Members’ Newsletter: A Fresh Start for the NRA?

As anyone who has been a Reload Member for long knows, the NRA has been inching its way toward a fresh start for a while now as its corruption scandal comes to a close.

It got help down that path recently when the founder of a major gun maker announced it is getting back involved with the group. Now, I explain how the outcome of the NRA board election will tell us if its post-trial direction has been decided.

Contributing Writer Jake Fogleman takes a look at the Supreme Court’s latest GVRed case. The Court sent another felon-in-possession case back down but with a bit of a twist this time.

Plus, Reason Magazine’s J.D. Tuccille joins the podcast to give his take on the FBI Director also running the ATF. Then, I detail how my range day with the National Journalism Center went. Spoiler: it was great!

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Analysis: The NRA Board Election May Deliver a Fresh Start [Member Exclusive]
By Stephen Gutowski

The National Rifle Association (NRA) just brought one significant donor back into the fold. Or, at least, its reformer faction did.

In a recent video posted to gunmaker Daniel Defense’s social media accounts, founder Marty Daniel said he believes the gun-rights group is primed for a turnaround. He said he’d left the NRA in the wake of its half-decade-long corruption scandal, but now is the right time to return. He encouraged customers to do the same and vote for a slate of reformer candidates in the group’s current election.

How that reformer campaign turns out could determine if the NRA seizes its opportunity for a fresh start.

That opportunity came into focus in January. It started when former CEO Wayne LaPierre, who was at the center of the corruption allegations that dogged the organization since 2018, resigned ahead of being found liable for millions in misspent NRA funds. Then, at the end of 2024, the judge overseeing the civil case against LaPierre and other NRA leaders issued a ruling cementing a series of internal reforms but left it free of a government-appointed overseer. Finally, in January, the controversial law firm that guided the NRA’s strategy throughout the ordeal parted ways with the group.

That’s left the NRA with the chance to carve out a new path forward.

Reformers on the board, like Rocky Marshall and Phil Journey, have long advanced a specific way out of the mess. They want to replace leadership members at the center of the scandal, institute new ethical and transparency standards, then refocus on the NRA’s core mission. They believe if the group can rebuild trust with its former members, it can likely bring a substantial number of them back.

That argument has persuaded Daniel.

“The National Rifle Association has led the fight to keep and bear arms, but, as you know, they simply lost their way, and many people like me took a step back and refused to condone their behavior with our time and resources,” Daniel told customers in the video. “The message was heard loud and clear, and now change is on the way. With former leadership gone and new leaders at the helm, there’s a plan in place to revive the organization and restore trust with NRA members and all gun-owning Americans.”

Of course, the NRA likely could’ve shortened its ordeal if it had done all this back in 2018 when the corruption allegations first came to light. It did manage to fend off New York Attorney General Letitia James’s most aggressive punishment proposals, including outright dissolution. But it burned hundreds of millions in a fight that saw LaPierre ousted from leadership, all while millions of members, as well as their dues, left the group.

However, the NRA went in the direction it went over the past six years. There’s no turning back that clock. The group’s only chance is to move forward.

That won’t be an easy task.

The group’s board still isn’t totally united. While last year’s reform candidates performed well enough to make the board and convince a majority to buy into their vision during leadership elections, longtime LaPierre allies outmaneuvered them at last fall’s board meeting.

The reformer they picked to succeed LaPierre had an animal cruelty case he was involved in during college come back into the spotlight, which preceded Donald Trump canceling a rally with the NRA right before the election and will probably follow the group around for the foreseeable future.

Still, they backed Trump, and he won alongside majorities in Congress. Trump’s history of pushing for new gun restrictions in the wake of major mass shootings is a potential friction point. As are the tight margins in the House and Senate, which make major gun-rights legislation an all-but-insurmountable hill.

