DALLAS _ The National Rifle Association isn't coming to Dallas this weekend. It's been here a long time.
For years, in a glass-walled, high-rise office just across from Klyde Warren Park, the NRA has conducted what might be its most important experiment yet in churning members' emotions, crafting talking points and pushing an agenda of near-absolute opposition to gun restrictions _ NRA TV.
Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, NRA TV is the nonstop answer to any and all threats to gun rights. The message is loud and constant: Nothing less than American freedom is at stake if the Second Amendment is challenged and firearms are regulated.
"WHY AREN'T SCHOOLS SPENDING MORE ON FORTIFYING CLASSROOMS?" a ticker screamed across the bottom of NRA TV a few days after Nikolas Cruz murdered 17 students and faculty members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.
Above the ticker, anchor Grant Stinchfield faced the camera and wondered why government leaders aren't doing more to secure schools.
"Children are dead _ children we should have protected," Stinchfield said. "But the media and its war on guns scared politicians into bowing down _ not to the NRA, but to liberal elitists and their politically correct, anti-gun, unicorn-and-rainbows way of thinking."
The station _ which streams on NRATV.com and platforms including Apple TV, Roku and Amazon TV _ has changed the NRA's public relations playbook. Once largely silent in the wake of mass shootings, particularly those where students were targeted, the NRA now uses NRA TV to present a counternarrative to calls for gun regulation and to attack those who see things differently.
It has been a game-changer, keeping the NRA on the offensive even as calls for gun restrictions grow louder with each mass killing. To hear the hosts tell it, this is the only place with the truth; the mainstream media conspire with the tyrannical socialist left. Here, proposals to clamp down on guns _ mandates to lock them, limits on firepower _ are derided as ways to hurt the law-abiding and embolden criminals.
To Stinchfield, this is how the NRA needs to get its message out _ by raising the volume.
"We've just had to get louder as the voices of dissent get louder," he said.
There are signs that the rhetoric, amid massive student demonstrations for gun control, is firing up the NRA's members. In March, the NRA's Political Victory Fund broke its 15-year monthly fundraising record, collecting $2.4 million. Most of the donations came from donors who gave less than $200 each, Federal Election Commission records show.
The format of NRA TV will be familiar to anyone who watches partisan cable news.
The channel has three main anchors, all based in Dallas: Stinchfield, 49, a former KXAS-TV reporter who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2012; Collins Idehen, 34, a lawyer who amassed a YouTube following for his pro-gun videos under the moniker "Colion Noir"; and Dana Loesch, 39, a former tea party activist and Breitbart editor.
A mother who lives in Southlake, Loesch emerged as the public face of the gun-rights group last year, after an NRA ad featuring her went viral. The ad played ominous music and showed images of riots, as she said liberals "scream racism and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia, to smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and airports, bully and terrorize the law-abiding _ until the only option left is for the police to do their jobs and stop the madness."
NRA TV declined to grant access to its studios, but Idehen and Stinchfield did speak to The Dallas Morning News. Loesch didn't respond to interview requests.
The channel has a variety of shows, but about half the content is commentary on the day's news, often featuring the hosts making appearances on one another's shows, agreeing with one another's perspectives, exchanging softball questions and ranting about the two groups they present as the enemies of gun rights: the mainstream news media and liberals. The anchors regularly bring on guests from right-wing think tanks.
"The media politicizes these mass shootings to push an agenda," Stinchfield told his viewers recently. "They weaponize America's sadness to use it against us all, to rip apart our freedoms. They know no new law would have stopped this lunatic from getting his gun and using it, but they don't care. They only care about disarming law-abiding Americans."
Launched in 2016, NRA TV produces a few dozen original programs, including "Patriot Profiles," a series of police and military stories; "Armed and Fabulous," which follows gun-toting women; and "Under Wild Skies," which profiles big-game hunters shooting everything from buffaloes to elephants. The network has sponsorship agreements with gun brands such as Mossberg, Smith & Wesson, Sig Sauer and Ruger, and their products are regularly featured.
Ads and marketing are another major feature _ often with the same three anchors pitching gun products, as well as energy drinks and NRA classes.
In fact, advertising is how NRA TV got its start. In 2002, Congress passed the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act banning political broadcast ads in the weeks before an election.
The NRA, in coordination with its longtime ad agency Ackerman McQueen, decided that the best way to circumvent the political advertising rules was to go into the news business. And so in 2004, the precursor to NRA TV was born.
"If political free speech is restricted to news media, why not go deeper into the news business yourself?" says the website of Ackerman McQueen, which is based in Oklahoma but has a large office in Dallas.
In recent years, the NRA has invested tens of millions of dollars per year in member support programs, which include NRA TV, according to public tax filings.
It's unclear how many people tune in. Stinchfield said he doesn't know. On social media, some of his videos have drawn millions; others a couple thousand. Web traffic to NRATV.com has risen steeply since January, going from an estimated 55,000 page visits to 580,000 in March, according to SimilarWeb.com, a digital analytics company. The growth is impressive, but the numbers are still far behind the mainstream media NRA TV frequently targets. The New York Times _ often cited on NRA TV as part of the mainstream media problem _ logged 382 million visits in March. NRA TV has 9.5 million views on YouTube and 1.3 million followers on Facebook.
NRA TV anchors point, however, to a reach beyond the numbers of direct viewers. Their words are often picked up and echoed by dozens, even hundreds, of media outlets. And Stinchfield said power brokers, especially Republicans in Congress, keep the channel on in their offices to monitor the NRA's take on events.
