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

Janice Harayda
2 min readNov 30, 2024
School security video taking during the Columbine shootings
Still from a school security video during the Columbine murders / Wikimedia Commons

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

--

--

Janice Harayda
Janice Harayda

Written by Janice Harayda

Critic, novelist, award-winning journalist. Former book editor of the Plain Dealer and book columnist for Glamour. Words in NYT, WSJ, and other major media.

Responses (8)