National Rifle Association Research Articles

Reinterpreting the NRA’s Eddie Eagle GunSafe® program as a corporate political activity

Abstract Background In the US firearm injuries are the leading cause of death among children and adolescents. However, and despite there being limited evidence to support the adoption of gun safety education programs, firearm industry-funded groups like the National Rifle Association (NRA) promote the delivery of their education-based Eddie Eagle Gunsafe® program while lobbying against other firearm policies less favourable to the firearm industry. The study aimed to address an important research gap by examining how the NRA frame gun ownership, safety and the role of the Eddie Eagle GunSafe® program as an effective firearm safety intervention and whether the design, promotion and delivery of the program serves the corporate political interests of the firearm industry, and if so, how. Methods We conducted a critical analysis of program-related texts and films and the NRA’s practices to promote its legitimacy and effectiveness, guided by the application of published taxonomies of corporate framing and action strategies. Data was collected from the program-specific websites and other NRA outlets to capture the breadth of strategies used to promote their education program. Results The NRA’s practices support the corporate political agenda of the firearm industry. The NRA adopts framing and action strategies that present the presence of firearms in homes and communities as inevitable and normal and the education of children through the delivery of their “lifesaving” program as the common-sense and effective way of keeping children safe from firearm injuries. They make misleading claims about the effectiveness of the program while undermining the credibility of those who advocate for the safety of children and adolescents. Conclusions The ongoing delivery of the Eddie Eagle GunSafe® program needs to be questioned. Policies based on a recognition that children and adolescents are safest when their homes and communities are free of firearms are needed to prevent firearm injuries. Key messages • The NRA makes misleading claims about their program’s effectiveness and distorts understanding of what is needed to prevent firearm injuries and ensure the safety of all children. • The firearm industry needs more attention from the global public health community. Evidenced policy measures that prioritize the prevention of firearm injuries are needed to save children’s lives.

The Influence of Gun Victimization on Support for Gun Control Legislation.

The primary objective of the current study was to add to the literature and broaden our understanding of gun violence victims by examining attitudes towards gun legislation held by victims of gun violence. To our knowledge, there are only two quantitative studies that have examined the impact of gun victimization on attitudes towards gun control legislation. A secondary objective was to examine the link between impressions of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and gun policy preferences, which remains an understudied area in the gun legislation literature. The current study additionally examined other factors that may impact support for gun control measures. Utilizing data from a national sample of 880 adults and controlling for demographic predictors, logistic regression was employed to examine the impact of gun victimization on attitudes towards gun control legislation. Although prior gun victimization did not yield any significant findings, concordant with prior research, regression results indicated that gun ownership was a strong predictor of opposition to gun control among respondents. Interestingly, holding a favorable attitude towards the NRA was an even stronger predictor of opposition to firearms legislation than gun ownership. Findings point to the need for additional empirical research on the impact of gun victimization and the influence that organizations like the NRA have on public opinion and subsequent gun safety legislative efforts.

Legitimacy, issue management, and gun debate

This study examined how two opposing advocacy organizations, National Rifle Association and Moms Demand Action, legitimize issues related to gun violence. Through topic modeling and social network analysis of tweets from both organizations, this study analyzed how advocacy organizations dealing with controversial issues use communication to achieve certain types of legitimacy. With the consistent outbreak of school mass shootings, this study also explored the communication strategies employed by advocacy organizations to manage issues and enhance legitimacy to garner policy initiatives. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings were discussed.

