Would Jesus Shoot?
Silver bullets, presumably for werewolves.
A full dress made of shell casings.
Unless the Liberty Pen Gun obtains its patent, the danger most of these accessories pose to anyone outside of Mattel’s IP department is negligible, however, when compared to the booths featuring .50 caliber sniper rifles, “self-defense” ammunition, and militant marketing.
I was somewhat surprised to encounter multiple booths selling .50 caliber sniper rifles, which have a massive range and can be used to take out cars, boats, or even helicopters. When I asked what these were useful for, and conveyed skepticism that they would be useful for self-defense, to their credit the salespeople did not even attempt to convince me about self-defense applications. One bragged that the company had a contract on a .50 caliber model with the U.S. Coast Guard for stopping small boats; and the rest of the salespeople indicated that the rifles were mainly sold to long distance competitive shooters (at ranges up to three miles) and to guys who just wanted to brag about how big their new gun was.
However, the salespeople failed to mention two more prominent markets for their vehicle stopping rifles: paramilitary organizations in the U.S. and cartels in Mexico.
Indeed, the Barrett booth had a wall dedicated to the varieties of .50 caliber rifles they offered, rifles that are in high demand across the border as Ieva Jusionyte describes in her recently released book on American guns surging across the southern border.
More prevalent than the booths offering high powered sniper rifles were those offering a variety of ammunition. Everything from full metal jacket, to hollow-point, to hydra-shok, to hydra-shok deep, to fluted rounds, to segmentation rounds, to the fragmentation rounds I described at the outset.
Aside from the ghoulishness of the fragmentation round booth, a different one highlighting hydra-shok deep and segmentation rounds also offered some harrowing insight. According to two of the salespeople there, they created a segmentation round — which is like a hydra-shok round except the three metal petals that typically flatten instead split off from the bullet once inside the body — due to customer demand, not because the round was any more effective.
Indeed, as they explained, the hydra-shok deep rounds provided the best penetration and wound size combination, which they then confirmed from autopsy reports they would occasionally access.
Each booth had its own theories on which specific rounds were best for a variety of “self-defense” scenarios, which types would be best for which calibers, and just how much damage they would do to a human body. While these booths also sold hunting rounds, the bullets I referenced were all very much designed for human targets.
After a certain point, it became clear that the difference in stopping power for many of these rounds is marginal. Instead, the point was to inflict as much internal damage as possible so that the person shot with it could not be saved by doctors later.
The point isn’t about the stopping power in the heat of the moment, it is about the killing power afterwards that is the selling point.
Ironically, outside of full metal jacket ammunition, all of the bullets I saw are generally not allowed for use in military conflicts. Signatories at a peace conference at the Hague in 1899 agreed “to abstain from the use of bullets which expand or flatten easily in the human body, such as bullets with a hard envelope which does not entirely cover the core, or is pierced with incisions.” And in a similar convention in 1907, nations further agreed to not “employ arms, projectiles, or material calculated to cause unnecessary suffering.”
While much is made of the fact that automatic weapons are very strictly regulated in the U.S. (though the explosion of auto-sear technology is challenging that), due to the ammunition available to civilians, guns used on American streets are often more lethal than their military counterparts. And the ammunition salespeople at the NRA convention are leaning into that lethality as a selling point.
Finally, and perhaps most disturbingly, was the vast array of booths explicitly selling gear designed for paramilitary purposes.
Large banners showed universally white men (ranging from young adults to grizzled veterans) with assault-style rifles, helmets with high-tech optics, body armor, tactical vests, and military style camo — all preparing for what looked like a tactical assault. It’s not the sort of set-up you would need for 30-50 feral hogs or any sort of hunting trip.
It also made no sense from a self-defense perspective, as walking around in daily life with such equipment would be obviously silly. However, if you are looking for a fight, or to go toe-to-toe with another armed group, then this gear makes sense. It’s not for defense, it's for offense. The brand names for some of the assault-style rifles underlined this militant theme, such as “Minutemen,” “Renegade,” and “Revolution.”
One of the slightly less militarized banners was emblazoned with “Defend America.” Defend America from whom? America still has the most powerful military in the world by far. Clearly the perceived threat does not come from foreign adversaries.
