These Honored Dead:

Sacrifice Narratives in the NRA’s American Rifleman

Magazine

Jessica Dawson and Dana Beth Weinberg1

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a case study of how a fringe idea moves into the culturalmainstream. In its cultural and political project to defend the Second Amendment, the National Rifle Association (NRA) embraced New War culture, a counter-cultural response to the trauma of the war in Vietnam, which extended warrior honor to armed men defending their families from anincreasingly hostile world and a suspect government that might try to disarmthem. Using textual analysis of the American Rifleman, we explore how the NRA co-opted narratives of soldiers' sacrifice for the nation to promote a New War cultural message. We find that magazine contributors retooled the traditional narrative to feature non-military protagonists, to differentiate the nation from the government, and to spotlight freedom as a sacrificial cause. With their strong civil religious overtones, the NRA's sacrifice narratives served as value-laden signposts that elevated the Second Amendment to a sacred God-given freedom, extended the consecration from sacrifice to encompass their mainstream audience of gun owners, and identified politicaland cultural enemies. These classic American narratives of soldiers’ sacrifice for the nation were thus co-opted to deliver a simultaneously patriotic and anti-government counter-cultural message that would resonate with mainstream American culture. (199 words)

Keywords: NRA, Narrative, Sacrifice, Second Amendment, freedom, New

War culture

1 Jessica Dawson is an assistant professor at the United States Military Academy at West Point and can be reached at Jessica.dawson@westpoint.edu. Dana Weinberg is a professor ofSociology at Queens College - City University of New York and can be reached at dana.bethweinberg@qc.cuny.edu1

INTRODUCTION

How do fringe cultural narratives or messages move into the mainstream?

A growing body of research has pointed to the persuasive and identity-building capacities of narratives for social movements and the way activists and stigmatized groups make strategic use of narratives, or storytelling, to shape understandings and mobilize participants. As Polletta points out, “storytelling is able to secure a sympathetic hearing for positions unlikely to gain such a hearing otherwise” (Polletta 2009, 105) in large part because stories are open to interpretation. Characteristically ambiguous in their moral, narratives invite others to attribute their own meaning, thereby making new or minority ideas or opinions less antagonistic or threatening (see also (Polletta and Chen 2012). Beyond a vehicle for relatively benign introduction of new ideas, narratives also have the capacity to engage new recruits: “Rather than simply persuasive devices deployed by strategic collective actors, narratives help toconstitute new strategic actors,” (Polletta 1998, 154).

As Lamont notes, “As important as messages are, their ‘medium’ or pathways of diffusion of the messages are equally important” (2019, 684). Inaddition to narrative’s power to introduce potentially controversial messagesin non-threatening ways and to engage new actors, narrative as a medium also has the power to imbue messages with cultural legitimacy. Successful claims to legitimacy require close adherence to dominant cultural codes, with culture driving the strategic decisions actors make about conforming to and challenging culture in the narratives they choose to tell and how they tell them (Polletta and Chen 2012). To the extent that narratives can call upon the codes of civil society, they are especially powerful tools for persuasion (Smith 2010) and for affirming group values and even national collective identity (Alexander and Smith 1993). The success of a narrative message is thus not only a matter of substance but also of strategic choices related to narrative form and presentation.

This is a case study in the way narratives (as stories) may be used both to speak to a core audience of believers while also introducing and engaging new and even initially unreceptive audience segments to counter-cultural messages. Examining narratives as rhetorical and discursive forms, we adopt a mixed methods approach that extends the work on narrative andcivil religious discourse. We show how seemingly slight changes in a common and familiar narrative, in this case the American patriotic sacrifice narrative, can be leveraged in what almost seems a sleight-of-hand trick to convey a very different set of cultural messages and to identify “moralized fact, actions sacred or profane, [and] events full of heroes and villains”(Smith 2010, 45).

Deviating from much research on narrative, the case example in this paper hails not from a rising protest movement or a stigmatized or fringe

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group but from a well-established and powerful advocacy group: the NationalRifle Association. We investigate the NRA’s adoption of a far-right cultural message aimed primarily at disenfranchised men outside of the political mainstream while simultaneously maintaining a more mainstream, New Right patriotic message. Despite strong initial resistance to their anti-government message, decades later, this same cultural narrative, continuously promoted by the NRA and other right-wing groups, has become a mainstay of American political culture, and the NRA remains a driving forcein politics.

BACKGROUND

Started by veterans of the Civil War in 1871 as an organization dedicated to improving marksmanship, the National Rifle Association (NRA) began active lobbying in 1975, almost a century after its founding, to protectthe Second Amendment (Melzer 2012; Knox 2009; Waldman 2015). Arriving on the political scene in the late 1970s at the same time as the Moral Majority, the NRA has significantly influenced American politics on the New Right. The NRA’s influence has largely been explored in historical (Waldman 2015; Dunbar-Ortiz 2018; Obert 2018), gendered (Carlson 2015b; Stroud 2012; Carlson 2019), and legal contexts (Halbrook 2012; Winkler 2013; Knox 2009). Recent work has also begun investigating the religious context(Melzer 2012; Dawson 2019; Mencken and Froese 2017; Yamane 2017a; Rodman 2019). Arguably no other organization has influenced mainstream American gun culture (Hofstadter 1970; Yamane 2017b; Melzer 2012) as much as the NRA.

The NRA’s explicit lobbying efforts began in the historical context of the civil unrest and social upheaval following the 1960s and the Vietnam War(Belew 2018; Gorski 2017; Jeffords 1989) at a time when disenfranchised groups such as women and Black Americans sought Constitutional inclusion of their civil rights. The military defeat in Vietnam engendered a feeling of emasculation in American men and sparked a particular backlash in the formof the “emergence of a highly energized culture of war and warrior…New War culture presented the warrior role for all men” (Gibson 1994, 9). In the post-Vietnam era, New War culture offered (mostly white) men a sense of identity and moral purpose derived from protecting themselves and their families in an inherently dangerous and increasingly hostile world (Mencken and Froese 2017; Carlson 2015b; Stroud 2016; Yamane 2017a) — one where the institutions of American life were no longer viewed as sufficient to protect the American way of life (Bellah 1992). New War culture offered a path to restoring the honor of the “American fighting man…[who was] degraded and damaged by [his] experiences in Vietnam” (Huebner 2011, 256) by providing all armed men — the NRA’s target constituency — the ability to be honorable warriors defending freedom. However, New War culture embodies a counter-cultural, insurrectionist position: these New 3

Warriors “either with or without official approval…could do what was necessary to win victory and thus affirm fundamental truths of America’s virtue and military prowess” (Gibson 1994, 27). Yet the NRA also sought to invoke the Second Amendment as a fundamental right established by the Constitution and provided by the same government that its New Warriors might have to defy to protect their freedom. By embracing New War cultural ideology, the NRA risked becoming associated with anti-government extremists (Belew 2018; Zeskind 2009).

