9 minute read
How a US gun enthusiast fled the NRA
from Booklaunch Issue 15
by Booklaunch
GUNFIGHT
MY BATTLE AGAINST THE INDUSTRY THAT RADICALIZED AMERICA
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RYAN BUSSE
PublicAffairs, Hardback, 352 pages October 2021 9781541768734 RRP £23.73
Check our website for a discount: www.booklaunch.london
EDITOR’S NOTE
Ryan Busse was taught to hunt by his father, and taught his own son in turn. He then built a successful career selling millions of firearms for one of the US’s most popular gun companies. But he also watched as America’s gun industry shifted from prioritising safety and ethics to promoting fear, conspiracy, intolerance and secrecy, for its own financial gain (secure people don’t buy guns) and to aid Trump’s Republicans. He now advises progressive organisations on how to undo rightwing radicalisation. What flipped him?
A couple of weeks before our trip to the NRA convention, in May 2016, Tom Daybrik called to ask me to attend an exclusive executive leadership lunch. ‘Wanna have lunch with Donald Trump Jr. and the top hundred gun execs in the country?’ Tom asked.
Don Junior had been making the industry rounds for months. The future president’s son had become a lifetime member of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, the organisation to which I devoted the majority of my volunteer time. Don Junior’s membership both troubled me and provided a possible point of leverage. Within a year, it would be clear that he shared almost none of the foundational values of BHA— his membership was like going to church once in a while just so people see you there. But it was smart politics. He even got a free Kimber pistol or Mountain Ascent rifle for purchasing his lifetime membership, one of the generous perks of supporting our growing organization.
‘See? He’s one of us,’ Tom quickly reminded me as we compared notes. ‘He knows how to shoot a gun, and he’s important to us.’ Don Junior and his father both had strong political instincts, and they knew exactly what motivated NRA members and millions of other fed-up, scared voters across the country.
For many gun owners, Hillary and Bill Clinton were the worst offenders: Bill because he presided over the assault weapons ban and Hillary because she promised to reenact it. Hillary made everything much worse when she dismissed many Trump supporters as ‘deplorables’. No matter what her true intent was, the comment was precisely the sort of blatant disrespect that the NRA trained its army to be on the lookout for. Trump and his son knew how to use the resulting anger to their advantage.
The Trumps rightly sensed that gun owners and hunters would play a leading role in the 2016 election, which focused on ‘making America great again’ by protecting old cultural touchstones. Normally, political pundits don’t pay much attention to hunters. True, millions of them vote regularly, but well-funded national campaigns rarely discussed the demographic’s cultural significance. The Trump play in 2016, though probably devoid of actual policy, was a brilliant strategy, never mind that the elder Trump had no clue about actual hunting.
After the champagne and caviar that preceded our lunch, Trump Junior took the small stage and addressed our group. He spoke with sharp, excited vigor. ‘My dad is going to be the greatest president in the history of the country for the Second Amendment and the gun business,’ he declared. The crowd applauded, and even a few whistles emanated from the normally buttoned-down executives. (CONTINUED AFTER THE BREAK)
READERS’ COMMENTS
Kristin Hussey and Rick Rojas:
Congresswoman Gabby Giffords:
Robert Spitzer:
After Trump Junior finished, the NRA’s Chris Cox began his act: part auctioneer, part televangelist. ‘Let’s raise some money to make Donald Trump the next president of the United States!’ he exclaimed. ‘C’mon, everybody. No one in this room wants to wake up after Election Day with another Clinton as president.’
‘Five hundred thousand!’ one of the executives said, as if bidding in an auction.
‘Let’s raise a million to defeat Hillary!’ another added. ‘I’ll match the next half million.’
Hands shot up as their owners barked more dollar figures into the air. Within a couple of minutes, top gun executives had raised almost $5 million for Cox’s NRA Institute for Legislative Action.
The organization spent most of this money on securing a November 8 win for Donald J. Trump. The NRA pushed all in because in this rogue, unconventional candidate the organization immediately saw something others did not: Donald Trump had adopted so many of the NRA’s own messaging and operational tactics that the NRA was, in essence, supporting itself for president. The self-absorbed real estate tycoon embraced the same hatred of the media, the same criticism of cultural elites, the same overriding belief that only power mattered, and the same innate sense that promulgating fear was the most efficient way to reinforce all of it.
