How NRA TV Co-Opts Girl Power to Sell More Guns
The reality show I was watching had a familiar format: three women rushing to put together outfits within a time limit, within a set budget. When time was up, they modeled their looks for the host, smiling shyly as they descended a staircase.
The first contestant, Olympic biathlete Lanny Barnes, stood in front of the host, professional sport shooter Julie Golob. Barnes wore gray cropped pants, a midnight-blue jersey tank top, and a blue-and-black checked button-down. “In Colorado, the mornings and evenings are nice and cool, so it’s nice to have something to throw over a top,” she said, pulling the button-down away from her body.
“Absolutely,” Golob said, smiling encouragingly. “And where are you carrying?”
“At the waist,” Barnes said, pulling a tiny blue mock-gun out of her waistband. She smiled broadly. “But I have another option, too.” She reached into her shirt and pulled another mock-gun from beneath her armpit.
“Nice,” Golob purred.
I had almost forgotten, until that moment, that I wasn’t watching regular TV. I was watching NRA TV-a “concealed-carry fashion challenge” on a show called Love at First Shot, to be specific. After all, NRA TV’s content for women is very much meant to feel like everything else we watch. The formats all look interchangeable with TLC’s; the women all look like someone who’d be briefly labeled “Bethenny’s friend” on Real Housewives of New York. They talk about empowerment and wear chandelier earrings. For stretches of time, as you’re watching, it’s easy to forget who’s behind this stuff. Then someone lifts a bit of fabric, and you remember what’s underneath.
Ahead of the NRA-ILA Leadership Forum, which is happening this weekend (they got Mike Pence, people! Like he has literally anything else to do.), I spent a week watching NRA TV. I expected to feel like a snowflake Alice in a wonderland of rifle rah-rah and Obama-hate. And I did, in some moments-but those weren’t the scariest ones. The eeriest part of watching NRA TV was discovering its chief way of reaching women: Give them the kind of television they like, but without all those pesky people who might not live and die by the Second Amendment. There’s fashion stuff, gaggles of girlfriends chatting gun life over candy, and constant implications that-forget #MeToo reckonings-guns are the real source of female equality and empowerment. This isn’t fake news. It’s a fully-styled fake world. And my week inside it left me thinking less about guns than it did women, and the way we sometimes deal with division: by retreating to spaces wallpapered in opinions like ours. Spaces that have no windows to let realities we don’t like drift through.
You might have heard of NRA TV after the Parkland shooting, when people called for a boycott of Amazon and other outlets that distribute it. Then, I imagined NRA TV was dangerous propaganda masquerading as innocent programming. Once I started watching, I found this wasn’t true. For what it’s worth, NRA TV-a loosely-organized collection of safety-tip videos, shock jock shows, and female-centric docuseries with names like Armed & Fabulous and Love at First Shot-really isn’t trying to sell gun culture to anyone who isn’t bought in. Smith & Wesson is blatantly all over everything, and the platform’s politics are clearly established. The first words I heard when I launched my new NRA TV app were spat by a host named Grant Stinchfield: “If you’re a gun-hating liberal, you’re mentally irregular and a loony toon.”
Obviously, NRA TV isn’t hoping to catch the eye of the woman who loves to hunt but also voted for Hillary. These fiercely partisan moments didn’t surprise me-it’s 2018, and I’m alive. But what did surprise me was how little NRA TV relies on partisan appeals when it comes to luring women in. Most of the female-centric programming barely acknowledges politics at all; the majority of the shows fall into that wallpapered rabbit hole category. Armed & Fabulous is a series of pastel profiles of women who love to shoot; the episodes have an oddly romantic feel, like an episode of The Bachelorette where the girl always picks the gun. The ladies on Love At First Shot, which examines female gun culture, are all relatable, warm, and smiley-though you get the sense the channel is struggling to find more of them. Everyone has to play multiple roles, like in a backyard play-hosts are repurposed as interview subjects, safety advisers pull double-duty as foreign affairs experts. Still, there’s an intimacy to seeing the same faces again and again, and I found myself genuinely listening, and even sympathizing, as they talked about being vilified for carrying a gun while babywearing, or having to cut ties with family members that couldn’t accept their stance on gun rights.
Sprinkled throughout all these segments are moments designed to evoke girl power. “I love introducing women to shooting because it is an equalizer,” says Esther Schneider, an NRA board member, in her Armed & Fabulous profile. “You have to have the will to rise up and help yourself.” A Love at First Shot segment that shows Golob taking her preteen daughter to the range feels like a warm-and-fuzzy glimpse at a next-generation feminist. “What do you think about shooting-is it a girl thing or a boy thing?” co-host Natalie Foster asks the child, who screws up her face and answers thoughtfully, “I think it’s for anyone because it’s fun.”
But NRA TV’s brand of feminism is as narrow as the barrel on an AR-15. Its talent can’t stop reminding you that you’re entitled to defend yourself-but, just in case you start getting thoughts of other rights you should have into your pretty little head, there’s marketing strategist Lydia Longoria, who hosts mini-segments called “27 Words” (after the length of the Second Amendment), to remind you not to pursue those in the voting booth. “Liberals… want to pry these guns from our hands,” she says, urgently, in one piece, adding: “‘Assault weapon’ is a made-up term to incite fear.” Longoria’s segment is sandwiched in between the lighter segments, as if NRA TV wants to make sure you get a zap of brainwashing for every twenty minutes of gauzy Bravo-knockoff stuff.
Still, for all the girl-power stuff, there’s a troubling difference between what the men on NRA TV do and what the women on NRA TV do. The men are sweaty and hard-charging, yelling with a level of assurance that seems to match their blood pressure. But the women seem less convinced of their own shill; they spend a lot of time defending themselves. And I don’t mean ballistically.