Indeed, in 1995, then NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre overplayed the anti-government rhetoric when he referred in a fundraising letter to FBI agents as “jack-booted government thugs” — a term frequently associated with Nazis (LaPierre 1995). His use of this term referenced government overreach and misconduct at Ruby Ridge and Waco that were widely viewed as assaults on American citizens (Crothers 2003). Ruby Ridge—where white nationalist Randy Weaver, refusing to turn himself into federalagents, engaged in a standoff that resulted in his wife and son being shot by the FBI—marked a turning point for how many disparate groups on the American far right viewed the government. As a result, the American far right began coalescing around this antigovernment narrative in the early 1990s (Zeskind 2009). Attempting to capitalize on this emerging sentiment in terms of membership recruitment and fundraising, the NRA began to adopt more extreme language toward the federal government. However, while LaPierre’s statement about the FBI may have been welcomed by the emerging militia and white nationalist Christian Identity movements, it was not well received by more mainstream members of the American public. Outrage over the letter led to senior NRA and government officials such as former President George H.W. Bush resigning their membership in protest(Bush 1995), and the NRA hit a low point in it favorability rating among Americans (Jones 2019). Indeed, WWII and Korea-era veterans, who were at the height of their political and social power as a generation in the 1990s, balked at the prospect of abandoning the government for which they believed they’d sacrificed (Faludi 2000).

The insurrectionist overtones of the New War rhetoric provoked a backlash against the NRA, which then sought a path for reconciling its anti-government messaging with patriotic ones. Over the next decades, the NRA successfully shifted its rhetoric to influence cultural change that “foregrounded and recalibrated” defense of the Second Amendment(Rodman 2019, 634), even in the face of rising calls for gun control following the mass school shootings at Columbine, Sandy Hook and elsewhere. Deploying Christian nationalist (Mencken and Froese 2017; Melzer 2012) alongside civil religious discourse (Dawson 2019), the NRA recast the SecondAmendment not as a mere civil liberty but as a fundamental freedom extended from God. A Pew Research Center study reported in 2007 that the NRA’s favorability rating among Americans had surpassed 50% for the first time since its low in 1995 with the greatest increases in favorability from its

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target constituencies of men (+8%), Whites (+11%), and Republicans (+12%) (Rosentiel and Neidorf 2007). Moreover, in a 2017 survey, Pew foundthat one in four Americans owns a gun and that a full three quarters of gun owners viewed the right to own a gun as essential to their freedom (Parker etal. 2017). While the NRA was not the only purveyor of this cultural message, it is significant that the link between gun ownership and individual freedom critical to the NRA’s political position has become so mainstream.

This paper uses a Cultural Sociology framework to shed light on how the NRA made what was once a controversial message more acceptable. Using the NRA’s most mainstream and longest running magazine, American Rifleman, we demonstrate how the NRA co-opted traditional American narratives of soldiers sacrificing for the nation to position themselves as patriotic New War defenders of Second Amendment freedom against corrupt government elites, a narrative that its constituents and a wide swath of the American public ultimately found palatable. Moreover, they transformed the narratives from defense of this freedom from a civic obligation to a sacred duty entrusted to a new breed of warriors willing to defy the government if necessary (Dawson 2019; Melzer 2012; Yamane 2017a).

NARRATIVES AND MEANING

In 1995, the NRA confronted a hard truth about civil discourse: they could not simply adopt anti-government rhetoric and expect their membership, especially a patriotic and law-abiding membership, to follow along. As Smith (2005) explains:

Civil society is the location of struggles over meaning. . . Agents relentlessly struggle for the moral and interpretive high ground, and they cannot achieve this objective by speaking in their own, more particularistic terms or by using their own veiled cultural codes and local idioms. To take this strategy is to risk being ignored by others, or perhaps worse, to be incomprehensible to them even if it brings the easy gratifications of preaching to the converted. Efforts at a more active persuasion, justification, and proselytism require actors to fix meanings for multiple audiencesusing the lingua franca of the public sphere. (Smith 2005, 13)

Smith describes civil discourse as a classification system, “the ‘common sense’ we use for talking about cultural and political life” (Smith 2005, 17). Civil discourse ultimately boils down to two primary codes: “A Discourse of Liberty that marks out the sacred and valued and a Discourse of Repression … that denotes the profaned, polluted, evil, and dangerous” (17). We argue that in seeking to restore their favorability and spread their message, the NRA began to adopt this common language of civil society for persuasion through the strategic use of narrative.

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The NRA’s election of American cultural and film icon Charlton Heston to the NRA presidency and the launch of his “Crusade to Save the Second Amendment” (1997, 30) in the late 1990s, occurred as the NRA was countering the legislative failure of the 1993 Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act and the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban. These were the first major federal gun restrictions since the 1960s (Winkler 2013; Waldman 2015). Heston took a more centrist rhetorical approach than executive vice president Wayne LaPierre. Avoiding blatantly anti-government rhetoric, he argued that the Second Amendment is “America’s First Freedom, the one right that protects all others...The right to keep and bear arms is the one right that allows ‘rights’ to exist at all’” (1997, 32). In this way, Heston placed the NRA firmly in the camp of defending liberty and fighting repression. But invoking these binaries was not enough in itself to prompt a mainstream cultural shift. While these binaries give us a rubric for sensemaking, narratives are what drive action: “People make sense of the world with stories and act accordingly” (Smith 2005, 18).

Simply put, narratives are stories from which we derive cultural meaning. Like all stories, they have a beginning, middle, and end. The sharing of narratives is a social activity, and the teller strings together a chronological chain of events that work together to convey a point to the audience. However, the moral or point of a narrative is often not contained within the story itself but rather is what Polletta (Polletta 2008) terms “allusive.” Polletta and Callahan (2017) posit that the audience derives a story’s meaning by reference to other stories it invokes, for example: “We hear a story of a little guy going up against a big guy, and we recognize them as David and Goliath. We hope David will win and, if he does, we take the message that cleverness can triumph over brute force. Stories’ persuasive power lies in their ability to call up other compelling stories” (2017, 3). In Polletta and Callahan’s formulation, the most powerful narratives can be invoked by simple reference, usually to the story’s protagonist, because the audience already knows the story.

Stories have the capacity to build collective identity, not through didactic lectures on morals, but through their personal nature. Audiences might take pleasure in catching a reference to a story they already know, especially if it is a story known mostly to insiders (Polletta and Callahan 2017) as in the use of dog whistles (Albertson 2006). But stories also carry deeper collective meaning when they hit a salient emotional chord, whether or not they are true. Hochschild terms these stories that feel as if they are true “deep stories.”

Nostalgia narratives are a potent example of potentially deep stories that can construct or reconstruct identity. According to Maly (2013) nostalgianarratives are used by individuals “when they feel their identities, status, and/or attachments to a place are threatened, and these narratives provide a means for constructing or framing identities that are positive” (2013, 759). In civil discourse, nostalgia narratives provide a way for groups collectively

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to rewrite their history and affirm a positive identity and can be used, for example, to “defend territory, to create a sense of authenticity, and to give legitimacy to a way of life” (Kasinitz and Hillyard, 1995: 161).

