The Gun Industry Knows That Gun Laws Save Lives. It Just Doesn’t Care.
A series of articles by The Trace and Rolling Stone dive deep into the gun industry’s sacrifice of public safety in its pursuit of profit.
Last year, investigative journalist Mike Spies published an extraordinary series of articles about how the firearm industry operates—and the lies it tells to juice gun sales.
Called “The Secret Files of the Gun Industry” and published in partnership with The Trace and Rolling Stone, this reporting should’ve shaken the industry to its core. But gun industry CEOs have a tendency to get away with dangerous and questionable behavior, so they ran their usual playbook and rode out the crisis until the news cycle moved on.
But we didn’t forget, and we’re not letting anyone else move on either. The documents Spies uncovered illuminate a persistent dynamic in American gun politics: What the gun industry privately knows is very different from what it says publicly.
Now, this probably isn’t very surprising. But consider the market for large-capacity magazines, which are magazines with the capacity to hold 10 or more rounds. They’re often used in mass shootings because they allow a shooter to fire a lot of rounds before stopping or pausing to reload, in turn increasing casualties and reducing the likelihood of escape or intervention.
Internal industry analyses show how carefully gun companies tracked the proliferation of large-capacity magazines in the US, and how commercially important these deadly devices are to them. After all, they’re high-volume and relatively inexpensive—the gun industry is making millions from them.
The article also illustrates just how dangerous large-capacity magazines are in practice, despite protests from the gun lobby:
Allen also documented and examined 161 mass shootings that took place between 1982 and 2019. For 105 of them, the shooter’s magazine capacity was known. Of those, 63 — or 60 percent — involved LCMs. ‘In particular,’ Allen noted, ‘we found an average number of fatalities or injuries of 27 per mass shooting with a large-capacity magazine versus 9 for those without.”
While the industry has long resisted regulations targeting large-capacity magazines, after the 2018 Parkland school shooting, the National Shooting Sports Foundation commissioned research examining Americans’ attitudes toward gun policy. The results complicate one of the most familiar talking points in gun politics.
According to the industry’s own polling, many Americans who hold favorable views of gun ownership, including gun owners themselves, are open to supporting gun regulations. That is very different from industry portrayals of gun owners as a bloc uniformly opposed to any gun law, no matter how commonsense the laws may be:
[…]
For people who the study says have a ‘positive feeling’ about gun ownership, the study ranks the top five arguments for and against it… When told to rank the ‘most effective arguments against firearm ownership,’ these same respondents chose policies that the gun industry and Republican lawmakers actively oppose. The argument the group found to be most effective is: ‘Universal background checks for gun sales and transactions are supported by approximately 85 percent of Americans.’
Other statements deemed highly effective by these respondents included ‘Guns should be licensed just like cars,’ ‘State red flag laws to remove guns from those who show warning signs of violence keep guns out of the hands of those who would harm themselves or others,’ ‘Gun violence is an epidemic in the U.S.,’ and ‘Common sense gun laws to close loopholes in current gun laws will save lives and prevent gun violence.’
And yet, since this survey was conducted, Republicans have blocked efforts to pass universal background checks, which would expand the procedure to all firearms transfers instead of just commercial sales.”
Minimal Support for Concealed Carry
Internal studies reviewed by Spies also shed light on the debate over concealed carry. If the gun lobby had its way, anyone would be able to carry a concealed gun on them anywhere, regardless of local laws.
Gun rights advocates frequently argue that widespread concealed carrying of firearms increases public safety and deters crime. But in the industry-funded research that Spies uncovered, many respondents reported feeling less safe when they believed people around them might be carrying concealed firearms. This lines up with the data: The more guns are in public, the higher likelihood of lethal violence.
A Focus on Extremist Marketing
A chilling part of the series sheds light on gun marketing and its role in fueling violent extremism. Internal research identifies a core consumer demographic for the gun industry: frequent firearm purchasers whose motivations often center on personal protection, preparedness, and perceived threats to social order. As one article explains:
That’s why marketing campaigns for guns and gun-related products frequently draw on those themes, emphasizing danger, instability, and confrontation. These narratives fuel paranoia and extremism, and glorify combat. And for the businesses, they’re successful—these campaigns are very effective at selling guns, even if they do so while driving up crime and violence.
The documents Spies unearthed provide an unusually detailed portrait of an industry that has long operated with limited public scrutiny. They show a sophisticated ecosystem of market research, political strategy, and consumer targeting.
For policymakers, journalists, and advocates trying to understand the dynamics of gun violence in America, that insight matters. The story of gun violence is as much about how guns are sold as it is about how they are fired, and to end gun violence we must understand the industry that works relentlessly to sell as many as possible.
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