CNN: This is how the NRA loses [View all]

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...after 50 years of hostility, the United States would normalize relations with Cuba. It was a stunning defeat for a group that once seemed invincible.

"You couldn't forecast it because you didn't know it was going to happen, but it happens much more than people think," Bishin says of powerful political groups that suffer sudden downfalls.

Could the National Rifle Association ever face a similar fate? Most Americans probably don't think so. When a gunman murdered nine people at a community college in Oregon earlier this month, the President seemed to express what many Americans were thinking when he said, "Somehow this has become routine. ... We have become numb to this."

There's a pervasive belief that any attempt to tighten gun laws would be futile because too many politicians are afraid to defy the NRA. But there are at least four examples from American history -- including two snatched from recent headlines -- where ordinary people and unforeseen events defeated a seemingly invincible lobbying group, and hardly anyone saw it coming.

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The ASL could control politicians, but not the unintended consequences of Prohibition, which spawned organized crime and the rise of gangsters such as Al Capone. Fed-up Americans opened up "speakeasies" across the country. Pharmacists stocked "medicinal liquor" and sold Old Grand-Dad and Johnnie Walker by prescription, while many Americans brewed alcohol in their homes. Even President Warren G. Harding was rumored to keep bootleg liquor in the White House.

What really hurt the ASL, though, was the onset of the Great Depression.

"The Depression came on and there was no more tax revenue for the federal government," Okrent says. "People were saying, 'Where are we going to get the money to keep the lights on?' The primary tax revenue before Prohibition was alcohol."

Prohibition ended in 1933 with the ratification of the 21st Amendment. And so did the ASL.

"By the middle 1930s, it was a toothless organization," Okrent says.

Wheeler died of exhaustion at age 58 in 1927. When Prohibition was passed, people predicted he would be remembered as one of the most important people in America's history. Yet who remembers Wheeler or the ASL today?

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http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/15/politics/defy-gun-lobby/index.html