As such, these powerful narratives can provide the basis for collective action (Ocejo 2011). In sum, narratives, and especially nostalgia narratives, elicit and play on emotion by tapping into deeply held beliefs and values, and shared interpretations of these narratives serve as an expressions of group membership. As Polletta and Callahan conclude in their research on fake news, “stories may have political impact less by persuading than by reminding people which side they are on” (2017, 14).

In order to bring its New War rhetoric around the Second Amendment into the mainstream, the NRA needed to shape a civil discourse that cast themselves as defenders of liberty and crusaders against repression, and they needed to mobilize narratives that could foster collective identity among both anti-government and patriotic factions. We posit that the nostalgia narrative of honorable soldiers laying down their lives to restore the nation presented the perfect starting point. The beloved sacrifice narrative could be used in service of the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing to mask the NRA’s subversive, counter-cultural message and deliver it to a perhaps unsuspecting and initially unreceptive audience of sheepdogs devoted to protecting the flock (Grossman 2009) as well as to attract lone wolves.

DATA AND METHODS

The data for this research is the corpus of American Rifleman magazine from 1975-2019, the official magazine of the National Rifle Association that has been consistently published in its current form since the early 1923(O’Neill 2007). We begin with 1975, the official end to the Vietnam conflict and two years before the Revolt in Cincinnati when Second Amendment hardliners seized control of the NRA Board and the organization began to focus on political lobbying efforts.

American Rifleman includes transcripts of major speeches given at the annual conventions each year as well as presidential addresses, which focus on key issues each month, and presents an excellent vehicle for investigating the NRA’s shifting discourse and cultural project around the Second Amendment. Whereas magazines like Soldier of Fortune also rose to prominence in the immediate post-Vietnam era, Soldier of Fortune focused on survival skills and apocalyptic narratives of societal collapse. As a result itappealed more to paramilitary fringe readers than mainstream gun culture(Lamy 1992). In contrast, the American Rifleman focused on more mainstream topics like safety and sports shooting (Dunbar-Ortiz 2018; Melzer 2012; Carlson 2015a; Rodman 2019; Gibson 2000; Knox 2009), hunting, and finally, defense of gun rights (Yamane, Ivory, and Yamane 2018; Saylor, Vittes, and Sorenson 2004; Melzer 2012). Moreover, unlike

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other NRA publications written for an audience of core Second Amendment supporters, such as America’s First Freedom (Melzer 2012), American Rifleman is more representative of how the organization has communicated to the broadest base of membership and readers. Its circulation represents one of the top 50 magazine distributions in the country (Waldman 2015), even in an increasingly digital environment. The NRA states that more than 2million subscribers receive American Rifleman every month (O’Neill 2007).

The sample includes nearly every issue from 1975 until December 2019. Digital editions from 2008 until the present were downloaded from a digital archive. Physical editions were accessed through library archives or purchased from collectors through online vendors such as eBay. Physical editions were scanned to create digital editions and then optimized for text analysis using publicly available optical character recognition software2. Where optical character recognition was unclear, the text was read and selected passages transcribed. All remaining issues from 1975 until December 2019 were included in the dataset. The total number of issues analyzed is 5163. Issues average between 100-120 pages in length, with election year issues being on average about 20% longer.

We use a mixed-methods approach to analyze textual content. First, using natural language processing (NLP) we computationally searched through the magazines for direct mentions (Morning 2008) of the word “sacrifice” or its inflections (e.g. "sacrificial"). In addition, we searched for specific phrases denoting and commonly associated with sacrifice: "laid down their lives," "gave up their lives," and "risked their lives." Our focused approach identified 647 unique occurrences of discussions of sacrifice, 216 of which were advertisements (for example for commemorative memorabilia,fundraising for memorials such as the US Army Memorial at Fort Belvoir, weapons, scopes or other equipment) and 428 of which were distinct articles.In this analysis, we focus only on the articles, which appeared in 250 different issues of the magazine, or 48% of the issues in the full sample, withmany of the articles representing Presidential Addresses or articles from the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action. However, the bulk of issues including references to sacrifice, 67.6%, were published in 1995 and after, representing more than half (54.5%) of the issues across the sample.

Sacrifice narratives follow a common plot progression: A protagonist sacrifices something for some cause. “Sacrifice” is not a narrative on its own but rather serves, as do the other variants, as a keyword reference that signals presence of a sacrifice narrative or an allusion to one. In the case of

2 Due to software errors in scanning, the exact counts and word usage may be slightly off. Transcription errors as well as optical character recognition errors may have results in references and usages being missed due to not being picked up by automated searches. Wedo not believe these errors undermine the broader findings.3 Several years combined November and December into a single issue, including one case in 1995 where January and February were combined into a single issue. There are also 14 missing issues in our sample, with 6 of the missing magazines from the time period of 1995-2005.8

allusions, some part of the sacrifice narrative may be included along with thekeyword “sacrifice.” In the most powerful narratives, allusions may be achieved with reference to the protagonist (Polletta and Callahan 2017), but sacrifice narratives may also include allusions to the sacrificial cause.

We manually coded the narratives or narrative allusions associated withthe term “sacrifice” based on what was sacrificed, by whom, and for what cause. We identified five types of sacrifices: sacrifices of blood, service, money, rights, or quality. Using a combination of computational search and hand-coding, we then further coded the narratives by the type of protagonist(military, patriots, Americans, Founding Fathers, or the NRA) and the purposeof the sacrifice (for the nation, for freedom or liberty, for rights, or for other reasons). Interrater reliability was 98.3%.

Our analysis examines the increased prevalence of sacrifice narratives in American Rifleman beginning after its public relations crisis in 1995. We examine the shifts in those narratives in terms of their prevalence, their content, and the way they were coupled with other narratives. We explore the implications of these narrative presentations and allusions for the NRA’s project to build and affirm a simultaneous patriotic and anti-government group identity around a New Warrior cultural message that would mobilize mainstream constituents to defend the Second Amendment even from the government.

RESULTS

Invocation of Patriotic “Blood” and “Service” Narratives

We identified five main types of sacrifice narratives referenced in American Rifleman from 1975-2019. We characterized them according to what is being sacrificed in the narrative. Articles referencing sacrifice sometimes contained more than one type of narrative.

“Blood” (n= 93) narratives relate to sacrifice of life or limb in war, combat, or battle and is sometimes referred to as the “ultimate sacrifice.” This category, which includes references to laying down or giving up of lives, is the second most prominent narrative surrounding sacrifice from 1995 on.

