The NRA’s playbook is absolutely fucking outrageous.
Offense, offense, offense.
Guns save lives.
Gun control does not.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun
is a good guy with a gun.
Crying white mothers are ratings gold.
You condemn the victims.
You manipulate the media
to make it not look as bad as it really is.
Our task was to infiltrate the NRA
and get their inner workings and playbook.
The right to protect and defend yourself,
it’s recognized by the constitution,
but it’s a God-given right.
I honestly just could not ever have imagined that
we could peer into, with such clarity,
into this monstrous world.
What we found was absolutely gobsmacking.
[INVESTIGATORS]
Hi, I’m Peter Charley,
an investigative journalist with Al Jazeera.
I was driving out to the airport here in Washington, D.C.,
past the headquarters of the National Rifle Association, the NRA.
Just so happened that I heard on my car radio
a report of yet another school shooting.
And I looked across and thought,
“What on Earth are they thinking in there?”
I picked up the phone and called my boss and said,
“I’ve got this audacious idea.
I want to create a fake grassroots pro-gun organization
based in Australia
with the intention of trying to fool the NRA, if you like,
into thinking that we’re on their side.”
I needed to hire a frontman
who was going to be the key undercover guy.
I decided to call my friend Rodger Muller,
a fella I’ve known for more than 20 years.
I’m Rodger Muller.
I was an undercover reporter for Al Jazeera investigating the NRA.
Peter rang me.
He then talked to me a little bit
about his idea of forming an Australian gun lobby,
a fake Australian gun lobby, and infiltrating the NRA
and asked if I would be interested
in being the person in charge of that lobby.
I said yes.
We constructed a fake organization
that purported to represent the interests
of a portion of the Australian population
that was unhappy with Australia’s tough gun control laws.
[GUN RIGHTS AUSTRALIA Unite. Protect. Reform.]
[GRA: GUN RIGHTS AUSTRALIA]
There was a massacre in the southern state of Tasmania
in Australia in the mid-1990s.
On the island of Tasmania,
the worst massacre in Australian history.
The massacre at a major tourist attraction
has shocked the nation.
And the government,
the Conservative government at the time,
made radical changes to Australia’s gun laws.
It’s a real bugbear for the NRA
that Australia is such a safe place.
Hey, guys, Rodger Muller here from Gun Rights Australia.
We don’t have our rights as gun owners diluted.
And they’ve come out with legislation that picks on farmers.
Gun crime has been decreasing at a steady rate.
That was his cover story.
He hated the gun laws in Australia.
He thought they were too strict, too tight.
It was really difficult because, you know,
you’re pretending to be something that really grates against your DNA,
and you’re walking down the street of a small town
where you know most people are thinking you’re a gun nut.
I flew him to London
to have him trained in the use of these tiny little cameras
that we hide in buttons in shirts and various other places.
He ended up putting one in his Akubra hat, the Aussie hat.
Once we’d established the website and had the social media going,
we then reached out to the NRA
and said that I would be in America on business,
and it’d be nice to have a meeting.
Oh my God! Oh my God!
Seventeen people have been killed, students and adults.
The site of what’s become
an all too familiar panic of students fleeing,
hands raised in single file,
only matched by the images of armed tactical police.
During our investigation,
there was the dreadful massacre at the high school in Florida,
and we used it as a way for them to explain
or to give us clues and hints
as to how we should deal with something similar
if it were to occur in Australia.
What their playbook actually is, is to actually not talk to an event.
We will not comment because we don’t want our name in that story.
We had nothing to do with it.
So we generally just won’t comment.
The NRA advised that if the media persists,
then you go on the offensive.
Offense, offense, offense,
and that is an effective communication strategy.
And that’s what the NRA does, very well.
One of the key tools that the NRA uses
is to create the idea that we are all under threat.
House invasion, rape, assault, you name it.
At the top of the tweet or Facebook post or whatever,
“Not allowed to defend their home, not allowed to defend their home,”
boom.
Women, that’s the key, women.
You’ve got to tell women they’re vulnerable.
The only way they can protect themselves is to carry guns.
It’s an absolute fucking--
The volunteers tell Rodger how the NRA sways public opinion.