One of the final booths I visited was “Attorneys for Freedom,” who were marketing their “self-defense” coverage. As one of the lawyers excitedly handed me a pamphlet, he explained that while other firms might care if I was intoxicated or using an illegal firearm during my “self-defense” incident, they didn’t. As long as I attested that I “tried,” they would cover me all the way. The pamphlet went even further, additionally explaining that if I shot someone in a criminal act, a gun-free zone, a domestic violence case, and/or was a prohibited purchaser, their legal plan would cover me. This legal sales pitch further solidified the emergent militant theme.
Several years ago there was a minor academic debate about the state of gun culture. Gun Culture 1.0 was about hunting and sportsmanship. Gun Culture 2.0 was about self-defense and concealed carry, which as GVPedia has documented is the product of the gun lobby’s decades-long Firehose of Falsehood strategy.
The academic who popularized the 1.0 and 2.0 terms, Professor David Yamane of Wake Forest University, contends that the dominant gun culture is still focused on self-defense and concealed carry. And that culture is most likely still a majority.
Yet academics from Boston University posited back in 2020 that we were seeing a new Gun Culture 3.0 arise in the form of insurrectionist ideology, a claim Yamane disputed. Incidentally, Yamane was present at the convention as a featured speaking guest, and was using the opportunity to promote and sell his new book on gun culture.
Some form of Gun Culture 3.0 was fully on display at the NRA convention. Yet an insurrectionist ideology, which directs the majority of its ire towards the government, doesn’t fully capture what I witnessed. That ire is still present, but it seems to be overshadowed by the marketing and political signaling that fellow citizens with different political beliefs were the primary enemy. The best way to describe it was militancy, which takes its most prominent form in the paramilitary organizations that have formed across the country.
In comparison to the Exhibit halls, the major political events of Saturday felt like a sideshow.
The Annual Meeting of Members was current NRA leadership bemoaning being under political siege from all directions while simultaneously pinky swearing to their members that the organization was as strong as ever (their financials tell a different story). The corruption you might have heard about from the fake news and other vultures was just a couple individuals and groups betraying the NRA. Nothing to see here… all in the past. Amusingly, Wayne LaPierre’s name never crossed the lips of the current leadership.
The NRA Leadership Forum — starring “hot politician” Governor Greg Abbott of Texas, and “freedom fighter” former President Donald Trump — started an hour and a half late, despite the line to get in starting three hours before the event was scheduled. At least part of the insanely late start was due to Trump golfing with former Dallas Cowboys quarterback, Tony Romo.
If the NRA weren’t already beholden to Trump, being more than an hour and a half late to one of the most powerful political lobbies to ever exist would’ve been the snub of the century. Instead, 95% of the audience obediently waited and blamed the NRA leadership for the delays.
While Greg Abbott made no mention of pardoning Perry in his Saturday speech at the Leadership Conference, he did brag about blatantly violating the First Amendment rights of student protestors at the University of Texas, as well as constructing buoys and razor wire obstacles at the southern border designed to drown and slice up families seeking asylum from violence largely perpetrated with U.S. guns. He had nothing but praise for former President Donald Trump.
Meanwhile in his own rambling speech, Trump accused Biden of siding with cartels. This is deeply ironic, given that the gun lobby Trump was speaking to has done everything in its power to make it as easy as possible for those cartels to obtain as many American firearms as possible, with a particular emphasis on .50 caliber rifles.
That, plus a poem about how immigrants are snakes, along with fabricated stories about interactions with world leaders — nothing new, and very little about guns.
For Abbott and Trump, this was just another opportunity to rail about the culture war. The exhibit hall on the other hand was about taking the war aspect of culture war very literally and arming militants in preparation.
The overt militancy and marketing to private paramilitary organizations — who style themselves as militias, but have nothing in common with the “well-regulated militia” envisioned in the Second Amendment — was ubiquitous and a departure from the 2018 NRA convention also held in Dallas.
Back then, the vibe was much more “own the libs.” Yes there was militant marketing, but a lot more stuff designed to make “snowflakes” shed a tear. This time the vibe was far more “prepare to shoot the libs.”
