National Shooting Sports Foundation - The Gun Lobby Next Door
As the NRA loses relevance, another more insidious pro-gun group ascends
By: Po Murray
Most Americans recognize the National Rifle Association (NRA) and understand its role as a major gun lobby group in the United States, but the vast majority of Americans have never heard of the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF). I didn’t until 2012.
Shortly after my 20-year-old neighbor used his mother’s gun to kill her while she was sleeping and used an AR-15 and high capacity magazines to hunt and murder 20 first graders and six educators in Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012, a woman from my community began to protest the NSSF. Soon, a few more community members joined in as weeks went by. I found out quickly why these protests were warranted.
In a sick, twisted irony, the gun lobby group that helped the gun industry market AR-15s to the Sandy Hook shooter was headquartered just three miles from Sandy Hook Elementary School, and next to the Intermediate School for our fifth and sixth graders.
A former employee of NSSF informed me that this group was the trade association for the gun industry. It hosts the world’s largest annual gun show called the Shooting, Hunting and Outdoor Trade Show (SHOT Show) in Las Vegas, and it was responsible for rebranding assault weapons as “modern sporting rifles” to help the gun industry sell more AR-15s to civilians after a steep decline in sales of hunting rifles. In recent years, the NSSF allowed a gun manufacturer to showcase its colorful “JR-15s” — AR-15s made for children — at its gun show.
Shortly after the Sandy Hook massacre, the NSSF set up its lobbying office in Washington, D.C. and dramatically ramped up its lobbying efforts to block any and all lifesaving gun control measures.
Now representing 10,000 manufacturers, distributors, firearms retailers, shooting ranges, sportsmen’s organizations, and publishers, it has spent more than the NRA on lobbying. Since the shooting, the NSSF spent a total of $43,150,000 and the NRA spent $38,331,564 to push for the gun industry’s financial interests.
Unlike the chaotic NRA, the NSSF stays out of the limelight, but it works aggressively to block all local, state, and federal gun control bills that would help stop mass shootings, unintentional shootings, gun suicides, and prevent stolen and illegal guns from seeping into communities of color or into countries south of our border. It opposes any and all gun safety measures with no regard for public safety, including legislation that would enact universal background checks, safe storage, and red flag laws; and ban assault weapons, high capacity magazines, and ghost guns.
The group had a seat at the table to negotiate the Senate Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA). This untrustworthy group weakened the legislation then withheld its support for the passage of the bill. In spite of NSSF’s opposition, 15 Senate Republicans and 14 House Republicans joined the Congressional Democrats to pass BSCA — in response to more children and educators being hunted and killed by an 18-year-old gunman with an AR-15 in Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
The NSSF’s power is growing as more Congressional Republicans lean on it for guidance as the NRA struggles with public opinion.
While some moderate Senate Democrats may think the NSSF is a good actor, it personally attacked gun violence survivor and former congresswoman Gabby Giffords over her support for background checks — a policy supported by the vast majority of the American public — and criticized the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for urging more research into gun-related issues.
The NSSF worked closely with the NRA for decades to ensure the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) was leaderless, weak, and underfunded. It derailed the confirmation of President Joe Biden’s nominee, David Chipman, as the Director of the ATF with an ad campaign. NSSF’s lead lobbyist, Larry Keane, led a smear campaign by posting a picture on the NSSF website that showed a camo-clad federal agent — falsely identified in a tabloid article as a young Mr. Chipman — standing in the rubble of the Branch Davidian compound in 1993.
This lie spread like wildfire on social media, and led to a spate of death threats for Mr. Chipman and his family. Meanwhile, Mr. Keane took home $651,054 in total compensation in 2022. The group’s revenue soared from $36 million in 2016 to over $51 million in 2022.
The NSSF is far more nefarious than the NRA since it has infiltrated the federal government.
Over the years, it lobbied Republican Members of Congress to add millions in the appropriations bills for its co-branded program with the ATF on smokescreen programs such as Project Childsafe and Don’t Lie for the Other Guy. In addition to partnering with the ATF to mask its true identity, it also partners with legitimate organizations like the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
Despite our call for the Biden Administration to distance itself from the NSSF, the Veterans Administration and the CDC continues to promote and market NSSF’s Project Childsafe program on its websites.
The NSSF is disguised as a trade group for the gun industry, but it is no different in its tactics than the NRA. The NSSF understands that fear of gun control drives gun sales. It pushes conspiracy theories about sinister government plots to undermine the second amendment to rally its base. In addition to waging a culture war, it has endorsed far-right figures like Donald Trump and uber-conservative supreme court justices who will support the gun industry agenda.
During Trump’s presidency, the NSSF played a key role in convincing his administration to move gun export controls from the State Department to the Commerce Department. This shift in 2020 yielded financial dividends for the U.S. gun exporters due to the Commerce Department’s pro-business approach.
According to Forum Arms Trade, since the regulatory change went into effect on March 9, 2020 to June 30, 2023, the Commerce Department has processed a total of 26,422 licenses, approving 24,741 of them (for a 93.6% approval rate) with a total approval value of $34.7 billion. By calculations performed by the Forum on the Arms Trade, that averages to approximately $10.5 billion per year. A recent Bloomberg News investigation showed that the Commerce Department was acting as SHOT Show’s travel agent, gun industry promotion service, and deal broker for foreign buyers.
The NSSF unsuccessfully sued the State of Connecticut for passing their gun control package after Sandy Hook, and lost the Sandy Hook families’ lawsuit against Remington when the gun company’s insurers settled. However, its support for the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court of the United States paid off.
In an interview with PBS News Hour in 1991, Chief Justice Warren Burger, who was appointed by Republican President Richard Nixon in 1969, said that the Second Amendment “has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.” The current conservative justices committed what Justice Burger termed “fraud” and gave the gun lobby a win with the Bruen decision.
The NSSF is now using the Bruen decision to continue to pursue the revision of the Second Amendment with additional lawsuits in many states.
The NSSF’s worst nightmare is Congress passing the Equal Access to Justice for Victims of Gun Violence Act that would repeal the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act to remove the special legal shield for the gun industry and give gun violence survivors their days in court.
It’s been 11 years since a woman from our community began to protest the NSSF. For many years, we froze our butts off when we held protests in front of its headquarters to raise awareness while the very well-paid NSSF lobbyists were hanging out at the glamorous Venetian and Caesars Palace in Las Vegas during the SHOT Show in January, selling more AR-15s.
Last year, the NSSF silently moved out of Newtown to a neighboring town. While we can no longer protest the gun lobby group in our town, we want Americans to learn more about this extreme gun lobby group next door to help us convince the Biden Administration that the federal agencies funded by our tax dollars should completely cut ties with a gun lobby group that helped market the AR-15 to my 20-year-old neighbor with mental illness, and has continued to contribute to the gun violence crisis in our nation.
Po Murray is Chairman of Newtown Action Alliance/Newtown Action Alliance Foundation and a board member of a number of gun violence prevention organizations, including GVPedia.