The astounding transition from an era of self-restraint to where we are now began in 1999, after the murders at Columbine High School. The National Rifle Association’s convention was scheduled to take place just a few days after that school mass shooting, and only a few miles away, in Denver. Although much of the convention was canceled, the NRA leadership held closed-door business meetings in which they discussed strategy options, as we know from secret recordings of those meetings recently uncovered by National Public Radio. The choice before the NRA, as leaders saw it, was either conciliation and engagement with lawmakers to help draft improved policies or aggressive resistance with the aim of frightening its members into believing lawmakers would come after their guns. The NRA chose to enter the culture-war business, and so did the gun industry.
The Bush administration helped that along by allowing the assault-weapons ban to end in 2004, and, more important, by signing in 2005 the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which shielded the gun industry from liability no matter what kind of irresponsible marketing it used to promote firearms. The new law removed any incentive for the gun industry to hold on to its former self-imposed restraint.
Perhaps Bush’s biggest gifts to AR-15 makers, though, were the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nothing normalized the “black rifle” like the evening-news segments featuring U.S. soldiers on combat missions. Later, as returning veterans, they would go on to form a ready-made customer base for civilian versions of the rifle. For many of those ex-service members, owning and shooting the rifle became a way to stay connected to the people they had served with in “the sandbox.”
I watched all of these ingredients—the NRA’s fear, the Bush-era laws, the returning soldiers, and the glorification of war—coalesce into a frightening, self-perpetuating vortex. A handful of others in the industry also quit or lost their jobs for speaking out, but we were too few, too late.
Barack Obama’s win in the 2008 presidential election provided the firearms industry with a culture-war boost, as the NRA took to promoting conspiracy-theory-minded fears. Before Obama took office, U.S. gun consumers had never purchased more than 10 million guns in a single year; by the time he left, they would be buying more than 16 million a year, and at least 2 million of those were AR-15s. The industry came to call Obama “The Greatest Gun Salesman in America.”