There are more guns than cars in the United States. And studies show that gun sales go up following mass shootings. We had a different episode planned for this week, but given the marked rise in gun violence, we pivoted. This week’s guest spent 30 years as a leader at one of America’s most popular gun companies. Ryan Busse is a former firearms executive at Kimber America and is author of “Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America,” in which he talks about how America’s multibillion-dollar gun industry has profited from and fueled cultural divisions. Busse joins WITHpod to discuss how we got to this point, why he chose to leave the industry, what he observed behind closed doors at NRA meetings, how political division fuels extremism and what the failure to enact stricter legislation means for the future of our democracy.
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Chris Hayes: Are there black people in the industry?
Ryan Busse: Very, very few. Very few. I mean, I can count on one hand probably the ones that I’ve met through 25 years in the industry.
Chris Hayes: So it’s really, really a very white space?
Ryan Busse: It really is. Yeah, it really is.
Chris Hayes: And is it very extremely male?
Ryan Busse: Pretty much. That’s changing some, but, yeah, I don’t know the official statistics, but if I had to guess, certainly in the management ranks, I would guess it in the 75% to 80% male.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me your host, Chris Hayes.
Well, I will tell you the honest truth which is that we had planned another podcast for this week, which is the second week of June as you’re listening to this. But we decided to delay it because of the shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Obviously, we’ve been covering on the show, where 19 children and two adults were murdered by an 18-year-old who acquired I think two, possibly three weapons, legally two of them assault-style rifles, one of them a handgun it appears, tons and tons and tons of rounds of ammo, and went into that school and killed all those kids.
And it’s been pretty awful to think about and to cover. I’ll just say that I’ve been hosting my show now for longer than nine years, and hosting a television show for coming up on 11 years, and have covered, I don’t know, a dozen and a half, two dozen, and maybe more mass shootings. And it’s just a terrible, soul crushing sameness to it. I mean, there’s the soul crushingness of the first to what the actual facts of the atrocity, and the menace, and the sorrow, and the trauma, and the awful effects on people’s lives.
And then the second order conversation about guns and about why it wasn’t the guns. And the third order conversation about like, “Will Congress act this time?” And all this feels to me really ritualized in a way that I almost find offensive to be part of the ritual, because the ritual itself is so horrendous. And I’ve been looking for ways to like break out of it, just to find different ways of thinking through the problem, thinking about what it is, why are we this way? Why do we have this American exceptionalism?”
If you’re listening to this podcast, it’s likely you know the statistic, but the U.S. is the most armed place on earth in terms of civilian guns. We have more guns than cars, more guns than people. We have 120 guns per 100 people. The next highest is Yemen, which comes in around 55. So it’s like we’re just off the charts. There’s just American civilian relationship to weaponry, to guns, to gun ownership, to gun acquisition, to gun collecting, to gun usage. It’s just in a totally category by itself, the legal regime. Guarding it is completely in the category itself. We just exist in a different universe than everyone else.
And one of the things that I think is actually really important to understand is, while that has been the case for a while, while the U.S. is an outlier, it’s actually gotten worse in the last 20 years, and I would say particularly in the last 10. So one of the ways I’ve been trying to work through thinking about this, that doesn’t run into the same ruts, which are soul killing, is just to think about what stays the same and what changes. So when there is change, right, like when things happen in a given direction, gun sales spike up as we’ve learned from a recent ATF study, right?
Gun manufacturing has gone up. Gun laws have been getting loosened in a bunch of states aggressively. What is happening that’s driving change in that direction? Instead of sort of banging your head against the wall of the filibuster, Joe Manchin doesn’t want gun control, Republicans, blah, blah, and array yada, yada, yada. Like, what are the things happening within gun culture, within the relationship of Americans to guns, that is changing for the worse, as a way of countering like the first part of the problem, right?
Like, the first thing to do if you’re going in the wrong direction is stop moving in that direction. So even if you can’t turn around and get back, right, the U.S. is moving in the wrong direction in guns. It’s not just that we’re not getting gun safety measures and all this, it’s actually the boat is headed in the wrong direction. So we have to stop it, turn it around, and then start moving in the other direction. And one of the ways I’ve sort of thought about that is thinking about guns, and gun culture, and the gun industry.
And one of our booking producers called my attention to a guy by the name of Ryan Busse. He is a former firearms executive, and he’s also a senior advisor at Giffords, which is an organization dedicated to ending gun violence, which was of course started by former U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords, who of course was shot by a gunman at a constituent event he was doing outdoors, in a mass shooting. That was one of the mass shootings that I’ve covered in my time on air.
And he’s the author of a book called “Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America,” which is a book about his experience as a firearm executive and battles the industry, which is a pretty unique and interesting perspective. We had him on the program on “All In With Chris Hayes,” which is our show on MSNBC, which is 8 p.m. on weeknights, and I talked to him for five minutes which is the length of cable news segment. As soon as I got off air, I said, “Oh, I’d like to talk to him for much longer than that.” So Ryan Busse, thanks for coming on now “Why Is This Happening?”
Ryan Busse: Well, like you, Chris, I wish we weren’t talking about this, as much as I admire you and your show. In your desire to get at issues and intellect on these things, I wish we weren’t doing it. But here we are. Much of what you just enumerated is exactly why I wrote this book, because I feel like, I know, I’m tired of getting the questions like how did we get here? How did we get here? How do we get out? And so I finally decided I had to stop fighting from inside the industry, fight from out, and I had to tell everybody the story of how it is that we got here, and so that maybe we can, as you said, reverse course here.
Chris Hayes: So I want to go back to the very beginning about your upbringing and relationship to guns, and how you got into the industry and all that. But let’s just start at the point where you brought up which is I think a little bit about, I don’t know if you saw this one, remember when the RTV correspondent for Russia state television like went on air and said, “Stop the war,” and she was arrested and she was detained. And she gave a talk afterwards.