“People ask, ‘How can you say you love animals, but you like to hunt?’” says Libby Krottinger, one of the Armed & Fabulous subjects. “What they have to understand is, it’s conservation.”
In a View-style roundtable on Love at First Shot, competitive shooter and salon owner Krystal Dunn described a conversation she’d had with a client. “He [asked me], ‘What do you need an AR for?’” she said. “And I was like… ‘What do you need a car that goes 200 miles an hour for? Because I can. What do I not need it for?’”
“Taking that responsibility of my own safety was that step into womanhood, that was the final step for me,” said Longoria in the same segment.
Empathetic murmurs and nods rippled across the couch. For all the slow-mo action-heroine shots that punctuate the segments, for all the talk of guns being the ultimate male-female equalizer, the women on NRA TV seem haunted, in a way the men don’t, by loved ones and Twitter trolls who don’t agree with them. You can tell that it bothers them, having had to trade in being seen as virtuous and reasonable in order to be here, repping the world’s biggest gun lobby. You can tell that their real fear isn’t losing their weapons; it’s losing their reputations. And you can see them banding together, retreating into the rabbit hole, where no one will make fun of them and where they can reshape reality in moments like the scene in which Golob urges a woman who’s only shot a handgun once-“It was not the best at all,” the woman says nervously-to try out an AR-15.
“I know you’ve probably heard about them on the news,” Golob says playfully. “But it’s a ton of fun.” She presses one of the rifle’s bullets into the woman’s hands. “Twenty-two caliber,” she explains. “That is the size of the hole it will make on the target.”
Watching, I can’t help it; my stomach twists. When I picture those holes, I see them in bodies.
The frightened girl gathers her courage, squints into the scope, and fires.
“How do you feel?” Golob asks her, as the gunshot’s echo fades.
“Not as scary as I think I was anticipating,” the girl says.
“Exactly!” Golob chirps. “It’s just this nice light poof of happiness!”
I spend a week watching the women of NRA TV, long enough time for me to notice that several of them wear the same gold revolver charm necklace. I come away unnerved about how these women, and their viewers, have used this programming to isolate themselves with a smile, over a single issue. And I can almost hear my fellow liberal loony toons saying, Who cares? Let them stay in their rabbit hole. It has nothing to do with us.
But it does have something to do with us. When women break themselves into pieces like this, trading in solidarity to clique up around one cause, sexism never fails to take advantage. It never hesitates to flood the fissures. I got bitter proof of this when, in the middle of my NRA TV watching week, I tuned into an episode of Relentless with NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch.
If you’ve absorbed any sort of cultural association between the NRA and women, you’re probably wondering why it’s taken me so long to mention Loesch, who’s easily the most famous person on NRA TV. (See: her CNN exchange with activist Emma Gonzalez; her musings that the late nonviolent-resistance icon Martin Luther King, Jr. might still be alive today if he had carried a gun.) Loesch exists outside the rosy realms of the platform’s news-agnostic girls next door. She chops, twists and pounds the news of the day til she finds the bear-arms angle. Her guests are predictably worthless, agreeing with her live from their spare bedrooms. When she imitates gun control advocates, she uses a lisp she ripped off that homophobic kid from your high school. What I’m saying is: Regardless of your beliefs, Relentless is a miserable viewing experience.
So I was already half tuned out when, on April 18, Dana began to debate Elliott Woods, a journalist who had recently reported on the NRA’s dogwhistle marketing for The New Republic. From the start, the segment was a shitshow. A delay in Woods’ audio feed made for a painfully unsynchronized debate. Both parties made the best of it, pressing on with their points. Unsurprisingly, I mostly agreed with Woods’.
Then, at the height of their bickering, Woods-who’s also a veteran and a National Magazine Award winner-took a breath and unleashed a line that smacked of him having rehearsed it the night before.
“Dana, how can you call me an anti-gun advocate?” he said. “When you were figuring out what to do with your toddlers and getting your blogging career going, I was patrolling Highway One in Iraq.”
I straightened up.
“Are you f-ing kidding me?” I said, out loud, from where I, a toddler mom and sometimes-blogger, sat, surrounded by Fischer Price, researching this article. Oh, I thought to myself. Twitter will destroy this guy for that pig remark.
And Twitter did. Part of Twitter. An unsavory part that reached for slurs nearly immediately (Woods retweeted some of the ugliest examples). Woods’ chauvinist quip was quickly drowned in the greater ugliness of the people who came to Loesch’s rescue. Over the next 24 hours, I kept an eye on my own Twitter timeline, and an ear out in my conversations, to see if anyone I knew had been similarly incensed by the exchange. But no one even mentioned it; it had happened in a vacuum. Woods had gotten away with it, as I’m sure he figured he would. I highly doubt he would’ve tried that line on MSNBC, CNN, or even Fox News. But he calculated-correctly-that most people who typically rail against misogyny wouldn’t be paying attention.
The irony, of course, was that this happened on Loesch’s show, on a channel designed to shield its talent and viewers from the other side of their arguments. The women of NRA TV, I sensed while watching, built their wallpapered rabbit hole to escape other girls who don’t get them. But a man can still get into their safe space and smash things up without consequence. When that happens, you miss having neighbors.
I won’t be around to see the next guy who comes on Relentless and demeans Dana Loesch. At the end of my week watching NRA TV, I was glad to delete the app, relieved to fall back into the arms of Morning Joe. But even now, I’m unsettled. The women of NRA TV remain in their corner. I’m far away, back in mine. And I can’t shake the feeling that something’s got us both in its scope, right where it wants us.
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