'Our moment to go on offense': NRA makes big plans for Trump presidency

For nearly a decade, the National Rifle Association has spurred its members with apocalyptic warnings that the Democratic president wanted to confiscate Americans’ guns.

Now, the NRA has won. The candidate the NRA backed with an unprecedented $30m in ad buys is heading to the White House. Republicans will control both houses of Congress. Donald Trump has pledged to nominate a supreme court justice who supports gun rights.

“This is our historic moment to go on offense,” NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre told members in a post-election video address.

Compared with European countries, most of America’s laws are already extremely friendly to gun owners, and many states have continued to roll back gun restrictions to make it easier to carry guns in public – including on university campuses.

“Part of the problem for the NRA is that they’ve been so successful already that there’s not a lot for them to accomplish,” said Adam Winkler, a University of California Los Angeles law professor and gun politics expert.

LaPierre pledged to go after the “tyrannical erosion of gun rights” in the relatively small number of states with very strict gun control laws, such as New York and California. He assailed their “deceitful web of gun bans, ammo bans, magazine bans, exorbitant fees, and taxes and registration schemes”.

The NRA’s priority is a federal law that would make gun-carrying permits issued in one state valid across the country, which would make carrying a concealed firearm across the country as easy as driving your car across state lines.

This federal national reciprocity law, which Trump has already endorsed, would essentially gut existing local restrictions on carrying guns in public, and would mean that tourists from other states could soon carry their guns around New York City. Gun control advocates have called the potential reciprocity law “dangerous”. LaPierre called on Trump and Congress to pass this national reciprocity legislation “as quickly as it can be written and signed”.

Winkler said he believed that if reciprocity passed, “the NRA is going to organize gun owners to descend en masse in places like New York City”.

“I wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot more very bold, aggressive, in-your-face political actions by gun rights activists,” he said.

Another high priority for the NRA is to end “the absolute fallacy of gun-free zones”, LaPierre said in his address. “Not one more American serviceman or woman should be murdered on a military base because the government denied their right to defend themselves with a firearm.”

Barack Obama’s defense department released a new directive on 18 November that clarifies the process of how commanders can give service members approval to carry their own personal weapons for self-defense on military bases. Bearing Arms, a gun rights news site, hailed the move: “The Trump Effect Ends Gun Free Zones Before He Even Takes Office.”

A defense department spokesman said the new directive had been in process for more than a year, as part of a broader set of new security measures prompted by mass shooting attacks on service members, including at the Fort Hood military base in 2009 and at two military facilities in Tennessee in 2015. “Yes, it occurred after an election, but this has been in the works for a while,” US army Maj Jamie Davis said.

It’s not clear whether Trump will also move to end gun-free zones in schools, a talking point earlier in his campaign, which is not included on his official second amendment policy platform and which LaPierre did not mention. The mother of one of the 20 children killed in a mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school in 2012 told the Guardian that Trump would face broad opposition if he tried to bring more guns inside schools.

Trump also promised to roll back Obama’s January executive actions on gun control, which were announced by the White House with great fanfare. In early 2016, Trump said: “I will veto that. I will unsign that so fast.”

It’s not clear how much impact, if any, a rollback of the January executive actions might have. Though Obama’s actions were hailed by gun control groups and slammed by the NRA, they were in fact mostly symbolic. Obama’s attempt to tighten background check regulations by executive action amounted to little more than publicizing a new handout from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms explaining how citizens should comply with the current law.

With Republicans controlling both Congress and the White House, gun rights advocates have also focused on the possibility of loosening restrictions on some weapons, including removing gun silencers from the legal category of especially dangerous weapons. “As they become more popular and people realize they’re environmentally friendly, no noise, no damage or hearing loss, they’re being used by tens of thousands of Americans,” said Paul Valone, the president of Grassroots North Carolina, a state gun rights group.

As for universal background checks, for which Democrats pushed in vain in Congress this year – including holding a highly publicized sit-in just trying to get a vote on a bill – “I would hope that will be dead on arrival for the duration of the Trump presidency,” Valone said.

Gun violence prevention groups, which won three important victories on state-level ballot measures to advance gun control, pledged to play strong defense and to keep pushing for gun control legislation.

“It’s more important than ever that gun safety groups like ours to continue to grow, to protect the progress we’ve made, and to fight for responsible change,” said Peter Ambler, the executive director of Americans for Responsible Solutions, a gun control group founded by the former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who survived being shot during a public meeting with her constituents in Tucson, Arizona, in 2011.

Republicans will have at least 51 senators, a narrow majority, in the next Congress. But Ambler said that legislation in the Senate would still need 60 votes to get approval, and that securing that 60th vote in support of, for instance, national concealed carry reciprocity legislation could be hard to come by.

