No, The NRA Museum Is Not Selling Off Its Guns

Have you heard the rumors for the past few years? Since at least 2021, there has been Internet chatter that the National Firearms Museum is selling off firearms from its collections. Now, the National Firearms Museum has issued a statement that says this isn’t the case.

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A strong statement

In the statement that you can see below, NRA Museums Director Philip Schreier says the museum has been running for months, after a shutdown in the early days of COVID-19’s spread: "We were closed for a couple of years during COVID, but despite what you might read on the Internet, we're open for business again and have been for over two years," he says in the video "And again, pay no attention to the nattering nabobs of negativism that you encounter online. Everything that was here in the museum when you last saw it before COVID is still here today. There are no holes in the gallery. In fact, we've added two new exhibit galleries while we were gone."

Schreier does say that firearms previously exhibited in the museum may indeed be up for sale, but that doesn’t mean the museum is selling them—they could have been firearms on loan for display.

"Nothing from our collection has literally been sold ever during my watch, and I've been here 35 years,” he says. “Just because they once appeared in the museum doesn't mean that they were actually property of the museum or belonged to our members, you all, as part of your collection here at the National Firearms Museum." He says they recently had just such a case, where the museum managed to convince the owner to leave 100 of 200 guns they’d initially loaned when they were planning to take the whole lot out of the museum’s display.