“Service” (n=137) typically refers to tireless effort, hard work, dedication, as well as sacrifices of time or family for a larger purpose. It also refers to a generalized type of sacrifice that does not specify bloodshed or loss of life, for example, “the sacrifice their forefathers made to secure the freedom they now enjoy” (Roberts 1977, 33) or “the countless sacrifices made by the American military” (NRA Staff 2013, 64), or the risking of lives. For much of this analysis, we consider the categories of blood and service sacrifice together (n=230).

“Quality” (n=156) points toward sacrifices in quality or performance, usually in relation to gun equipment, for example: “I sacrifice a little reloading time, but not much” (Weller 1978, 45) or “… target shooters will 9

sacrifice almost nothing over the first 300 yds” (NRA Staff 1981, 69). Quality sacrifice narratives typically occur within the context of product reviews or indiscussing new techniques or technology.

“Money” (n=18) narratives involve the sacrifice of money, for example:“[competitors] will have to sacrifice to buy guns, ammunition and pay expenses to matches” (Popowski 1975, 58) or “a sacrifice they can make andstill pay the rent”(Burke 1977, 80). These narratives tended to be donor solicitations, where NRA leadership requests a financial sacrifice to support the NRA, or recognition of volunteers who had donated money often along with time. This was the least prominent of the sacrifice narratives. Moreover, once the NRA began regularly invoking “blood” and “service” sacrifice narratives, they largely ceased referring to NRA donations as sacrifice.

“Rights” (n=38) refers to sacrificing rights or legislative gains. These narratives generally discuss a political loss of Second Amendment rights. Here are three examples:

But we cannot allow the anti-hunters, hiding behind the cloak of conservation, to sacrifice sport hunting and subvert the interests of our responsible and ethical hunters for a “cause” that does no one any good. (Reinke 1988, 10, emphasis added)

We also risk having our Second Amendment freedoms sacrificed on the altar of "stopping kids from killing kids" (Metaksa 1997, 47, emphasis added)

The political elites. The academic elites. The trial attorney elites. The health-care elites. They all want us to sacrifice our freedom and independence on the false promise that they’ll protect us (Robinson 2003, 16, emphasis added).

The form of these narratives and narrative allusions tend to discuss politicians seeking to sacrifice gun rights for a cause deemed unworthy.

Figure 1 presents trends in the counts of the most prominent sacrifice narratives—“blood,” “service,” and “quality”— over time. From 1975 to 1995“quality” was the most commonly referenced type of “sacrifice” narrative. This finding reflects an initial and enduring emphasis on American Rifleman content targeting gun enthusiasts. Beginning in the 1995-1999 period, however, narratives of “blood” and “service” sacrifice sharply rise to sustained prominence.

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Figure 1. Predominant Sacrifice Narratives in American Rifleman from 1975-2019

To the extent that narratives draw their power from their ability to call upon other related narratives (Polletta and Callahan 2017), the narratives of blood and service sacrifice, presented a particularly strong starting point for the NRA in its bid to recast itself as patriotic defenders of freedom after its anti-government rhetoric went too far and alienated members. Narratives of sacrifice, especially those that reference “blood sacrifice,” contain an encoded reference to powerful religious narratives in the Judeo-Christian tradition (Gorski 2017). American religious nationalism invokes blood sacrifice with allusive Biblical references that harken to pre-rabbinic Jewish religious tradition, which “defines Israel’s most fundamental obligation to good: blood offerings” (Gorski 2017, 21) as well as to the Christian religious tradition surrounding the sacrifice of Jesus and the redemption of the sins of humanity.

Not only does the Judeo-Christian reference make sacrifice narratives particularly resonant for Western audiences, but they are deeply rooted in American history. As Marvin and Ingle note, “American’s have rarely bled, sacrificed or died for Christianity or any other sectarian faith. Americans have often bled, sacrificed and died for their country” (Marvin/Ingle 1999, 9).In the typical American sacrifice narrative then, soldiers sacrifice of themselves on behalf of the nation.

Sacrifice fundamentally involves “a religious act which, through the consecration of the victim, modifies the condition of the moral person who accomplishes it” (Hubert and Mauss 1964, 13). Thus, in sacrifice narratives, the sacrificer occupies a moral high ground and a sanctity that extends to

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the cause on behalf of which the sacrifice was made (Hubert and Mauss 1964, 24). By extension, those who honor the sacrifice or its legacy also share in the elevated status flowing from consecration. In sum, identifying with a sacrificer, for example by being a member of the sacrificer’s group, or somehow honoring the cause of the sacrifice are both paths to claiming the sacredness that flows from the sacrificer to the chosen cause.

In the Gettysburg Address, President Lincoln provides the quintessential example of the classic American sacrifice narrative and the way it is used to signal consecration of soldiers and the nation. He begins hisnarrative of soldiers' sacrifice at Gettysburg with invocation of the nation andits core values, in the process alluding to the nostalgia narrative of the nation's founding: "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” He then invokes soldiers' sacrificing for the nation: "Now we are engaged in a great civil war... We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.” He then goes on to discuss the consecrating aspect of their sacrifice, saying, “… in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men,living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world … can never forget what they did here.” In this statement he places firmly the power of consecration on the soldiers, the sacrificers of blood or service, and no others. Seeking to unify a fractured nation and reaffirm national values and a shared sense of collective identity, Lincoln then calls upon his audience to devote themselvesto the now sacralized cause for which the soldiers died: “It is for us the living … to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve thatthese dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth” (Lincoln 1865, emphasis added). The sacrifice narrative is an important part of Lincoln’s callfor national reunification since, as Marvin and Ingle (1991) explain, shared blood sacrifice is the tie that not only binds but also defines the nation. Fox and Miller-Idriss differentiate the nation, what they term the “cultural unit” from the state or the government, the “political unit” (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008, p. 536).

Classic American sacrifice narratives invoke the “cultural unit,” and theway they incorporate the “political unit,” if at all, can send powerful messages about the relationship between the two. In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln calls out both the state and freedom as consecrated causes,intimately attaching them to the nation. This strategic narrative choice underlines the political tensions of the time. During and following the Civil

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War, the American nation became an “object of shared struggle” (Bonikowski2016, 19–5), with the warring sides reunited through shared sacrifice. However, this reunification nonetheless contained seeds of contention. With the Constitutional abolition of slavery and extension of citizenship to freed slaves during Reconstruction, the government granted through legal means the “rights and obligations defined by membership in the collectivity”(Tiryakian 2007, 51). This legalistic approach ignores the blood shed by Black Americans in every American war and was countered by Jim Crow Laws that kept the new constitutional citizens separate and unequal until the Civil Rights Movement nearly 100 years later. Like the Gettysburg Address, classic American “blood” and “service” sacrifice narratives invoke simultaneously the sacred and the patriotic (Smith 2010; Marvin/Ingle 1999).They also typically allude to the founding of the nation or victory in war and, as such, are nostalgia narratives of national pride and honor. Finally, they invoke collective memory as Americans who share in the legacy of the sacrifice, if not through direct identification with the military sacrificers then through devotion to the nation and the causes the storyteller attaches to it. American Rifleman contributors followed the traditional formulation of the classic American sacrifice narrative, but as we will see in the next sections, they also increasingly introduced seemingly subtle variations in the identification of sacrificers and causes that had significant implications for the narratives’ allusive messaging about who and what is sacred.

