The Daily - The Secret History of Gun Rights

Episode Date: August 1, 2023

How did the National Rifle Association, America’s most influential gun-rights group, amass its power?A New York Times investigation has revealed the secret history of how a fusty club of sportsmen became a lobbying juggernaut that would compel elected officials’ allegiance, derail legislation behind the scenes, and redefine the legal landscape.Mike McIntire, an investigative reporter for The Times, sets out the story of the N.R.A.’s transformation — and the unseen role that members of Congress played in designing the group’s strategies. Guest: Mike McIntire, an investigative reporter for The New York Times.Background reading: Over decades, a small group of legislators led by a prominent Democrat pushed the gun lobby to help transform the law, the courts and views on the Second Amendment.The potential Republican 2024 presidential candidates showed strong support for gun owners’ rights — a core issue for the party’s base, but one that can be a tougher sell in a general election.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, a Times investigation reveals the secret history of how America's most influential gun rights group amassed its power and the previously unseen role that members of Congress played in designing the group's strategies. My colleague, Mike McIntyre, explains. It's Tuesday, August 1st.

Mike, it's very well understood at this point that the NRA, the National Rifle Association, is a seemingly insurmountable force in American politics. So much so that even in an era defined by mass shootings and gun violence, it's managed to convince members of Congress to block almost every meaningful effort to regulate firearms. And the basic dynamic is the NRA tells lawmakers what to do, and a lot of those lawmakers do it. And the basic dynamic is the NRA tells lawmakers what to do, and a lot of those lawmakers do it. But you've spent the past few months carrying out an investigation that changes our understanding of that dynamic. So tell us what you did and what you found.

Well, it turns out that there's a flip side to this commonly understood narrative, and that there are members of Congress, certainly, who have carried water for the NRA, so to speak, over the years. But there is also a subset of lawmakers who are not just members of the NRA or supporters of the NRA, but they actually serve on the board of directors of the National Rifle Association. And so these members of Congress were in a position to not only influence firearms policy, but also the path of the private organization most responsible for influencing it. So there are many instances in which the conventional idea that we've had for some time of a member of Congress sort of meekly accepting talking points or draft bills from the NRA was actually the other way around. It was the members of Congress who were telling the NRA what they needed to do.

And I think the one lawmaker that best exemplifies that is John Dingell. And we recently obtained thousands of pages of his files going all the way back to the 1960s. They really gave us the ability to see what exactly he did for the NRA as a member of Congress. And tell us, Mike, everything about Dingell and his relationship with the NRA and with guns. Where does that begin? So Dingell, having been the longest serving member of Congress, it's something like 59 years. I think one of the few things that probably lasted longer than that was his membership

in the NRA. He actually joined the NRA as a boy, as many did during his generation. His father was a hunter and an outdoorsman and was a New Deal Democrat, member of the House, representing a working class district outside of Detroit. And so Dingell Jr. started as a page in Congress as a young kid. One of his pastimes was shooting rats in the Capitol basement using an air gun. Wow. He was known to actually hunt bears with a pistol, which requires a certain facility with firearms. So he was somebody with a familiarity and comfort level with guns that carried over into Congress when he succeeded his father in 1955 in the same House seat.

Like a lot of people who had a similar mindset, he would cooperate with the NRA. He was helpful to them in passing legislation or fending off bills that they liked or didn't like. But it wasn't until the 1960s, starting with the assassination of President Kennedy, and then going forward to the murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King later, that you see not only concerted efforts to impose new firearms restrictions, mainly through the Gun Control Act of 1968, but you also see Dingell becoming increasingly radicalized in a sense. He seems to be convinced that there was an existential threat to Second Amendment rights. And he starts doing more and more somewhat extreme things.

He's getting his staff to research Nazi-era gun confiscation laws in Germany to try to show that there's a slippery slope with gun control. He considered having NBC News investigated by the FCC because he didn't like a gun rights segment that they did. Wow. And we see speeches that he gave at NRA meetings in which he was really railing about patriotic duty to defend what he saw as encroachment on Second Amendment rights. So by the time you get to the end of the 60s, he has joined the NRA board. He has joined the NRA board. And Dingell was starting to advocate internally that the NRA really shift its focus? As Dingell is becoming more radicalized, how is it approaching the question of gun rights and gun control?