The political environment should provide more opportunities than pitfalls, though. Trump’s gun executive order lays out a series of possible reforms, and most gun-rights groups back his pick to lead the ATF–although his pro-gun credentials center around a speech at Gun Owners of America’s conference rather than the NRA’s gathering. If Trump follows through on enacting pro-gun reforms and the NRA can show it helped influence them, that would raise the group’s profile again.

With its scandal nearly behind it and prominent industry members returning to the fold, the group has a better chance than ever to recover. If its board can get on the same page and slowly but surely convince other former members and donors like Marty Daniel to rejoin, it can get its books back into the black and recapture its political punch.

The outcome of the board election will give us the next signal for where the NRA might end up and how quickly it could get there.

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Podcast: Reason Magazine’s J.D. Tuccille on Kash Patel Leading the ATF and FBI [Member Early Access]
By Stephen Gutowski

This week, we’re looking at the first-of-its-kind move to make the FBI Director the Acting Director of the ATF.

To do that, we’ve got Reason Magazine’s J.D. Tuccille back on the show. He recently wrote about what Kash Patel’s appointment might mean for the gun agency.

He argued it could send a signal the administration plans to merge the two law enforcement arms, if not officially, at least effectively. Tuccille said the move has the potential to reign in some of the worst excesses of the ATF by eliminating its singular focus on gun law enforcement. But, he noted, it could also backfire on gun owners given the FBI’s reputation for aggressive enforcement, even over-aggressive at times.

Then there’s Kash Patel himself. He has received strong backing from gun-rights groups, who hope he’ll wipe out the gun restrictions and zero-tolerance approach, as well as the officials who implemented them. However, Tuccille said his history of comments promising retribution against his and President Trump’s opponents in government and media raise concerns about how he might wield his expansive new power over federal law enforcement.

You can listen to the show on your favorite podcasting app or by clicking here. Video of the episode is available on our YouTube channel. An auto-generated transcript is here. Reload Members get access on Sunday, as always. Everyone else can listen on Monday.

Get a 30-day free trial for a subscription to The Dispatch by clicking here.

Plus, Contributing writer Jake Fogleman and I cover the Supreme Court’s latest remand of a case concerning whether convicted felons have any Second Amendment rights. We also discuss major gun manufacturer Daniel Defense’s decision to wade into the ongoing efforts to reform the NRA through board elections. We then briefly touch on the Trump administration’s decision to tap Kash Patel as acting ATF director before wrapping up with a round-up of stories from outside The Reload.

Audio here. Video here.

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National Journalism Center Range Day

On Friday, I helped teach the spring semester interns at the National Journalism Center about the basics of firearms policy and politics reporting. We started with a classroom session where I discussed basic terms and common gun-reporting topics, covering things like semi-automatic vs fully-automatic and how firearms sales are regulated by federal law. Then, we headed to the range to give students a safe environment to experience shooting some firearms, including semi-automatic handguns and AR-15s.

This class is always one of my favorite events to participate in. The students are smart and eager to learn about my experiences across conservative and major media. It’s one of the highest-rated parts of the center’s intern program!

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Analysis: What to Make of the Supreme Court’s Latest GVR [Member Exclusive]
By Jake Fogleman

The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) placed a new twist on a familiar pattern in its treatment of Second Amendment cases this week.

On Monday, the justices declined a request by a Florida man to review his conviction over possessing a firearm as a previously convicted felon. Instead, they opted to grant, vacate, and remand (GVR) that decision back to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals to be re-examined with the Court’s US v. Rahimi decision in mind.

While a GVR in light of Rahimi is nothing new for the Court in recent months, the motivation for this latest one is harder to decipher. Every other Second Amendment case sent back down to date has involved a decision that predated its holding on the constitutionality of the domestic violence restraining order gun ban. But the case the justices just sent back, US v. Rambo, was already decided in a post-Rahimi world.

“The Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Rahimi did not abrogate Dubois or Rozier because it did not ‘demolish’ or ‘eviscerate’ the ‘fundamental props’ of those precedents,” the Eleventh Circuit panel wrote in Rambo last July. “Rahimi did not discuss § 922(g)(1) at all, nor did it undermine our previous interpretation of Heller.”

