Gunner Quinn
One of the National Rifle Association’s crown jewels is its National Firearms Museum in Fairfax, Va. Located on the ground floor of the NRA’s headquarters building, the 15,000 sq.-ft. museum is comprised of 85 exhibit cases housing more than 3,000 firearms. In the above video, NRA Museums Director Philip Schreier clarifies the current status of the museum and dispels any rumors about the sale of any of the museum’s arms.
“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,” Schreier said. “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.”
The centerpiece of the National Firearms Museum is the Robert E. Petersen Gallery, which opened in 2010 and is considered by many to be “the finest single room of guns anywhere in the world.” In it, museum goers can view some of the best-quality double rifles and shotguns ever made, along with a number of historically significant arms and the largest single collection of Gatling guns on public display anywhere in the world.
“The museum is thriving and surviving here in Virginia,” Schreier said. “Nothing from our collection has literally been sold ever during my watch, and I’ve been here 35 years. 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.”
As an example, Schreier cited a recent case where the owner of more than 200 guns on display requested that their guns be returned to them.
“We were so reluctant to return them, I begged them to leave at least 100 of them with us,” Schreier said. “And so they gifted those 100 guns to us and took back half their collection. They had such great guns that were on exhibit here, we wanted to keep them for our members to be able to see them on a daily basis.”
The National Firearms Museum is located at 11250 Waples Mill Road in Fairfax, Va., and is open seven days a week from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission is free to all. Additionally, the NRA also owns and manages the National Sporting Arms Museum at Bass Pro Shops in Springfield, Mo., as well as the Frank Brownell Museum of the Southwest, located at the NRA Whittington Center in Raton, N.M. For details on the museum’s locations and exhibits, visit the NRA Museum website here.
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