Short Run WBUR

Our country would look very different without the gun industry. And without the federal government? The gun industry might not exist at all. The premier episode of The Gun Machine introduces the story of how the U.S. has shaped, and been shaped by, the gun industry — and how we all play a role.

In episode two of The Gun Machine, host Alain Stephens travels down to Florida to attend the Pew Party, where he talks to Black gun owners about why they carry and examines the link between our nation’s fraught history and why it’s so easy to sell us guns today.

The Gun Machine host Alain Stephens and producer Grace Tatter dig into the scandal-ridden biography of the man who cracked the mass civilian market for guns, and who helped create an iconic genre defined by falsehoods that are misremembered as facts today.

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.

When criminals have access to some of the most powerful weapons in the world, how will police match or outgun them? What role does the gun industry play?

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.