Members hoping to change the National Rifle Association from within face the entrenched power of Wayne LaPierre and the PR firm that wields huge influence

A few days after the murder of nine people at Umpqua Community College in Oregon, Mike Rosen joined the National Rifle Association.

Rosen, an elected member of the Portland public schools board, has never so much as fired a real gun let alone owned one. But he was frustrated that, for all the talk of tighter gun control after each mass killing in the US, nothing changed because of the power of the NRA.

“I was really impressed by what Obama said in his address to the nation. That this has got to be a single voter issue. Only vote for people that are for gun control,” he said.

“I keep hearing that there are people in the NRA who want gun control and I have friends that are NRA members who own guns and want gun control. So why not get people to join the NRA and change it from within?”

The first obstacle to Rosen’s strategy was the reaction of liberal friends.

“It was like I had gone to the enemy camp. My $25 membership from their perspective had now funded all of the anti-gun control legislation that was to come,” he said. “Frankly, the feedback I’ve gotten has been dismal from ‘That’s an interesting idea but I don’t think it’ll work’ to ‘You’re an asshole, you just joined the NRA’.”

Public opinion is divided. A Gallup poll this week confirmed a long-term trend of support for the NRA, with 58% saying they have a favourable view of the organisation. But a Pew poll in August also showed that 85% of Americans would like to see gun control measures, such as wider background checks on buyers, which the NRA opposes.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A woman looks over the ‘Wall of Guns’ raffle case during the NRA’s 144th annual meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, in April. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images

Rosen soon discovered a much greater impediment to reform of the organisation from within.

For a start, only life members and those who have been in the NRA for five years or more can vote in its elections.

The NRA claims to be a grassroots organisation driven by the popular will of its 4 million-plus members. But real power lies in the hands of a few executives, a shadowy committee which tightly controls elections to the NRA’s board of directors and a public relations company that for three decades has driven the organisation’s uncompromising opposition to any form of gun control.

NRA officials and members who challenge this power structure say they have been driven out or marginalised.

The illusion of choice

The face of the NRA is Wayne LaPierre, its executive vice-president for the past 24 years who sharply divides America with his unyielding defence of gun rights even in the aftermath of tragedies such as the massacre of 20 children at Sandy Hook elementary school three years ago. He is surrounded by a clutch of key executives with budgets of tens of millions of dollars to run political campaigns, strong-arm Congress and influence elections.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Wayne LaPierre, executive vice-president of the NRA. Photograph: Rex Shutterstock

LaPierre is also supported by gun makers, who help give the NRA its financial clout with large donations and hold seats on the organisation’s board of directors.

The axis of power at the top of the NRA is shored up by an internal electoral structure that has had the effect of stalling change.

In theory, policy is decided by the NRA’s membership through its election of representatives to the organisation’s board of directors. But grassroots power is limited. And less than 10% of those eligible cast a ballot.

Candidates for the board must be approved by a nine-member “nominations committee”. The committee is appointed by the NRA’s president in consultation with LaPierre and his executives.

Each year it strikes down dozens of potential contenders to put fewer than 30 names on the ballot for the 25 seats up for election each year. The 75 board members serve a three-year term. A 76th is appointed annually by popular vote at the national conference.



“The nominating committee is very, very important,” said Richard Feldman, a former Reagan administration commerce department official who went on to work as an NRA regional political director. “If you don’t control the nominating committee you lose control of your own board.”

Feldman said the result is a board of directors – mostly made up of ordinary members, gun company executives and a few celebrities – that may avoid stepping out of line for fear they won’t be renominated.

“Like all politics to a degree, if you go along you get along. If you shut up and go along with the power curve, you get reappointed,” he said. “If you’re not renominated by the nominating committee, you’re not serving another term. Everybody knows that. So you might make your comments privately. You might not make them publicly and you’re not going to cause a big firestorm.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Only life members and those who have been members for five years can vote in elections to the NRA’s board of directors. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images

There is a mechanism for candidates without official approval to get on to the ballot for the board of directors but they are rarely elected.

“It’s a very closed and tightly controlled system with little in the way of competition from outside,” said Jeff Knox, a lifetime NRA member whose father, Neal, was a senior official until he was driven out of the organisation after a power struggle. “Wayne and his supporters on the board make sure that others who will support Wayne and his policies remain on or are elected to the board.”

Knox has accused the NRA of keeping “election information and their board of directors shielded from public scrutiny”.

He told the Guardian that unofficial contenders face difficulties even making it known they are running for election because NRA members get information about candidates from the group’s publications which only promote the official slate.

“Every year there is a big ad that has Wayne [LaPierre] and the president’s pictures up in the top and says, ‘vote for your nominating committee guys’. I have never have been able to find out exactly who’s paying for that. My suspicion is that it’s underwritten by the PR company, Ackerman McQueen. That is their way of maintaining and consolidating their power within the NRA hierarchy,” he said.

A consistent front

Ackerman McQueen, an Oklahoma public relations firm, has run the NRA’s confrontational publicity campaigns and driven many of its political victories for more than 30 years. In that time, the firm has forged a symbiotic relationship that has kept LaPierre unchallenged in power and Ackerman McQueen in lucrative contracts.

Feldman, who said he regards Knox’s criticisms as fair, credits Ackerman McQueen with the NRA’s metamorphosis from a sporting organisation to a gun rights group and the remaking of LaPierre into an aggressive defender of the second amendment.

Feldman, author of Ricochet, Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist, said that when LaPierre was appointed he showed little personal interest in guns or hunting. Other former colleagues characterised him as a policy wonk and an “absent-minded professor”.

