During Donald Trump’s presidency, the NSSF used its lobbying muscle to help prod his administration to move regulation of gun exports from the state department to the commerce department, a shift that seems to have yielded financial dividends for gun exporters due to the department’s pro-business approach.
In the past few years, as the 5-million-member NRA has been battered by financial woes, internal rifts and legal threats from the New York attorney general and private interests, the NSSF has expanded its legal and lobbying spending to fight gun-control efforts nationwide, while boosting gun rights and industry sales.
“The NSSF functions as the gun industry’s voice, with a singular focus on expanding the market for all types of firearms, including assault weapons and short-barreled rifles, and is eclipsing the NRA’s lobbying power on Capitol Hill,” said Kristen Rand, a lawyer with the Violence Policy Center, a gun control advocacy and research group.
The rising clout of the NSSF is underscored in part by the group’s increased spending on lobbying, which has outpaced the NRA’s lobbying spending in recent years. For instance, in 2020 and 2021, the NSSF reported spending $4.6m and $5m respectively on federal lobbying. By contrast, the NRA spent $2.2m and $4.9m.
Further, the NSSF’s legal muscle has expanded in the last year since the NSSF tapped the former solicitor general Paul Clement as an outside lawyer to fight laws in seven states that limit the protections from lawsuits that were granted by Congress.
Clement has also mounted legal challenges for the NSSF against new gun-control measures in New York, New Jersey and other states that have been enacted in the wake of a supreme court decision last year against a New York law limiting concealed-carry permits to those people who can show a “proper purpose” for having such weapons outside their homes.
The NSSF’s board of governors reflects the group’s financial interests and clout: the board includes top executives from major arms companies such as Daniel Defense and Smith & Wesson, which made the AR-15 military-style assault rifles used in the Uvalde and Highland Park mass shootings.
Little wonder the NSSF, founded in 1961 and once best known for hosting an annual and lavish “Shot” (Shooting, Hunting and Outdoor Trade show) in Las Vegas, has become a more active and visible player waging legal and lobbying battles to boost arms company interests, say experts and gun control advocates.
“The NSSF burrows in on every nook and cranny of gun regulation as it works to ensure that the gun industry’s financial interests are consistently and zealously represented – on even the most arcane issues. For NSSF, gun violence prevention legislation is literally bad for business,” said Rand. …
“Make no mistake: the NSSF is even more insidious than the NRA with its ever-expanding lobbying operation and abnormally cozy relationship with its regulator,” said Adzi Vokhiwa, the director of federal affairs at Giffords, the gun control advocacy group. “The NSSF hides behind its public identity as a simple trade association, while aggressively working to undermine any and all attempts to slow this nation’s devastating gun violence crisis.”
Vokhiwa, for instance, noted that the NSSF ran a television ad blitz, its first ever, to scuttle the Biden administration’s first nominee to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, David Chipman, by stressing his role as a Giffords adviser after 25 years of serving as an ATF agent.
“From leading dangerous smear campaigns against ATF director nominees who publicly promise to better regulate the gun industry, and bullying members of Congress to vote against even the most reasonable pieces of legislation regulating guns, the NSSF continues to value gun-industry profits more than the American people’s right to live in safe communities,” Vokhiwa said.
Other gun-control advocates say the NSSF, like the NRA, has often exploited fears of gun owners and pushed conspiracy theories about “big government” efforts to undermine the second amendment, in order to rally opposition to gun-control measures.
— Peter Stone in ‘Even More Insidious Than the NRA’: Us Gun Lobby Group Gains in Power