From New York Times, I'm Michael Vobaro. This is a daily.

Today, a Times investigation reveals the secret history of how America's most influential

gun rights group amassed its power and the previously unseen role that members of Congress

played in designing the group's strategies.

My colleague, Mike McIntyre, explains it's Tuesday, August 1st.

Mike, it's very well understood at this point that the NRA, the National Raful Association,

is a seemingly insurmountable force in American politics.

So much so that even in an era defined by mass shootings and gun violence,

it's managed to convince members of Congress to block almost every meaningful effort to regulate firearms.

And the basic dynamic is the NRA tells lawmakers what to do and a lot of those lawmakers do it.

But you've spent the past few months carrying out an investigation that changes our understanding of that dynamic.

So tell us what you did and what you found.

Well, it turns out that there's a flip side to this commonly understood narrative

and that there are members of Congress, certainly, who have carried water for the NRA so to speak over the years.

But there is also a subset of lawmakers who are not just members of the NRA or supporters of the NRA,

but they actually serve on the board of directors of the National Raful Association.

And so these members of Congress were in a position to not only influence firearms policy,

but also the path of the private organization most responsible for influencing it.

So there are many instances in which the conventional idea that we've had for some time

of a member of Congress sort of meekly accepting talking points or draft bills from the NRA was actually the other way around.

It was the members of Congress who were telling the NRA what they needed to do.

And I think the one lawmaker, the best exemplifies does John Dingo

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