National Rifle Association of America v. Vullo: Brief to the Supreme Court of Financial and Business Law Scholars as Amici Curiae in Support of Petitioner

National Rifle Association of America v. Vullo: Brief to the Supreme Court of Financial and Business Law Scholars as Amici Curiae in Support of Petitioner

Legacies of Militarism: Ascriptive Republicanism and the Origins of America’s Contemporary Gun Culture

Abstract Scholars have associated gun culture with liberal individualism, but this is inconsistent with participants’ emphasis on political duty and obligation, the dominance of White men in this space, and the centrality of negative racial and gender priors. I argue that militarism – the valorization of firearms as a sign of good citizenship – is a constitutive part of one dimension of American identity which I call “ascriptive martial republicanism,” which combines the ideal of armed service with White male supremacy. I trace the origins of this conception of Americanism to the American Revolution and the military institutions that developed in the early republic. As a product of the 19th century military establishment, the National Rifle Association (NRA) brought this ideology into the 21st century, long after government abandoned it under pressure from the progressive movements of the 1960s. Through its political and legal advocacy, the group succeeded in making it once again part of the country’s institutional core via Supreme Court decisions. This new institutional regime represents a threat not only to the multicultural ethos but to democratic stability.

Session on Firearm Violence to Stress Nonpartisanship

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Annual MeetingFull AccessSession on Firearm Violence to Stress NonpartisanshipTerri D'ArrigoTerri D'ArrigoSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:26 Feb 2023https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2023.03.3.24AbstractUnderstanding the epidemiology of gun violence will equip psychiatrists for public health advocacy.In 2018, the National Rifle Association posted a tweet that began with “Someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane.” Many in the medical community considered that to be a gauntlet thrown, and since then health professionals have demonstrated the myriad ways they have seen firearm violence harm and kill their patients. At APA’s 2023 Annual Meeting, a session titled “I Am in My Lane: A Public Health Approach to the Role of Health Care Providers in Firearm Violence” will offer strategies on how health professionals can convey the message that preventing firearm violence is a matter of public health, not politics or partisanship.Psychiatrists who wish to address firearms violence should focus on public health, says Aradhana Bela Sood, M.D., M.S.H.A.“Firearm violence is a polarizing topic, where any discussion of it is often equated with gun control,” session chair Aradhana Bela Sood, M.D., M.S.H.A., told Psychiatric News. She is a senior professor for child and mental health policy at Children’s Hospital of Richmond at Virginia Commonwealth University. “As medical providers who deal with the aftermath of firearm-related morbidity and mortality, we would be well served to shift rhetoric that appears to infringe on individual rights to a focus on gun safety and preventive practices.”The session will cover the epidemiology of firearm violence and provide a historical perspective of the polarization surrounding the causality of firearm violence that will better enable attendees to frame the issue in terms of public health.Attendees will come away from the session with an understanding of regional firearm laws, including Extreme Risk Protection Orders (“red flag” laws) that allow family members or law enforcement to petition a judge to remove a firearm from the environment of a person considered to be at risk of harming themselves or others. The session will explore the challenges and barriers to implementing these laws and delve into how these laws have reduced morbidity and mortality from firearm violence, thus equipping attendees to be more effective as advocates for public health strategies to address the issue.Finally, attendees will learn how to get involved at the hospital, city, and state levels to advocate for policies and legislation that support safe firearm practices. ■ ISSUES NewArchived

School Shootings, Protests, and the Gun Culture in the United States

Abstract Scholars document that attitudes toward guns and gun policy reflect deeply entrenched cultures that overlap with ideological affiliations and party politics. Does exposure to dramatic events such as school shootings and protests regarding gun control affect these patterns? I explore two aspects of the gun culture: attitudes favoring (or rejecting) stricter gun policies and the number of memberships in a key organization supporting the expansion of gun rights, the National Rifle Association (NRA). I first argue that school shootings are significant triggering events that become associated with attitudes favoring gun restrictions. A second argument holds that while triggering events such as school shootings reinvigorate the growth of a gun-rights organization, school shootings that are also accompanied by gun-control protests will decrease growth in that organization. To examine these ideas, I combine information from national exit poll data on respondents’ attitudes toward gun policy with state-level information on the counts of recent school shootings, gun-policy protests, existing laws restricting gun use, and membership in the NRA. To minimize problems associated with observational data, the analysis of public opinion applies Coarsened Exact Matching techniques followed by analysis using mixed-level logit. The second analysis uses data on gun control protests, school shootings, and NRA memberships in states over time. Results show that conservatives (but not liberals) exposed to more school shootings favor more restrictive gun policies. The second, longitudinal analysis found that there is a significant interaction effect between increases in school shootings and gun control protests that diminishes NRA memberships significantly.