And it was really interesting because I think a lot of people in the West were like, “Wow, that’s incredibly brave. Good for her.” There are a lot of people in Ukraine who were like, “Oh, now you’re doing this?” Like, it’s a little late. Like, you and your propaganda outlet have caused so much destruction. So like, for the people that are hearing you’re a gun executive, and you’ve sort of made this turn, you’ve written this book, like what changed in you?
Ryan Busse: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And how do you think about your former self?
Ryan Busse: It’s an excellent question, something I struggled with while writing the book. In a lot of ways, I don’t think that I’ve changed at all, certainly not over the last 15 or 16 years, and I kind of have to go back to the beginning just a little bit to describe that, which I will. But I spent 15 years in the industry. Yes, I was selling guns. Yes, I was building a gun company. But they are guns and a gun company that I am still proud of. I am still a gun owner. I still hunt and shoot with my boys and my father. Those are integral parts of my culture.
But I believe in an immense corresponding responsibility in safety, something that I think is way out of whack in the country now. I grew up with these things. Many of my best days of my life were associated with guns and have been associated with guns, hunting, like I said, with my boys, or my dad, or my brother, or my grandfather, or whatever. And I don’t think of myself as defined by guns. My friends don’t think of themselves as defined by guns.
Many, almost all responsible gun owners that I know are disgusted with so much of the gun radicalization that you’ve seen across the country. I spent, like I said, 15 years, warning people that this crap was coming, that it was dangerous, that the marketing practices that the NRA and the firearms industry were engaging in would lead to these kinds of outcomes, that responsible gun owners should be casting incredible aspersions at it. We should be ripping it apart. I was castigated. And many other people in the industry who gave the same kind of warnings were run out. They were trolled. They were fired, whatever.
And if this sounds a lot like our modern right-wing Trumpish political system, well, I believe that they’re one and the same, right? Like, the NRA affected all this and then it became the right-wing of our politics.
Chris Hayes: That point, I want to talk about the safety issue, which I’ve been thinking a lot about, because that’s one of the things I find a little hard to square. Two thoughts I had, one was I just took this trip out to Arizona with my family that I’ve talked about in the podcast. And one of the things that is always striking to me when you are in the great open west of the country. I’m talking to you, you’re in northwestern Montana.
Ryan Busse: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: There’s an interesting, a little bit of a paradox, a little bit of attention, these two things side by side in the culture of these places that are big, rural, expansive, beautiful places. This kind of libertarian, “You own your land and I don’t want the government breathing on my neck.”
But then if you zoom in, whatever it is, if you want to go fish in a stream, if you want to go hunt javelinas in Arizona, if you want to go camp, there’s a ton of regulation and it’s just part of the way that everyone operates. Now, some people don’t like it and they find it annoying. But someone said to me on the Internet the other night, they’re like, “It is harder to get a fishing license in Texas than it is to get an assault rifle.”
Ryan Busse: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like just straight up, that is the truth. And I do think it’s weird that we do have so much regulation over so many other parts of the activities one associates when you say your culture. Like all of the activities one associates with the kind of great, beautiful, wide open mountain west of this country are pretty regulated for a good reason.
Ryan Busse: You’re exactly right, Chris. And that, as you probably have noted, there is this movement amongst gun enthusiasts and kind of the radical side, which I fear is leading much of the gun movement, this idea of Second Amendment absolutism, meaning, literally, there can be no infringement of your gun rights. So all of these reasonable regulations that you described, a fishing license, God forbid, and these sorts of things, like those things are infringement.
I don’t advise you do this because it’s a tough existence. But if you go on message boards and websites that traffic and this stuff, they often say the three words or the foreword “Shall not be infringed.” They just like repeat it over and over and over and over.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ryan Busse: And I try to explain to them like in analogies and examples, like I love the freedom of driving places, but I don’t value it so much that I drive 90 miles an hour through a school zone. That’s not an infringement. Like, that’s just what reasonable people do.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And the other part of it, too, is like this idea of safety. There’s another sort of interesting thing at the core of this sort of cultural conundrum too, which I also think about a lot. So you’ve got regulation on the one hand, which is like all parts of our lives are regulated in all kinds of ways.
And even when you think about, particularly we think about children, right? We think about like things with children. Like someone made this point, Benjy Sarlin is great reporter at MSNBC, because I was talking about, like, it’s crazy when you think about it. Right now, like there’s a house renovation I’m working on, and you just really are up, like you can’t just only rewire this, you got to rewire this, you got to install it. There’s a ton of regulation. And it’s all safety focused, even though in some ways, it’s fairly remote, the risk. And then you’ve got like stuff with kids that’s even more like that. Like, car seats that I bought 10 years ago got recalled. And then guns are in this totally different category of that.
Ryan Busse: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And I think about it, too, in this sort of when you talk about hunting with your dad and your boys. There’s an interesting thing I found when I’ve been around like people in the trades, for instance, like construction, guys, right? Carpenters. There’s a lot of sort of traditional male culture and there’s a kind of like tough guy, boastfulness, whatever. But it’s also the case that like in those subcultures construction, people are really safety folks.
Ryan Busse: Yeah, yeah.
Chris Hayes: Because you learn the hard way, that if you are not, you will lose a finger, you will get a back injury. Like, it ain’t a joke. And in cultures that are close to danger, particularly male-dominated cultures of physical labor, there is a very intense safety culture around those things, precisely because you learn real quick. And how is that not the case with guns?
Ryan Busse: Interestingly enough, let me tell you a story which will only heighten your frustration about this. There’s a chapter in my book called Bulletproof Glass. In that chapter, I discussed the fact that I witnessed an office renovation at the gun factory at which I was working. And the top executives were debating where to place the wall with the bulletproof glass in case somebody from pistol assembly came up and started shooting up the place, right? So the gun executives knew that this was inherently dangerous.
Furthermore, in that same chapter, I explained that my experience in going down to the shooting range and shooting our products, and the sort of safety procedures I had to go through. I was like a 20-year senior employee, maybe the most senior employee. I had to fill out basically a 4473 federal background check even though everybody already knew who I was. I had to wear safety goggles. I had to wear a bulletproof vest. I had to wear gloves. I had to keep my muzzle downrange. If I violated any of that, the shooting session was over. Okay.
