On the first floor of NRA headquarters, a large glass and steel building that looms over I-66 in the ambivalent suburbs of Fairfax, Virginia, exists the National Firearms Museum. It is free and open to the public. After a brief visit, I highly recommend that instead of ever going to the museum, you do what roughly 19,000 responsible gun owners do each year and shoot yourself. It’d be far less painful.

The museum was initially built in 1935 and moved to Fairfax in 1998. Allegedly, it “details and examines the nearly 700-year history of firearms with a special emphasis on firearms, freedom, and the American experience.” Really, it’s a monument to rash, unreflective violence and willful stupidity.

I visited in part out of morbid curiosity and in part out of a lack of having anything better to do. I was in the area for work, to write about Kenny Loggins playing in a living room (long story), and had less than 48 hours to kill in the area. I was staying in a roach-infested hotel right off the highway, the kind that someone rents for a tired, passionless affair. The stains on the carpet charted years of loneliness and despair like the rings of a tree. It seemed like being anywhere else was preferable to watching reruns of Suits in a bed where thousands of marriages were ruined.

After accidentally driving by the address twice, I parked in a lot behind the NRA building. To enter the museum, you have to pick up a phone and speak to a woman at a desk who then buzzes you in. The heightened security was strange, considering the NRA’s “guns prevent all crime” stance.

http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/265869/nras-gun-propaganda-museum-visit/