Brand activism

In the context of a global pandemic, social inequalities such as health disparities, systemic racism and economic shutdowns are amongst the challenges of a harsh reality. Given these myriad societal issues, consumers are becoming increasingly distrustful of governments and public service support systems. Consequently, there is a call for the corporate world to take a stand on significant societal issues. Yet, brand activism can be precarious ground. In seeking to address the question of brand activism, this paper presents three cases that demonstrate the range from progressive to regressive brand activism. The Patagonia case shows progressive brand activism with a foundational brand purpose of environmentalism. The National Rifle Association (NRA) case also shows a strong brand purpose of gun rights but demonstrates regressive brand activism. The National Football League (NFL) case demonstrates both progressive and regressive brand activism with a weakened brand purpose of a national football league. Theoretically, the dimensions of brand activism are shown to include social, legal, business, economic, political and environmental dimensions. More practically, brand activism consistently demonstrated in an authentic and transparent manner over time reinforces brand purpose. Values based organisations demonstrating brand purpose in an active and activist manner will engage increasingly discerning consumers who hold similar values. Consumers supporting progressive brand activism will generate momentum. Conversely, consumers withdrawing support for regressive brand activism will also make an impact. Collectively, brand activism may positively influences society’s most urgent challenges and effectively build societal resilience.

Silent Spring Revisited – Is it Time to Ban Lead? An Argument for a Federal Ban of the Use of Lead Ammunition for Hunting Game Pursuant to the Endangered Species Act

This note will explore EPA’s authority under the Endangered Species Act (“ESA”) to promulgate regulations banning the use of lead ammunition for any purpose. Section II discusses the impact of lead on the environment and wildlife and demonstrates how even small amounts of lead discharged into the environment through hunting practices can have lethal effects on wildlife, especially scavengers, such as the California condor and the grizzly bear. Section III discusses the current regulations that exist to control the discharge of lead into the environment from the use of other common substances, such as paint and gasoline, demonstrating that the federal government has recognized the toxic effect of lead and has taken steps to eliminate the presence of lead in the natural environment. Then, Section IV discusses how the federal government can leverage the Endangered Species Act to enact a complete prohibition of the use of lead ammunition and how the Act might even mandate such a prohibition based on an interpretation of § 9, which prohibits the “taking” of endangered species. Section V provides a model state statute to demonstrate the positive impact a largescale ban on the use of lead ammunition can have on wildlife populations, provided that sufficient monitoring and enforcement practices are applied. Then, Section VI discusses the hurdles regulations restricting the use of lead ammunition face, such as lobbying efforts by opposing groups, including the National Rifle Association (“NRA”), despite the overall necessity and positive impact of a nationwide ban on the use of lead ammunition and the lack of evidence demonstrating any negative impact a regulation would have on hunters. Finally, Section VII discusses alternatives to lead ammunition for hunting purposes, demonstrating that alternatives are not only widely available, but are also just as practical and cost effective as bullets composed of lead.

Examining a Dataset on Gun Shows in the US, 2011–2019

Gun shows are public gatherings where licensed gun dealers and private gun owners use formal and informal venues to exchange information or sell and buy firearms, accessories, and ammunition. A major challenge is that gun shows, unlike established business locations, can be considered gray zones where regulatory loopholes facilitate the movement of legal firearms to illegal domains both domestically and internationally. Given this, they tend to feed into gun trafficking schemes. Despite this, gun shows are poorly monitored. Moreover, these events are not tracked by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and what little is known comes from academic studies, press releases, or outdated ATF reports. To address this gap, update information, and generate a better understanding of how gun shows connect with gun trafficking, we generated a gun show dataset in the US from 2011 to 2019. We compiled information on promoted gun shows from three main sources, The National Rifle Association Magazine and the websites Gun Show Trader and Shooting Illustrator. We completed our dataset by looking at other minor sources that promoted gun shows. Our dataset encompasses information of 20,691 gun shows and suggests that 71% of them occurred in states where background checks were not required during gun sales between private individuals. We argue that scholars and practitioners will find in this dataset an original tool to analyze gun shows and their impact on public security and public health.