These are the rules inside of every single gun company, every single gun company. In other words, to your point about the guys in the trades, the people who are closest to this, they know damn well how dangerous this is.
Chris Hayes: Of course.
Ryan Busse: And yet, the industry and the NRA goes out and basically tells everybody, “No, we will have a political system where no such safety measures are mandated. In fact, we’re going to run you out of office if you even suggest a fraction of that.” Dude, it’s insane.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, if you walk into a carpentry shop with someone who really knows what they’re doing and just start like futzing around with like table saw, like they’re going to lose their mind. It’s like the first thing when you walk into someone’s shop is like, “Here are the protocols. Put your goggles on, like get your head right, be attentive.” And everyone understands that who works around dangerous stuff, that’s just like the culture of this place.
Ryan Busse: Yeah. That, Chris, what you described with the trades, what I described about being around guns at a gun factory, that’s the sort of culture that I was raised with.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ryan Busse: Guns were a part of our lives, but, man, you did not screw around with them. Like, you did not wave muzzles around. You did not joke. They were not a toy. You were very serious. You kept them unloaded. You didn’t put your finger near their trigger until you’re ready to shoot. Like, they were serious things, right?
And so my book opens with my own son being intimidated and attacked by a, quote-unquote, Second Amendment Patriot at a Black Lives Matter rally where there’s all these like 100 of these open carry armed intimidation guys that you’ve like reported on, right? And I looked at that and I thought that violates every single gun safety regulation known to man. And I looked at that like this is the product that my industry created. How can we stand for this?
I don’t hear a single gun industry executive criticize it. I don’t see the NRA criticize it. And this happened all across our country, right? So everybody knows that this is unsafe. Everybody knows that this radicalization is going to break down norms and lead to terrible spillover effects, and it’s going to tell troubled 18 and 19-year-old kids that it’s okay to fix your problems with an All right-15. Like everybody knows this, yet nobody is standing. I mean, I’m trying to stand up. But industry leaders are not saying it’s wrong. Where are the leaders standing up and saying that is wrong?
Chris Hayes: When you say “attacked,” what do you mean by attacked?
Ryan Busse: So he was chanting with a bunch of high school kids, and this guy got in his face and started screaming at him. That was an evil little bastard and he was armed, like this, I don’t know, 50 something year old guy armed. And then he starts poking him in the chest. And my kid did nothing. He’s 75 pounds soaking wet.
Like, you don’t take loaded guns into that sort of situation. Like, it violates every gun safety rule that anybody has ever been taught. And here I am watching that thinking, “Oh, this could go south so fast.” There’s 1,500 people chanting with all these armed people. This guy screaming at my kid. I’m thinking somebody twitches wrong and the bullets are just going to start flying.
Chris Hayes: So let’s go back to the beginning and talk about how did you end up in the gun industry.
Ryan Busse: Well, I grew up, as I explained, in this rural place with guns as part of my life. And I hunted all the way through college, and that was a good diversion for me. I mean, I even skipped class to go quail hunting. And so after I graduated from college, getting into the firearms industry was a little bit like a kid who had played baseball his whole life, getting a minor league contract, right, like, “Holy smokes, I get to get paid to go do this, you know?”
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ryan Busse: And I didn’t think anything of it. My association with guns had never been negative. So I know that sounds strange to some people, but it was completely positive to me.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, I have to say, like, I’ve come a long way on this. I grew up in the Bronx. So just where I’m coming from, over the Bronx in the 1980s, so my association with guns were negative because, like, I would hear gunshots in the neighborhood I grew up in sometimes, particularly like that period of time. And we had 2,300 murders in New York City, by that time, it was 1982. Like, in my context, that’s the only thing guns are used for.
Ryan Busse: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: When I’m growing up, I’ve seen them be flashed occasionally. I remember being at a swimming pool once, Pope Pool in the Bronx. So we didn’t have any of the good associations. Over the course, the trajectory of my life and being a reporter, like, I have now come to understand that in the same way that like I feel fondly about, for instance, like the axe, my splitting axe that I used to split wood which I love. But like, obviously, it could do something terrible to someone if it was used. People have that association with guns, like just a completely different contextual universe.
Ryan Busse: That and I think, yes, you’re absolutely right. And also, let’s face it, guns and the power that they convey, they transmit almost an immediate sense of freedom and power, this sort of Americana feel, like you’re a master of your own destiny.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ryan Busse: I mean, I believe and I experienced in positive ways, but let’s be honest, it can be in very negative ways, too. And I think that sort of intimidation and power transfer now is what is at the middle of our political radicalization in and around guns.
Chris Hayes: So you got into the industry, you’re psyched because this was something that was close to you.
Ryan Busse: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And what was your early experience like?
Ryan Busse: It was kind of crazy cowboyish. The industry was much, much smaller, a fraction of the size of what it is today. I got what I joke as an entry level executive job, meaning I was head of sales, and the whole sales department was like a couple of us. So it was a paycheck bouncing company in an industry with relatively small family-owned businesses. So there were some crazy things that happened.
Eventually, I grew the sales force to include these other salespeople. We had accidental shootings in the office. Like, it was just real people, right? These were just people who had a very high degree of fondness for guns. That was their commonality. And as I pulled away and wrote the book, I thought, “My God, these are the people that changed our country, right?” They’re just average people that like guns a lot. But it wasn’t some group of highly educated or button-down executives. Like, they’re just a few hundred average people drove the gun industry to what it is, and it got much, much larger and much more powerful.
Chris Hayes: Well, what’s the driving? What does that mean? So, I mean, we should sketch the history, right? The National Rifle Association is actually founded by Union Army veterans. Obviously, the mid 19 century Civil War saw the almost comprehensive mass mobilization of draft aged men in the country. They all learned to shoot. A lot of them came out of it, having gone to war and having relationship with guns.