Sacrificial Heroes: Military Servicemembers and New Warriors

In American civil religion, it is members of the military who willingly shoulder the sacred charge of defending the nation and remain a class set apart (Marvin/Ingle 1999). Sticking to the common trope, the NRA increased their use of “blood” and “service” sacrifice narratives that featured military heroes, but they also increasingly offered versions of these narratives that featured non-military heroes (Figure 2).

The trauma of the loss in Vietnam shattered the national narrative surrounding American soldiers and their sacrifice – and government bore the blame. Marked by no formal declaration of war and no formal ending, Vietnam “was a failed ritual sacrifice” (Marvin/Ingle 1999, 90). Consequently,the discourse "shifted to emphasize the mistreatment of veterans by the government and civil society” because they were “denied the right to win by limiting their use of force against a beastly, subhuman enemy” (Belew 2018, 23). Representations of the Vietnam War throughout the 1980s focused on the belief that “the war was just and could have been won [but] somebody wouldn’t let us win” (Jeffords 1989, 2). As the government became associated with forced bussing, mandated desegregation, and lawsuits that broke down the racial and gender barriers and that seemed to "threaten and victimize white men," (Belew 2018, 10), the fear of being disarmed by the

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government gained traction among segments of the population as a deep story, something that felt true (Hochschild 2016).

Counter-cultural depictions of the Vietnam war position the government, bureaucrats, and the police as the enemy, “recasting the state as a menace to morality and prosperity” of “real” Americans (Belew 2018, 10). As Smith (2010, 221) states, “increasingly, the real foe came to be seen as the misguided American elites and politicians sending troops to their senseless death.” In the May 1985 issue of American Rifleman, General Westmoreland, the former commander of forces in Vietnam, alluded to this discourse when he called his fellow Americans to task for abandoning and abusing those soldiers who “did what the nation asked” in Vietnam in defense of freedom:

Have you ever paused to consider that during the Vietnam war, there were more Americans here at home cheering on the Communists waving his flag than there? Can you imagine putting your life on the line in the combat zone while the boy who lived next door may have been visibly supporting your armed enemy from some chosen campus sanctuary remote fromthe field? Can you imagine living through that ordeal only to come home to silence or even hostility?... Today let us pause to remember, to pay tribute to the Americans who gave their lives in the preservation of freedom throughout our nation’shistory. And we add to that honored assemblage the equally deserving Vietnam Veteran (Westmoreland 1985, 20)

Westmoreland offered this narrative of soldiers' blood sacrifice alongside others of civilians who profaned that sacrifice and quietly references the post-Vietnam anti-government New War narrative.

However, in the mid-1990s, faced with countering disaffection with the NRA for its anti-government rhetoric, American Rifleman contributors abandoned explicit references to Vietnam and the related allusions to government betrayal. Instead, they presented nostalgia narratives of America’s military sacrifices and victories to emphasize their shared patrioticpride while also more subtly pushing their New War cultural agenda. In fact, Westmoreland's sacrifice narrative, occurring nearly a decade before LaPierre’s fund raising letter public relations fumble, is the only sacrifice narrative that explicitly mentions Vietnam. Nonetheless, the NRA subtlety works to redefine the nation through narratives about shared blood sacrifice and uses a narrative government betrayal of “real” Americans to accomplish this.

In American Rifleman, members of the military are the most common protagonists in the “blood” sacrifice narratives (n= 37 or 40.2%), while most “service” sacrifice narratives feature non-military heroes (n=87 or 77.6%). References to military "blood" sacrifice peaked during the height of the war

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in Iraq. As the frequency of both types of narratives increase over time, so too does the representation of both military and non-military heroes. However, the non-military protagonists appear in an increasing share of the narratives.

References to non-military protagonists tend to references “forefathers” (n=10), “patriots” (n=14), “Americans” (n=27), or members of the NRA (n=25), for example: “Since our forefathers carved America out of the wilderness, our nation has faced many enemies. American patriots, forgenerations, have made many sacrifices for freedom” (Hammer 1995, 29, emphasis added). Most often these non-military references are described in general terms, for example, “those who sacrificed for the freedoms we cherish” (Paralyzed Veterans of America 1997, 6) or “the sacrifice of free men often bearing their own arms in defense” (Keefe 2003, 10).

Figure 2. Protagonists of Blood and Service Sacrifice Narratives in AmericanRifleman 1975-2019

The Silent Generation which fought in WWII was retreating from political power and the Baby Boomers--the Vietnam generation which had so divided the nation--was rising. Meanwhile, without the draft, the military increasingly drew from fewer and fewer communities (Watkins and Sherk 2008; Philipps and Arango 2020), creating greater social distance between military servicemembers and the average citizen. For the NRA, nostalgia narratives of America’s military sacrifices and victories could serve to emphasize shared patriotic pride while variations on them centered on generalized warriors, particularly armed men fighting for freedom, invited American Rifleman’s audience to identify closely with the sacrificers in the narratives. These reformulated narratives created the opportunity for an increasingly large population of their audience—both those who served in Vietnam and those who never served in the military—to lay a claim to

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sacred, warrior honor separate both from military service and from a potentially suspect government.

Sacrificial Causes: For Nation, Freedom, or … Something Else

As the NRA introduced non-military protagonists into the classic “blood” and “service” sacrifice narratives of American soldiers sacrificing for the nation, so too it introduced new sacrificial causes as shown in Figure 3.

Although the classic trope, sacrifices for the nation comprised less thanhalf of the “blood” and “service” sacrifice narratives in American Rifleman from 1975-2019, or 46.4%. These for-the-nation narratives had a strong presence in the NRA discourse from 1995 onward. Equally frequent, though with increasing prevalence in more recent years, was sacrifice for freedom, comprising 47.8% of cases. The next largest sacrificial cause (n=40 or 19.6%) related to rights, with this category comprising keyword references to"rights," "Second Amendment," and "Constitution." Finally, only 17 of the 230 “blood” and “service” narratives referenced causes other than the nation, freedom, or rights. These "other" sacrificial causes typically reflected the NRA's core values like this tribute to NRA member Secret Service Special Officer Craig Miller who died at the World Trade Center on 9/11: “… never forget Craig's dedication to everything we stand for and the ultimate sacrifice he made for it" (NRA Publications Divsion Staff 2002, 75, emphasisadded).

Figure 3. Sacrificial Causes in the American Rifleman 1975-2019

In the sacrifice-for-freedom narratives, freedom from what or freedom for what is rarely clarified, but the narratives are evocative of both the classic civil religious Discourse of Liberty as well as a more specific albeit indirect

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allusion to the Second Amendment freedom of gun ownership, easily recognizable and familiar to American Rifleman’s audience as “America’s First freedom” (Heston 1997, 32).