Are guns the new dog whistle? Gun control, racial resentment, and vote choice*

AbstractTwo principal movers of American politics appear increasingly to be connected: racism and guns. The racial content underlying gun rights rhetoric, however, is rarely made explicit during political campaigns. As such, it is possible that espousing pro‐gun messages may be an effective way to surreptitiously court prejudiced voters without transgressing popular egalitarian norms. In other words, gun rights rhetoric may function as a racial dog whistle. In the present study, we test this theory using data from a survey experiment conducted with a national sample of registered voters. The findings from our experiment show that election candidates’ National Rifle Association (NRA)‐funding status and position on gun control impact voters’ evaluations, and racial resentment moderates these effects. Racially resentful voters are more likely than low‐resentment voters to say they would vote for a candidate when the candidate is funded by the NRA and does not support gun control. This is true among voters who own guns and among those who do not, and it is true regardless of the candidate's political party. The findings also show that there is a backlash effect among low‐resentment voters—such individuals are aversive to NRA‐funded candidates but strongly supportive of pro‐gun control candidates.

Child access prevention laws and juvenile firearm-related homicides

Debate over safe-storage gun regulations has captured public attention in the aftermath of several high-profile shootings committed by minors. To date, the existing literature provides no evidence that these laws are effective at deterring gun crime, a conclusion that has prompted the National Rifle Association to assert that such regulations are “unnecessary” and “ineffective.” Using data from the FBI's Supplementary Homicide Reports for the period 1985–2013, we find that child access prevention (CAP) laws are associated with a 17 percent reduction in firearm-related homicides committed by juveniles. The estimated effect is stronger among whites than nonwhites and is driven by states enforcing the strictest safe-storage standard. We find no evidence that CAP laws are associated with firearm-related homicides committed by adults or with non-firearm-related homicides committed by juveniles, suggesting that the observed relationship between CAP laws and juvenile firearm-related homicides is causal.

Post‐loss power building: The feedback effects of policy loss on group identity and collective action

AbstractStudies of policy feedback have produced an increasingly nuanced understanding of when, why, and how public policies generate—or fail to generate—political effects that entrench the policies themselves and provide benefits to their proponents. Left open, however, is the question of whether policies can paradoxically generate political benefits for those who opposed them. This paper extends the study of policy feedback by exploring the mechanisms through and conditions under which organized groups can counterintuitively use policy losses to build power moving forward. It then demonstrates how post‐loss power building operates by exploring the National Rifle Association’s historical use of gun policy losses to reinforce a shared identity among its supporters, which it later uses to spur collective action on behalf of gun rights. The analysis shows how policy outcomes can interact with the identity‐building efforts of organized groups in ways that enable those groups to use losses to their long‐term advantage.

Decisions to react after mass shootings: exploring negative affect, relational trust, and public behavioral intentions toward the National Rifle Association

ABSTRACT Situated in the context of crises, the present study examines stakeholders’ reactions, including negative affect such as fear and anxiety, relational trust, and public behavioral intentions, toward the National Rifle Association (NRA) of America after the Florida Parkland shooting. To test the proposed theoretical model, we conducted a national survey with 603 NRA stakeholders living in the USA. Using structural equation modeling procedures, we found that a high level of negative affect activated publics’ behavioral intentions, while reducing their relational trust toward the NRA. Furthermore, relational trust could lead to information seeking about the NRA as well as accommodative intentions such as cooperating with the NRA to address gun violence issues. This study enriches crisis communication literature and has important implications for crisis managers working at non-profit organizations as well.