The NRA’s original idea was like very much in this kind of like the little Elks or something, right? Like this sort of like club men group where they get together and they do their thing, right. And it was very much, I don’t know, how would you characterize it? It was kind of a gun safety org?
Ryan Busse: Well, camaraderie, safety sort of Americana, very clubby. I mean, my grandfather was a proud Roosevelt Democrat, and his favorite hat was his NRA hat, right? It signified sort of responsibility, camaraderie. My father, even through the early part of my childhood, got the NRA magazines and was an NRA member, still the same thing.
Then about the time I turned to a teenager, things started to change. They really started to change after I got in the industry in 1995. I’ll give you the short dissertation on the history here of how we got here. This would be just a minute or so, but —
Chris Hayes: Yeah, please.
Ryan Busse: So the NRA then in 1999, and I got in ’95, it was starting to change then. Obviously, we had Timothy McVeigh in I believe ‘93, who blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Wayne LaPierre made some very distasteful comments about federal officials.
Then in 1999, Columbine happened. We now know that the NRA had meetings behind the scenes at what would have been the NRA Convention, where they essentially debated two options; should we be a part of the solution and be conciliatory, offer some solutions, sit down and maybe change policies? There were two troubled kids who invaded Columbine High School, really America’s first really high profile mass shooting. Or maybe we could double down on this, maybe we could use this to fuel the culture war, maybe we can tell people that the Clinton administration will come get their guns and it will be good for our membership. And literally, they debated this. It’s now proven with the tapes that have come out.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, we have audio tapes on that.
Ryan Busse: And basically they said, “Screw it. Let’s go for the culture war thing,” and they did. And so they started the culture war movement. Then 2004, Bush doesn’t renew the assault weapons ban. Okay. That removes another impediment. 2005, Bush signs PLCAA which is the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which essentially prohibits any liability suits against any gun company for irresponsible marketing.
So you’ve got a culture war started, assault weapons are okay. Now, the federal government says, “You can’t get sued if you market them aggressively.” Then people looked around like, “Okay, let’s roll.” About then, Barack Obama, in 2007, starts to lead in the polls. The NRA says, “Okay, let’s go racism, conspiracy, hatred, fear. Let’s use it to gin up voters.” The firearms industry had got going on this AR-15 thing, and liability coverage had been granted.
And the industry basically looked around and said, “The same thing that are driving the voters to the polls for the NRA, that they’re using to drive membership and drive polls, guys, that sells guns. Like, hatred, fear, conspiracy, racism, that sold guns.” And if you go look at firearm sales rates from about 1990 to about 2007, they’re roughly stable, with just a slight increase and a tick-up during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars with Bush. But starting in 2007, steady climb, it looks like Mount Everest. We went from 8 million guns sold in 2007 to 25 million guns a year sold by the time Donald Trump left office. So that’s how we got here.
Chris Hayes: There’s a few parts of that story that are interesting. Like, I think there’s different ways of conceiving sort of cause and effect, and who’s the principal and who’s the agent between the industry and the NRA. So one is to view the industry is the principal and the NRA is the agent. And that the NRA is essentially a front group for the industry and they do sells guns, But the story you tell is actually the opposite. The story you tell is basically the NRA understanding the sort of power of the certain kind of like culture war paranoia before the industry did and sort of leading up there.
Ryan Busse: Absolutely right. And it was sort of lizard brainish, right? I don’t think that they understood it until they tried it and it worked, and they’re like, “Oh, well, we got something here. We’ve got this.” And I’ve heard it reported, Chris, a hundred times. I mean, I’m probably the only firearms executive to ever listen to NPR in the morning, but, okay, I do and I’ve heard a billion times, “Oh, the NRA just does the bidding of the firearms industry.” I’m like, “No, you have it backwards. The NRA runs the show.” And let me give you a quick illustrative example.
In 2012, we had Sandy Hook. December 14th, 2012, we had Sandy Hook, another one of these horrific shooting she had to report on. And in 2013, we had what was called Manchin-Toomey. It was an amendment to a bill which would have extended background checks and made them universal. The NSSF, which is the industry trade group, basically signaled, “Hey, we’re going to be for this. We think it’s good policy. Let’s give in to it. Let’s try to make things better.” But they signaled that, but did not take the official position. They just stood back and wait, stood back and wait.
The NRA is in these negotiations. The NRA gets about halfway into it, and then the NRA, through Chris Cox and LaPierre, they decide, “Screw it. We’re not going to be for it. We’re going to score it. Why? Because we can screw these two or three moderate Republicans, and we can screw these two or three moderate Democrats that are kind of pushing this.” And the NSSF in the industry who had previously said, “We’re going to be for this.” They said, “Yeah, we hear you, big boss and NRA. We’re with you.” And they bought tons of ads, and they went all in on fighting it. So you see who really runs the show, right? It’s the culture war from the NRA because that’s what drives the whole thing now.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: This culture war, this sort of transformation of the NRA from an industry group, or a one issue group to a culture workgroup is fascinating because it presages a lot of our politics more broadly. So like it used to be the case, right? And some of the NRA’s power was precisely this sort of single issue power.
In fact, we’re watching a very similar thing happening with AIPAC in a really interesting way, right? Like, AIPAC’s power used to be that it didn’t matter what your other politics were. You could be an evangelical Christian. You could be for abortion or against abortion. You could be an urban liberal or you could be a rural conservative. We don’t care. If you’re strong in Israel, we support you, right?
Ryan Busse: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And what has happened is that it’s gotten harder to uphold that amidst the culture war politics of America and polarization. And you can watch this happening in AIPAC, where they’re moving more towards being essentially a right-wing group, right?
Ryan Busse: Yeah, that’s correct.
Chris Hayes: Not there yet. But the NRA was that before, right? It used to be like, “We don’t care about the others.”
