The financial backbone of the modern NSSF is the SHOT Show (Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade Show), which NSSF has owned and operated since 1979. The show launched with 50,000 square feet of exhibit space. It now runs at over 800,000 square feet.

Most guys I've talked to at the LGS counter think of NSSF the way they think of the NRA — a membership org you can join. It's not. It's a trade association funded almost entirely by a trade show. That's a meaningfully different thing when you're trying to figure out whose interests it actually represents.

Both things can be true at once — NSSF's safety programs can serve genuine public interest while also providing legal and political protection for the industry.

Project ChildSafe has put over 35 million cable locks into circulation. That's a real number, not a press release. Whether the motivation is pure doesn't change the fact that there are gun locks in homes that didn't have them before — and if you've ever seen an unsecured safe-queen sitting on a nightstand in a house with kids, you understand why that matters.

A wave of municipal lawsuits in the late 1990s and early 2000s was explicitly designed to bankrupt manufacturers through litigation costs rather than courtroom losses.

The PLCAA is the one that still gets people fired up on both sides. What the article captures correctly is that those lawsuits weren't really about winning in court — they were attrition warfare. Whether you think the PLCAA was necessary self-defense or industry overreach probably depends on how you feel about the firearms business generally, but at least understand what the fight actually was before you take a position.

NSSF was an early promoter of sporting clays when it was still a novelty in the U.S., helping generate press coverage and build the infrastructure that allowed the discipline to establish itself alongside trap and skeet.

Easy to forget how recently sporting clays was a fringe discipline here. Now it's the first thing a lot of new shotgun shooters try — and the SCTP has a generation of high schoolers shooting it competitively. That's not nothing.

For anyone who's taken a new shooter through a First Shots-style intro session at a participating range — did you find the structured framework actually helped, or did it feel like corporate window dressing compared to just walking someone through the basics yourself?

Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team