Is it seeing what's happening at that time as an existential threat? The NRA was always somewhat conflicted up till then about what its role should be in the whole gun debate. Traditionally, going back to the late 1800s, it was an organization that focused on rifle training and marksmanship. In fact, they publicly supported some of what was passed as part of the Gun Control Act of 68. So, you know, this is also part of what was agitating Dingell during that time. He'd become a member of the leadership of the group, and he was not liking what he was seeing. So what does he do? He's now a board member of the NRA who thinks its approach is insufficiently aggressive. One of the first things he does, and this is a document that we discovered in his files,

was at the end of 1968, writes a memo to the executive of the NRA, in which he, for the first time, lays out the rationale for a new direction that the NRA should take. And his key focus is on trying to establish a constitutional right for an individual ownership of a gun, unconnected to the common defense. So in other words, the Second Amendment to the Constitution talks about a well-regulated militia. What he is advocating in this memo is that the NRA start trying to work toward establishing an understanding of the Second Amendment that would protect an individual's right to own a gun for sporting and self-defense purposes. And of course, that's an approach we now think of as the NRA's instantly recognizable policy

playbook, that every individual has a Second Amendment right to a firearm that should not be impeached in any way. What you're saying you found in these records is that was Dingell, a sitting member of Congress's idea. He was offering the NRA its intellectual framework for fighting gun control. What happened to this proposal that he gives to the NRA? Right. He was offering this as sort of an intellectual framework, and he was also suggesting the infrastructure of how to achieve it. And this became probably the most important document

that we discovered in his files, was a 1975 plan for the creation of the NRA's lobbying institute, the Institute of Legislative Action, which for anybody who's covered firearms issues as a journalist, it's sort of like finding the Dead Sea Scrolls. And by that, I mean, it's essentially uncovering the original document that lays out the lobbying playbook for the NRA. Dingell writes,

the NRA will use all available resources at every level to influence the decision-making process. And then he ticks off in detail what the organization will do. Maintain files for each member of Congress and key members of the executive branch. Develop contacts in each congressional office, majority and minority. And he talks about using computerized data for the first time to try to influence members of Congress and effectively increase their lobbying capacity. to try to influence members of Congress and effectively increase their lobbying capacity. And probably most importantly, begin funding and supporting legal research in court cases that would lead the NRA to its objective of recognizing a Second Amendment right of an

individual to own a gun outside the context of a militia. It really kind of lays out in incredible detail what exactly the Institute was going to do, what its goals were. Dingell essentially wrote this document. He proposed it at a board meeting in 1975, and the plan was adopted. The old guard that ran the NRA at the time was very uncomfortable with this idea. There was a letter which the head of the NRA wrote to a colleague saying that John seems to think that we should become involved in partisan politics, but they didn't see themselves as a lobbying organization. So much as they did not like gun control, they were more interested in promoting sports shooting and

hunting and conservation, that sort of thing. Right. So Dingell's pushing them to go to a place they aren't instinctively ready to go. So what happens to this bold strategy? What do they do? So Dingle, you know, succeeds in sort of rewriting the mandate of the NRA and creating this new organization. It took several years for it to get off the ground. But by the end of the decade, you pretty much had an NRA which had been reshaped in the form that John Dingell foresaw. But Mike, as we all know, in eventually adopting and pursuing this strategy that Dingell has written for the NRA, the NRA becomes more and more affiliated with a single party, which is the Republican Party. But Dingell is a Democrat. So based on your reporting, based on your reading of his personal and professional papers, how does Dingell square that pretty obvious conflict between his party identification and who the NRA is starting to identify with as it pursues his vision?

Well, Dingell, of course, came up during a period in which the partisan dividing lines on firearms were not what they are today. And I think it was more comfortable for Democrats in that era to be where he was on the side of gun rights. his fellow Democratic Party members that they had the gun issue upside down and that they needed to get more on board with how he viewed it if they wanted to continue succeeding in elections. And, you know, that's one of the interesting facets of his character is that he was very much in favor of union rights. He was pro-national health insurance. He was a liberal, you know, a Democratic Party favorite on many issues. But on this one thing, he was pretty far out there. And yet he would try to make the argument again and again, all the way up till the time he died, that the Democratic Party needed to get more in line with his thinking on gun rights. So once the NRA adopts this Dingell strategy, On gun rights.

So once the NRA adopts this Dingell strategy, what does the playbook look like in practice during this period of time? You know, so once the infrastructure was sort of put into place, courtesy of John Dingell, the NRA in the subsequent, I'd say, 10 to 15 years throughout the 1980s, the strategy really started to bear fruit. The strategy really started to bear fruit. During the 80s, you had the election of Republican president and Republican control of at least one house in Congress. And they really, during this time period, succeeded in a lot of ways that previously were unimaginable. They passed in 1986 one of the single most important firearms rights laws in the modern era, the Firearm Owners Protection Act, which rolls back some of the limits imposed by the Gun Control Act in 68. And you see during this time period also a continuing shift in the political affiliation of the NRA membership. And there are increasing indications that the membership is becoming more and more partisan, more and more conservative, right-wing, which is sort of leaving Dingell marginalized a little bit. The members of Congress who joined the board during this time, and there were several, were all Republicans.