Ryan Busse: Yeah. They claim to be a bipartisan organization, right?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ryan Busse: They endorsed Democrats. In early 2000s, there were still endorsed Democrats from the NRA. And the point of my book and the thesis of my book is exactly what you said that what the NRA did predates our politics, or our modern politics by about four or five years, because in my experience, when I was living inside of it, it was like I was living in the kitchen where it was cooking up the dish to hand to the American right, and it did. And now, so much of what the NRA did, I mean, I can’t think of anything that sort of epitomizes Trumpism and the American right now, that I didn’t experience in the NRA 5 to 10 years prior.
Chris Hayes: But talk about when you saw it up close, like what were you thinking about it, and what was the process that produced it. What I hear from you, and this is really key and important, it’s essentially a trial and error process of like what sells. And it’s a little like what comedians do, like they go into a bunch of rooms and people laugh at certain jokes and they keep those, and other jokes bomb and they lose those and they iterate on that. Until, if they’re a good comedian, they’ve got a set that just plays the whole way through, right?
So you’ve got a situation where you’re trying different stuff. You’re seeing what hits, what pops, what gets your direct mail list fired up, what gets people calling, what sells guns. You keep that. You get rid of the other stuff. Was that basically right?
Ryan Busse: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And what did that look like up close?
Ryan Busse: So I tell the story about QAnon coming onto the scene in our modern politics and me being not surprised at all. Why? Almost exactly like you described with a comedian trying this stuff out. I watched Wayne LaPierre 10 or 12 years prior to that, during the Obama elections, where he would stand up on stage in front of all these executives and almost like he was trying out a joke, he would be like, “And Barack Obama is going to rewrite the Constitution,” pause and then everybody cheered. He’s like, “Holy shit, they believed it.” Well, you and I, Chris, have studied the Constitution. I don’t think a president can rewrite the Constitution.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ryan Busse: But he said it and they believed it and they cheered. And it was almost like he said, “Well, let’s try another one. Barack Obama is going to outlaw hunting ammunition,” which he actually said and run this in an ad, and everybody, like they cheered at that one. And it was almost like whatever they said, they couldn’t say anything wrong. That’s why when I see Donald Trump get up on stage and emit this “word salad” that sounds completely conspiratorial, or Marjorie Taylor Greene or Matt Gaetz, or whatever, I’m like, “I’ve seen all this before. I saw Wayne LaPierre do this 10 years ago. It’s just they’ve taken it to a new level.”
Chris Hayes: The Obama election is really an inflection point because in the transformation of the NRA is a cultural and political force. And in the data, like, I mean, people are going to buy guns because the black man named Barack Obama was getting elected president. Like, it’s just in black and white in that data.
Ryan Busse: You cannot get away from it. And that’s the thing out of everything that I wrote about the sort of just below the surface racism that the NRA tapped into, has pissed off the industry more than anything because they don’t want to deal with it.
But I tell stories of, for instance, I was walking into an NRA show once and this during the Obama administration. There’s a guy with a T-shirt that says, “Don’t blame me, I voted for the white guy.” And everybody is giving him a high five, right?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ryan Busse: There’s a guy walking through the NRA convention selling a shirt with a picture of an African lion and a picture of Barack Obama on it. And it says, “African lion, lion African.”
Chris Hayes: Lion African, yeah.
Ryan Busse: And he’s selling the shirt and people are buying it, and they’re like, “That’s an awesome shirt.” And nobody in the NRA show says anything. They don’t kick him. I have a picture of it because I wanted it for proof. Nobody kicks him out. Nobody says that’s inappropriate. At the same time, they said, “Well, we’re not racist.” I’m like, “Excuse me. This is racist.” And so it wasn’t even really hidden.
I mean, at that same convention, I had Glenn Beck speak, who was at that time king of the birthers. So yeah, it was on the surface. And I mean, in that way, Obama handed the NRA a messaging gift because they organized around it.
Chris Hayes: Are there black people in the industry?
Ryan Busse: Very, very few. Very few. I mean, I can count on one hand probably the ones that I’ve met through 25 years in the industry.
Chris Hayes: So it’s really, really a very white space?
Ryan Busse: It really is. Yeah, it really is.
Chris Hayes: And is it very extremely male?
Ryan Busse: Pretty much. That’s changing some but, yeah, I don’t know the official statistics, but if I had to guess, certainly in the management ranks, I would guess it in the 75% to 80% male.
Chris Hayes: And is it mostly folks, when you say normal people, average folks, people like yourself who just came to it from being people who grew up in gun culture in fairly traditional rural places?
Ryan Busse: I tell that story. It’s changing now because the companies are becoming so large, that sort of the quarterly capitalist pressures of America are professionalizing it more. But certainly up until this point, the one commonality that I experienced in all of the movers and shakers in the industry, it’s just that they love guns. I mean, that was it. They weren’t Harvard educated. They weren’t button-down military types. They just love guns.
Chris Hayes: There’s a few other things that happened, right? So Barack Obama, when I think about like the sort of radicalization of this culture, right, this change from we’re gun enthusiast, the way that someone might be hunting enthusiast, fishing enthusiast, watch enthusiast, ATV enthusiasts, right? There’s like a million different things that people are really into, that they order around. They might even draw kind of identity from, that they want to see reflected in their politics.
And then there’s the like totalizing, conspiratorial, reactionary proto-fascist worldview of the modern NRA, right? The conversion from one to the other is kind of part of the story. So there’s a few inflection points. Barack Obama’s election is a huge one. Spencer Ackerman just wrote an incredible book about the war on terror called “Reign of Terror.” Like, I do wonder how much having a permanently mobilized war footing society for 20 years, including, I mean, again, we go back to the original NRA, right?
Ryan Busse: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: What was burgeoning NRA? Well, the whole country went to war. They came out, and then NRA started as this rifle club of veterans of U.S. war. Now, our experience of war on terror is extremely different because we don’t have a draft and a very, very small percentage of the population bears the brunt of it. But I do wonder how much do you think that that war footing for 20 years has an effect on this cultural shift?