This example from NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre links non-military sacrifice to freedom in general as well as to rights granted by the Second Amendment and the Constitution:

Year by year, sacrifice by sacrifice, link by link- lives of men, women and deeds of honor - that precious chain binds us to the founders of this great country, whose vision gave us the SecondAmendment to the Constitution of the United States and all of the freedoms it stands for” (LaPierre 1995, 7, emphasis added)

Although on the surface this narrative might seem similar to Lincoln's invocation of "a nation, conceived in liberty," it shifts the sacrificial cause away from "government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Instead, LaPierre links "blood" sacrifice to America’s founding virtues, and explicitly links the only Second Amendment to the Constitution to freedom. This centers on the Second Amendment – the right to bear arms – and not the broader Constitution as a document guiding the government. The distinction is subtle but important. LaPierre's comments also anticipate an additional shift in the sacrifice narratives, where freedom and rights also become separated. He presents the Second Amendment — and not the entire Constitution — as standing representationally for a larger body of freedoms existing outside of the constraints of constitutional law. The shift here then is from “republican freedom,” which requires active citizenship, to a “liberal freedom,” which views the state as standing in opposition to individual freedom (Gorski 2017, 25).

Direct references to rights were nearly as common as the more generalized and expansive references to freedom in 1995-1999 when the NRA first increased its use of sacrifice narratives. However, this more specificsacrificial cause lost ground relative to freedom in the later issues in the sample. References to rights coincided with references to freedom in nearly half (47.5%) of the rights references but only a quarter (23.5%) of the freedom references, with the growing trend in later years to decouple them and emphasize freedom alone.

The Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution laid the foundation for some to argue that some men gained their rights from God while others attained these rights from government (Zeskin 2009). More recently, the 1960s saw women and Black Americans gain rights through new Civil Rights legislation (Rodman 2019; Harding 2000; Belew 2018). The emphasis on God-given freedom (Dawson 2019) as opposed to government-granted rights plays on this historic tension for white men, who felt threatened when the government acknowledged equal rights to previously subjected groups. In this way, the NRA subtly focuses the narratives of

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freedom on preserving the rights of individual Americans, “real” Americans whose “inalienable rights” are “endowed by the Creator”(“The Declaration ofIndependence” 1776), while unmooring them from any obligation on behalf of the civic government. Tellingly, 70% of rights references and nearly half (49.3%) of freedom references appear without any direct mention of the nation. While the nation would nonetheless be inferred as the cause of sacrifice, its absence serves to highlight these attached causes. Notably the government is not referenced as a sacrificial cause in these cases where the nation is not explicitly mentioned. Nor is it ever referenced on its own without reference to freedom, rights, or another cause. These patterns in narrative presentation foreground rights and freedoms and imbue them with sacredness. At the same time, they stand to set the government outside this consecration and, more extremely, to cast it in opposition to the nation and these associated sacred causes

Later examples are even more explicit in this separation of God-given freedom from government-granted rights. For example, NRA President Charlton Heston emphasizes the God-given nature of freedom--“Our freedoms may be a gift from God"--and then invokes the sacrifice narrative,saying, "but the only reason we enjoy them today is because of the service, sacrifice, and eternal vigilance of generations of Americans who have risked and given all so that we might live free” (Heston 2002, 18, emphasis added). This narrative sacralizes everyday Americans eternally ready to sacrifice for the NRA audience’s particular cause, now consecrated through sacrifice.

Numerous other examples similarly decouple freedom from the government in service to an above-the-law New War anti-government cultural message. For example:

To win the battles that are surely headed our way, we are counting onyour strength and your courage—every bit as much as our nationhas counted on the service of our brave men and women in uniform who've pledged their lives in battle. More than ever before in your life or in the life of our nation, you need to send a message to every member of the U.S. House and Senate, every federal judge, every entrenched gun-hating bureaucrat, every legislator in your home state and every enemy of freedom thatyou're standing tall with the NRA for the next four years. As Charlton Heston said, it is "We the People" who rule this country—not the politicians and not the media—and we will protect our cherished freedoms. Standing together, we will prevail(LaPierre and Cox 2009, 18, emphasis added)

The excerpt invokes the shared memory of military service to the nation. It then pits the sacralized nation – everyday members of the NRA - against the

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government with its call to “send a message” to unnamed members of Congress, the judiciary, and faceless anti-gun bureaucrats who are identified as enemies of freedom. LaPierre equates blood sacrifice on behalf of the nation with actions that everyday members of the NRA, who stand for “We the People,” must now take to “defend freedom.” In this way, LaPierre signals that “real Americans” are defending their sacred individual freedom and the sacred nation from the corrupt government.

Over time, the American Rifleman sacrifice narratives distinguish the government from the nation (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008) bound by shared blood sacrifice and memories of shared sacrifice (Marvin and Ingle, 1999). Moreover, through use of direct reference, these narratives foreground freedom as part of the sacrificial cause, giving it an even stronger emphasis when the nation is an implicitly rather than explicitly referenced cause of sacrifice. These narrative strategies reflect a post-Vietnam New War culturalmessage, namely that the government cannot protect you and if the government restricts the Second Amendment, armed Americans, true Americans, are encouraged to violate the law in the defense of freedom as part of protecting the God-given right to bear arms (Dawson 2019). Sacrifice creates a sacred barrier protecting freedom secured through the right to bear arms and protected from profane government restrictions. The NRA's variations to the classic American sacrifice narrative affirmed New Warrior identity that lent honor and patriotism to defenders of Second Amendment freedom untethered from obligation to or restraint from the government. Alluding to the patriotic, nostalgic, and civil religious tropes of sacrifice for the nation through form if not explicit content, the NRA used the cover of these patriotic narratives to advance their anti-government New War culturalagenda.

Sacrifice Narratives as Signposts

In the later years in our sample, during the Obama and Trump presidencies, the sacrifice narratives increasingly were pointed toward demarcating the boundaries between consecrated, worthy insiders and their enemies, including government officials.

Later "blood" and "service" sacrifice references present sacrifice for something alongside a fight against something else that opposes that sacrificial cause. Mark Keefe, a regular contributor, typifies this approach when he notes,

For this issue, in which we commemorate the service and sacrifice of American riflemen 75 years ago—as they embarked upon the “great crusade” … As long as there is evil and oppression in the world, we will need riflemen. We will need men and women who believe in freedom and liberty, who take seriously the values that make us American, and who are willing

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to fight to preserve our way of life. We will need patriots like those men who, in the darkness and dawn of June 6, 1944, did nothing less than save the world from evil. Remember them, andremember their sacrifice. They fought against an evil that, hopefully, the world will never see again. But if it does, we will need American riflemen willing to stand up and face it.” (Keefe 2019, 8)

Keefe’s military-sacrifice narrative explicitly positions sacrifice by WWII veterans as sanctifying “our way of life,” while also representing a “crusade”against “evil.” The American Rifleman protagonists in this narrative are military men, and riflemen is a military term referring to members of an infantry platoon. However, the repeated reference to the soldiers as “riflemen,” a reference rarely seen across the articles, also calls to mind the name of the magazine, American Rifleman, and likely speaks to the collective, non-military identity of its readers. In this way, the NRA clearly aligns themselves symbolically with the sacrificers and against anyone who threatens the sacrificial cause, “our way of life.” As New Warriors, the membership is thus granted consecration from identification with the sacrificers as well as the sacrificial cause. Meanwhile “evil” New War enemies, frequently identified in connection with the Nazis (Gibson 1994), are anyone who opposes the group’s collective values (Dawson 2019).

