A particularly low point came during the 2018 midterm elections, when the NRA was outspent by gun control groups for the first time in recent history, even while allegedly coordinating with GOP candidates in two states.
The NRA has also been enveloped in a Department of Justice investigation into Russian efforts to influence US politics that featured Russian nationals using the organization as a conduit to the Republican Party. It’s been decried for paying millions of dollars to contractors and close associates of the organization while laying off dozens of employees. And that doesn’t even mention that between January 2017 and November 2018, two of the NRA’s biggest legislative initiatives resulted in failure — derailed by high-profile mass shootings.[...]
For the NRA, the Obama administration provided what any organization needs: a motivating threat. But now that threat, however existent or nonexistent it may have been, is gone, replaced by an unreliable ally in Trump. Furthermore, the organization has been so successful in changing not only America’s gun laws but the gun conversation more broadly (and what potential restrictions on guns are even floated as possibilities) that the NRA isn’t thinking big anymore — because it doesn’t have to. [...]
This is perhaps unsurprising from a president who grew up in New York City and once advocated heavily for gun control before he aligned himself with the Republican Party. In Trump’s 2000 book, The America We Deserve, Trump decried members of the GOP who “walk the NRA line” and resisted restrictions on guns. [...]
And the NRA is certainly on Trump’s side, which might be part of the problem. While real threats to gun rights and the Second Amendment still exist, as we saw in the Philando Castile case — one the NRA decided to opt out of — the NRA’s turn toward Trumpian right-wing culture warring has possibly turned off those who might be supportive of the groups’s actual messaging on guns. Coupled with the group’s stance on bump stocks — which has turned off many gun owners — one source told me that the NRA’s turn toward culture-warring has given rise to more direct criticism of the NRA even from within the gun rights community.
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