Gun sales spiked under Obama’s presidency, and the NRA had warned members that Obama was the most anti-gun president in history. But the president’s big push for stricter gun control laws after the Sandy Hook shooting failed to get those 60 Senate votes necessary, after strong opposition from the NRA and other gun rights groups. Despite a series of increasingly lethal mass shootings, and Obama’s emotional speeches about gun control, restrictions have been blocked at the federal level. Instead, the threat of potential gun control has served as an ironic boost to gun sales.

The day after the election, shares of the US’s two largest gun companies fell more than 10%, a seeming reaction to Trump’s victory, and to the potential end to the spiking gun sales driven by a fear of looming gun bans. With their candidate in the White House, the NRA may face a similar challenge: less engagement by its members, and perhaps fewer donations, if gun rights appear on safer ground.

“Their membership tends to stagnate, and contributions tend to fall, when the government is more sympathetic,” said Robert Spitzer, a gun politics expert at the State University of New York (SUNY) Cortland.

“When they’ve had friendly presidents in the White House, most notably George W Bush, they would try to find some other person to demonize to keep their membership interested,” Spitzer said. “Who the demons will be now, in the next couple years, I’m not sure. Maybe Chuck Schumer or a new Democratic leader. It’s hard to know. But they’ll find demons, they will, because that’s what they do.”

While LaPierre celebrated sending Clinton “on permanent political vacation”, her loss and the end of Obama’s presidency leaves the NRA without its chief opponents.

In his address, LaPierre put the spotlight on what he called two elitist anti-gun billionaires, George Soros, a major liberal philanthropist, and Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor who has invested millions in supporting new gun control groups and backing candidates who support stricter gun control laws.

He also criticized the federal judges Obama had appointed over his presidency. “More than 300 Obama-appointed anti-gun judges present an infection for which there is no cure, other than time and vigilance,” he said.

But Trump’s victory seems likely to restore the supreme court’s pro-gun majority, which narrowly supported a sweeping interpretation of Americans’ gun rights in a 5-4 ruling in the 2008 Heller case.

“The most important issue for us this cycle was the Scotus [supreme court] nominee and protecting Heller. Trump will appoint a new justice soon after he enters office, so our top priority will become a reality,” Jennifer Baker, an NRA spokeswoman, wrote in an e-mail.

For Dick Heller, the gun rights advocate whose lawsuit against the District of Columbia’s handgun ban resulted in the historic 2008 decision defining Americans’ constitutional right to own a gun in their homes for self-protection, Trump’s victory came as a relief. He no longer had to fear that Clinton would attempt to overturn his victory.

“Now I think at least for half a generation, I think we’re OK. Maybe a full generation. Maybe two,” he said.

The benefits the NRA is poised to reap from a Trump administration were not easily earned. In backing Trump, the NRA made a big bet on a candidate who had once endorsed a ban on assault weapons and who had no record as a champion of gun rights.

The NRA went on to spend more to boost Trump than any other outside group, including the most prominent Trump Super Pac, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics and the Trace, a not-for-profit news outlet that covers gun violence.

In supporting Trump, the group more than doubled the $12.5m it spent supporting Mitt Romney and attacking Barack Obama in 2012. The group also spent $20m across six Senate races and saw five of its six candidates win, and the Republicans maintain control of the Senate.

Chris Cox, the NRA’s chief lobbyist, repeatedly championed Trump and pushed back on or smoothed over his more outrageous remarks, including Trump’s initial suggestion that the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando would have been less deadly if more people had been carrying guns while drinking at a bar.

When Trump made a sly reference to what “the second amendment people” might be able to do to stop Clinton’s agenda if she got to appoint supreme court justices, a remark widely interpreted as a reference to insurrection or assassination, the NRA staunchly argued that Trump had only been talking about gun rights advocates turning out to the polls to defeat Clinton.

Since he won, the NRA has not been shy in claiming credit for Trump’s victory.

“While many in the establishment shunned Trump, NRA stood with the candidate during ups and downs, highs and lows, and finally victory over Clinton,” the editor of America’s 1st Freedom, an NRA publication, wrote on 10 November.

In his address, LaPierre praised “the everyday Americans who stormed the polls in an act of ultimate defiance agains the elites” and called NRA members “the special forces that swung this election and sent Donald Trump and Mike Pence to the White House”.

“Just as the narrative was becoming that the NRA was vulnerable, they’re now entering a period of renewed strength,” Winkler said.

Even if the NRA membership was less active under a Trump administration, that would not matter much, he said.

“It’s a good problem to have if the problem is you’ve won too much,” he said.