ProPublica has released more details about the secret database of gun owners’ personal data that the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the gun industry’s trade association, compiled and used to “rally firearm owners to elect pro-gun politicians,” as the journalism non-profit first reported in October 2024. The NSSF began building its database in the 1990s using customer warranty cards provided by some of the country’s largest gun makers and sellers — including Glock, Smith & Wesson, Remington, Marlin, Mossberg, Cabela’s, and others — without notifying customers.
According to ProPublica’s new report, the NSSF supplemented the warranty card information with “names from voter rolls and hunting licenses” to grow its database to contain at least 5.5 million people by 2002. The NSSF then worked with Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm, to target voters in key states as part of the NSSF’s “GunVote” campaign in 2016. (Cambridge later shuttered amid allegations that it had misused personal data from Facebook.)
As discussed below, according to privacy experts that ProPublica spoke with, companies that shared data with the NSSF may have broken the law. The gun group deployed its GunVote campaign in the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections as well, but the NSSF has not indicated if it used customer data for those efforts, or if it still maintains its database.
Ironically, the NSSF has repeatedly railed against government and corporate attempts to learn more about gun owners, alleging that the information could be used to create a registry “akin to a watchlist” and the “first step to confiscation.” To learn more, click here.
The NSSF-CAMBRIDGE PARTNERSHIP
In their latest report, ProPublica’s Corey G. Johnson and Byard detail how the NSSF contracted with Cambridge in April 2016 to mobilize gun rights activists in Colorado, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin with targeted ad campaigns.
To accomplish this, the NSSF provided its database to Cambridge, which “turbocharged the information it had on potential voters,” adding “5,000 additional facts about them that it drew from other sources.” In addition to “potential voters’ income, debts and religious affiliation, analysts learned whether they liked the work of the painter Thomas Kinkade and whether the underwear women had purchased was plus size or petite.”
In an interview with ProPublica, NSSF Senior Vice President and General Counsel Larry Keane “said the trade group’s 2016 campaign involved only commercially available data, not information from gun-makers’ warranty cards.”
But ProPublica obtained an email showing that Cambridge received a “Warranty Cards” client file in April 2016 along with customer data from gun retailer Cabela’s. According to a Cambridge presentation, the data included “[p]eople who submitted a warranty card upon purchasing a weapon in the last 20 years.”
Casting gun owners as stereotypes
With its enhanced data, Cambridge used an algorithm to create “psychological profiles that allowed for more incisive targeting. Potential voters were assigned one of five personality groups: risk-takers, carers, go-getters, individuals, and supporters” who received tailored ads. One Cambridge report uncovered by ProPublica said risk-takers are “impatient and can be easily frustrated, overreacting to various situations and often acting without thinking. They are disorganized, often late and more prone to addiction than others.”
To reach the risk-takers, Cambridge suggested creating ads that “appeal to their emotionality,” like the example shown below.
Cambridge described “go-getters” as people who “enjoy social interactions and are likely to be perceived by others as self-assured, direct, welcoming and friendly.” Unlike risk-takers, these gun owners are “in control of their emotions.” To that end, Cambridge suggested ads that “appeal to their need for cohesion, uniformity and continuity” that “show people collectively taking actions to solve problems in a positive environment,” like the example ad below.
Cambridge’s profiles are reminiscent of NSSF marketing materials that categorize gun owners as “Fun Fanatics,” “Weaponless Wendys,” and “Unarmed Aarons,” among other caricatures.
According to ProPublica, people in the database were then targeted with Facebook ads and mailings crafted by Cambridge for the NSSF’s GunVote campaign that promoted Trump and Republican Senators Richard Burr, Pat Toomey, Roy Blunt, Rob Portman, Kelly Ayotte, and Ron Johnson. The ads “garnered nearly 378 million views and drove more than 60 million visitors to the NSSF’s website.” The Tarrance Group, a Republican research firm, also used the database to conduct polls over the phone.
an invasion of privacy
After the 2016 election, Cambridge produced a report for the NSSF — titled “Make America 2nd Amendmentable Again” and including a picture of Yosemite Sam holding revolvers — concluding that the GunVote campaign “had encouraged nearly 10,000 more voters to turn out in Missouri, 7,744 more voters in Ohio, 6,979 more in North Carolina and 4,743 more in Pennsylvania. The numbers weren’t pivotal,” Johnson and Byard wrote, “but they contributed to victory for the NSSF’s preferred senatorial candidates in all those states.”
The morning after the election, Keane sent an email to Cambridge, writing, “Thank you for all your hard work on an incredibly successful #GUNVOTE campaign. NSSF and our 13,000 members are grateful to you all for your efforts.”
Privacy experts who spoke to ProPublica said that “companies that shared information with the NSSF may have violated federal and state prohibitions against deceptive and unfair business practices. Under federal law, companies must comply with their own privacy policies and be clear about how they will use consumers’ information.” ProPublica also reviewed “dozens of warranty cards” from gun makers and “found that none of them informed buyers that their details would be used for political purposes.”
Notably, the report describes how Steve Urvan, the CEO of GunBroker — known as the the “eBay of guns” — was in talks with Cambridge to “provide data on about 1.1 million registered users of the website in the states Cambridge planned to target,” but was worried about legal risks and wanted the records destroyed after the campaign. In an email, Urvan wrote, “Still I don’t want the [Federal Trade Commission] or some state agency to come knocking on our door saying we violated the privacy of our users.”
Their talks “fizzled” after Cambridge refused to destroy the data, which Urvan noted was “HIGHLY sensitive” and could be “leaked, subpoenaed, or misused, and under any of those cases the data would point back to our company. Those are substantial business risks we are not willing to take.”
reactions from gun owners
ProPublica’s Johnson and Byard say that they “obtained a portion of the NSSF database” and reached out to 6,000 people on the list. Those who responded “expressed outrage, surprise or disappointment over learning they were in the database.”
Arthur Douglas, a contractor and firearms instructor who was included in the NSSF’s database, told ProPublica, “I don’t like the idea that they’re getting information, possibly illegally, to forward their agenda.” Alvin Ingram, an avid hunter and retired chemist, said “I think it’s horrible that there is such a thing.”
Joseph LeForge, a 74-year-old contractor who “has no Facebook account or email address and spoke to ProPublica on a flip phone” speculated that he was added to the database after he purchased shotgun shells over a decade ago: “I don’t recall having to give them a driver’s license or anything, but I might have.”
Kathy Gavin, another person included in the NSSF’s database who received “loads of mail during election season, urging her to vote for pro-gun politicians,” demanded answers from the NSSF: “Why is my information in there? Why did you need it or want it? Yes, you could use it to pummel me with postcards, but what else are you doing with it?”