Hey, Latino USA listener. So this is a sobering reality.
We know it.
All too many lives are lost to guns across the United States every single day. Mass shootings have devastated entire communities in El Paso, in Uvaldi, both of where I have been tragedies that have broken our collective hearts and that we've covered here at Latino USA. And the first question we usually ask is why why did this happen? But a new podcast called The Gun Machine from our colleagues at WBUR and The Trace, seeks to remind us what we usually forget, that in this country there are
centuries of history of violence that got us here. Hosted by reporter Alan Stevens, The Gun Machine looks into the past to understand where we are now. For example, how early partnerships between mad scientists, gunsmiths, and a fledgling US gouvern that actually created the gun industry in the Northeast, and a look at how that industry has been partners
with the government well ever since today. We share with you episode two where Alan talks to a historian about the racist roots of the Second Amendment and he travels down to Florida where he talks to black gun owners about why they carry looking at the link between our nation's fraud history and why it's so easy to sell us guns today. And a warning to our listeners. This episode includes some explicit language, so be prepared. Here's episode two of the Gun Machine.
If there's one thing to know about America, it's that it's a land of revolution, and no one would know that better than a Virginia blacksmith with a plan, Gabriel Prosser.
He and his brother had in fact created swords as part of their weapons in order to fight this rebellion, but they knew the swords.
Gabriel and other early American arrivals had grown tired of working under the boot heel of an institution they had no stake in creating, no rights, a world where your life and livelihood were dictated by born status, not merit. So he spread the word to nearly a thousand like minded men with a promise.
He said that all of those who believed in liberty would be able to be in this incredible space, would be able to enjoy this vibrant democracy.
Gabriel's enemies are better armed, organized, and already suspicious of sedition. If he and his men were planning on getting out alive. His operation would have to be executed sharply, swiftly, perfectly.
The plan was to have basically three divisions. One division would set a warehouse on fire as a diversionary tactic. The other division would go to the treasury and get the money in order to be able to pay for the insurgents. And the other division would go to the armory and get the guns and the ammunition that they needed in order to fight for their liberty.
You see, Gabriel Prosser and his conspirators were some of America's first patriots, but you never know it because they were black. An enemy they were fighting was the United States, to be specific, the plantation. The gun machine looks a number of slave people accounted for nearly forty percent. Sure you episode two where Alan talks to Historian and his
followers needed guns to take on the government. Gabe's rebellion would ultimately be dashed a freak storm on the even the attack shook the resolve of the men one more than the others. In particular, a conspirator named Pharaoh.
He's sitting out there and the rain and the thunder is hitting and every time there was a crack of lightning, every time there was a burst of thunder. His nerves were shattering, and so he was like, Okay, we're gonna die.
We're just gonna die.
He's like, I'm going to be free, but I'm going to be free by telling my master about this plot.
Altogether, some seventy men would be arrested, Gabriel his brother, and twenty three others would be made examples of and hanged. A few others would be sold to plantations out of state, and two would be granted freedom for being informants to the government. Many Americans may have heard of the Nat Turner Rebellion in Virginia or the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina.
As a black journalist covering the history of American violence, I discovered that there were nearly three hundred slave revolts throughout the course of American history, most of which have been purposely erased. And the erasure of those stories is connected to the gun I'm Alan Stevens, and you're listening to The Gun Machine How America Was Forged by the Gun Industry, a podcast by WBR and The Trace. On the last episode of The Gun Machine we explain how
America built its early gun industry. In this episode, we have to go back to the actual beginning and ask the why, what type of the sign necessitate the need for not just militaries to be armed but everyone all the time? Today we talk about America's foundation a fear and how the gun industry was built on top of it. Chapter two, Why we Carry It's the sixteen hundreds. In Central Europe, two things are about to happen that will change the world forever. The first is the invention of
the flintlock musket. Before that, the systems that sparked the gunpowder and guns were finicky and wet or humid conditions. But the flintluck musket was reliable, battle tested and therefore primed to be exported outside of the mild European temperatures. And secondly, the Protestant Reformation had swept through Europe. The Catholic Church had long banned the sales of European guns to non Catholic nations, but Protestant churches didn't care the
Catholics to abandon their policy, sparking a mass selloff. Europeans dumping guns into new countries, and it was in Africa where Europeans will find the closest and most worthwhile commodity for trade, human cargo. And just like that, the Triangle slave trade was born. The guns for bodies trade was so high that by the eighteenth century, records show gunpowder accounted for nearly forty percent of European imports to Africa.
