How the NRA's Radical Anti-Gun-Control Ideology Became GOP Dogma & Still Warps Debate

The massacre in a Boulder grocery store came just after a Colorado judge ruled in favor of the National Rifle Association's challenge to the city's ban on assault weapons, which was passed in 2018 after this type of weapon was used in the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida. Despite increasingly regular mass shootings, the NRA has pushed for expanded gun rights since the 1970s and insisted that more guns, not fewer, would prevent gun deaths. The NRA's ideology is something that they've convinced the overwhelming majority of elected officials in the GOP, especially on the national level, to believe," says investigative journalist Frank Smyth, author of The NRA: The Unauthorized History."