(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- When a gunman murdered 17 students and teachers in Parkland, Fla., two weeks ago, survivors at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School quickly organized to lobby for gun control measures. The #NeverAgain movement has succeeded in putting politicians such as Senator Marco Rubio on the spot and focusing national media attention on the epidemic of gun violence.
But the most immediate and dramatic effect of the students’ anti-gun activism has come not in politics, but in business. Corporate America, or at least the segment with business ties to the National Rifle Association, is rapidly deciding that the association is toxic. Companies that severed deals with the NRA include, but are not limited to: Avis Budget Group, Best Western, Chubb, Delta Air Lines, MetLife, Symantec, United Airlines, and Wyndham Worldwide. Meanwhile, Amazon.com, Apple, FedEx, Google, and Roku are under intense social media pressure to follow suit and #BoycottNRA, as the hashtag has it. (FedEx Corp. offers NRA members discounted shipping; the other four companies stream the NRA’s video channel.)
The success of the boycott campaign has angered some conservatives who are upset that corporations are responding to “culture war” issues such as mass shootings. Yet the companies are simply reacting to market pressures. The reason business leaders are moving so much faster than politicians is because the NRA is organized to strike terror in Republican lawmakers—but is too small and far too extreme to have much influence beyond them.
The group’s legendary political clout is built on the fact that its 5 million members are often highly motivated, single-issue voters. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that gun owners are 80 percent more likely than those who don’t own guns to have contacted a public official about gun policy in the last year. This translates to serious political muscle in GOP primaries and places such as Colorado, where the NRA funded successful recall campaigns against state senate leader John Morse and another Democrat after they helped pass gun regulations following the 2012 Aurora theater shooting. “They turn out people that already agree with them,” Morse told the New York Times. “The reason why gun policy is where it is in this country, at this point, is that the rest of us are too lackadaisical.”
But against the broader backdrop of the U.S. economy, the NRA’s membership is puny. United Airlines, whose parent company,United Continental Holdings Inc., cut ties with the gun lobby last week, had 148 million passengers last year. Delta Air Lines Inc., which also dumped the group, served 180 million customers last year. Even if NRA members are fanatically loyal to companies that give them discounts because of their membership, those companies won’t worry about losing their business, because the alternative is much scarier. By a 2-to-1 margin, Americans favor stricter gun control laws, while the NRA opposes even overwhelmingly popular regulations like universal background checks, which a Quinnipiac Poll found voters favor 97 percent to 2 percent. With numbers like these, the choice of whether to affiliate with the NRA isn’t difficult at all.
That’s especially true in commercial industries with multiple competitors. It’s no accident that whole groups of business are fleeing the NRA in sectors such as rental cars (Avis, Hertz, Enterprise), hotels (Best Western, Wyndham), insurance (Chubb, MetLife), and airlines (Delta, United). It’s easy for consumers to register their displeasure by choosing an alternative. The fear of being punished in the marketplace led American Airlines to post a statement to Twitter on Saturday explaining why it hadn’t joined Delta and United in dropping the NRA: It hadn’t had a deal to begin with. “To clarify questions we have received today,” American Airlines’ account tweeted, “American does not offer discounted group travel rates to the NRA.”
In the Trump era, almost everything has come to be seen through the lens of the culture wars, so it’s no surprise that #BoycottNRA and #NeverAgain would be, too. But in the corporate boardroom, whatever people’s personal feelings are about gun control, the issue still comes down to dollars and cents.
To contact the author of this story: Joshua Green in Washington at jgreen120@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Matthew Philips at mphilips3@bloomberg.net.
©2018 Bloomberg L.P.
