How a Group of High-School Students Put the NRA In the Hot Seat

For years, the National Rifle Association wielded its political power to dominate America’s conversation about gun rights and gun control — outlasting and overpowering the calls for change that followed mass shooting after mass shooting, from Columbine to Newtown to Charleston.

As the coronavirus crisis sparked a run on firearms in March 2020, a FRONTLINE documentary investigated how the NRA has long mobilized its base around fear that their guns would be taken away – and how the organization was being challenged by a group of students just as passionate about a cause of their own. 

In the above excerpt from NRA Under Fire, watch how, after a gun massacre killed 14 of their classmates, students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, embarked on a sustained gun control campaign that helped to motivate a groundswell of politicians willing to take on the NRA.

“We had a moment,” Parkland survivor Ryan Deitsch told FRONTLINE. “We had a chance to turn the tides, and we fundamentally did.”

As the documentary traced, the Parkland students’ movement helped to usher in a new era in which the NRA — long one of the most feared forces in Washington — came under threat from all sides. At the time the documentary first aired, in March 2020, New York State Attorney General Letitia James, one of the pro-gun control candidates elected following the Parkland students’ organizing, was leading an investigation into the NRA’s finances and had issued nearly 100 subpoenas to current and former employees. [Editors’ note: In August 2020, James sued the NRA, alleging “illegal self-dealing,” and the organization vowed to fight back.]

The group was also threatened from within: As the documentary explored, in 2019, leaked internal documents revealed lavish spending, and sparked allegations of financial misconduct by longtime leader Wayne LaPierre.

“There were a lot of people around the NRA looking to be rich. Can’t imagine any other non-profit in the entire country that has a similar mission where people are making so much money,” former NRA fundraiser Aaron Davis told FRONTLINE in NRA Under Fire, speaking out in his first on-camera interview.

[Editors’ note: LaPierre, who has denied any wrongdoing, was one of four individual defendants charged in the August 2020 New York state lawsuit, along with the NRA.]

For the full story, watch NRA Under Fire below. Building on Gunned Down, FRONTLINE’s 2015 investigation of the NRA’s political history and influence, the newer documentary traced the NRA’s evolution from a group of gun enthusiasts and sportsmen with minimal political focus to a powerful lobbying force opposing any perceived infringement of the constitutional right to bear arms — and explored how the NRA came to face a raft of new challenges.

NRA Under Fire premiered Tuesday, March 24, 2020, on PBS and is now available to stream in FRONTLINE’s online collection of documentaries, in the PBS Video App and on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel. This story was updated Oct. 20, 2021, to reflect developments since the documentary first aired.