Believe it or not, two NRAs exist in this country, but not necessarily coexist. 

The most controversial, our National Rifle Association established in 1871, claims a current membership surpassing 5 million, dedicated to protecting and defending the Constitution’s 2nd amendment – the right to keep and bear arms. Our more modestly popular National Reading Association, established in 1876, tallies at least 50,000 members (primarily librarians but also trustees, publishers and other library supporters) defending the Constitution’s 1st amendment, the right for citizens to arm themselves with virtually any kind of book they choose to carry, open or holstered in their backpacks. 

Surprisingly, I found that gun and book people could share similar goals. Both organizations emphasize educating people and remaining vigilant when the constitutional right they cherish is threatened. 

According to the NRA, its founders were originally dismayed at a lack of marksmanship shown by their troops. They set forth as their prime directive to “promote and encourage rifle shooting on a scientific basis” and to “teach firearm competency and safety.” Ten years into its mission, the young NRA faced political opposition to promoting marksmanship in New York and was forced to find a new home in New Jersey.

The other NRA – our National Reading Association, better known these days as the American Library Association (ALA) – seeks to increase public awareness of the crucial role libraries play in education and lifelong learning, intellectual freedom and literacy. I can hardly imagine how fostering reading skills or hosting spelling bees might prove controversial, but the battle against censorship is inescapable.

Both organizations spend a considerable portion of their budgets on lobbying efforts to influence legislation, participate in or initiate lawsuits, and to endorse or oppose various political candidates depending on how friendly they are to the organizations’ missions. They also spend money on advertising, often to collect more money. 

One infamous NRA slogan supplies a good example: Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. It has been touted and mocked by both sides of the gun control debate, so much so that it has become a cliche. Even Charlton Heston, a former president of the NRA, curiously paraphrased it this way: “Guns don’t kill people. No! Bullets do! Guns just get ’em going really, really fast!” On the side of the gun debate an anti-gun T-shirt quipped, “Guns don’t kill people. Gaping holes in vital organs kill people”

Reading campaigns also use slogans, but they’re rarely loaded with the same punch. An annual event celebrated on March 2 tries to gather support using this understated theme: Read Across America. An ALA upcoming Banned Books Week event on Oct. 5-11, 2025, requires a literate audience to understand its slogan: “Censorship is so 1984. Read for Your Rights.”

For me, this is where the similarities between the two screech to a halt. State-based book banning attempts reached a historic high last year in the United States. NBC news reports “your library association found that nearly half of the book titles targeted for censorship dealt with ‘the voices and lived experiences’ of the LGBTQ+ community and people of color.” Please excuse my gunny language but this conservatively controlled legislation is a premeditated and targeted political hit. 

The ALA should go full-metal-jacket with a new slogan: “Books Don’t Kill People, Censorship Does.” 

In all fairness, it’s rare but it happens, that books kill people, but not like guns. “In 2013, a man in China was reportedly beaten to death with a history book by his girlfriend, who was angry that he had been chatting with other women online,” and “In 1999, a man in California was killed when a 6-foot-tall stack of magazines and books fell on him in his home. The stack was estimated to weigh around 1,000 pounds.” 

Censorship, however, undeniably kills people.

Greg Lukianoff on newyorkpost.com writes: “One of the strangest things about fighting cancel culture is the stubborn claim that it doesn’t even exist. But 22 years of combatting censorship on college campuses has shown me that cancel culture is very real, and can even be deadly.”

Talented and dedicated teachers and politicians are threatened and harassed, financially and emotionally, so relentlessly that some have ended their own lives. Targeted hits that happened recently in Utah and Minnesota are clearly assassinations, attempts to silence political voices with guns and deadly ammunition, not books. Cancel culture means to cancel people and inappropriate history.

Can we ignore the intellectual casualties? Those repressed young lives growing up under imposed and enforced curriculum bans? Students never exposed to reading or even talking about what the censors consider “dangerous” facts about life and history in their own classrooms and school libraries? About slavery or the Civil War, about lynchings in the South, about the mass extermination of Jews in concentration camps, or even about sexual diversity?  

These are children the censors hope will grow up wearing blinders. These are children who will be the ghosts of our rich and diverse history, haunting reminders of the truths we should be strong enough to remember and face.