Investigating the Gun Lobby's Long Game

When he was around 12 years old, Mike McIntire’s father drove him down a long dirt road into the woods on their Vespa motor scooter that rarely started on the first try. His father was going to teach him to shoot a .22 caliber rifle, which they fired at some old cans and bottles before the discovery of a nearby wasp nest sent them right back home. He said the experience left him feeling giddy and he shared a good laugh with his father.

“It was one of my favorite experiences with him, but it was all around learning how to shoot a gun,” McIntire said. “In some sense, it was this quintessential American experience. I was a boy coming of age with his father learning how to shoot.”

McIntire, three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist for The New York Times, shared this anecdote at a talk in the Frank Center for Public Affairs about his book, Ricochet: Guns, Greed, and the American Way of Violence. The book tells the story of the American gun lobby, their quest to reframe the national conversation surrounding the Second Amendment in the 70s, and how they planned to promote firearms to children through media and public programs.

“I think what people who are concerned about gun violence need to understand is that guns are here to stay,” McIntire said. “They're part of the American experience. They are part of the tradition and history of the country. But the gun rights movement is what has changed over time. And they've succeeded reframing our understanding of the Second Amendment.”

He said the Second Amendment was written with the intent to preserve a collective right for citizens to come together and build coalitions, or militias, in defense of the state. Originally, the Second Amendment had little to do with an individual right to gun ownership, he explained. “This isn't to say that the founders didn't believe that people shouldn't be able to have a gun—of course they did,” he said. “But they didn't see that as an existential issue in the same way that the need for a citizen-based militia at that time was seen as important and critical.”

The National Rifle Association (NRA) largely drove the effort to change how the American public viewed the Second Amendment following a concerted effort from Democratic Congressman John Dingell from Michigan. Before Dingell joined the NRA's board in the 70s, the NRA was historically an organization that promoted citizens’ marksmanship, hunting as a sport, and conservation. Then he made it his mission to turn it into a gun rights lobbying juggernaut and ensure that no law like the 1968 Gun Control Act, which regulated interstate and foreign trade of firearms, would be passed ever again, McIntire said.

To do this, Dingell created a plan for the NRA to sponsor legal research, court cases, law review articles, and books to create a set of evidence that could be used to support a new view of the Second Amendment as granting an individual right to bear arms for self-defense. It was a long-term plan that the NRA knew would unfold over decades, with the goal of pushing a gun rights case to the Supreme Court, which they accomplished in 2008 when the court heard District of Columbia v. Heller. This decision established that the Second Amendment grants an individual’s right to possess a firearm for self-defense.

“It’s remarkable how they created a foundation of scholarship, if you will, that didn't exist before to try to create this new historical understanding of what the Second Amendment's purpose was and what it was created for,” McIntire said.

While researching the book, McIntire gained access to Dingell’s official Congressional papers through the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library. Within these documents, he found handwritten letters in which Dingell discusses creating the NRA’s lobbying institute, confidential letters with NRA presidents, and transcripts of NRA meetings on how to weave guns into the lives of children as a means of securing future generations of gun customers.

One way the NRA sought to do this was to get firearms and rifle training in public school physical education course curricula. McIntire said this was a tactic to have children exposed to guns without the greater public noticing the change. The NRA also helped market guns to children through video games, films, and books. “I found it really interesting because they showed self-awareness on their part that people might not agree with what they were doing; they might find it objectionable,” he said.

Before concluding the talk by taking audience questions, McIntire also discussed his reporting career and an upcoming Supreme Court case on assault weapons bans that the Court agreed to hear in December. “This particular case has the potential to be pretty important because it will likely decide the constitutionality of assault weapons bans at the state level,” he said.