"I can effect more change doing what I'm doing now than I could have as a congressman in Washington, getting lost in that cesspool," Stinchfield said. "We hold Republican lawmakers accountable."
If Stinchfield wants, he said, he can spur scores of his viewers to pressure their lawmakers into voting a certain way.
It's clear that NRA TV is effective in stirring those who already agree with its positions. It's harder to know whether tuning in would persuade anyone to change their perspective for or against guns.
"They're preaching to the choir," said Russ Winer, deputy chair of the marketing department at New York University's Stern School of Business.
There are two persistent themes repeated on NRA TV that are classic marketing tactics _ fear and patriotism, Winer said. Those are powerful signals to people who are already disposed to watching NRA TV.
"Obviously, not everybody feels, even among gun owners, that if you take away, say, AR-15s, there's going to be a slippery slope to killing the Second Amendment," Winer said. "But if you hammer it home relentlessly, you might have an impact on that group."
In interviews, both Stinchfield and Idehen said they are prepared to face bad guys at any moment, even though they live in affluent areas of North Texas where crime rates are relatively low. They nevertheless carry guns at all times and both say they imagine springing into action if they had to, to protect themselves and those around them.
Idehen has lost count of the number of guns he owns, somewhere between 70 and 100. In restaurants, he sits facing the entrance so he can react if an assailant comes in. Stinchfield practices drawing his pistol from his holster quickly inside his home. While he's filling up at the gas pump, he imagines what he would do if someone tried to rob him. He has a fingerprint gun safe by his bed, in case of an intruder.
The commentators don't live in fear, they say. They just see the world realistically. To their critics, it's the opposite _ the hosts live in a world of paranoia that benefits the NRA's interest in marketing guns.
"It's crazy. The NRA wants a country where we're just arming ourselves against each other," said Peter Ambler, executive director of the gun control advocacy group Giffords: Courage to Fight Gun Violence. "That's not the type of country that Americans want to live in."
Whichever view of reality is right, it's plain the NRA is winning _ and has long been winning _ the policy struggle over gun rights. NRA TV is a way of ensuring the base doesn't grow complacent during a time of Republican power in Congress and the White House. The threat to guns is presented as constant and imminent.
Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent and NRA TV host, described the debate over gun control as "zero-sum." Of the March for Our Lives movement, Bongino said, "Whatever power they give to this group, they're advocating to take a power and a right from you."
NRA TV's depiction of existential threats to gun rights is an effective tool at driving donations, membership and votes, said Julie Irwin, a professor of business, government and society at University of Texas in Austin.
"Their base will vote with them and give them enormous amounts of money because their message is so, 'Emergency _ you're under attack, everyone's taking your guns away,'" Irwin said. "Literally no one says they're taking their guns away, but it can be so effective when you make someone feel that they're being attacked. Since humans have existed, it's been one of the ways that people work their propaganda."
So heated is the rhetoric on NRA TV that it has raised an important question within the NRA itself: Can a constant state of alarm over guns rights be sustained over time?
Inside the NRA, it's unsettled whether the ad agency driving the message, Ackerman McQueen, is leading the gun-rights group in the best direction.
"That relationship is the single biggest problem that the National Rifle Association has today," said Jeff Knox, a member whose late father, Neal Knox, as a top NRA executive, advocated for cutting ties with Ackerman McQueen and ended up being pushed out.
NRA TV has drawn criticism for its response to the massacre in Parkland.
Not long after the massacre, Idehen went on the station and told Parkland students that he wished a hero like Blaine Gaskill, a SWAT-trained officer who intervened in a Maryland school shooting, had been at Parkland "because your classmates would still be alive and no one would know your names, because the media would have completely and utterly ignored your story, the way they ignored his."
The response was swift, with condemnations across social media.
Idehen acknowledged that the Parkland students present a difficult rhetorical problem for NRA TV. But to him, it's important to oppose them because the gun control measures they're pushing are misguided, and would harm good people in need of self-defense.
"I say anything about these kids, I'm automatically a monster," he said. "Kids have an effect on us that's emotional and irrational _ we'll do anything for them. A parent will spend $10,000 for his kid to play a sport that he's sucky at and never going to be good at, because that's his kid. We can't use that same irrational mindset to drive policy."
On a recent Thursday afternoon at home in Dallas, Stinchfield cracked open an energy drink and turned on his laptop for a Skype appearance on Loesch's show "Relentless." On the walls hung noise-insulating boards _ one decorated with the Statue of Liberty and an American flag; two showing majestic images of elephants, which he picked to symbolize the GOP.
Both Loesch and Stinchfield have accused the mainstream media of loving mass shootings such as the one in Parkland.
"We have never once attacked these kids," Stinchfield said. "They're playing a big boy game right now, and I'm not attacking children, I'm not going to do it."
"I feel like somebody has to be the adult in the room, right?" Loesch said. "I feel like I've just got to go and tell some of these adults like, give them what for, for exploiting people."
After the interview, Stinchfield shook his head as he thought about his own son, a third-grader in Dallas Independent School District.
"God forbid a deranged lunatic walks into that kid's classroom," he said. "I'm praying either there's a cop in the school, preferably in that classroom. I'm praying there's a volunteer parent who's carrying _ even though in Dallas, he's not allowed to do so inside DISD. I hope the teacher's got a gun. Because if none of those things are in place, my kid's dead. Your kid's dead. They're all dead. It's another massacre.
"I do believe everyone wants the kids to be safe. We just disagree on how we get there."
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