Immovable objects/irresistible forces: Intelligences of sociopolitical decision making

Mutually beneficial relationships (MBRs), a concept used to define public relations processes and outcomes, has been featured relatively uncritically for many years. This normative concept became a defining theme in the romantic era (1970s–1990s) of public relations: an elixir for collective problem solving and shared decision making. Careful consideration of highly contested issues, however, reveals evidence that within-group MBRs can prevent overarching issue solutions, decisions between issue-groups, and can constitute stalemating, hegemonic tribalism. Strategic issues management (SIM) provides decision-making intelligences by which conflict between businesses and other members of society can be understood. Issue advocates’ adversarial strategies, however, can frustrate a society’s ability to solve problems and make meaningful decisions, even when parties share a common motivating value. Stalemated public policy interpretations create sores that cannot heal; problems cannot be solved. Within-group MBRs can prevent between-group MBRs. This paper reviews the MBR and SIM literatures to analyze the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) marketplace and public policy role in a battle over gun regulation with students of Parkland, Florida. Parkland voices emerged after 17 students were killed with an assault weapon on February 14, 2018, in Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

An apple in one hand, a gun in the other: Public support for arming our nation's schools

Research summaryIn the wake of repeated school shootings, today's youth have acquired the label of the “mass shooting generation.” Another fitting label would be the “armed school generation.” Most states now permit school security officers to carry firearms, and at least 466 school districts in 19 states allow teachers or staff members to be armed. In this context, understanding public opinion about guns in schools is essential. Using a 2018 national survey of 1,100 American adults, we examined public support for arming our nation's schools. Although consensus exists for school resource officers carrying weapons, respondents are divided about arming teachers and nonteaching staff. Those who believe in gun defensive effectiveness, lean right politically, are racially resentful, older, and have children are more likely to endorse arming nonlaw enforcement school personnel. National Rifle Association membership and altruistic fear are associated with support for arming teachers, while a belief in the moral wrongness of harming others predicts opposition to teachers having a gun in one hand and an apple in the other.Policy implicationsThe controversy around arming teachers will likely be ongoing. With decisions made locally, public opinion will continue to play an influential role in this debate. Our study provides important new evidence about the extent and correlates of public opinion on guns in schools. The next step is to examine how public attitudes change in response to information about the policy issues associated with arming schools. Future polls should examine the impact being armed has on the teaching profession and localized variations in support for arming the school.

#March for Our Lives: Health Activism, Diagnostic Framing, Gun Control, and the Gun Industry

ABSTRACT This article investigates #March for Our Lives as health activism. Students organized a social media campaign, major marches and other events after surviving the 2018 school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Many commentators praised the group’s success in rallying public attention to gun violence, promoting gun safety legislation, and challenging the National Rifle Association. This critical analysis sheds light on how the students’ Twitter activism addressed longstanding framing and attribution practices that impede structural and policy responses to gun violence, including efforts to address the gun industry. We investigated how the activists’ diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational framing attributed the causes of gun violence, promoted solutions, and fostered support. The conclusion discusses the implications of #March for Our Lives strategies for our understanding of health social movements, challenges to corporate power and influence, and the politics of framing and illness attributions.

The NRA in Crisis: Social Identities and Publics’ Cognitive and Affective Evaluations

Contextualized in the Florida Parkland high school mass shooting and National Rifle Association (NRA) crisis, our study is among the first to apply the social identity theory in understanding simultaneously publics’ cognitive and affective evaluations of a non-profit organization’s crisis response. Results from an online survey ( N = 603) revealed that participants displayed a range of both negative and positive emotions towards the NRA, including anger, disgust, and interest and hope. On the rational side, publics considered NRA’s actions as harmful and unjust. Publics’ NRA affiliation status and political partisanship identity had a significant main effect on their crisis evaluations.

