The gun industry is inextricable from the American government and, for many, American identity. But with more than 100 Americans dying from shootings everyday, and even more being wounded, how do we begin to calculate the cost of our country's current relationship with guns?
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is supposed to regulate the gun industry and protect the American public from gun crime. But the ATF often falls short of that mandate. This is no accident.
In 1999, at the end of a decade in which Gary, Indiana, had endured being labeled as the “murder capital of the nation,” then-Mayor Scott King filed a suit against gun manufacturers he believed were knowingly flooding his city with illegal guns. But soon, the NRA would help ensure that such lawsuits were nearly impossible.
In the fifth episode of The Gun Machine, we explore how gun companies court police departments across the country – and how those departments have become not only some of the biggest customers of private gun manufacturers but their guiding inspiration.
The byproduct of producing the world's most lethal guns is that criminals have them, too. We go back to the birthplace of the industry, Springfield, Mass., where nearly every young person we speak with has a story about big guns and the terror they cause in their community.