Here are a few ways to interpret the justice’s latest move.

SCOTUS Tipping its Hand

One possible way to view the vacatur and remand of the Eleventh Circuit’s decision is that the Court is telegraphing its preferred application of Rahimi to the question of gun rights for convicted felons.

After all, the Eleventh Circuit’s decision in Rambo held that its precedents foreclosed any challenges to the felon-in-possession ban regardless of whether a person was convicted of non-violent offenses. By contrast, the Court in Rahimi seemed to endorse a narrower standard for disarmament.

“We conclude only this: An individual found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority in Rahimi.

And while the Court aimed that holding squarely at the federal gun ban for those subject to domestic violence restraining orders rather than convicted felons, it may nevertheless view its focus on individualized judicial findings of dangerousness and temporary disarmament as incompatible with a lower court standard that provides blanket approval of lifetime disarmament for all types of felons.

SCOTUS Requesting More on Rahimi

Another possible interpretation of the GVR is that the Court is sending a softer request to the lower court, which is unrelated to what it decided but how it got there. In other words, the move could be a nudge for the lower court to do its part in developing post-Rahimi Second Amendment jurisprudence.

Though the Eleventh Circuit invoked Rahimi in the first go-round, it didn’t exactly give the precedent a thorough treatment in its four-page, unpublished opinion. In fact, the decision was only briefly referenced three times, all in the penultimate paragraph of the opinion. Therefore, the Court may want to see a deeper analysis of its precedent so it can evaluate how the lower courts are interpreting its application to other gun laws.

There are procedural considerations that could lend this view some support. The ruling the lower court in Rambo relied on most to reach its decision, US v. Dubois, was decided by the Eleventh Circuit before Rahimi. The justices also opted to GVR Dubois itself just last month. Therefore, the Court might view a case decided based almost entirely on pre-Rahimi precedent, that has since been vacated no less, as an insufficient review of Rahimi.

Of course, this explanation is also tempered by the likeliest outcome of the GVR. Though it has employed them consistently, the Court’s previous GVRs have not borne much fruit. Of the seven prohibited persons cases it GVRed immediately after Rahimi, each has resulted in the same final holding after the lower courts concluded Rahimi didn’t have much to say about their cases.

SCOTUS Punted

A third possible reading of the order is that the justices simply did not want to take this particular case, or perhaps any felon-in-possession case, and it cleared its plate of the issue for now.

It’s unlikely they can avoid all felon cases for too long, considering the great consternation different interpretations of the ban are causing among federal law enforcement and the lower courts. The law is also the most commonly charged federal firearms offense, and it has explicitly been called into question in at least one region of the country, something that tends to presage an eventual cert grant.

The justices also may not have liked Rambo as a case to settle the legal questions at play. After all, it came before them on appeal by a public defender in an active criminal proceeding, with a skimpy appellate court decision to go off of. There also appears to be some murkiness surrounding the nature of Rambo’s predicate offenses. His legal team’s petition for certiorari refers to his status as a “non-violent” felon. Yet, it also describes him having been convicted in 2015 for “battery on a corrections officer” in addition to at least three other separate weapons charges over a span of seven years.

Contrast that fact pattern and procedural history with a candidate like Range v. AG, where the case record is far more developed, and the respondent in question is highly sympathetic (his singular conviction was indisputably non-violent). He also has the support of a high-profile constitutional law firm to represent him before the Court.

The justices may want to wait for a more robust case with a more sympathetic plaintiff before addressing something as publicly controversial as the gun rights of convicted felons.

Of course, these interpretations rely on tea leaf reading, a potentially perilous endeavor for an institution as opaque as the Supreme Court. Only the justices themselves know what their actions genuinely entail. However, the unusual step of vacating and remanding a decision to be reconsidered in light of an already-cited case suggests something deeper could be at play.

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That’s it for now.

I’ll talk to you all again soon.

Go Birds,
Stephen Gutowski
Founder
The Reload