Last week, students at Great Mills High School joined students from 2,500 schools across the country in a mass school walk out to protest congressional inaction on gun control and the NRA’s stranglehold on our political system. On Tuesday, those same students became the latest group of American kids to be attacked by a gunman while at school. While momentum for gun control has grown since the tragic shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the NRA has continued to wield its political muscle, blocking reforms efforts even in the face of more school shootings. While the momentum and energy against the NRA and its agenda is palpable, in order to translate this energy into reform, we must go after the NRA’s political clout by hitting the organization where it hurts—its pockets.

After last month’s school shooting in Parkland, Florida, several of the country’s largest businesses cut ties with the National Rifle Association. Delta and United Airlines announced they were ending their partnerships. MetLife, Hertz and Avis decided to drop discounts for NRA members. Other corporations now face mounting pressure to sever their connections to the gun advocacy group. These are critical first steps in what must become a growing trend — corporations need to finally abandon their long-standing role in funding and legitimizing the NRA’s worst impulses.

The NRA has a clear game plan — to stoke fear in Americans through race-baiting. They use manufactured fear to drive guns sales and ownership, which in turn increases their membership and revenue, which they deploy to block common-sense gun control measures. They frighten politicians away from standing with children who survived school shootings. Instead, they push politicians straight into the arms of money hungry gun lobbyists. And up until now, many of the biggest corporations in the country were happy to quietly enable the NRA’s deadly strategy in the face of mounting deaths, all while turning a profit themselves.

“Murder insurance” is a perfect example of what’s wrong with companies getting in bed with the NRA. Up until just days ago, insurance companies Chubb and Lockton Affinity provided an insurance policy in partnership with the NRA called “NRA Carry Guard” for gun owners who have murdered someone. The policy provides a free lawyer, money to bail yourself out when arrested, and even a replacement gun for the one that police confiscated as evidence – for just $45 a month. It couldn’t be more clear: insurance companies underwrote an NRA initiative to help gun owners avoid the consequences when they broke the law by killing people.

Murder insurance–just like the Stand Your Ground laws that allow gun owners to shoot innocent people based only on alleged fear–is impossible to fully understand without considering the role of racism in manufacturing an artificial craze for “self defense” which creates the demand for these products in the first place. The NRA has spent years arguing to their 5 million members that they are not safe without guns and that they need to protect themselves — particularly against Black and Brown people. This was made clear in late June when the NRA released an aggressive recruitment video. The ad cast the pain and demands of Black communities advocating for an equitable justice system into a personal affront and threat to white people, essentially exhorting people to respond to non-violence with violence.

Both Chubb and Lockton Affinity publicly announced last month that they would stop underwriting Carry Guard, thanks to a campaign headed by Guns Down and my organization Color Of Change, which also involved Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin. But we shouldn’t assume that the policy is dead and that the NRA won’t find another way to continue help gun owners escape accountability for murder. We cannot let up and stop pressuring corporations that enable the NRA’s ongoing efforts to stoke fear and block common-sense gun control.

You would think that one of the deadliest mass shootings in our history would prompt all corporations to rethink their relationship with the NRA, but too many global brands still enable the organization. FedEx is still the NRA’s partner, and the NRA continues to boast on their website that they’ve teamed up with the shipping service to provide “BIG savings.” Amazon, Google, Apple and other streaming sites are still airing NRATV. By offering NRA members discounts and giving a platform for their content, these companies are complicit in the proliferation of deadly weapons and school shootings, all to tap into the five million consumers who make up the NRA’s membership.

This comes at a steep cost to all of us. With the ongoing support of corporations, the NRA has built a society where Black people can’t leave their homes without fear of being gunned down by vigilantes and all children live with the fear that their school could be the next Parkland.

Imagine how different our country would be, and how much safer, if corporations had stood with the majority of Americans who support gun control and cut off financial support for the NRA years ago. Without the clout and financial backing of these corporations, the NRA would have been a far weaker organization and we might have been able to cut off the Shoot First laws when we first saw them coming from the NRA and ALEC, or cut off the commercialization of guns before it had spread to Walmarts across the country, or cut off access to automatic weapons before they were ever allowed to hit the consumer market.

The last few weeks have shown that powerful organizing can make a difference. Companies are realizing that they can’t quietly support an organization whose very existence depends on more guns and more violence. As the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, parents like Sybrina Fulton, and Americans across the country continue to speak out with passion and conviction on what gun violence is doing to our communities, one of the best ways we can support them is to continue to make our voices heard to the businesses that are still partnering with the NRA. It’s time for corporations to join the majority of Americans in our fight against the influence of the gun lobby in our politics and our neighborhoods.

Rashad Robinson

Writing since March 2018 · 1 story contributed