So you see in what's happening to the NRA sort of something similar to what's happening culturally in a Republican party. And that is reflected in the choices of candidates for the Supreme Court that the NRA decides to back. It's reflected in the number of the people who joined the board during this time. So this NRA and the political landscape all around it is starting to bear a lot more resemblance to the NRA and political landscape that we know today. Yeah, there was an increasing uncompromising attitude by the NRA in terms of not only the legislation they would accept or not accept, but also the willingness to enforce their will on members of Congress who deviated from it. And, you know,

this again harkens back to the outline that Dingell had written in 1975, where he foresaw the need to maintain files on members of Congress to enforce allegiance. So they had voter report cards in which they would give A through F for your willingness to support their view of what gun rights should be. Campaign donations were ramped up. But as we know, the NRA could never really get

all that excited about many Democrats. When it came to those report cards, it was frequently the Democrats who were getting the Ds and the Fs. And in some races, and I've covered some of those races, those Democrats are being almost every way, the modern NRA is a creature of what Congressman Dingell wanted it to be. Despite the NRA's original reluctance to become that, it sounds clearly like Dingell designs the NRA to become the organization that so many members of Congress fear, especially Democrats and moderate Republicans. And rather that being the story we thought we know, like you said, of the NRA telling lawmakers what to do, that was the dynamic. It really was the story of a single member of Congress

telling the NRA what to tell members of Congress to do. And the great irony is that as this sort of creature took shape that Dingell was responsible for animating in the first place, it wound up blowing back against his own party. He, in some sense, foresaw the need to have them become more politically active, but there's no way he could have foresaw how that activism would eventually be put into action. So, you know, by the time you reach the end of the 1990s, the NRA has really positioned itself as the dominant player in Washington politics when it comes to lobbying. They were viewed almost like the Death Star of lobbying in D.C. And yet they were about to have probably their biggest test in the modern era in 1999 when you had the Columbine school shooting in which two teenagers murdered 12 classmates in a suburb of Denver.

And there was an immediate reaction to that in Congress that was going to really force the NRA to face one of its biggest tests. We'll be right back. So, Mike, remind us how the NRA responds after the national trauma that is the Columbine shooting. So there's a huge push in Congress to do something about the private sale of guns at gun shows, since a couple of the weapons that were used in the Columbine shooting were purchased at a gun show in Colorado. And the private sale of guns, in other words, the guns that were sold not by a licensed dealer, but just by anybody who sets up a table at a gun show, they're not subject to background checks. And so there was an effort in Congress to impose that background check requirement for the first time. The NRA strongly objected to that. One of the arguments they had was that gun shows are on the weekends, they usually don't last more than three days, and so if you were to impose a three-day

background check requirement, which is what was being considered, most gun shows would end before the background check could be completed, and the sale couldn't go through. So John Dingell, who by that time was actually off the board of the NRA, but he was still very much helpful to them, he worked with the NRA to come up with an amendment to the legislation being considered, which would require that a background check be limited to 24 hours. They have to be done in one day, or the gun sale would go through automatically. Now, the problem with that, as he and his staff well knew, because this is in the notes that we found in his files, was that most background checks, even though they're done very quickly, if a person has committed a crime and court records are needed to confirm their eligibility to own a gun, well, you know, since gun shows happen on the weekends, most courts are closed on the weekends. And so it would be impossible to conclude the background check for a potentially disqualified person. Dingell knew this, but he pushed ahead with the amendment anyways.

And he succeeded in getting it added to the bill, which pretty much neutralized the effect of the legislation and, in fact, ended up killing it. Ah, basically he sabotages his entire plan to regulate guns bought at gun shows. That's how you could view it. Basically, he sabotages his entire plan to regulate guns bought at gun shows. That's how you could view it. And the NRA internally, because we have the record showing it, viewed that as a big legislative victory, the failure of legislation. He was praised as a master leader at a board meeting. In fact, a year later, they honored him with a legislative achievement award. Wow. And so in many ways, that was sort of the 25-year culmination of what John Dingell had laid out back in the early 70s. So this was a key flashpoint in the history of firearms violence in this country that required them to step up and use the tools that Dingell had

essentially helped provide them with, and they succeeded in preventing any meaningful gun legislation from taking place. And of course, this pattern repeats itself throughout the 2000s, where more and more mass shootings are happening. Each one leads to calls for some sort of gun control, which never seemed to go anywhere. Even after Sandy Hook, in which 20 students and six adults were shot to death in Connecticut,

there was a task force put together to recommend new gun restrictions, and nothing came of that either. By the time that John Dingell retires in 2015, the landscape has really shifted in favor of the gun lobby in a way that it had not been when he first started out with his vision for what the NRA should become. And his legacy in some respects is just that. You now have a Washington that is largely beholden to the gun lobby in a way that had not been the case previously. The NRA itself has lost a lot of its power, largely through internal turmoil, external investigations. But in some interesting sense,

