- Let's talk about one thing
more important to lobbyists and the gun industry
than children, than houses of faith, than human beings.
Let's talk about profit.
(gun fires)
- [Cameraman] It's double action, so it's still loaded.
(gun fires)
- In the days after Columbine,
with their convention scheduled to proceed
the following week only a few miles away,
the NRA met to discuss how to proceed.
They discussed setting up a fund
for the victims' families for $1 million
before abandoning the idea
for fear it would be seen as admitting some responsibility.
They discussed canceling the convention,
but they expressed concern internally
about how their more extreme members would react.
Eventually, they went ahead
and sent Charlton Heston out to give a fiery speech
condemning anyone suggesting policy change
in the wake of the tragedy
as trying to politicize the death of children.
He argued for more guns everywhere, all of the time.
- From my cold, dead hands!
(audience cheers)
- If that sounds familiar,
it's because that speech has formed
the core of the gun lobby's message to this day,
and that message has been incredibly successful.
This is the story of how the NRA
and the larger gun lobby won
and continues to win so effectively.
And not surprisingly, it all starts with money, big money.
Every time there's a mass shooting in America,
politicians put out statements of thoughts and prayers,
communities gather for vigils for the victims,
and people vow to make a change.
Oh, and gun sales skyrocket.
- The interaction between hate, fear, conspiracy,
society coming apart at the fringes.
That's the same thing that drives gun sales.
- That's Ryan Busse, a proud gun owner
who went into the gun sales business right after college,
eventually rising to an executive position.
But he became increasingly troubled by his industry,
and after 25 years, he left to advocate for gun reform.
His book "Gunfight," reveals how he believes
the industry has radicalized America.
- If you're an African American family
in a place like Buffalo today,
are you more or less likely to go buy guns
than you were like two months ago
before the Buffalo shooting?
You're probably more.
You're trying to do what it takes
to protect yourself and your family.
So, you see how this mass shooting
creates more gun sales, creates talk of gun bills,
creates then people on the right who buy more guns,
than the people on the right have more guns
and disadvantaged minority communities
then have to get more guns
because they're worried about the people on the right.
You see, it's this ever faster spinning spiral
that just feeds itself.
- [Talib] This trend has been building for years,
ever since a certain Illinois senator became president.
- If you look at gun sales
through the last 30 years about, they're mostly flat.
They're between three and seven million units per year,
up until 2007.
That was the year at which Barack Obama,
America's first Black president,
started to lead in the polls.
And that's also the year where the NRA and the industry
coalesced around this plan.
The NRA knew hate, conspiracy, fear, racism,
those can drive political outcomes.
And the industry sort of sat back and was like,
"Holy shit.
"That's the same stuff that drives gun sales."
In 2007, as our national radicalization
started to really light on fire, so did gun sales.
The nation never bought more than
eight million guns per year before 2008,
before Barack Obama became president.
By the time Barack Obama left office,
it was buying more than 16 million per year.
The last year of Donald Trump's office
bought almost 25 million guns.
- Even the solutions the NRA and the politicians they fund
put forth to curb gun violence lead to more profit.
- Implement the very best strategy to harden their schools,
including effective, trained, armed security.
- Hiring armed guards, adding barricades,
revamping security systems, limiting doors.
- Having one door that goes in and out of the school,
having armed police officers at that one door.
- These measures take serious investment,
bolstering a private school security business
that already brings in $3.1 billion annually.
The recent gun bill set aside a billion dollars
for schools to revamp their security,
and 300 million for increased training and equipment.
That's a lot of money, but does it work?
Uvalde was already a hardened school on May 24th,
having received almost $70,000 to spend on the project.
And yet, all that security proved futile.
Research over 18 years
done by UToledo professor, Dr. James Price,
found no evidence that hardening schools
prevented gun violence.
But that doesn't stop the NRA from pushing its message,
because even the threat of gun violence makes money.
So, pro-gun advocates call for more armed guards
and the arming of teachers.
Now, requiring teachers to carry guns
may strike some as extreme, but does it work?
After all, as we've heard over and over,
the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun
is a good guy with a gun.
- The only thing that's gonna stop a bad guy with a gun.
- The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun.
- Is a good guy with a gun.
(audience cheers)
- The NRA was quick to praise a bystander
who recently pulled out his pistol
and killed a mass shooter in a mall in Indiana.
But the truth is these kinds of examples
are statistical unicorns, according to The New York Times.
Only 3% of attacks over the past two decades
have ended in a civilian shooting back.
And that good guy with a gun
might actually make things worse.
Ohio Governor Mike DeWine recently signed a bill
reducing the hours of training for a teacher
to carry a gun in a school safety zone
from 700 down to a maximum of 24 hours.
According to their own numbers,
NYPD officers hit their target
when they discharge their weapons in real-life situations
just 34% of the time.