But the firearm wasn't just the lubricant of the slave trade abroad, it was also its guarantee right here in America. The invention of the firearm was a force multiplier. It was the gun that made colonial slavery even possible u see Berkeley history professor Brian Delay says the firearm now gave regular working colonists the ability to control those in bondage, even if they were outnumbered.
Slavery was a fact in every single colony, and of course it was concentrated in the southern colonies. And slavery doesn't work without a weapons gap.
By seventeen seventy five, before we were the United States of anything, twenty percent of America's colonial population was enslaved Africans, most of them living in the South, all of whom posed a potential security risk to established order.
This required the able bodied, adult male population of white colonists to be armed at a far higher rate than, say, was the case among average working people in Great Britain at the time.
So, if I was a black person living, say in seventeenth century America, how would I go about getting my hands on a gun? And what opportunities could that make for me?
You would have the opportunity to be whipped thirty nine lash, that's the opportunity that you had.
This is Carol Anderson, a professor of African American history at Emmer University, who has been investigating something you probably haven't heard about in school, the link between the Second Amendment an America's long history of slavery and racism. Let me go ahead and burst that bubble and hurt your feelings right now, most Americans subscribe to certain myths about the foundation of our country. We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, But
that was never the case. The South had gone all in on plantation slavery from the start, which brings me to the next myth that plantation slavery as a system just somehow worked, when in fact, the slave economy was a dangerous economy, large scale slave rebellions continuously rocked country, not to mention many other individual acts of defiance and violence in the face of enslavement, enslave people fighting back against their enslaver. I'm talking about stabbings, beheading shootings, real
heavy metal shit. But it also meant that plantation societies had to function like prison societies. So if you had to imagine the South, imagine a network of omnipresent slave patrols on the horizons, contraband and shakedowns, and the constant looming suspicion that at any given time these plantation owners could all get their little slaving heads cut off. In sixteen eighty, Virginia prohibits black people from using a gun in self defense against white attackers, even if they are free.
In sixteen eighty one, the Colony of New York bans black people from having any sort of weapons. Seventeen forty one, North Carolina's legislature implements state paid bounties for slaves and the right for patrollers to keep any guns and other contraband plus off the enslaved as personal rewards during shakedowns. And this was all before the Revolutionary War. Even took place. By the time the colonies began drafting the Constitution, there was no standing military, and the creation of one would
be highly regulated. But at the same time, a number of Southern colonies were concerned with the more internal threat to their peculiar institution, so they demanded the Constitution include a security backstop to their enterprise, give us the ability to carry guns, quation surgencies, and support the web of slave patrols that had already been established.
The bad history that we have had about the Second Amendment, how it gets cloaked in this nobility of the militia fighting off domestic tyranny and fighting off a foreign invasion, when in fact the militia really wasn't really good at I of those. What it was effective at was putting down slave revolts.
Without the Second Amendment, many southern colonial forefathers refused to ratify the Constitution at all.
The Second Amendment was the bribe to the South to not scuttle the Constitution of the United States and to therefore not scuttle the nation itself. And it was George Mason talking about, we will be left defenseless if this militia is put under the control of the Feds. We cannot trust the federal government to protect us from these black people.