Trump’s inauguration, January 20, coincided with the last day of the 2017 SHOT Show in Las Vegas. That day, as I walked the long aisles toward our booth, I noticed something I had never seen at the huge convention: giant televisions tuned to network coverage in almost every booth. It may have been a Friday, but it felt like a Sunday worship service. Just half an hour after the SHOT Show opened for the day, the entire convention center came to a stop. Tens of thousands of people who normally moved with frenetic trade-show speed froze to watch Trump’s inauguration as the audio piped in through the convention’s entire sound system. All of them were glued to a foreboding address that history will remember as Trump’s ‘American Carnage’ speech.
As if listening to a stern father, no one in the convention center moved. Only after the newly sworn-in president’s final words did they break into rapturous applause. The fear that our industry had relied on for so long suddenly relaxed.
Of course, the attendees in Las Vegas were happy, but the immediate impacts on the business prospects of some of us exhibitors weren’t going to be so joyous. ‘What do you think will happen to sales?’ a fellow gun-company executive asked over breakfast one of those mornings. ‘You know, now that we don’t have to worry about Hillary?’
‘I think you’d better get ready for a 20 percent decline,’ I told him. ‘The air is going to fizzle out of the gun market.’ My spreadsheets proved to be correct when, just weeks after Trump took office, the same people who contributed millions to the NRA and stood at rapt attention in the SHOT Show began to experience a precipitous drop in gun sales. Suddenly an industry that had geared itself for continuous years of growth had to deal with a nearly 17 percent drop in sales. Over the coming months, numerous national political and business articles highlighted the same ironic outcomes with headlines like the Wall Street Journal’s ‘The Trump Slump: With a Friend in the White House, Gun Sales Sag.’
For millions of Trump voters, the president’s victory released steam from the pressure cooker. But why didn’t they see that they actually lost on the issues that affected them? Over Trump’s turbulent four years in office, most of his voters experienced no improvement in income or living conditions, and the Trump administration continuously sought to overturn healthcare legislation that provided support for tens of millions of them.
And when it came to hunters, the new administration immediately embraced an energy-dominance policy that made George W. Bush seem moderate, wrecking multistate bipartisan wildlife-conservation projects that had been decades in the making. The administration rolled back clean-water protections that had benefited wildlife across the nation, and it attacked bedrock laws such as the Antiquities Act.
Like a lot of other people in America, I hoped this would all soon wear thin on Trump’s voters. Hunters, and the other groups that had supported Trump, would surely awaken to the disastrous realities of his actual policies: Voters will abandon this bozo in droves. They’ll wake up
What I did not anticipate was a whole new round of fear-mongering from the industry that had perfected it. Following the election in 2016, the NRA had launched its massive NRA-TV digital platform, complete with thirty-five original shows and dozens of original ads. The network was the brainchild of seventy-oneyear-old Angus McQueen, the founder and CEO of the ad agency Ackerman McQueen. Angus had a fierce partisan reputation as the driving force behind many of the emerging conspiracy theories fermenting in the Republican Party.
The marketing slogan for the NRA’s new propaganda network highlighted the real mission, which was to further degrade the country’s shared facts: ‘America’s Most Patriotic Team on a Mission to Take Back the Truth.’
With a budget of more than $30 million, the NRA crammed its new network onto the nation’s most popular streaming platforms. Within months, the platform hosted dozens of original shows, including daily ‘news’ updates from a Texas talk-radio firebrand named Grant Stinchfield, who gained notoriety outside the platform by equating US deaths in Benghazi with the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, then blaming both on Hillary Clinton.
But the new network’s most visible and bombastic star was Dana Loesch, a college-dropout-turned-internet-sensation, named by CNN as one of the top fifty most powerful ‘mom bloggers’. Soon after being named as host of The DL with Dana Loesch, she went to work creating headlines with incendiary and racist rants. In one episode she attacked the media as ‘the rat bastards of the earth’ and (CONTINUED IN THE BOOK)
