The AR-15 had come a long way. One of the first ones I tried, from a company called Battle Arms Development, was made of a blend of carbon fiber and titanium and felt like it weighed no more than a baseball bat. Compared to my M16A4, which was almost nine pounds empty, this sub-four-pounder was a dream. I asked the rep running the bay, a tall and lanky guy with a short beard, if using such lightweight materials made his company’s rifles less durable than the heavier competition. “I’m not going to give you the sales pitch. Come back at four and if it’s still running, it’s still running,” he said over the racket, never losing his enthusiastic grin. It was about ten in the morning. I took him at his word.

Earlier, I had drifted toward the popcorn-like sound of rounds cycling on full-auto. Ascendance International was exhibiting its trademark frangible bullets with a full-auto AR-15. Frangible bullets are made from compressed copper powder instead of lead, so when they hit something solid like a wall or a car door, a company rep explained, they turn to dust. But when a frangible bullet hits flesh, he said, it “shreds everything inside of it.” The advantage for law enforcement officers and soldiers is clear: In a gunfight, there would be low risk of ricochet or punching through exterior walls and injuring noncombatants. For the average user, who presumably won’t be shooting at people, the upside is less exciting: They’re easier on steel targets. I listened patiently to the spiel, eager to get my hands on the full-auto AR.

As soon as I did, I immediately understood why the military got rid of full-auto M16s after Vietnam. A shoulder-mounted, lightweight weapon like an AR is inaccurate on full-auto, which is why new military-issue weapons are limited to semi-automatic and three-round-burst. This is also why bump stocks are a joke in the serious shooting world. Bump stocks are accessories that allow shooters to simulate automatic fire. You hold the rifle to your shoulder, put your finger in the trigger well, and then pull the rifle forward until you trip the trigger. As long as you keep pulling forward, the blowback of each shot will reset the trigger, and you’ll keep firing until you run out of ammo, which will happen in about nine seconds. You can achieve the same effect by holding the stock an inch or so away from your shoulder and pulling the foregrip forward instead of squeezing the trigger. I’d imagine the novelty wears off quickly at 50 cents per round and $15 per 30-round mag.

Slide Fire, the original manufacturer of the bump stock, did not attend SHOT in 2018. Neither the company nor the NSSF gave an explanation for its absence, but it probably had something to do with the fact that twelve of the rifles Stephen Paddock had in his hotel room at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas on October 1, 2017 were fitted with bump stocks. Paddock smashed his room’s window and used those modified rifles to kill 58 people gathered at a country music festival below. It was the worst mass shooting in American history. Multiple states have initiated legislation to ban the devices in the months since the shooting, and Donald Trump’s Justice Department is currently considering a ban. Even the NRA called on the ATF to review the legality of bump stocks. Some of the molon labe types are upset at the NRA’s moderate stance on the issue, but to the majority of the shooting community, bump stocks are a distraction from the battle to avoid another assault weapons ban or an even larger slate of gun control measures.

Young people have sparked a protest movement around the country against mass shootings, calling for increased gun control. Ashley Gilbertson/VII for The New Republic

They have reason to worry. On March 9, Florida Governor Rick Scott, a Trump supporter and NRA ally, signed new gun controls into law in response to the shooting in Parkland, Florida. The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act, named for the high school where 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz used an AR-15 to kill 17 students and school officials, raises Florida’s minimum age for purchasing guns to 21, requires a three-day waiting period for firearms purchases, bans the sale of bump stocks, and, controversially, sets aside $67 million to arm teachers. The NRA immediately filed a lawsuit against the state on Second Amendment grounds, arguing that 18-year-olds are considered adults “for almost all purposes and certainly for the purposes of the exercise of fundamental constitutional rights,” and therefore should not be prohibited from purchasing rifles. Federal law already prohibits licensed dealers from selling handguns to anyone under the age of 18, but Florida’s new law makes it only the third state in the country, along with Hawaii and Illinois, to raise the minimum age for rifle purchases to 21.

The bill has largely been viewed as a politically calculated response to the increasing momentum of student protesters in Florida who are calling for an all-out ban on assault weapons. Similar student movements are spreading around the country. It remains unclear how long the energy of the youth protests will continue, but one thing seems clear: In the continuing gun control fight, the AR-15 will be the skirmish line.

Maksim Netrebov, a gun industry analyst from New Jersey, told me that after Sandy Hook, “almost every gun was sold out, and AR-15s which used to cost $500 were selling for $1,500-plus. That attracted a lot of people into the business, but by the time they got started, that boom was done and over with.” Anticipating a Clinton win, manufacturers kicked production into overdrive and foisted large inventories of guns onto distributors, who passed them on to retailers on credit. “Now they have stockpiles of guns that are selling slower,” and often for less money, Netrebov said, making it harder for stores to repay distributors and harder for wholesalers to repay debt from investment banks. “This is a deep phenomenon,” he said, comparing the gun slump to the collapse of the housing market in 2008 and plummeting oil and gas prices in 2016.