Now, I know what you're thinking, why don't I know about all this? And that is actually by design. First and foremost Americans still struggled to talk about the national embarrassment that was slavery. We don't like to think of our society as violent, and after the writing of the Constitution, it just gets more violent. Like I said earlier, there were nearly three hundreds slave uprisings from the country's inception
to the end of the Civil War. And if you read abolitionist newspaper clippings from the Antebellum era, you hear of countless other tales of violence and threat escaped slaves using contraband revolvers to shoot it out with captors, enslave women bludgeting to debt their white assaulters, apparent killing their own child rather than return them to the horrors of servitude. But there is another reason we don't know about it, and that is a strategic one. Back in the eighteen hundreds,
insurrection was bad for business. In the eighteen sixties, the economic value of the enslaved was worth four billion dollars and today's money that comes out closer to forty two trillion. That was more than all the banks, factories, and railroads in the US were worth at the time. Stories and plans of rebellion were inspired to black people, and the US government was aware of this and acutely aware of similar things going on international with successful slaver votes in
places like Haiti. So there was a desire to keep these stories out of public view.
The Haitian Revolution, I've got to say up front, scared the bejeebers out of the founding fathers. When you look at their correspondence, they're like, oh, my god, did you see what just happened in zent domain. Oh if those ideas come here, we are going to be in trouble. If black people believe that they can be free, that these ideas about liberty and justice apply to them, we are doomed.
So these stories were erased from American history, But that fear of black people and the need to defend oneself from black people didn't go away after the end of slavery with the Civil War. In fact, in many regards, those fears got worse.
When thinking about what makes America unique, you know, it's really not that much of a skip and jump to see, well, is there anything to do with our history of enslavement, our history of civil war in the ways that we've thought about who is safe and who is dangerous in our country.
Nicholas Buttrick is a professor of social psychology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He has spent the last couple of years researching how and why America formed its current gun culture. What he found was a great deal of how we view the need to carry guns today stems from the attitudes formed in the wake of reconstruction.
You have emancipation, and with emancipation comes the rise of black political power, and for the white Antebellum elite, it seems as if this is something that cannot stand West.
You're wrong.
I do want to escape too.
I'm so very tired of it all. I've struggled for food and for money, the.
Weed and holden piccottontil I can stand in another minute.
I tell you asked that the South is dead. It's dead.
The Yanks in the common din't gotten.
There's nothing left for us.
This line from Gone with the Wind may seem melodramatic to us, but for Scarlet o' hear and crew, it was an understatement. The American South during reconstruction was a hellhole. Akin to any modern post war occupational environment you'd see today. Law and order was nearly abandoned. Basic commodities were scarce. The only thing and ready supply where the newly free black Americans beginning to cement their burgeoning political power, and
an avalanche of post war guns. White Americans in the South lose their goddamn minds at the new status quo.
A lot of the speeches that these redeemers were using is that they seem to anchor a lot of sort of southernness, Southern masculinity, ways of restoring a Southern way of life in firearms specifically, and I think this makes a lot of sense that the South, while destroyed physically, was just totally a wash in firearms.
Homicide rates were eighteen times higher in the South than they were in the North, and these guns were different. The Civil War was one of the first conflicts with mechanized production of guns. Soldiers return home with high quality weapons and lots of them.
And you also have a really dangerous society. You have murder rates that are completely out of control and so you have a dangerous world with a lot of weapons, and it maybe makes sense that rich white Southerners might look to different sorts of ways of picking out how to suppress black power into rally white power. And one of the items we think that was really super salient were all these guns.
White Southerners formed hundreds of so called rifle clubs, claiming they needed to defend themselves against black people, even though most of the murders at the time were white on white. The clubs were actually armed white supremacist groups meant to intimidate voters and diminish black political power. This started forming a modern gun identity and set forth ideas in people
about what the government could and couldn't do. In the reconstruction South, state constitutions were being rewritten for the first time black people had political power. Many white Southerners didn't trust the government to represent their interest, to protect them and their sense of order, so they felt they had to take matters into their own hands, and guns were an important symbol. Buttrick's research makes one thing abundantly clear.
The counties with the highest rates of enslavement before the Civil War are the places where today we see the highest rates of gun ownership and by following social media connections. Buttrick also found that as those same Americans have migrated around the country, so have those ideas about guns. The communities with the deepest social and cultural ties to slaveholding counties carry similar feelings about gun ownership in the present day.
His research also suggests that while people think of guns as a defense against physical threats, they're also using them as a defense against psychological threats.
