I haven't read this article yet but it was quoted in a podcast i listen to and I really liked this breakdown of the way the NRA shaped gun culture, and how in many ways that culture is more dangerous than guns themselves.

Though the story of this tactical development in U.S. gun culture is complex, I focus in this essay on a few particularly crucial components. The first is that border enforcement has been increasingly militarized since the 1970s and diffused deeper into the interior of the country. This has blurred the boundary between domestic and foreign conflict, brought the use of exceptional police powers into nearly every U.S. town, and turned militarized “border security” into a ubiquitous mechanism of racialization. This has also corresponded with the militarization of local police forces, which was certainly worsened by the War on Terror, but which historian Elizabeth Hinton has identified as having deeper roots in the Johnson administration’s War on Crime. Like the nationalization of “border security,” it turned the nation’s city streets into sites of militarized racial enforcement.

The history of white supremacy is replete with those who speak about universal rights, yet doggedly pursue a white-dominated racial order. Recent tactical developments can only be understood through this lens. Second, individuals once arming themselves for self-defense—often out of racial fears or a perceived threat to their masculinity—are now frequently claiming to do so in defense of the Constitution and freedom itself. The NRA has played an outsize role in this vigilante reframing by promulgating the myth that gun ownership has always been an individual, constitutional right and oriented toward a nativist vision of self-defense. This vigilantism operates in conjunction with the extralegal violence of law enforcement officers and is fueled by an individualist notion of sovereignty more dangerous than any military-grade weaponry. It rejects the freedom of others as equal to one’s own and views any attempt to support such equality as tyranny. Most importantly, this sovereignty is assumed to grant the individual the power to take life (vitae necisque potestas) in defense not of law, but of particular social and racial orders.

There are now twenty-five federal agencies with special tactical units. In May and June of 2020 alone, sixteen deployed their tactical teams to Black Lives Matter protests including Border Patrol; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF); the Bureau of Prisons; the U.S. Marshals; the U.S. Coast Guard; and every one of the FBI’s fifty-six field offices. And at the local law enforcement level, Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) units are now a staple of daily policing. Their very ordinariness is a testament to how dramatically local policing has changed since 1969, when a SWAT unit was first used to raid the Black Panthers headquarters in Los Angeles, pioneering what was at that time an almost unprecedented domestic use of military force.

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In [Harlon Carter's] victory speech, he declared, “Beginning in this place and at this hour, this period in NRA history is finished.” The post-1977 NRA was decidedly partisan, took an absolutist position against gun regulation, and redoubled its efforts to cultivate a social identity and authoritarian political ideology among its members.