It is important to note that none of this is to suggest that most of the attendees were militia members. Far from it. There was a sizable older crowd, and many people there clearly just wanted to gawk at big guns that go boom. There was still a section for hunters, some older firearms that were works of art that would never show up at a crime scene, some bizarre stuff best labeled simply as “WTF,” and plenty of gear marketed for hunting or target shooting.
Yet it was crystal clear from the marketing of multiple major booths and numerous smaller ones that gun companies have conducted their market analyses and concluded that militancy is a money maker.
Some of the people in this market segment are merely military cosplayers and keyboard warriors who want to act cool and nothing further. But there are the true militants, those who see the variety of full metal jacket, hollow-points, hydra-shoks, fluted rounds, segmented rounds, and fragmenting rounds, and hoard each for the variety of tactical situations they see coming.
Those who traverse the booths featuring body armor, night-vision optics, tactical vests, handguns, assault-style rifles, bullpups, and .50 caliber sniper rifles see all of it as essential provisions for what will transpire. Those who fervently believe the last election was stolen, and that voting from the rooftops is the only option left. Those who listen to Abbott and Trump rant about inner cities, courthouses, leftist students, and asylum seekers, and hear a target list. Those who heard “Stand back and stand by” in 2020 as orders.
It doesn’t take many. Even if only 1% of those in attendance held this worldview (which would be a considerable underestimate based on what I saw), that would mean anywhere from 500-700 of the people in attendance (whether one believes the NRA’s attendance estimate of 72,000, or a more likely 50,000). That’s 500-700 high casualty events waiting to happen.
And the folks with these beliefs would likely be underrepresented at the NRA convention, given that in many pro-gun circles the organization is seen as corrupt liberal sell-outs.
Indeed, an informal survey by ammunitiontogo.com of 986 conference attendees confirms what I witnessed. While 84% of respondents believing the lie that Biden’s presidency is illegitimate is unfortunately unsurprising, the other results are more harrowing.
A full 75% of respondents think that civil unrest is imminent around the upcoming election, 70% are stocking up on ammo in preparation, and “39% of NRA members believe our country will see some sort of American Revolution in which citizens will have to arm themselves against a tyrannical government in the next decade. Generally, the younger the respondent, the more likely they were to believe a Revolution was imminent.”
For that militant audience, war is coming. There is no doubt in their minds who the enemy is. They are fully armed. And come January 6th, regardless of who wins the presidency, I fervently hope that I am terribly mistaken about what I witnessed and its implications.
As I left the NRA convention on its final day, the Uber driver drove over the “x” on the road where President John F Kennedy was assassinated on November 22nd, 1963, less than a mile away from the convention center. That assassination, along with those of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. would spur the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968. The failure to block the legislation would eventually lead radicals to seize control of the NRA in the 1977 Revolt at Cincinnati, who would then institute their Firehose of Falsehood campaigns to change the face of gun ownership in America. The fallout over the Gun Control Act of 1968 simultaneously caused anti-government paramilitary groups to rapidly multiply across the country.
During the 1980s and ‘90s, federal law enforcement agents frequently clashed with heavily armed far-right groups. These clashes culminated in the 1993 Waco Siege, which saw the disastrous and deadly Federal response to a heavily armed religious cult. Thirty years later, Trump would announce his most recent campaign for the presidency at Waco, Texas.
The day after I returned home to Oklahoma, I visited the Oklahoma City National Memorial, built to commemorate the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995 by NRA member Timothy McVeigh. The deadliest domestic terrorism attack in U.S. history was revenge for the Waco Siege exactly two years earlier, and came after then NRA Vice President Wayne LaPierre decried federal agents as “jack-booted thugs.”
We’ve seen the catastrophic consequences of militancy before. Oklahoma and Texas bear its scars. And we will again as the gun lobby continues down this path.
Devin Hughes is the President and Founder of GVPedia, a non-profit that provides access to gun violence prevention research and data.
All images by the author.
Good lord, that Barbie Kalashnikov...
Been waiting for this and I wasn’t disappointed! Well done Devin!!!