Guns become a sort of a totem or a charm that help gun owners to feel their lives are more meaningful, that they have or control, and that they feel safer.
It's also an identity that has fueled gun companies and gun sales.
And so I think that the Civil War and its aftermaths set a template, but the template that we've then been building on as a society for quite a while. And so it's not just that these things happened once and ended. You know that there is quite a lot of advertising, quite a lot of marketing which is sort of reinforcing these beliefs that we've had about how guns work.
And for one hundred years, white people become ingrained with the notion that firearms in this country equals autonomy, identity, and most of all power. And that's all fine and dandy until black people start getting guns too.
The Black Panthers first made national news just a year ago when they entered the state.
Capitol and Sacramento armed with rifles and pistols.
In nineteen sixty seven, when the Panthers march on the Capitol legally carrying guns to protest a newly proposed gun control bill. Then Governor Ronald Reagan would respond by signing it into law, banning public carry without a permit. The NRA would approve it, would become the state's first major piece of legislation restricting the right to carry a gun, and would lead to a slew of gun control laws targeting black people nationwide. Then the following year, we'd really melt down.
Martin Luther Kingey twenty minutes ago die.
In the wake of King's death, There'd be over one hundred uprisings, and Congress would renew a once stalled effort to limit access to guns. They passed the nineteen sixty eight Gun Control Act, which lay the groundwork for modern laws around who is allowed to buy and sell firearms. But more importantly, just look at the here and now. As demographics change, we fragment. The Obama administration sparked record gun sales for the time, but it wouldn't hold a
candle to twenty twenty. If COVID had us locked. The murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed would get us absolutely loaded.
These are not acts full protests.
These are acts of domestic durrah arresting. One person shot and killed at a Black Lives Matter protest an Austin Tech.
When the Proud Boys group showed up, a confrontation caused a violent street fight to break out. Police ordered the crowds to disperse, and they also did.
Americans would buy over forty million guns and twenty twenty one, that's more guns than the entire population of Canada. Five million of those Americans would be grabbing a piece for the first time, and it would pour billions into the pockets of the gun industry. I would watch in real time as my beat as a gun reporter went from niche specialty to sitting front row to the largest wave of gun buying and recorded American history. How's that for
job security? And it's not like it's an undercurrent that gun culture hasn't been afraid to tap into. Make them protest, make them scream racism and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia, to smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and areas. In that ad, the NRA calls racial justice protests madness and calls on Americans to fight them with what they
call a clinched fist of truth. Rifle producer Daniel Defense ended up in Congress last year where lawmakers grilled them on using extremist iconography in their ads.
That's a fall knot, and it's a symbol that has been increasingly embraced by white supremacists, But.
It doesn't have to be that explicit. I've always been a gun nerd and growing up I'd cringe at the number of times I'd come across Confederate flags, Nazi war gear, end or straight up disdain of anything not quite American. It's this shadow that no matter how far I go into the community, is still always there. And don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that everyone who is buying a gun is doing so because they are racist. More so that when your country is founded on a
fundamental fear of the person next door. Carrying a gun is a lot more palatable than not carrying one. But if gun ownership and the gun industry was built on whiteness, what does it mean to be a black gun owner? Now we'll find out in a minute.
Have you heard that?
Yeah, that was a gator?
Did not hear that?
That's pretty grace tatter. And this is the Bunker Club. It's a field in Claremont, Florida where hundreds of gun enthusiasts as symbol in the swamp like humidity to do one thing, play with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of high powered weaponry. And we're gonna play two. It's asking me, am, I currently on probation. No, have ever been ampudicated as a mentally defective or committed and meant to a mental institution. No under influenced.
Alcohol or drugs or anything negative issued or restraining order, Domestic Violence Act, borrowing. Now, have you ever handled a handgun?
This is pew Party two.
Yes, you ever handled a rifle or shotgun?
Yes? Click here to sign. It's a black led shooting event and it's the second time it's being held in as many years. It's a playground of burns, tires, and targets.
Have I ever handled a handgun? No, rifler shotgun? No, I think I'm the only person here. You can probably answer notableth those questions.