And that's after years of training
and experience on the job, or a lot more than 24 hours.
A minimally-trained teacher
would presumably have an even lower success rate.
And that's when the good guys opt to use their guns at all.
In Uvalde, Texas, 19 good guys with guns
waited around for more than an hour
while a shooter murdered 19 children and two teachers.
According to the chief of police,
they needed more equipment
and more officers to do a tactical breach.
In other words, even more guns.
So, we know the NRA has a lot of money to spend,
and we also have a pretty good idea how they spend it.
The list of politicians
receiving donations from the lobby is long.
Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, Mitch McConnell.
Even supposed gun moderates are on the list.
Mitt Romney has received more in total from the NRA
than any of his peers.
It's true that Romney was one of the 15 Republicans
who voted for the bipartisan Safer Communities bill
that President Biden signed in June,
which will require
more stringent background checks for under-21s
and ban domestic abusers from buying guns.
It's the first major
federal gun control legislation in 30 years,
but many critics say it's too modest.
It doesn't go nearly as far
as 1994's assault weapons ban,
the last piece of federal legislation.
The NRA's influence was certainly a factor.
After all, the NRA claims to have enacted 382 pro-gun bills
from 2013 to 2018,
and effectively killed any gun reform for decades.
But is the reason for their success purely money?
After all, other lobbies from lucrative industries
have not proven as successful.
Big Pharma and tobacco have both seen
reformative legislation curb their growth.
What does the NRA have that they don't?
The answer?
Loyalty.
- The gun lobby was the first, I think,
to perfect what you see now on the right.
Political observers now are understanding
that what's going on on the political right
really isn't a top-down thing.
It's bubbling up from the base.
It's this radicalized millions of people
who think it's okay to put
Let's Go Brandon stickers on their truck
and intimidate kids and use AR-15s as political tools.
You didn't see like people rally around cigarettes.
You didn't see like cigarette bumper stickers on trucks.
It didn't bubble up from the base.
That was a top-down, moneyed,
guys in $3,000 suits who work for Philip Morris.
That's where that came from.
That's not the way the gun industry lobby works.
It works because legislators, senators, Congress people,
are freaked out that a few thousand people
in their district or their state
are going to be single-issue voters
and organize and threaten and troll
and do all the stuff
that the gun lobby does from the bottom up.
That's what's different about it.
- With a mandate that comes
from their rank and file members
and not just the industry they support,
the NRA can use that loyalty
to hold their politicians accountable.
The NRA's Political Victory Fund
ranks every politician as a way for gun owners to see
who they should and shouldn't vote for.
Their grading system publicly flags politicians
who align with the NRA and their political agendas,
and more importantly, those who don't.
If a politician votes for stricter gun laws,
the NRA will throw the full weight of their money
at unseating that politician.
And knowing how much money they spend
and how loyal their members are,
the threat alone can sometimes be enough
to keep incumbents in line.
In federal elections since 2010,
the NRA has spent more than $148 million.
Nearly $91 million went towards unseating candidates
who vote for reform.
So, with a deep war chest
and the fierce loyalty of their members,
the NRA has proven to be a formidable opponent
to meaningful gun reform legislation.
So, what can be done?
The answer might lie with addressing the cultural attitudes
around guns themselves.
Because of relentless NRA messaging, guns,
especially those high-powered weapons of war,
have become part of people's identities,
deep-rooted symbols of their politics and culture.
- One of the things I'm fighting for
is to sort of reinstate the norms that I talked about
that were industry insisted-on not very long ago,
15, 18 years ago.
It's not like it's ancient history.
People talk about the AR-15
as if their granddaddy
and their great-granddaddy owned them.
Hell, less than 20 years ago they were a pariah.
Almost no company sold 'em.
We have to stigmatize that again.
And I think that reinstating social norms
is going to prove just as important
as any legislation we do,
but they're gonna have to go hand-in-hand,
'cause one's gonna have to reinforce the other.
- So, while passing common sense gun laws
is the main goal of gun control advocates,
the real fight might be repairing
cultural attitudes around guns,
and treating them like the destructive devices
they really are.
- People ask me all the time, like how can we fix this?
Like, so I will say, I don't think it can be fixed per se.
I think that in a democracy like ours,
we're going to do things that make it marginally better
instead of making it marginally worse.
Like there's so many things that are so common sense, right?
Universal background checks, come on.
Like, why aren't we doing that?
Stronger red flag laws, come on.
Essentially, if we're going to have guns in our society,
which I'm a gun owner and I appreciate guns,
but if we're gonna have 400 million guns,
we're gonna have to have
one hell of a lot of responsibility.
- No matter what broadly popular solutions
we as a society may attempt,
we can rely on the nation's most powerful lobby
to fight us tooth and nail
with its money and the single-minded focus of its members
every step of the way.