Member-only story
The Creepy NRA ‘Playbook’ For Responding To School Shootings
What the gun lobby urges members to say after mass murders involving firearms
I review a lot of books about horrific events: wars, natural disasters, unfathomable true crimes. One of the creepiest passages I’ve read in any of them involved a “playbook” for responding to school shootings drawn up by the National Rifle Association after the 1999 murders at Columbine High School in Colorado.
Frank Smyth, a gun owner and award-winning investigative journalist, describes that game plan in his evenhanded The NRA: The Unauthorized History (Flatiron, 2020), which shows how the NRA evolved from a post-Civil War group focused on improving marksmanship to the most powerful gun-rights organization in the world.
Smyth writes that after Columbine, the association decided to give members talking points for quashing an argument that inevitably arose after school shootings: The U.S. needed stricter gun laws. So the leadership drew up a “playbook” members could use in media interviews or elsewhere.
Some of the tactics the NRA recommended to members, as described by Smyth, are:
“Stall by saying as little as possible. Deflect by saying this is not the time to discuss politics but a time to mourn. Deflect more…