Armed in America: A History of Gun Rights from Colonial Militias to Concealed Carry by Patrick J. Charles

Reviewed by: Armed in America: A History of Gun Rights from Colonial Militias to Concealed Carry by Patrick J. Charles Andrew J. B. Fagal Armed in America: A History of Gun Rights from Colonial Militias to Concealed Carry. Patrick J. Charles. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2018. ISBN 978-1-63388-13-0. 539 pp., cloth, $28.00. In the aftermath of District of Columbia v. Heller, the 2008 Supreme Court case finding that the Second Amendment protected an individual's right to keep a handgun within the home, historians have produced a number of books, peer-reviewed articles, and law reviews reinvestigating the origins of the Second Amendment and the broader place of firearms in American history. Patrick J. Charles's Armed in America joins this recent trend by providing an intellectual history of gun rights in the American imagination from the colonial period to today. In detailing the changing history of how Americans thought about firearms, and their role in society, Charles makes several important contributions to this ongoing discussion. First, Charles gives historians and legal scholars a broad understanding of how thinking about firearms changed over time in American society. In this, he agrees with most other historians of the Second Amendment, who understand it as protecting a right that was associated with militia service and not "armed preparatory carriage" or the "castle doctrine." Second, and most notably for the significance of his book, Charles makes an important historiographical intervention by locating the emergence of modern gun rights theory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Historians of gun rights and gun regulation have argued that the individual rights theory of the Second Amendment was a recent invention, which largely dated to the 1960s and then, oddly enough, was most forcefully articulated in the public sphere by members of the Black Power movement. According to this account, the National Rifle Association (NRA) was a group that for most of its history was primarily interested promoting gun safety and target shooting. It was only Harlan Carter's 1977 "Cleveland Revolt" that turned the organization into a political advocacy group. With this new emphasis, the group was in favor of "law abiding citizens" carrying arms (concealed or otherwise) for their own protection. By the 1980s, a number of prominent law school professors agreed that the Second Amendment protected an individual's right to use arms for self-defense. Thus, from a confluence of interest group organization and legal academic reasoning, our current "golden age" of gun rights was born. Not exactly, Charles conclusively demonstrates. The actual emergence of gun rights tied to self-defense was located in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Early on, the NRA, and a competing organization, the United States Revolver Association (USRA), organized against Progressive Era legislation designed to keep guns out of the hands of criminals. New York State's Sullivan Act (1911), which requires the issuance of a license to own a handgun, was met with active opposition by the NRA and the USRA. These groups argued, in what would [End Page 309] become a standard rallying cry, that the act's passage would only serve to prevent law-abiding citizens from bearing arms. Once guns were "banned," only criminals would have guns. This rhetorical strategy of firearms organizations was only refined during the 1930s when the Roosevelt administration sought additional firearms regulations. Following the Kennedy and King assassinations of the 1960s, the NRA again mobilized to prevent additional firearms laws. Although unsuccessful in their ultimate goal of preventing passage in the 1930s and 1960s, the group was successful in limiting the effects of these laws. If intellectual history should show people thinking, and not just thought, then Armed in America is quite uneven. Compare Charles's excellent discussion of Timothy Pickering, and his late-eighteenth-century ideas of what a well-regulated militia ought to be, with the depiction of the emergence of modern gun rights ideology in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. We can clearly see the importance of the militia for republican political systems in Pickering's thinking. What we do not get as good a glimpse into is the thought process behind the early proponents of...

Attitudes toward guns and mental illness stigma among college students in the United States.

In the United States, citizens opposed to stricter gun control laws as a response to mass shootings frequently reframe the problem of gun violence as a mental health issue. As a result, it has been suggested that pro-gun attitudes (i.e., pro-gun rights attitudes and favorable attitudes toward the National Rifle Association) might be associated with stigmatizing attitudes toward people with mental illness. In three studies (total N = 756), we assessed gun attitudes as predictors of mental illness stigma among college students in the United States (data collected in 2018 and 2019). While zero-order correlations revealed that pro-gun attitudes predict more negative attitudes toward people with mental illness, they were not unique predictors after adjusting for political affiliation. These findings replicate previous research on the relationship between conservatism and mental illness stigma and provide a starting point for future research assessing relationships between gun attitudes, political affiliation, and mental illness stigma. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).