The NRA: The Contemporary Tobacco Institute?

The American Tobacco Industry formed the Tobacco Institute in 1958; it was a trade association for cigarette manufacturers with the goal of propping up the tobacco industry through lobbying and advertising. Cigarette companies would pay a proportion of their revenues, and in return, the Tobacco Institute would lobby Congress for favorable legislation, publish flattering content about tobacco, and attack scientific studies proving the negative health impacts of tobacco.

The Tobacco Institute was dissolved as a part of the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement 40 years later. Under this settlement, tobacco companies were forced to pay for the health damages they had caused through their misleading publicity and advertisement campaigns. In addition, the agreement limited the ability to advertise tobacco and helped fund the creation of the Truth Initiative, an anti-smoking advocacy group.

The Tobacco Institute’s story is one quite similar to that of the National Rifle Association (NRA). While smoking and gun ownership are two distinct issues, the strategies used by the NRA and Big Tobacco are incredibly similar, and by examining the NRA through this juxtaposition, we can begin to understand how to tackle the issue of gun control.

The NRA calls itself “America’s longest-standing civil rights organization,” putting itself in the same category as public interest groups such as the ACLU and the NAACP. The NRA publicizes itself as a group that represents people, specifically gun owners, pointing to the fact that it has around five million members.

In reality, the NRA isn’t a group that represents gun-owners, more so a group that represents gun manufacturers. Dozens of gun companies fund TV programs that the NRA runs, place advertisements in NRA publications, give millions of dollars directly to the NRA, donate a portion of every gun sale directly to the NRA, or giving each gun buyer a free membership to the NRA. From 2005 and 2013, it is estimated that the NRA received between $20 and $60 million in corporate sponsorships. Eight of these corporate sponsors donated over one million each and are thus part of an elite group of influencers the NRA calls “The Golden Ring of Freedom.”

The NRA isn’t a public interest group; it’s a corporate lobbying group. It doesn’t represent its members and their second amendment rights. It represents gun companies that want to maximize their gun sales. The NRA’s five million members aren’t truly being represented: most of them are open to moderate gun control and aren’t the aggressive second amendment supporters the NRA makes them out to be. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, 73.7 percent of NRA members support universal background checks. While the majority of liberal America may see the NRA as synonymous with the gun-owning population, it isn’t, and there are serious implications that come with accepting the NRA as a public interest group.

The worst of these is the NRA being brought in to participate in televised and broadcasted gun reform debates. At these debates, the NRA advocates its hard-line position for unregulated second amendment rights and claims that only “people kill people,” that video games are at fault for increased gun violence, and that the only thing way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.

All of these tactics are meant to deflect debate away from gun control itself and maximize the profits of the gun companies propping up the NRA. The NRA will never compromise on a solution to gun reform, and when they come to debate, their interests aren’t to find a solution to gun violence, but to simply promote guns. The NRA’s platform provides a twisted view of the opinions of gun-owning America and infects the gun reform debate with its commercial and corporate interests.

In the end, the NRA will never make concessions in its stance about gun control. It will continue to stubbornly support the deregulation of firearms as long it is in the best interests of the companies that fund it. As a result, debates with the NRA are futile, and no common ground or solution can ever be reached. Instead, television companies will continue to give up their airtime to senseless debate from which no meaningful conclusion can be derived. In the same way that the Tobacco Institute was successful in promoting its disinformation, the NRA has been able to take over our media, and action must be taken against it.

News companies and citizens must stand up to the NRA and refuse to debate it and fuel its corporate-driven extremism. Instead, debates should be happening between real gun-owning civilians and their counterparts and should have the goal of finding a solution for the gun violence epidemic in America. It will be hard to push the NRA out of the position it has developed within the gun debate, but it has been done before, with the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement against the Tobacco Institute being the most recent example.

The most effective way to address the NRA will be to publicize and reveal it as the corporate interest and lobbying group it truly is. Once television stations stop broadcasting the NRA, its platform will be taken away, and it will no longer be able to obstruct the gun control debate. With the floor open to meaningful debate, gun violence in America will have the opportunity to be seriously addressed, making our country a safer and better place for everyone.