Barry Moore Gun Safety Alabama

Barry Moore Wrote a Bill to Make the AR-15 America's Official National Gun

Alabama has the fifth-highest rate of gun violence in America. Its Republican Senate nominee spent his time in Congress trying to make the rifle used at Uvalde a national symbol — and got George Santos and Marjorie Taylor Greene to sign on.

MAGA Report Cards · Aug 07, 2026

Every state gets to pick official symbols. A state bird. A state flower. It's the kind of bill legislators pass when they want a nice photo and nothing is at stake.

Barry Moore had a different idea. In February 2023, he introduced a bill in Congress to give the United States something it had never had: an official national gun.

Not just any gun. The AR-15.

What the bill actually said

The bill was H.R. 1095, the "AR-15 National Gun Act". Moore introduced it on February 17, 2023. In the statement of constitutional authority he filed with the bill, he described its purpose in one sentence:

"This bill declares AR-15 style rifles chambered in .223 Remington or 5.56x45 NATO to be the National Gun of the United States."

That's it. That was the whole bill. It did not lower the price of a single thing, fund a single hospital, or protect a single right that anyone was actually losing. It was a symbol — and Moore chose his symbol carefully.

He rolled it out days later at a gun store in Troy, Alabama, and explained the reasoning on social media:

"The #SecondAmendment is as American a right as freedom of speech, religion, & the press. Today I unveiled my bill to make the AR-15 the National Gun of America. We must send a message that we will meet every attack on any of our constitutional rights."

At the store, he went further, telling the crowd: "The anti-Second Amendment group won't stop until they take away all your firearms… One rule to remember: any government that would take away one right would take away them all."

The rifle he wanted to honor

Nine months before Moore filed that bill, a gunman armed with an AR-15-style rifle walked into Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, 2022, and fired 142 rounds of hollow-point bullets "designed to inflict maximum bodily harm." He killed 19 children and two teachers. It was the deadliest school shooting in Texas history and the second-deadliest in the country's.

Barry Moore's response to a country that had just watched that was to propose making the weapon a national emblem.

And he didn't pick a quiet moment to do it. When he introduced the bill, Newsweek noted that 2023 had already seen more mass shootings than there had been days in the year, and that nearly 50,000 Americans had lost their lives to gun violence in 2021 alone.

Who signed on with him

A bill like this tells you who a politician wants to be seen standing next to. Four members of Congress cosponsored the AR-15 National Gun Act:

Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia
Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado
Rep. George Santos of New York
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia

That is the company Moore chose to keep on the one bill he called a message to the country.

And he stuck with it. Ten months later, when the House voted on a resolution "providing for the expulsion of Representative George Santos," it passed 311–114 — and Barry Moore voted no (Roll Call 691, December 1, 2023). Even with 311 of his colleagues voting the other way, Moore wanted Santos to stay.

It went nowhere — and that's the point

The AR-15 National Gun Act was referred to the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability on the day it was introduced, and that is the last thing that ever happened to it. No hearing. No markup. No vote. It died. Moore never reintroduced it in the following Congress.

So it accomplished nothing — which means we should be honest about what it was for. It was for attention. It was a press conference at a gun store and a post on social media. Moore had a limited number of bills he could put his name on, and he spent one of them on this.

Alabama is not a state with a gun surplus problem to celebrate

Here is what was happening in Alabama while its congressman was writing symbolism bills.

Alabama has the fifth-highest rate of gun violence in the nation — 213.6 shooting incidents per 100,000 residents from 2014 to 2024, roughly 83% higher than the national average, with 10,522 shooting incidents over that period. Those are our neighbors, our kids, and our emergency rooms.

Nationally, 125 Americans are killed with guns every day and more than 200 more are shot and wounded. We wrote about the Republicans with the worst records on guns — the ones who keep choosing the gun lobby over their own constituents. Moore's bill is the same instinct, just with the pretense stripped away. There's no policy argument to have with it. It doesn't do anything. It just announces whose side he's on.

He's asking for a promotion

Moore is now the Republican nominee for Alabama's open U.S. Senate seat, having won the June 2026 runoff with about 56 percent of the vote. A senator has six years and far more power than a House member to shape what does and doesn't get a vote.

Before Alabama hands him that, it's fair to look at what he did with the power he already had. In a state with the fifth-worst gun violence rate in America, he used it to try to put the AR-15 on the same list as the bald eagle.

Alabama families burying people shot with these weapons did not need a national symbol. They needed a congressman who took the problem seriously. We deserve better.