The US gun lobby is running out of members and money – the NRA is in a ‘desolate situation’ March to the land of dreams: thousands of people from 24 countries march through Mexico

2022 was a bad year for the largest and most effective lobbying group in the United States – a very bad year. The National Rifle Association (NRA) experienced significant declines last year on virtually every relevant metric: membership, revenue, assets, lobbying and political spending.

This is evident from a look at the NRA’s latest tax documents, available on the Daily Beast online portal. Their membership numbers have fallen by almost 60 percent since 2016 and their income by more than 50 percent. The gun lobby is in a real downward spiral:

From the yacht club to the most powerful lobby

Until the 1960s, the gun lobby was initially just a kind of hunting club that focused on issues such as gun safety and marksmanship. That changed when the Gun Control Act came into effect in 1968, a regulation aimed at restricting gun sales. Radical members of the NRA feared further legislation and began to stand up for themselves within the association. The NRA thus became an increasingly powerful lobby with two goals: promoting the sale of weapons and combating tightening laws. The gun advocates – many of them Republicans – are generously supported while at the same time their opponents are covered in aggressive campaigns.

The growth of the NRA culminated in the years in which Donald Trump entered the political stage and reached its peak: revenues of more than 450 million dollars, a turnover of 367 million in 2016 and a membership record of 6 million people in 2018. One of the consequences : No country today has as many firearms per capita as the US.

But now the great collapse at the NRA. It has long been known that the American gun lobby has problems. “The NRA depends on income from members and appears to be losing members,” said American Frank Smyth, who wrote a book about the gun lobby a year ago. “They are doing their best to cover it up.” But it's a trend that will continue, says Smyth.

However, the NRA's downward spiral comes at a time when the gun lobby should actually benefit.

NRA donations rise after shootings

As a new study shows, gun lobby revenues are rising in counties where school shootings have occurred in recent years. And these – like shootings in general in the country – have increased in recent years.

The University of Oxford study reexamined donations to the NRA. To do this, the authors compared counties where a school shooting occurred with counties without such an event. The result: Contributions to the NRA's political action committee, the Political Victory Fund, increased by an average of nearly $1,000 per year in affected districts in the four years following a school shooting. The number of individual people who donated also increased.

Interestingly, a similar 2021 survey found a seemingly contradictory result: In districts where a school shooting with multiple victims occurred, support for Democrats also increases. These mainly support tightening gun laws.

An author of this study, Laura García-Montoya, explains the new results by saying that there are two simultaneous effects on both ends of the political spectrum. “People who support gun rights also feel threatened by school shootings and therefore feel the need to help their advocacy group,” says García-Montoya.

Since 2018, when the NRA still seemed to be doing very well, not only school shootings but also mass shootings — events in which four or more people are killed or injured — have generally increased sharply. While the number was always below 400 in the years before 2019, there were more than 600 every year from the first year of the pandemic in 2020. By 2023, more than 650 such events will already take place.

So that should actually help the NRA have fuller pockets?

Stricter gun laws are introduced

The fact is: at the same time that the gun lobby begins to lose its influence, gun violence is paradoxically soaring.

On the one hand, the NRA's decline could be seen as a result of its own "success," writes the online portal "Daily Beast," which evaluated the tax documents. Their massive lobbying efforts through the mid-2010s successfully froze the national debate over stricter gun laws — thereby shrinking the advocacy group's user base. But that seems to be changing lately.

In 2022, fifteen Republican senators opposed the NRA, making possible the first meaningful gun control package in decades. This could be a sign of the NRA's decline, but it could also be interpreted as a response to the rise in gun violence. And this in turn is based on the lax gun laws that the NRA enforced during this time.

The question of cause and effect is therefore not so easy to answer. But what's more, and this is probably the lobby group's biggest problem right now, is that the NRA has simply lost its way with a significant number of supporters.

Financed private jets and a failed bankruptcy filing

The record number of members is accompanied by a record high in expenditure, especially expenditure on legal disputes. That, combined with low revenues, resulted in a net loss for the NRA of $22 million last year.

In recent years, there have been increasing scandals and signs of illegal actions in the US gun lobby, centered on controversial CEO Wayne LaPierre. LaPierre misused membership fees by spending nearly $300,000 on designer clothing over a decade and billing the NRA for luxury private jet trips to the Bahamas, Budapest and Italy. There was also a 'professional make-up artist and hairstylist' for his wife.

In 2020, New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit against the NRA, alleging that LaPierre and others had plundered the NRA's assets for their own benefit, thereby violating nonprofit law as an association.

In 2021, the NRA, which has large debts to repay to its largest creditors, filed for bankruptcy. The goal: move its legal headquarters from New York to Texas and restructure itself as a nonprofit. But nothing came of that; a few months later an insolvency court rejected the request for creditor protection. According to the judge, the NRA only filed this to avoid a lawsuit from the New York State Attorney General. And that is not in the spirit of insolvency law.

With this behavior, the NRA has lost the sympathy of a large portion of its supporters. The NRA would seal its demise under its current leadership, which has the full support of the board, said Phil Journey, a dissident NRA board member. “There are no corrective actions” within the NRA, Journey said.

Stumbling on the NRA as an opportunity for stricter laws

However, that doesn't mean Americans are buying fewer guns. Gun ownership in the US has declined slightly but steadily since the 1970s. However, since 2018 there has been an upward trend again. So people are buying more firearms again - "but these new gun owners no longer join the NRA," says the former board member.

At the same time, however, awareness and support for stricter gun laws is increasing. This is evident, for example, from the fact that organizations advocating gun control are increasingly gaining ground and receiving donations – albeit at a significantly lower level than the NRA. As a senior member of Giffords, one of the largest anti-gun organizations, puts it: “Expert observers on both sides of the gun debate know that the gun safety movement is growing exponentially, while the NRA is suffering from declining membership and shrinking bank accounts. ."

The anti-gun lobby's financial power still pales in comparison to that of the NRA, with nearly $3 million spent on political purposes in 2021, compared to the NRA's $16 million. But in times of weakness for the lobbying giant, the chances of finally passing more effective laws are greater than ever.