“Ackerman McQueen, back in the early 90s when Wayne LaPierre wasn’t nearly as secure, when it was less clear he would survive, Ackerman McQueen protected him in a multitude of ways. With advertising, they made him a rock star within the gun community,” said Feldman. “Now nobody’s out to get his job. He’ll have the job until he’s ready to leave.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The NRA executive vice-president Wayne LaPierre: ‘With advertising, Ackerman McQueen made him a rock star within the gun community.’ Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The PR agency had already established itself inside the NRA before LaPierre’s rise to power. By the late 1980s, it had overseen the scrapping of the group’s in-house public relations team and planted executives in the organisation’s headquarters.

From there it forged a series of hugely successful recruitment campaigns which dug the NRA out of debt.

Strident advertisements outraged large numbers of Americans but fired up the NRA’s core support. In parallel, Ackerman McQueen transformed LaPierre into the second amendment evangelist Americans see today.

Occasionally the pair stumbled. A campaign portraying federal agents as wearing “Nazi bucket helmets and black stormtrooper uniforms” and a Clinton administration law as giving “jackbooted government thugs more power to take away our constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns” backfired a month later when Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma, killing 168 people. McVeigh was an NRA member who evidently bought into the stormtrooper claims.

Josh Sugarmann, director of the Violence Policy Center, and author of National Rifle Association: Money, Firepower & Fear, said it was one of the few times he saw the NRA leadership shaken.

“What you saw at the time was a change of tone in the NRA’s publications: ‘the final war has begun’ and ‘jackbooted government thugs’. That’s taking the risk that this rhetoric can inflame and even validate the views of the well-armed far right and you’re just gambling that no one is going to take you seriously,” he said. “This all ended in Oklahoma City when Timothy McVeigh basically took the NRA at its word and bombed the Murrah building. The final war had begun, the NRA said, and McVeigh chose the date.”

Sugarmann said the NRA changed tack, dropping the final war against the government rhetoric and turning it into a “culture war where white gun-owning Americans were besieged by the changing America”.

“They were trying to weave the gun theme into a broader message,” he said.

Barack Obama’s election gave that new impetus. The NRA’s warnings to its members that the country’s first African American president would take away their guns was wrong. But that did not stop LaPierre from claiming that the president’s bid for a second term was “the most dangerous election in our lifetime” because of the supposed threat to the second amendment.

LaPierre has now held his position as the NRA’s executive vice-president for 24 years, earning about $1m a year as the face of the message that the second amendment is a virtually unrestricted right to carry a weapon and that the US government is the enemy.

‘The NRA didn’t tolerate dissent’

Feldman has described Ackerman McQueen’s tactics as “cynical”, saying they are less about policy than whipping up fear to raise funds to pay “exorbitant” salaries to top NRA staff and consultants.

But its approach has proven effective in blocking new gun control measures even after tragedies that have rocked the nation. In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook massacre, the NRA unleashed a barrage of claims intended to divert responsibility from guns. It blamed poor mental healthcare, and violent video games and films. LaPierre shocked a mourning nation by going on the attack with an uncompromising speech that called for armed guards in schools.

In parallel, the NRA ran a television advertisement which asked: “Are the president’s kids more important than yours? Then why is he sceptical about putting armed security in our schools when his kids are protected by armed guards at their school?”

The White House called the ad “repugnant and cowardly”. But the clamour for new gun control measures after Sandy Hook was fleeting and went nowhere.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest NRA merchandise sits on display at the NRA’s annual meeting in Nashville, Tennessee. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images

The more activist wing of the NRA had no problems with the messaging but there were those who took issue with the power Ackerman McQueen – and one of its subsidiaries, Virginia-based Mercury Group where LaPierre’s wife was an executive – wielded within the organisation.

Neal Knox, the NRA’s then vice-president, was seen as a likely successor to LaPierre in the 1990s. But he tangled with Ackerman McQueen, accusing it of having too much influence within the NRA and calling for its contract to be cancelled. By crossing the PR company he also crossed LaPierre.

Ackerman McQueen arranged for the actor Charlton Heston to run for Knox’s position – a hard candidate for macho NRA voters to resist – and Knox was out.

Knox’s son, Jeff, is a lifetime NRA member who makes a point of emphasising that he strongly supports the organisation. But he has taken up his father’s objections to the power of Ackerman McQueen.

“I think they have a major influence over policy. There’s a lot of tail wagging the dog from my perspective,” he said. “This company has embedded themselves within NRA and is very locked in, and they make millions of dollars off of NRA and quite a bit more just off the fact that they have the relationship with NRA. They’re the NRA’s guys and so it’s easier for them to get jobs with other folks in the firearms industry. They’re willing to spend money to make sure that people who support keeping them on stay in power.”

Ackerman McQueen referred questions to an executive handling the NRA account, Melanie Hill.

“I’m not going to speak with you about the NRA,” she said.

The NRA did not respond to a request for comment.

Feldman also went up against Ackerman McQueen and paid the price when as a member of the NRA’s public affairs committee he questioned its influence and the amount of NRA money it was spending. Not long after he lost his seat on the committee.

Feldman went on to head an industry body, the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association. Feldman said NRA leadership turned on him after he persuaded gun manufacturers to back child safety locks and appeared next to Bill Clinton at a White House ceremony to announce the move. Nonetheless, Feldman remains an NRA member.

“If you criticise too much you’re out. The NRA didn’t tolerate dissent very well,” he said. “I thought Ackerman McQueen were really good at what they did. It isn’t that they were bad at it. It’s that I didn’t like the power that they had.”