In 1974, Florida lawmakers introduced a bill that sought to ban the possession of black powder, which is used in muzzle-loading firearms. Hammer joined a local N.R.A. volunteer in his successful fight against the legislation. The campaign occurred just before the launch of the Institute for Legislative Action, the N.R.A.’s lobbying arm, which transformed the organization from one primarily concerned with sporting and hunting into one that advocated for gun rights. In 1978, Hammer became the executive director of the Unified Sportsmen of Florida, and the N.R.A.’s top lobbyist in the state. Robert Baer, a former N.R.A. board member, compared her tactics to those of Lyndon Johnson. “She’s the same sort of operator,” he said. “She was a pro at political infighting—she understood how to get power.”

In the eighties, Hammer began to tell a story that she would repeat frequently in the years to come. One night, after leaving her office, she walked into a parking garage, where she was trailed by a carload of men. “They were yelling some of the most disgusting things you can imagine,” Hammer told the Houston Chronicle. “One man had a long-necked beer bottle, and he told me what he was going to do with it.” In those days, Hammer carried a Colt Detective Special six-shot revolver. “I pulled the gun out, brought it slowly up into the headlights of the car so they could see it, and I heard one of them scream, ‘The bitch got a gun!’ ” She added, “I could have been killed or raped, but I had a gun so I wasn’t. If the government takes away my gun, what’s going to happen to me next time?”

N.R.A. members elected Hammer to the organization’s board of directors in 1982. Five years later, Florida enacted her pioneering concealed-carry law, turning Hammer into a gun-rights star. In the early nineties, the board made her vice-president, and, between 1995 and 1998, Hammer served as the N.R.A.’s president, the first woman to head the organization. According to a former colleague at the Institute for Legislative Action, Hammer, who still sits on the N.R.A.’s board, has a “direct line” to Wayne LaPierre, the organization’s firebrand C.E.O. “Marion could do anything she wanted, and whatever she wanted she got,” the former colleague told me. “She would more or less single-handedly make legislation and push it.” In 2016, the N.R.A. paid Hammer two hundred and six thousand dollars, on top of the hundred and ten thousand dollars she earned from the Unified Sportsmen of Florida.

In Florida, when a gun-rights measure is introduced, it is often Hammer, and not a lawmaker, who negotiates with committee policy chiefs, the staffers who guide legislation through the House and the Senate. Chiefs assess whether the language of a bill is constitutional, and how it might affect the state economy. If there is a problem with the text, chiefs will judge whether it can be remedied, and they are supposed to work with lawmakers to make necessary adjustments. Chiefs are the right hand of committee chairs, helping to decide which bills are brought up for a vote and allowed to progress to the floor.

Katie Cunningham was the policy chief of the House Criminal Justice Subcommittee during Governor Scott’s first term in office, and she spoke with Hammer often. When Cunningham discussed revisions to gun legislation with other government staffers, she would send e-mails that said things like “Would you like to call Marion and let her know you’ve got another change to her bill?”

Other lobbyists communicate with staffers, too. But Hammer consistently has the most powerful voice in the room. In 2012, the subcommittee received a bill establishing that a concealed-carry permit does not allow a person to bring a gun into a range of government buildings or a childcare center. Within days, Hammer had sent an e-mail to Cunningham, informing her that the “N.R.A. is opposed” to the bill. She continued, “Hope that it will not even be heard.” The legislation was left off the voting calendar, and died two months later.

In March, 2011, shortly after Scott took office, Hammer e-mailed Cunningham about a bill called the Firearm Owners’ Privacy Act, one of Hammer’s top legislative priorities for the year. Later dubbed Docs vs. Glocks, it prohibited doctors from asking patients if they owned guns. The question is one that some physicians pose, especially to parents of small children, when assessing potential health hazards. On an N.R.A. talk show, Hammer said that doctors were “carrying out a gun-ban campaign.”

Hammer reprimanded Cunningham for making a change to the legislation. “We NEED the bill to continue to say that asking the question is a violation of privacy rights,” Hammer wrote. “You are changing the whole thrust of the bill by gratuitously removing language that is important to purpose of the bill. Please, put the first section back as it was and amend it as I suggested.” Hammer did not copy any lawmakers on the e-mail—not even the chair of the subcommittee or the bill’s lead sponsor, Representative Jason Brodeur, a thirty-five-year-old Republican in his first term.

Cunningham was contrite. “Believe me—I had no intent to change the thrust of anything,” she replied, adding, “See attached and let me know if that’ll work.”

Ray Pilon was one of the Republicans on the Criminal Justice Subcommittee. He called the interactions between Hammer and Cunningham “improper.” (Cunningham could not be reached for comment.) “I had no idea they were working together,” he told me. “When we discuss a bill in committee, what the staffer says to members—what Katie would have said—winds up looking like a recommendation. In a vote, the analysis weighs heavily.”

Within weeks, the bill had cleared the subcommittee and the legislature and was headed to the desk of Governor Scott. On May 1st, Hammer prepared to celebrate. She e-mailed Diane Moulton, the director of Scott’s executive staff. “Please ask Governor Scott if we can have bill signing ceremonies for the following bills with the invitees listed,” Hammer wrote.

The next day, Hammer sent a follow-up e-mail about the event. “Please remember that since we use these photos in N.R.A.’s magazines, only the best quality photo can be used,” she wrote. “That’s why we ALWAYS request E.T.”—a local photographer named Eric Tourney.

Tourney was hired. In photographs from the event, Hammer, dressed in one of her signature blazers, stands over Scott’s right shoulder as he signs her bill into law. Since then, at least ten states have introduced their own version of Hammer’s Docs legislation. In 2017, a federal court ruled Florida’s law unconstitutional.

Stand Your Ground was introduced in the Florida legislature in December, 2004. Though no one realized it at the time, it would become the N.R.A.’s most controversial law. “Marion was the ringmaster,” Dan Gelber, who later served as the House Democratic minority leader, said. “It was her circus. She was telling everyone where to go and what hoops to jump through.” Before Stand Your Ground, Americans were forbidden to use force in potentially dangerous public situations if they had the option of fleeing. The new law removed any duty to retreat, justifying force so long as a shooter “reasonably” believed that physical harm was imminent. It was a radical break with legal tradition. Now a person’s subjective feelings of fear were grounds to shoot someone even if there were other options available.

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The statute was supposed to be a bulwark against overzealous state attorneys, but Hammer and the Republican sponsors of Stand Your Ground could not point to a single instance in which a person had been wrongfully charged, tried, or convicted after invoking Florida’s traditional self-defense law. “There was no problem,” Mary Anne Franks, a law professor at the University of Miami, who has extensively studied Stand Your Ground, said. “There wasn’t a terrible epidemic of people getting prosecuted or harassed.”