It marketed a kind of gun-based empowerment that appealed to many working-class white men, whose status began to wane during the economic and social disruption of the late twentieth century. White men, who dominate the ranks of gun owners in the United States, also account for some eighty per cent of gun suicides. That claim unravelled in the face of years of litigation, and I wondered if anyone who had lost a loved one to gun suicide had sought to take the N.R.A. Morse lost two partners to gun suicide: her husband, in 1991, and her partner Lewis Tabler, in 2012. Before Tabler’s death, he secretly removed Stormy as the beneficiary of his retirement account, leaving it to the N.R.A.