Perhaps most well-known for being elected the 63rd president of the National Rifle Association, but by any standard, Cors lifelong involvement in firearms has been extraordinary. His origins in collecting begin much like anyone’s – with a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun that he still owns to this day. In grade school he would bring his Winchester Model 75, ammo, books, and sack lunch to school, and when finished he would head down the street to a church with a 10-point rifle range in its basement. It was there his interest in competitive shooting budded and bloomed. Unfortunately, his competitive, highpower shooting would temporarily take a back seat to his career, when Cors went to work as a counsel with the Judiciary Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives. Ever the proponent of individual freedom, Cors had his hands in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and helped to defang some of the nastiest bits from Gun Control Act of 1968 – a bill that at one time included registration, licensing, and a ban on handguns.

His interest in competitive highpower shooting, as well as the rampant availability of cheap surplus arms put Cors on an inevitable path toward collecting the longarms used by the U.S. military. Cors eventually discovered his interest wasn’t really the vehicles themselves, but the vehicles as “a medium for telling the story of those who served.” To that end, his current project is the Americans in Wartime Museum, an institution “dedicated to honoring those who have served” in all branches of the U.S. military from the Great War to the present and beyond. Located in Quanitco, VA, the 90,000 square foot museum will become a new destination for enthusiasts of military and American history. If the true goal of any collector is to preserve the items in their care and to pass information on to the next generation of enthusiasts, Cors has succeeded on an unimaginable level.