Allan D. Cors earned his Distinguished Rifleman badge in 1967 with a surplus M1 he bought because he wanted something to do that was not work. He kept the rifle for the rest of his life. He also kept the habit that came with it—showing up, doing the unglamorous part and making sure the next shooter had a place to stand.
Cors, the 63rd president of the National Rifle Association of America and one of the architects of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, died Aug. 10, 2026.
Competitive shooters knew him first as a service rifle man. Cors shot for the Virginia State High Power Rifle Team, practiced at Quantico when the ranges were open and made the trip to Camp Perry for decades, back when competitors slept a dozen to a hut in leftover World War II housing with broken doors and windows. His favorite event was the Infantry Trophy Match—the Rattle Battle—and his teams won it more than once. By the 1990s he had followed the sport onto the AR-15 platform, which he considered the more stable rifle for across-the-course work.
His path to a firing point ran through a church basement. Growing up in Cincinnati, Cors joined a Cub Scout pack led by a Marine Corps veteran who believed every boy ought to learn to shoot, and the pack practiced on a smallbore range about a mile away. He shot smallbore through high school, set the sport aside for college and a law degree at the University of Cincinnati, then rediscovered it in 1964 as a young counsel on Capitol Hill with a growing collection of M1 rifles and a six-day work week. Col. Joe Smith, the Army’s Director of Civilian Marksmanship at the time, told him to stop collecting the rifles long enough to compete with them and pointed him toward the Virginia team.
Two teammates finished the job. Clint Fowler and Dave Meredith, both Distinguished Riflemen, rebuilt his sitting, rapid prone and standing positions—and Cors credited them for years afterward with the results that followed. Mentorship became one of his standard asks of experienced shooters: take somebody to the range, help a new owner get trained, shoot at milk jugs if that is what it takes. He was blunt that the sport’s real obstacle was not politics but geography, since plenty of Americans buy a firearm and then discover they have nowhere to shoot it and nobody to teach them.
That practical streak showed up in his match-administration views, too. Cors argued that competition had to fit into a modern calendar and pushed for electronic targets on the theory that a shooter who spends 11 hours at the range to fire a single across-the-course match is a shooter the sport will eventually lose. As a member of the Civilian Marksmanship Program board of directors, he watched the Talladega Marksmanship Park come online and predicted correctly that networked scoring would spread.
Cors joined the NRA Board of Directors in 1972 and never really left the building. He chaired committees, including the NRA Gun Collectors Committee, served the NRA Foundation as trustee and chairman, advocated for the creation of the association’s political action committee and held the presidency from 2015 to 2017. Shooting Sports USA readers saw him at the National Matches in that role in 2015, on stage at the World Long-Range Palma Rifle Championship handing hardware to U.S. and international team members.
His legislative work is the part most competitors never saw. As minority counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, Cors worked the 1968 Gun Control Act fight from the inside at a moment when registration, licensing and a handgun ban were all live proposals, and he worked alongside Rep. John Dingell and a generation of NRA leaders to strip the harshest provisions out. Past NRA President James W. Porter, II, recalled that it was Cors who seconded Dingell’s 1975 resolution creating NRA-ILA, the grassroots lobbying arm that reshaped the association and the debate around it. Porter also remembered the steady hand Cors brought to NRA legal and legislative policy for decades afterward, and the standing invitation that thousands of people accepted over the years to visit his tank farm in Virginia.
Guns were only half of Cors’ collecting. He started with a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun that he still owned 80 years later and finished with a fleet of more than 50 military vehicles, including a running World War I-vintage tank. Open houses at the Virginia farm drew veterans who spoke about their service, and listening to them convinced Cors that the machines mattered mainly as a way into the stories of the people who crewed them. From that came the Americans in Wartime Experience, the museum project he founded and chaired to honor Americans who served from the Great War forward.
Outside the shooting world, Cors spent 34 years at Corning Inc., retiring as senior vice president after directing the company’s government affairs work worldwide.
“I had the pleasure of getting to know and working with past NRA President Allan Cors during his term of office early in my career at the National Rifle Association of America,” NRA Executive Vice President and CEO Doug Hamlin said. “Allan was a dashing figure who was articulate and well-spoken, a good listener, and highly informed and educated on Second Amendment issues. He was an enthusiast, collector, shooter and hunter—but mostly, he was a patriot. He loved this country, he loved his family and he loved the National Rifle Association of America. My thoughts and prayers go out to Allan’s family and friends. This is a huge loss for the extended NRA family.”
When asked which discipline a new shooter should take up, Cors often refused to answer, at least the way the question was usually meant. Every discipline was different, he said, and the right one depended on what a person wanted out of it and what stage of life they were in. He had been a service rifle competitor, then a shotgunner who called for the bird from a low gun because he was trying to become a better hunter, not because it looked good. Competition, to him, was an escape that happened to come with a scorecard and several hundred friends.
He will be missed.
Legends: Allan D. Cors
1936 – 2026