Ryan Busse: I think it’s been huge, and I’m going to get to that, I’m going to back up just a second to add one more component. The industry for 25 years prior, just as this was kind of winding down as I got there, but had accepted the fact that it was a graying, aging, waning sort of industry. Everybody bemoaned that it was going away. We felt under attack.
Chris Hayes: That’s interesting.
Ryan Busse: The Clinton administration was proposing new legislation. And so, you had this mantra in the industry that you had to accept anybody that was a shooter, anybody that was a hunter, anybody that was pro-gun was your friend. Why? Because you needed every customer you could get and you could never do anything that would dissuade the industry from dying, even one more little inch, because it was never going to grow, right? It wasn’t like there were fewer hunters, there were all this stuff.
Well, when that started to turn and the industry started to blow up, that old DNA of accepting everybody no matter what did not go away, that old DNA of castigating every enemy, because you needed to push your enemies away so you could grow or just exist, did not go away. So when you bring the militarization that you’re talking about and you have some admirable things about military veterans joining the industry, but some also dangerous things, the militarization, the sort of couch commando culture that I described, that was a pejorative term that the industry used to describe some of these people that kind of wanted to use militarization to demonstrate your manhood.
Like, you have this DNA mindset that nobody could ever be criticized. And so you end up here now, where even the worst element of gun ownership like, again, people that invade the Michigan Capitol, or January 6 insurrectionists that had gun flags. They didn’t have Chevy truck flags. They didn’t have Nike shoe flags. They didn’t have barbecue grill flags. They had AR-15 flags.
Kyle Rittenhouse, every single time something happens with a gun, the industry either says nothing or praises it. Why? It’s that old DNA where they have been told they’re victimized, and that victimization is really key to radicalization as you know.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, I’ve often said that the people with high degrees of relative power, combined with a genuine self-perception of victimization, persecution is the kind of engine of reactionary politics. Donald Trump is a great example of that, who’s —
Ryan Busse: Bingo.
Chris Hayes: — objectively an incredibly rich and powerful person, who always feels like slighted and put upon and persecuted, and has his whole life like that. That’s it. Those are the two —
Ryan Busse: Exactly.
Chris Hayes: — components of the nuclear reactor of reactionary politics.
Ryan Busse: Exactly. And I saw it, like you watch, Chris, Uvalde, it already started. But you watch, this will kick in. What will they say? “Look, the evil liberals are coming after our freedoms. They’re coming after our guns. They’re going to use those 19 kids to take apart the Constitution. See, we really are under attack. We’re the real patriots.” I mean, if you don’t see Trump in this, come on.
Chris Hayes: So you have a country on war footing. You have Barack Obama, the first black president. You’ve got other things that are driving polarization too of increasing rural/urban divide. And I don’t know how much guns are the cause of that, and how much are the effect of that, whether people are polarizing around that, or because people are from very different places and have different experiences between northwest Montana and the Bronx, right, of what a gun is and what it’s used for.
So then the other thing is like this, you talked about this in the book, the turn towards openly conceiving of the gun to kill people, to use to maybe wage war against the government. Like, I think of it as these sort of three layers of gun ownership, right? So like, the first to me and the least menacing, and the most I can get with is I like to hunt and I like to go to the shooting range. And I like doing those two things. I’m a hobbyist.
Then there’s the “I need to protect my home.” Now, I think there’s a lot of reactionary stuff in “I need to protect my home,” particularly because a lot of times, the people who own guns to, quote, “protect their homes” are living in places where like they’re not very high burglary, high crime areas. So like, I’m not sure how rational that “I need to protect my home.” But okay, fine. That’s another thing.
The third level which is the level that we’re at now, is like, “I need to prepare for Armageddon, I need to prepare to go to war against the libs, I need to prepare to go to war against the government.” And this is explicitly what the marketing is about, what the culture is about, what the messaging is about. And that to me is like, you see it now in mainstream Republican ads, like the purpose of the gun is to take our arms against the government, which is a derange thing for political culture to say.
Ryan Busse: And Chris, that’s where the business growth is, right? Because these things are not consumable goods, they’re durable. If you’re in one of the two categories that you just described, that you are defending, which I generally agree with, you’ll need one gun to defend your home.
Chris Hayes: You have all the guns you need. It will last a 100 years.
Ryan Busse: That’s right. Yeah. And so you look for growth, well, where is the growth coming?
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Ryan Busse: It’s coming in these basically insurrectionists, right? Like, these things are becoming a middle finger to the libs. Like, what do you do? I’ll buy an AR-15 to own the libs. What are you going to do to own them again? I’m going to buy another AR-15. Like, they’re literally a symbol.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: One of the most important stats about gun ownership in America that I say to people all the time is that the percentage of households with guns is declining. At the same time, the number of guns is increasing. So when you think about that, it’s like —
Ryan Busse: That has reversed here, though, in the last few years.
Chris Hayes: On the household front?
Ryan Busse: Yeah. And then this is the frightening thing. Once it gets to a certain point, this becomes like a self-perpetuating storm, it’s a storm that creates its own weather. Here’s an example. After Buffalo and you’re an African American family somewhere in the country, are you more or less likely to go purchase again? That’s because you’re freaked out. I’m not blaming you one bit, right?
Chris Hayes: Right, of course, yes.
Ryan Busse: If there’s enough, I have a very good African American friend who lives outside of Atlanta, who doesn’t like AR-15. He called me during the pandemic and he said, “Busse, I’m buying an AR-15.” He’s got a blurb on the back of my book. I said, “Terrell, what are you buying an AR-15 for?” He goes, “Look, man, I live in a mixed race area of Atlanta. All these guys are rolling every day to work with loaded AR-15s. They are hoping for a race war. And if one breaks out, somebody got to protect me and my family.” Okay.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And that logic which is both totally rational in the micro and totally madness in the macro, right? By the way, that is the exact calculation people go through in the Bronx, in the west side of Chicago, in the east side of St. Louis. If you are in places with high numbers of people who are armed, who are using those weapons to resolve conflicts outside the purview of the law, it obviously becomes more incentivized and rational to arm yourself in preparation, which is how you get places with high levels of gun violence, in which the laws essentially receded, in which homicides are unsolved and unheld accountable, in which the solution to homicide is essentially reprisal killing.
