The National Rifle Association is too rural and too radical to continue. The NRA will soon cease to be relevant in local and national politics as its members age and the political zeitgeist swings in favor of voters who support gun control and restrictions on the Second Amendment. The science is settled on this, it’s inevitable, it’s going to happen.

I’m not quoting this month’s story by Adam Winkler in the Washington Post, rather, I’m quoting a 1996 story in Rolling Stone. The “experts” in the halls of Washington and academia were wrong about the NRA 20 years ago, and they’re wrong about it today as well.

To be fair, there are some nuggets of truth in the Washington Post story. NRA members do tend to be old. However, they’re not as old as the Democratic presidential candidates, and no one at the Post is writing stories about the inevitable demise of the Democratic Party.

Well, not at this moment, at least.

The NRA realizes this, though, and they’ve recruited young voices like Colion Noir and Natalie Foster to help spread their message of gun rights and personal freedom. Gun owners are also not as rural as Mr. Winkler would have us believe. The gun industry’s main trade show, the SHOT (Shooting, Hunting, and Outdoor Trade) Show in Las Vegas has seen tremendous growth in the past few years, primarily because of the greatly expanded interest in concealed carry and “tactical” weapons. The “typical gun owner” of today is just as likely to be a middle-class woman in the suburbs who carries a pistol for personal protection or a young tech worker who shoots practical pistol as they are a farmer who hunts for deer every fall.

The NRA is not going away anytime soon, but their political role is changing. Thirty years ago, the Republicans relied on a “three-legged stool” of support from foreign policy hawks, small-government activists, and social conservatives. Of those three, it was the social conservatives who did the dirty work of knocking on doors and getting out voters to the polls on voting day. Since then, however, the power of social conservatives inside and outside of the Republican Party has waned, and it’s now gun owners and NRA members who get out the vote for their candidate of choice.

The NRA (and gun owners in general) used to be welcomed by moderates in both parties, but with the increasing radicalization of the Democratic Party, neither the NRA nor gun owners are welcome within their ranks. It’s not that the NRA is in the pocket of the GOP (or the other way around), but when the leading candidate for the Democrat nomination compares dealing with NRA members to negotiating with Iranian terrorists, it’s hard for the NRA to throw their support behind another party beside the Republicans.

The future of the NRA is bright because the NRA is a magnet for people who distrust government, and those ranks are growing every day. People of all ages, creeds and colors are looking to the NRA and other organizations that defend the Second Amendment to help them defend all their lives in an increasingly disordered world, one which shows that you’re one of the good guys who takes their civil responsibilities as serious as you do your civil rights. People who join the NRA (or other gun rights organizations) realize, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, that trust in government is not the solution to our problems, government itself is the problem.