While sacrifice narratives could themselves include references to enemies, they could also be introduced alongside other narratives to serve as interpretive signposts for the audience. For example, Chris Cox, former Executive Director for the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, first delivers a “blood” sacrifice narrative establishing the consecration of the audience asbeneficiaries of sacrifice in conjunction with a narrative about what would happen if Hillary Clinton were elected President:

America's best have given their all—some their very lives— to the cause of freedom. Many did so knowing America's brightest days were still ahead, beyond the horizon of their own experience. We are the beneficiaries of their dedication and sacrifice. (Cox 2016, 20, emphasis added)

The "blood" sacrifice narrative closes with an increasingly common call in later issues of the magazine to readers to be ready to take action to protect freedom: "However we are called, we must do the same for those who comeafter us” (Cox 2016, 20). Cox then goes on to convey a dark future should a pro-gun-control Clinton administration take power:

A Hillary Clinton presidency would not just usher in a resurgence of gun control via federal statutes,

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regulations and executive orders…eradicating the individual right protected by the Second Amendment…

Once that right is gone, everything is on the table…Gun owners would be mocked and vilified. They would be shut out of jobs andeducational opportunities. They would be banned from public housing and from transporting their guns on common forms of transportation. They would be subject to excise (or "sin") taxes that portray them as being responsible for crime and social ills. Their voices would be silenced from the media and from "legitimate” academic, scientific and legal discourse. To whatever degree gun ownership continued to exist, it would be forced to the margins of society (Cox 2016, 20)

The Discourse of Repression in the Clinton narrative couples with the Discourse of Liberty in the sacrifice narrative to place rhetorically oppressed gun owners in the same sanctified category as “America’s best” and to call on them to fight for freedom against potential action by the government. These references reinforce the New Warrior narrative of ordinary men “at odds with…traitorous elites at home” (Zeskind 2009, 59). By positioning gun owners as defenders of freedom against specific members of government, they avoid their earlier missteps in 1995 of attacking an entire government agency. Additionally, Cox stakes out a central place in American society for gun owners, a social position placed at risk by government action.

In another example, Cox juxtaposes an allusion to soldiers’ sacrifice with a narrative of an anti-gun Congressman walking out of President Trump’s State of the Union Address and of another narrative of an MSNBC commentator who disparaged Trump’s remarks:

Yet as lawmakers chanted “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” following a litany of memorials dedicated to American sacrifice, courage and heroism delivered by the president, anti-gun Congressman Luis Gutiérrez, D-Ill., fled the chamber in undisguised contempt. And he was not alone. An MSNBC pundit dismissed the president’s invocation of church, family, police, military and the national anthem as “tropes of 1950s-era nationalism." (Cox 2018, 16, emphasis added)

The sacrifice narrative makes the tale emotionally evocative and demarcatesthe boundary between the binary codes of good and evil, between those whohonor sacrifice and its causes and those, like the MSNBC pundit and the Congressman who allegedly hold them in contempt.

Similarly, LaPierre invokes a sacrifice narrative in conjunction with a veiled allusion to former NFL player Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling protest to raise awareness of police violence toward Black Americans:

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This is why as Americans united in patriotism, national pride and freedom, we stand to honor our flag and our national anthem…We stand to honor the principles of liberty and justice for all. We stand with pride of our individual freedoms and the opportunity that freedom offers for all of our citizens. We stand for the more than 1 million Americans who have lost their lives at war – on behalf of us and our liberty. We stand and honor the flag draped across the coffins, respectfully folded, and honorably presented to the grieving families of brave men and women who have paid the ultimate price for freedom…With pride and strength, we rise to our flag and sing our anthem, resolved to never be forced to ‘take a knee’ when it comes to honoring and defending our uniquely American liberty…Stand for all who have sacrificed to save our freedom…There is no greater sense of patriotism and duty than that which rests in the hearts and minds of NRA members. We stand out from the crowd. We stand!” (LaPierre 2019, 12, emphasis added)

This reference to sacrifice demonstrates the way that it serves as a boundary, implying that those who refuse to stand are dishonoring and profaning the blood sacrifice of Americans. It further signals to the audience of “NRA members” that they are the proud and patriotic inheritors of the sacred duty to protect themselves and their freedom from the unworthy “crowd.”

In the American Rifleman, patriotic sacrifice is not used solely in the traditional way to unite Americans and affirm national identity. Instead, whether used alone or in combination with other narratives, they draw a boundary between patriots and otherss, the worthy and unworthy, the good and the evil.

DISCUSSION

We began this paper by asking how a fringe cultural message moves into the mainstream. One answer relates to the strategic use of familiar narratives or stories. Our study bears out Polletta and Chen’s hypothetical lesson to activists with new messages to “use the familiar to draw audiences in; when they’re absorbed, and using the most sophisticated literary tropes that you can find, tell them something different than they expect to hear”(2012, 25). In its flagship magazine, American Rifleman, the NRA, we argue, employed exactly this approach. Contributors retooled a canonical American sacrifice narrative to make broadly palatable their potentially insurrectionist New War cultural message both to an audience of mainstream New Right gun owners who initially balked at the message and to more far right antigovernment extremists who already subscribed to this message.

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Through a textual analysis of the content of the American Rifleman from 1975-2019, we trace the way the NRA co-opted widely acceptable and compelling nostalgia narratives of soldier’s sacrifice for the nation and imbued them with meaning that affirmed New War culture and the need to protect individual freedom—obtained through gun rights even from the government. In this way, we contribute to historical and sociological studies related to the NRA, the culture of gun ownership in America, and New War culture through an examination of the role of narratives. At the same time, we contribute to a growing body of work in Cultural Sociology on narratives that examines the mechanism through which they serve as markers and shapers of both collective identity and broader culture.