This is a thing that you see in the United States. You see it throughout all human history, in all different kinds of cultures. Like, if you don’t have the mechanisms in place to resolve natural human conflict nonviolently, you will get mechanisms to resolve it violently. And in a technology where arms are plentiful, that will be the mechanism.
Ryan Busse: And so the NRA figured this out, right? And in its most elemental form, think about the words that you know from Wayne LaPierre, probably the best, “What stops a bad guy with a gun? A good guy with a gun.” So he just sold one more gun there.
Chris Hayes: That’s right.
Ryan Busse: You had the bad guy with a gun, you just sold one. So if you have more bad guys, you need more good guys with guns. Then if you have more bad guys, pretty soon, I don’t know if you can see where this is going. Everybody has got a gun.
Chris Hayes: I’ll never forget after the Las Vegas shooting, I was in Vegas, which remains one of the most —
Ryan Busse: This is the most underreported thing that’s happened in the last 15 years, but, yeah.
Ryan Busse: I got to say that of all the mass shootings that I’ve covered, I was just telling this somebody today, that one was like a vortex of meaning. It felt like it repelled because it was so planned out. It was so sophisticated, right?
Ryan Busse: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: It wasn’t someone walks into a grocery store or school. It was, as far as we can tell, entirely motivated by any specific ideological grievance, that it just felt like it repelled, meaning like I couldn’t get my hands around what I was covering other than a horrific, horrific tragedy, right?
Ryan Busse: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: But in repelling that, meaning I totally agree that it was like you couldn’t get a grip on that story. And I remember being down there and feeling that way. Like, it felt like an angel of death, right? It felt like biblical. It was like —
Ryan Busse: Raining down on people, right? Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Raining down., like why did he do it? It’s like none of it made any meaning out of it. And I went to a gun shop after that in Vegas and the guys told me what is borne out by the data, which is that gun sales go up after mass shootings.
Ryan Busse: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: They essentially serve as advertisements for the weapon.
Ryan Busse: And what’s interesting in that one, and I note that in my book that after Vegas, the worst mass shooting ever in the history of the United States, I was in the industry then and gun sales really didn’t tick up then. And that told me, “Oh my god, the dog has finally caught the car here.” And Bloomberg actually wrote a story two weeks after that shooting, and the headline was, “Gun sales have stopped increasing after mass shootings.” Like, we became so desensitized to it, that we didn’t even have the reactionary “Ban guns,” “Go out and buy guns.”
Chris Hayes: Right.
Ryan Busse: Like, it was so common that it didn’t even happen after 500 people were shot.
Chris Hayes: Why did you leave? When did you leave?
Ryan Busse: I left in 2020. I stayed in for so long because I held to the principles that I believed and I still believe in. And I was the only one inside the industry that was doing anything right. All the stories I tell in the book about me trying to take it apart from the inside or weaken it from the inside, like I was the only one there and I thought if I leave like who’s going to do this? And I know that for some people that’s hard to rationalize. It’s not totally different than what people think of like Trump administration officials who thought, well, if I leave, somebody worse is going to come in.
I’ve built up this purchase power. Reporters are interested in it when policies come up. I’m somebody that can insert reason. Maybe I can talk these people into not being so devotedly crazy, but I couldn’t. I mean, I lost the battle.
Chris Hayes: What are your relationships like with other people in the industry over this time? Like, people are like, “Oh, Ryan, he’s a lib. He’s a squish.”
Ryan Busse: Like, I’ve had people report to me after the book came out, and it would get back to me like big time executives that say, “I always thought that sucker was a Democrat.” I’m like, “Really?” You sit around talking about this, but just the fact that I would utter criticisms, just the fact that I would say that these conspiracies were conspiracies, like they looked at me askance. They have this suspicion I wasn’t a true believer. Like, “Damn right, I wasn’t a true believer.”
Chris Hayes: And true believers, what I hear from you is that this complicated process of sort of selection and acculturation, and kind of being in the bunker together at least perceived, and the demographic basis from which this is drawn, which is like if you just blindly took a bunch of white male, rural folks who aren’t gun executives, like, you’d have a pretty good sense of what their politics would be, generally.
Ryan Busse: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: That this was all producing the kind of monoculture, it seems like, in that world, right?
Ryan Busse: Yeah, absolutely.
Chris Hayes: Like, there’s not a lot of diversity of viewpoint and politics, or whatever.
Ryan Busse: One of those stories I tell is about a day in my life at an NRA convention, and I hopped on an elevator and I have a badge on. That was my badge that I was going to the convention with. Like, it would be a packed elevator and people just instantly start talking to you about politics. They’re just like “That damn Obama.” I’m like, the assumption of sameness in that environment was just absolutely stifling.
Chris Hayes: 2020 is another inflection point, I think, because when you talk about your friends, gun sales went through the roof in 2020. In some ways, I think we’re still living with the after effects of it. And at some level, it makes a little bit of sense because this kind of apocalyptic sense, everything shutting down. Who knows what comes next a once in a century plague? There’s going to be zombies at your door.
But it was a record-setting year for gun sales, and we’re living with the after effects. I mean, I think establishing causality is difficult, but I don’t think it’s a crazy hypothesis to say the massive increase in gun sales in the last few years relates to the big increase in gun violence.
Ryan Busse: Yeah. I think the NRA and the industry learned like the theories were all born out there, right? What drives gun sales? Fear, mercy.
Chris Hayes: Fear. Right.
Ryan Busse: Hatred, tumult, angst.
Ryan Busse: It doesn’t mean it had to be fear of Obama. I mean, that’s just so interesting, right?
Ryan Busse: Yeah, exactly.
Chris Hayes: Because it’s like the fear of a virus.
