Diego Mallo News Today

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.

The American government funded the country’s first gun companies. But as the country matured, manufacturers had to find a market beyond the government to stay afloat. This created a problem: how do you convince a bunch of civilians that they need to keep buying new guns?

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.

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 shares the surprising origin story of America’s foundational industry.

Not long after Jacob Wideman murdered his summer camp roommate, Eric Kane, in 1986 — seemingly with no motive — a question emerged in the breathless news coverage of the tragedy: Was Jake a “bad seed”?

This debut episode of Violation, a podcast from WBUR and The Marshall Project, introduces the story of the crime that has bound two families together for decades.