President Trump put it best. In a recorded message to members at NRA’s 2025 Annual Meeting in Atlanta, the Commander in Chief recognized NRA-ILA for 50 years of service and achievement. “A congratulations on 50 years of courageous leadership by the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action,” he said. “And you give it a lot of action, that’s for sure.”
The legacy that has been entrusted to me and my team at ILA inspires and challenges us every day. We would be living in a very different country for gun owners without NRA-ILA’s advocacy.
A lot of folks remember 1975 as “the good ol’ days.” On the eve of its Bicentennial, America’s freedom and prosperity were the envy of the world.
Yet the Second Amendment was at a tipping point.
Seven years earlier, the Gun Control Act of 1968 (GCA) had empowered the federal government with unprecedented oversight of the U.S. firearms industry. Five years after that, what was then known as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) became an independent agency.
Crime was a national crisis in 1975. Then, as now, gun control falsely promised an easy answer to the complex dynamics of violence.
Two national groups arose to promote handgun bans in 1974; we know them now as Brady and the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. With willing accomplices in media and academia, they made inroads on public opinion. A 1975 Gallup poll indicated 41% of Americans supported a handgun ban.
Indeed, Washington, D.C., banned handgun possession in 1976. Chicago followed suit in 1982.
At the time, the U.S. Supreme Court’s last pronouncement on the Second Amendment was 1939’s United States v. Miller. There, the Court decided short-barreled shotguns weren’t among the “arms” protected by the right, because the justices had no evidence they bore “some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia[.]”
Miller’s holding was distorted into an orthodoxy that the Second Amendment was an outdated relic designed to preserve the states’ prerogative to maintain organized militias. If law students heard about the Second Amendment at all in 1975, they were taught it had nothing to do with the individual right to own and use firearms for private purposes.
Meanwhile, the right to carry a concealed handgun for self-protection was recognized in only six states, accounting for only 6% of the U.S. population.
This was the context in which ILA arose. Its mandate was, and remains, to protect the Second Amendment in the legislatures and courts, to support pro-gun candidates for office, and to educate the public on the right to keep and bear arms.
ILA’s strategy included funding academic research into the history and original meaning of the Second Amendment and building upon NRA’s cohesive culture of responsible gun owners to form a bloc of politically active pro-gun voters.
State by state, issue by issue, NRA-ILA changed the face of American firearms law and made political fortunes rise and fall on candidates’ Second Amendment records. Its grades and iconic orange postcards became synonymous with grassroots political activism.
The shift peaked in 2008 with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, which invalidated D.C.’s handgun ban. It became black-letter law that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms for self-defense, independent of service in an organized militia.
Handgun bans, in the Court’s words, were “off the table.”
Two years later, the high court extended this holding to apply against the actions of states and localities, ending Chicago’s handgun ban.
Today, right-to-carry is the law in all 50 states. Permitless carry is the law in 29 states. Every American jurisdiction recognizes the right to armed self-defense. In 34 of them, you can stand your ground in the face of an unprovoked attack and decide what course of action is the safest for you.
On the federal side, ILA helped reform the GCA with the Firearm Owner’s Protection Act of 1986 (FOPA). FOPA reined in ATF’s overreaching enforcement, enabled licensed dealers to sell long guns interstate, repealed ammunition sales red tape, and protected the interstate transport of unloaded firearms. It was, at the time, the most significant pro-gun law ever enacted by Congress.
Then came the administration of Bill Clinton (D), who prioritized gun control.
He started with the “Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act” (the so-called Brady Bill), named for Jim Brady, President Ronald Reagan’s press secretary who was wounded in a 1981 assassination attempt on Reagan himself.
The bill’s proponents sought a national waiting period for gun purchases, supposedly to give local law-enforcement officers time to perform background checks. They had the votes, but ILA lobbied for a two-phase approach, with the waiting period giving way to an automated, point-of-sale background check (the National Instant Criminal Background Check System or NICS).
Additional concessions were obtained. Individuals with a NICS-exempt carry or acquisition permit (now available in 26 states) could bypass the background check. There would be no waiting period in states with their own point-of-sale checks. Most importantly, federal law—as well as most state’s laws—continued to recognize the right to sell personal firearms to trustworthy buyers with no paperwork or bureaucracy at all.
Moreover, after the legislation was signed, litigation worked its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the 1997 case of Printz v. U.S. determined the Brady Bill unconstitutionally violated principles of federalism by commandeering state officers into a federal scheme.
No one at the NRA ever idealized NICS, but it ensured that in most American states, a law-abiding person could walk into a gun store, fill out a few minutes’ worth of paperwork and walk out moments later with the person’s chosen firearm. According to the FBI, the vast majority of NICS inquiries are resolved instantly. And, by law, the government must destroy records of NICS “proceeds” within 24 hours.
NRA-ILA’s real-world advocacy salvaged a livable situation from certain defeat and kept the pro-gun movement alive to fight another day.
Another round in that fight came the next year over the grotesquely misnamed Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act, commonly known as the Clinton Gun Ban.
That measure exploited rampant crime arising from the crack epidemic of the 1980s and early ‘90s to attach a ban on various semi-automatic firearms and a limit on magazine capacity to a sprawling federal crime bill enacted in 1994. ILA couldn’t stop it entirely, but its lobbying helped ensure the ban came with a 10-year sunset provision.
Yet his temporary and largely symbolic “victory” for firearm prohibitionists turned into a historic defeat for Clinton and his Democrat party. The “ban” didn’t affect guns so much as features. AR-15s and the like were still lawful, just without a flash hider and bayonet lug. Existing guns and magazines were grandfathered, and production and sales surged before the ban.
Clinton’s Democrat Party suffered historic losses in that year’s midterm elections, ceding control of the U.S. House of Representatives for the first time in over three decades. Clinton acknowledged that backlash from the ban was a factor.
Statutorily mandated studies would later determine Clinton’s ban was a crime-control failure.
NRA-ILA was involved in every step of these events and in making national gun control a third rail of U.S. politics for decades afterwards.
It also supported George W. Bush’s (R) victory over Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore (D). The Clinton Gun Ban would sunset under Bush’s watch. President Bush also signed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, effectively saving the U.S. gun industry from the financial ruin of coordinated lawfare.
NRA-ILA was the earliest and fastest friend of Donald Trump during his historic election victory in 2016, when the fate of the U.S. Supreme Court’s pro-Second Amendment majority hung in the balance. President Trump would go on to appoint three Supreme Court justices, all of whom voted with the majority in 2022’s New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which affirmed the right to carry guns in public for self-defense.
Gallup, meanwhile, still asks Americans if they support a handgun ban. Even in today’s hyper-partisan era, support has fallen to 20%, less than half what it was when ILA got started.
None of this happened by accident.
Other nations’ citizens have lost their rights to armed self-defense. There was no equivalent to NRA-ILA standing guard for them.
Yet nothing ILA does would mean anything without your support: your giving, your votes, your activism, your volunteerism.
As part of our year-long celebration of ILA’s 50th anniversary, we commissioned a limited run of handsome folding knives to commemorate this history. Each comes with a leather sheath so you can carry it daily as a tangible reminder of what we’ve accomplished together. Reserve your own with a $32 donation to ILA by visiting nraila.org/50yearsknife or scanning the QR code on this page with your phone.
As President Trump said, it’s been an action-packed 50 years, and I’ve only scratched the surface with this brief recap. Let’s all redouble our commitment as we embark on the next 50 years of progress for the right to keep and bear arms.
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