Ryan Busse: But then you throw Black Lives Matter in it. And then sort of January 1, 2020 to January 7th, 2021, dude, we had it all. We had fear of COVID. We had fear of Black Lives Matter protesters. We had fear. I mean, you just went through it, right? But neither you or I have ever lived through a time that was anywhere close to that tumultuous, and that corresponds perfectly with, by far, the highest 12-month sales period of guns ever in the history of America. So everything that the NRA thought 15 years ago, we hate conspiracy like this, oh, yeah, it does. It drives gun sales and it almost got Trump reelected, right.
Chris Hayes: Well, I guess I want to sort of finish off in the place I started. But let’s take a step back from these political questions about what can get Republican votes? Can you bust the filibuster to get reasonable? And there’s low hanging fruit on the policy level, closing the background check loophole, other stuff.
But one of the arguments that people make, and it’s tough because it’s one of the better reactionary arguments. People make this argument about carbon too and it’s not a crazy one, which is like, whatever you do isn’t going to be big enough to deal with the scale of the problem. I mean, there’s 400-plus million guns in the country. Like, okay, you close the background check loophole, yada, yada.
My question is what would break the fever? What would stop the boat moving in that direction, because to me, it’s not just that it’s increasingly dangerous to American safety because of shootings. It’s very much posing an increasing threat to the liberal democratic order to non-violent transfers of power, et cetera. Like, it’s a complete existential threat.
Ryan Busse: I do, too. And this is what I argue in the book, I think the existential threat to our democracy in two areas he has greatly understated. One, in the actual like insurrection, armed people may try to take the government apart, there’s that. There’s also this, is anybody really free if you’re not free to experience an education in a grade school? Like, you have two kind of existential threats for a decent democracy.
I think what would sort of turn the ship, I have a couple of ideas. Yes, these incremental marginal things on the fringe that make things a little bit better instead of a little bit worse, i.e. background checks, red flag laws. I also am a big fan of turning the ship in a cultural way and essentially taking what once was very uncool to do, this armed intimidation, this open carry, that stuff used to be not cool, right? And so we didn’t see it in our country. It was a norm that wasn’t broken.
And I think outline open carry across our country, and really putting stiff laws in for armed intimidation would go a long way towards tamping down that sort of cultural explosion that has told, it’s a minority, but it’s a vocal minority of people, that it is okay to go out there and intimidate, that it is okay to use guns to scare people, that it is okay to march into the Michigan Capitol and scream at lawmakers with a loaded AR-15. Like, I’m sorry, but in a democracy, that is not okay. We have to figure out a way to turn that.
Chris Hayes: I completely agree with that. I’ve said this I think before on this program, and I think said it before on this podcast, I think on the show, which is that it’s increasing examples of the Second Amendment eating the first —
Ryan Busse: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — which is if you go to a protest and you’re expressing your First Amendment right to free speech and to petition your government. And then someone comes up to you expressing their First Amendment right to free speech and to petition the government, but they are carrying a deadly weapon that’s loaded, you’ve kind of lost your First Amendment, right?
Ryan Busse: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And the way I put it this way, too, is like think of the following scenarios. Knock on the door, you open it up, it’s your neighbor and they’re angry at you because you put your garbage on their part of the curve. And they’re like, “Hey, third time of asking you, man, please don’t do that, right? Don’t do that.” Okay. That’s a sort of unpleasant interaction.
Now, you run the same interaction, the guy is holding a loaded weapon. Those aren’t difference in degree, those are difference in kind.
Ryan Busse: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Those don’t exist on the same planet. And so, the difference between civil conflict in a civil society and the liberal democracy, arguments, protests, counter protests, with and without guns just exist in different planes of being.
Ryan Busse: So this is the best analogy I have to demonstrate this and I use this in my TED Talk. But let’s say you’re at a dinner party with nine of your friends and you’re waiting on the tenth You’re having political conversation, you’re drinking a lot of wine, things get crazy. But there’s a certain rule, right? There’s a certain civility that you hold to. You may even like raise the volume, but nobody screams. Like, this is the way things work.
The tenth person shows up, that person walks into the room, has a loaded AR-15, finger near the trigger. They sat down at the table, conversation freaking stops. The only opinion that matters now is that guy’s opinion. And that’s what this armed intimidation does to our democracy. It upends all the rules of civility. There’s no expertise. There’s no, like, debate. There’s none of the things that govern modern civil politics. That’s out the window.
Chris Hayes: And so you think that’s actually like a key legislative reform?
Ryan Busse: I think it’s such a key symbolic thing. Like, because we have provided license to radical right-wing actors in this country, that intimidation is okay, that racism is okay. Like, that’s what Trump did, right? He gave a license through all this. We have to figure out a way to take that license away. I personally believe it’s very key. I think as you described in your lead in, that is a way to start to turn the culture to go in the other direction.
Chris Hayes: Ryan Busse is a former firearms executive. He’s a senior advisor at Giffords, the gun safety organization. He’s author of “Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry that Radicalized America,” which is a memoir, as you heard, of his life and career inside that industry which he has subsequently left. That was so illuminating and thoughtful, Ryan. I really, really appreciate you taking the time.
Ryan Busse: Yeah. Thank you for having me, Chris. I appreciate your show and your thoughtfulness and your willingness to delve into tough topics. Thank you.
Chris Hayes: Once again, my thanks to Ryan Busse. That was really a fascinating conversation. And again, I’m trying to search for ways out of what feels like this kind of claustrophobic corner we’re locked into. I’m not sure whether Ryan’s description made me feel less or more claustrophobic, but I do think like understanding the psychology and the sort of sociology, this is pretty important.
We love to hear your thoughts. Tweet us with the hashtag #WITHpod, email WITHpod@gmail.com, and be sure to follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod. “Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway, Tiffany Champion and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory, and features music by Eddie Cooper. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
Tweet us with the hashtag #WITHpod, email WITHpod@gmail.com. “Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway, Tiffany Champion, Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and features music by Eddie Cooper. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.