I mean, there isn't even a need for what they do anymore because so much of what they sought to do has been institutionalized. You now have Supreme Court decisions that have basically reshaped, reframed our view of the Second Amendment. And, you know, the gun culture has just changed dramatically. Ownership of a gun has become pretty much a political identifier in many ways. And so there isn't really the need for the lobbying juggernaut that John Dingell had

envisioned back in 1975, because that juggernaut succeeded in getting us where we are now. It's quite ironic, interestingly, because, I mean, when he did pass away in 2019, he had written a memoir shortly before that in which he does not really dwell on the issue of guns much at all. But where he does, in the very end of the book, he does express some reservations about his role in all of this. He doesn't repudiate it. What do you mean? What are his reservations? He doesn't repudiate it. He doesn't back away from anything he did. But he does

talk about how he wondered whether or not he contributed to the polarization that exists now and the issue of guns, the debate about it. He expresses the view that, you know, why can't we have a discussion about it? He seemed to be at the end of his life suggesting that the absolutism that he had practiced up to that point was beginning to moderate, where he was open to the idea of considering things that he previously would not have been. Well, it's interesting to hear you describe him as worried about polarization around guns because from everything you have described here, there's no one more responsible for

that polarization around guns than John Dingell, who wrote the blueprint for the strategy that polarized guns. And he actually owns up to that in his memoir. He says he thought about the role that I know I played in contributing to that polarization. So he does accept it. That is the case. But there's nothing indicating that he doesn't feel like his role in, you know, cementing the gains that the NRA was able to achieve over the years was anything

other than something to be proud of. You know, this is an accomplishment for him. It was something that he talked a lot about all the way to the end. And I think there's every reason to believe that, you know, he saw this as nothing other than a victory. So, Mike, in the end, I wonder if we should see the NRA's unique success in American politics as really only possible because it so early on had an insider from Congress on its board telling it how to craft its strategy and carrying out that strategy from the inside in the person of John Dingell. And if you're any other lobbying group in D.C. pushing for issues like abortion or for oil drilling in Alaska, shouldn't that model make you want to replicate this strategy for your operation? Like, get yourself a congressman on your board to do your bidding, and you'll have success.

Or should this arrangement, this dual arrangement of congressman, congresswoman being a board member, should it make us very uncomfortable? And is it just a conflict of interest we should avoid put quite simply is this a success or is this a cautionary tale it's really kind of a shocking arrangement i mean there is nothing comparable to it either and it's entirely allowed which is something which i think a lot of people also don't realize is that if you belong to a non-profit group you know as a member of the board you can serve in congress the same time in some some ways, this is somewhat unique. There is no other comparable situation that you can look to on an issue other than firearms. But when you look back at what the members of Congress who serve on the board of the NRA were able to

achieve and how they're able to influence not just firearms policy in Congress, but the organization itself that was most responsible for influencing that policy. It's a dynamic that is inarguably a conflict. And it was recognized as such even by John Dingell at one point when he resigned from the board of the NRA in 1994. He admitted he had an irreconcilable conflict. So it's something which, in many ways, it may not happen again, but there's nothing preventing it from happening again. Right. In fact, there's everything to suggest, based on your reporting, that if you're a group trying to get something done in Washington, it should be replicated.

Sure. I mean, right now, there's nothing which would prevent any other advocacy group that, as long as they're a nonprofit, as long as the member of the board who happens to be in Congress is not paid for doing that, they essentially are lobbyists who are lobbying themselves. That's about what it amounts to, is that members of Congress are serving on the board in a leadership capacity of an advocacy group that is lobbying the congressman. So it really is kind of a through-the-looking-glass arrangement. And certainly in the case of the NRA, it worked wonders. Mike, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Yes, absolutely.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Monday, an affiliate of the Islamic State claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in Pakistan that killed at least 54 people at a political rally over the weekend. The group said that the attack was part of its war against democracy as a system of government. The suicide bombing, the latest in a string of terror attacks over the past year in Pakistan, suggests that the country is losing control over its security. And the Times reports that Phoenix, Arizona has now experienced temperatures of at least 110 degrees Fahrenheit for 31 days in a row. That not only breaks Phoenix's previous record of 18 straight days

of those temperatures, but sets a startling new set of records. The extraordinary heat has filled local hospitals with patients suffering from heat stroke and burns. And so far this year, the city's medical examiner has reported at least 25 deaths related to heat. Today's episode was produced by Shannon Lim, Lindsay Garrison, and Michael Simon-Johnson. It was edited by Lexi Diao, contains original music by Marion Lozano, Alicia Baetube, and Diane Wong,

and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Rundberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.