As powerful as the NRA seems, it does not represent anything close to a majority of American gun owners. Pew estimates that 30 percent of adults own guns; with about 250 million adults in the United States, that means 75 million gun owners, and only five million of them belong to the NRA. It’s reasonable to assume that a large percentage of American gun owners who do not currently pay dues to the NRA still support its views. But it is equally reasonable to assume that many gun owners are indifferent to the NRA and that others disapprove of the organization. Twenty-nine percent of gun owners think the NRA has too much influence on politics and policy, again according to Pew.

The astonishing boom in the gun market didn’t result from expanding the rolls of gun owners, but by convincing a small group of “super owners” to deepen their arsenals.

Just as the gun industry has become disproportionately dependent on the AR-15 and semi-automatic handguns, the NRA has become dependent on a winnowing demographic of gun owners. Nationally, gun ownership is at its lowest point in 40 years, with some studies placing the rate as low as 22 percent. According to research from the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center, 23.5 percent of Americans under age 35 owned a gun in 1980; by 2014, that number had fallen to 14 percent. Hunting households have declined by more than half in the same period. A Harvard and Northeastern study in 2016 found that 3 percent of the American population owns about half of the 265 million firearms in circulation. These “super owners” own an average of 17 guns each, with handguns making up 71 percent of the increase in total guns in circulation between 1994 and 2015. The astonishing boom in the gun market since the turn of the century didn’t result from expanding the rolls of gun owners, but rather by convincing people who already owned guns to deepen their arsenals. “When I look at our survey, what I see is a population that is living in fear,” Deb Azrael, one of the gun study’s authors, told The Trace. “They are buying handguns to protect themselves against bad guys, they store their guns ready-to-use because of bad guys, and they believe that their guns make them safer.”

As a group, gun owners are disproportionately old, Republican, male, white, rural, less educated, and not wealthy. The NSSF and the NRA will tell you that minorities and women are fast-growing markets. But the demographics of gun ownership remain lopsided, and when it comes to the hard-core activist element of the NRA, the scales tip decidedly in the direction of cliché demographic markers that describe Trump’s core supporters and the audiences for Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. The youth movements inspired and led by the Parkland students are, demographically speaking, a better representation of the political and commercial future of guns, because they are a better representation of the demographic future of the United States. Not only has the NRA’s rhetoric failed to scare them into begging for armed teachers, they’re defiantly rejecting calls to “harden schools,” and they’re focusing their protest on inhibiting easy access to the weapons of choice for mass killers. The NRA doesn’t seem to note the irony that young survivors of a terrible mass shooting are impervious to their brand of fear, or perhaps they do, and that’s why they’re getting more extreme.

At a time when the NRA ought to be thinking very seriously about its generational succession plan, it is entrenching itself deeper among the old guard. Research shows that young people were increasingly ambivalent about guns before Parkland, but the NRA’s response seems to be pushing them toward revulsion. As for their attitudes about the NRA, a Quinnipiac poll in June 2016 found that only 19 percent of Americans aged 18–29 had a favorable opinion of the organization, compared to 51 percent of people 65 and older. Young, anti-gun activists are dominating the national conversation about gun control, outflanking the NRA and national politicians in a new media landscape that is their native terrain. Instead of taking these kids seriously, the NRA’s proxies on social media and on cable and talk radio have mocked them, or worse, accused them of carrying out a “false flag” operation on behalf of Democrats. Conspiracy theorists have labeled them “crisis actors,” suggesting that they’re playing up their pain for political or personal profit. “The national press believes it is their job to destroy the Trump administration by any means necessary,” Bill O’Reilly said in a quip that was sure to please the people who write Dana Loesch’s scripts. “So if the media has to use kids to do that, they’ll use kids.”

In 2001, J. Warren Cassidy, Wayne LaPierre’s predecessor at the NRA, famously told Time, “You would get a far better understanding if you approached us as if you were approaching one of the great religions of the world.” The comparison obviously describes the members’ zealous obedience to the leadership, but it also has a financial connotation. Churches are tax exempt just like nonprofits, and in the church of the NRA, the gun is an idol, inviolate in the sanctuary of American myth. Its power to coax money from the pockets of the faithful is truly awesome. The rank and file donate generously to the NRA out of a sense of deep faith, and the industry goes along out of fear and financial self-interest; it is less like a partner than a well-fed hostage with Stockholm Syndrome.

On the same day that I went into the Carry Guard simulator, I had walked over to where the NRA had stationed some of its policy wonks to field questions from the SHOT show attendees. I spoke to Daniel Sheppard, a grassroots coordinator with the NRA’s ILA. I asked him about concealed carry reciprocity laws—which allow gun owners in states with lax concealed carry statutes to carry concealed weapons in states with more restrictive regulations—and a few other hot-button NRA issues. Then I asked him about the drop in gun sales under Trump.

Sheppard laughed. “That’s kinda the downside,” he said. “We feel a bit of a pinch, too. People don’t donate as much when they’re not afraid.”