See, the angle is,
shouldn’t she be allowed to protect herself?
Why are you trying to take this away from her?
If I can somehow put it into that context,
I can win the argument.
Man, what kind of barbarian are you?,
The NRA’s playbook is absolutely...
fucking outrageous.
The things that they could do in the event of a school shooting
was just bloody disgusting, frankly.
You smash down those who are grieving,
those who want gun reform.
You dominate them.
You lie to them.
How dare you stand on the graves of those children
to put forth your political agenda?
Completely shame them to the whole idea.
I love that.
The One Nation political party is a right-wing Australian party.
It’s run by a woman named Pauline Hanson.
I’m not there to keep the bastards honest.
I'm there to get rid of the bastards.
Women and children who are fleeing Iraq,
would you turn around and send them back to Saddam Hussein?
Yes.
Don’t mess with me.
Just make my day.
The investigation had been going for about two, two and a half years.
And Peter saw an article that was talking about
a connection between One Nation and the NRA.
So Peter asked me to contact One Nation, which I did.
Rodger’s first meeting with Pauline Hanson’s chief of staff,
James Ashby,
Rodger mentioned that he had good friends in the NRA.
James Ashby said, “Ooh, I’d like to meet them,”
and asked for Rodger to set up a meeting with them.
If the NRA want to rally their supporters in Australia,
that’s one start.
Two, I’d love to get my hands on their software.
Three, if they can help us with donations... that’s super.
After I met with James Ashby,
I had a phone call from Steve Dickson,
who was head of the One Nation party in Queensland.
Where the “aha” moment was was when One Nation got involved
and how eager they were to extract information systems and money
from the American gun lobby.
We would win potentially the balance of power
if we took two seats in the lower house.
I reckon you could do that with $2 million.
If you had 20, you would own the lower house and the upper house.
You would have the balance of power in both houses.
So if they could receive funds from the gun lobby,
that would then fund their political campaigns here in Australia,
that would then put pressure on the Australian gun laws
to make them more like American gun laws,
and that would be the payback to the gun lobby.
Why don’t you knock up some policy for us for guns
that we can run with for One Nation?
-What do you think of that? -Yeah.
You don’t get millions and millions
without there being some sort of expectation
that you will pay them back,
legislatively or in some fashion or other.
We also had a number of meetings with senior NRA, different departments,
and some other gun lobby groups and the Koch brothers.
The Koch brothers are two of the biggest
and most controversial names in American industry and politics.
They’re worth $43 billion each.
One Nation announces it has a meeting lined up that week
with representatives of the energy giant Koch Industries.
What you can do to help us,
it’s going to get down to money at the end of the day,
as James started to touch on.
We can change the voting system in our country,
the way people operate, if we’ve got the money.
We have the people. We’ve got momentum.
It’s impossible to know if any money changed hands.
Very shortly after that...
Pauline Hanson voted to ban donations from foreign parties.
I think that overseas money should not have
an influence in our political scene as well.
So I believe foreign donations should be stopped totally.
That’s something that’s always confused me.
Pauline Hanson 100 percent knew why James Ashby
and Steve Dickson were going to America
but then stood up
and said that she didn’t think we should have any foreign donations.
There’s no big organizations that donate to One Nation,
I can assure you that.
It’s just unfathomable that in a public space
that there can be that much secrecy about where the money is coming from.
One Nation’s James Ashby knows how Australia would react
if it ever learned that the party was asking for American gun money.
If it gets out, it’ll fucking rock the boat.
So his meetings in Washington were to be kept secret.
Or so he thought.
The documentary caused an absolute... shitstorm.
An outpouring of gratitude in Australia,
some criticism for the methods used.
This guy was employed by a Middle Eastern country,
by Al Jazeera as an Australian spy,
to interfere in Australian politics.
This is a political attack by Al Jazeera
in cooperation with the ABC.
The NRA had absolute zero reaction, which was predictable.
What was nice was a number of people
who came up and shook my hand in the street afterwards, saying,
“Look, I honestly thought you’d gone mad,
and I gave you a wide berth.
But, mate, you did an incredible thing.
You’ve done great things for Australia.”
And you know, “We’re proud of you,” I suppose was the main message.