In its cultural and political project to defend the Second Amendment, the NRA embraced New War culture, a counter-cultural response to the trauma of the war in Vietnam, which extended warrior honor to armed men defending their families from an increasingly hostile world and a suspect government that might try to disarm them. However, in 1995 they pushed this insurrectionist, anti-government rhetoric too far and triggered a backlash. We argue that American Rifleman contributors subsequently beganto incorporate more references to nostalgia narratives of soldiers’ sacrifice for the nation into the magazine’s issues to reaffirm the identity of the NRA and its constituency as patriots and to reconcile with the members they might have alienated. These powerful narratives invoked both the Judeo-Christian narrative of blood sacrifice and nostalgic American patriotic narratives of sacrifice for the nation. Drawing power from both religious and civil religious discourse, these sacrifice narratives carried with them moral lessons related to the consecration of both the sacrificer and the sacrificial cause, with the exalted status of each extending to those who identify with and revere the sacrificer or the cause.

We find that over time American Rifleman contributors introduced variations on these narratives that promoted New War culture. In addition to narratives of soldiers sacrificing for the nation, they invoked narratives of sacrifice by non-military heroes. These adaptations subtly separated honor as warriors from military service and invited the audience to place themselves in the narratives, identifying with the warriors or their sacrificial cause. For a generation of Vietnam soldiers struggling with the trauma of loss and sense of government betrayal, and a growing demographic of Americans who had never served in the military, these reformulated sacrificenarratives provided a way to claim honor and warrior status independent of the government and military service ̶̶̶—but within a highly patriotic rhetoric.

At the same time, the American Rifleman sacrifice narratives specifically referenced sacrificial causes alongside implicit or explicit references to the nation, most frequently freedom and rights. We argue the NRA’s elaboration of causes in the sacrifice narratives focuses the audience’sattention on “what shall be remembered and what shall be forgotten”(Tiryakian 2007, 51), a selective understanding or construction of the nation.

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Their narrative adaptation emphasized and promoted their construction of the “real America,” the cause of sacrifice for both the military and a cast of other noble characters, but an America not represented by a government seeking to curtail their individual Second Amendment freedoms while expanding rights to new classes of citizens. While these adapted narratives simulated the classic American sacrifice narrative, they promoted division rather than national unification. They sacralized freedoms, particularly Second Amendment freedoms, and placed them in opposition to the government, while also demarcating a class of citizens whose rights supersede those granted by the government and who are allusively set apartfrom others. In this way, the NRA helps to redefine the nation as separate from the government (Fox and Miller-Idriss 2008).

In addition, invoking these sacrifice narratives alongside other narratives provided signposts to help American Rifleman’s audience define their collective identity in opposition to enemies, both foreign and domestic, who threatened their core values. Embedded in these adapted narratives was a call to action to the audience to be ever vigilant and prepared to fight in service to their collective values—especially defense of the Second Amendment—against a growing cadre of political enemies and, if necessary, the American government itself. Because the adapted narratives still invokedthe classic American sacrifice narratives through their form and the specific reference to “sacrifice,” they thus formed a bridge between patriotic sacrifice tradition and New War culture. Reliance on these narratives thus helped the NRA achieve a simultaneously patriotic and anti-government message that could appeal to a mainstream audience and that could guide ifnot mobilize that audience in favor or against a wide array of political playersand current events.

This study has several limitations. First, the digitization of back issues and optical character recognition (OCR) of the resulting digitized text was imperfect. There may be a number of cases of “sacrifice” that we missed. Similarly, our limited natural language processing may have neglected casesin which sacrifice narratives were also used or referenced with different linguistic makers than those we investigated. In the worst case, our analysis may represent an undercount of “sacrifice” articles or an incorrect identification of the relative size of trends that introduced different protagonists and causes into the traditional sacrifice narratives. Nonetheless,this potential missing data problem does not negate the broad coverage of American Rifleman issues achieved here nor the presence of a substantial number of sacrifice narratives. Second, we do not know to what extent the adaptation of sacrifice narratives was conscious, deliberate, or strategic by American Rifleman contributors and editors. Thus, while we can identify narrative forms and instances of their use, we cannot attribute them to a concerted campaign without further investigation. We can only conclude withconfidence that adapted narratives promoting New War culture appeared with regularity in the magazine’s pages. Finally, although New War culture

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has become part of the mainstream discourse around gun rights and gun ownership, we do not know what role American Rifleman has played in this transformation. While the magazine claims a circulation of between 2 million and 5 million readers, this number represents only a small sample of US gun owners. Moreover, we do not know how much impact the narratives themselves have had on the readership’s views, attitudes, or behaviors. Thus, although the sacrifice narratives as described here had the potential toresonate with and even to mobilize the magazine’s audience, we do not know how much they actually did so.

Nonetheless, this study offers insights into how narratives may be presented to promote incremental culture change (Tiryakian 1967, 73). In the pages of American Rifleman, the meaning attached to sacrifice has been co-opted through shifts in protagonists, causes, and accompanying narrative references, from one of sanctifying and uniting the nation to one of setting the audience above and apart from others and calling on them to fight any opposers, including if need-be the government, to defend the group’s core values, particularly defense of Second Amendment rights—all ostensibly in service to the nation. The use of both traditional sacrifice narratives and adaptations and allusions to them link the readership’s defense of the Second Amendment to the sacrifice of soldiers who made sacrifices of service and of life to protect the nation and its laws, including the rest of the freedoms contained in the Constitution. By sanctifying the group’s core values as sacrificial causes, American Rifleman contributors symbolically elevated protection of the Second Amendment, its central cause, to a divine mission to defend God-given rights (Dawson 2019) while also casting anyonewho opposed the cause, including the government and specific lawmakers, as evil enemies. Moreover, by connecting readers to narratives of soldiers and other types of national heroes, it offered a patriotic pathway for its readership, even those disaffected by the war in Vietnam or who had never served in the military, to gain a positive sense of warrior identity and positionoutside of an American government that had betrayed its citizens. Its New War messages implicitly elevated defense of the Second Amendment, the NRA’s primary cause, from political advocacy to protect a Constitutional amendment to a holy mission consecrated through the blood, service, and vigilance of the similarly consecrated audience that defends it.

This study examined how a cultural message initially associated with extremists and fringe groups could be made palatable to a mainstream audience through narrative. We traced the way purveyors of a counter-cultural message could co-opt a well-accepted and closely held narrative to draw in an audience and ultimately speak convincingly to their emotions andsense of collective identity. Uses of narratives pervade media like the magazine articles investigated here, but also other forms of digital and socialmedia and communication. A rich avenue for future research would be to incorporate the lessons here about retooling mainstream narratives to carry

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counter-cultural messages with examinations focused on diffusion of such narratives and audience reception and mobilization.

AcknowledgmentsThe authors would like to thank David Yamane, Simon Brauer, and Lauren Valentino for assistance on an early draft of this paper. The authors would also like to thank the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology for workshopping a much broader version of this paper. We extend special thanks to Phil Smith and to the anonymous reviewers who recognized the potential in our early drafts and whose critical guidance pushed us to refine and hone our arguments. Any errors or omissions are our own.

About the authors

Jessica Dawson is an associate professor and lead information warfare researcher at the Army Cyber Institute at the United States Military Academyat West Point. Dana Weinberg is a Professor of Sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center- City University of New York.

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