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I Escaped The Gun Cult After A Decade As An NRA Life Member, And Your Loved Ones Can Too

The NRA’s lies successfully extracted money from me. I was infuriated.

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I have a barrister bookcase, one of those with the glass doors that swing up and open. On the top shelf sits a little bronze sculpture. It depicts a colonial-era minuteman standing next to a framed and embossed copy of the Second Amendment, right above the NRA logo. A tiny plaque screwed to the wooden base contains my name and apparent status as a lifetime member.

I keep that statue to remind me that anyone can be indoctrinated into believing nonsense. If you’ve been following this column since the beginning, you know that I’m among the 14 percent of Americans who own an unhealthy number of guns. Where I grew up, guns are a part of life. Children are taught marksmanship (as a teenager, I twice shot competitively at the Wolf Creek shooting sports facility built for the Atlanta Olympics). Guns, in rural America, are viewed as important, necessary, and fundamental to life itself.

For a long time, I believed that, even as I voted Democrat. In my early 20s, I dished out $500 to the NRA to become a life member. At that time, to me, it felt like the NRA was about hunting, comradery with other people who enjoyed an outdoor lifestyle, and educating young people about gun safety.

I was blind to the toxicity festering in the NRA even then, but things really started to devolve quickly after the federal assault weapons ban expired in 2004. People in the gun community scrambled to horde all the newly available high-capacity magazines. I joined in without really even knowing why. I didn’t ask what legitimate need I could possibly have to pop off more than 10 rounds at a time, one right after another. The AR-15-style rifle, once rare, something that would have looked foreign and out-of-place at a civilian shooting range, skyrocketed in popularity. The number of firearms manufactured annually in America nearly quadrupled over 12 years.

Meanwhile, America suffered mass shooting after mass shooting. The NRA’s solution was always more guns, but NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre struck a particularly absurd tone after Sandy Hook. My disillusionment with the gun subculture grew. I started reading about how Australia successfully addressed its mass shooting problem after Port Arthur. I read about many other countries where gun control worked, most of them still allowing for sportsmen like me to go right on hunting with, well, hunting rifles and shotguns rather than with the military weaponry flooding into American homes. I watched Jim Jefferies. The increasingly hysterical flyers and emails begging for more donations to the NRA and warning of impending gun control measures that never actually materialized kept coming, but fell flat. If you dug into any credible information source that was not the NRA itself or one of its many allies in disinformation on the right, it became very clear disturbingly quickly that everything the NRA was saying was ridiculous, utter bullshit.

I got rid of my AR-15. I got rid of my 9mm Glock. I let my permit to carry expire. I was a member of an organization whose primary function was spewing falsehoods. I had grown to despise the NRA. That is what happens when you finally realize you have been fed at a trough of lies your whole life. The NRA’s lies successfully extracted money from me, so that money could be squandered on a high-end lifestyle for its executives, and used to spread more lies to other people. I was infuriated.

For some reason, though, it took me a long time to cut the cord on that lifetime membership. One reason, I suppose, was the byzantine methodology — I eventually learned, after sending many emails that went unanswered, that under NRA Bylaws, Article III, Section 10, I had to send a physical letter to an address in Virginia to renounce my membership. Which I finally did, far too late, really, after a new wave of disgust hit me following the 2017 Las Vegas massacre.

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I don’t think I’ll ever give up on guns completely. There are few settings in which I really feel at peace these days, but drifting down the river in our canoe, on a warm fall day, hunting ducks with my dad, is among them (with shotguns plugged to hold only three rounds, if you were wondering, because the law is designed to give waterfowl the sporting chance against a gun that the law doesn’t bother to give concertgoers or schoolchildren).

Even short of complete abstinence, guns will never again be an unhealthy obsession for me. I’ll never own another gun that was designed to allow a shooter to kill a large number of people very quickly. I’ll never waiver from the conviction that in the 21st century, if we are dissatisfied with our government, we vote, we don’t form an armed militia. The NRA will never get another dime from me, and if that organization crumbles under pressure from the New York Attorney General or falls to the internal corruption and graft at its center, I will cheer. I will always hold out hope that the loved ones still seduced by the gun lobby’s lies can someday do what I did: escape.

Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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