P Party two is an event created by j Jenkins Akaj the Shooter, a self described gun tuber, a firearms social media influencer.
Do you Sementein has consistently lost? So I'm gonna get a block seventeen A here start, I'm gonna let a few rounds off.
Jay's a businessman, one of the few black people in the country who carries a coveted FFL sought three, a federal license that allows him to develop and sell things like suppressors and automatic weapons. These events are about building his brand, where he invites regular people, particularly black people, so they can do two things, meet face to face with the cutting edge companies in the gun industry. Plus they get a chance to handle some iconic and advanced weaponry.
Oh god, that was tight. That was a P ninety over there, so look at it. It's it's kind of like a sci fi looking gun, has this crazy magazine it fits on top, but a pretty much fast rate of fire. So you know, again, these are all you know, movie guns, things that like high level militant like you know, things that are in catalogs that most people will never be able to touch. Are you over my shoulder? Get this? When we run out, it's gonna make this awesome sound.
And that was the sound. Did you go if you can't tell? I actually love guns, and I always have. I'm black, but more specifically, I'm biracial. I was introduced to guns at a young age by my dad, a white man from Appalachia, and I remember the stairs I get growing up going to gun shows down south in Texas, the state and offish gunshop owners, the range masters, who with the sheer glance would remind me that no matter who I was or how trained I was, I was
there as a guest. So for me, Pew Party is different.
Yep.
It's an eccentric assortment of the familiar but the unfamiliar. It's the most black people I've ever seen at a shooting event, and therefore probably the most comfortable I've ever been in such a space. I mean, like you hear the hammer drop on this thing. There are things you'd never see at a gun range, like a DJ and a Caribbean food truck and all day, a few three lines became very clear. First, almost every black person we spoke with clearly understood what it means to be black
and all the pitfalls that accompany it. And their response to that reality was name that their life was in their own hands.
One as a black person in this country, as well as a woman in this country, it's very important that we be able to protect ourselves with the best tools Ted horere available.
My self protection is serious.
How about take advantage of your second Amendment right and do what you need to do to protect you and your family.
I want to protect me in mind. Secondly, that crazy year of twenty twenty where there was open white supremacy, government failure in COVID nineteen and the fallout of George Floyd, Well, black people saw it too, and we flocked to guns. Here's Thomas Lyles, a Navy vet and firearms instructor.
When Trump was in office, that's when we saw the largest spike of black gun ownership, and so a lot of black people during that time they felt as if the government, the police, nobody was going to help us or protect us, and so it was on us we had to protect ourselves.
When he talks to us, he is wearing a military chest ring adorned with bits of African can Take prey, and it's carrying thousands of dollars of military great hardware. This is my first time meeting him in person, but I'm familiar with his social media. One finger puts this live right, so I like that. So I think it might be a good recommendation for female shooters. This training isn't to put holes in paper, but winning gunfights.
And some of my family members I talked to the CCW class because during that time, when Kobe was happening, we had all the protests going on, the country seemed very unbalanced, right, It's very uncertain, And so even selling my family years before that, like I don't need a gun. I've been alive forty years and nothing's ever happened. But during those that time and no alson, I was getting these phone calls, Hey, cousin, nephew, when can you come over and teach me a class? And now they're in
the guns. My uncle's in the guns, my cousin's in the guns. He's buying rifles, building rifles, buying pistols.
In fact, according to the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. Sixty nine percent of people who bought their first gun during the pandemic were people of color. And if you looked at America through a thousand foot lens, it kind of makes sense. Black people are some of those most victimized in the country and always have been.
We have police systems that hurt more than help, where black people are five times more likely to be arrested than whites and three times is likely to be killed during a police encounter. And with this long pattern of isolation and victimization, is it really a surprise that more
black people are buying guns too? And how does the industry react to this backwards af As quick as the NRA is to savage Black Lives Matter protests to rally their base and defense of the gun industry, they're also quick to point out that often laws controlling gun ownership have been racist. Some of the messaging in recent years has been come on over, black customers, We're happy to
have you. But that same organization collectively shrugs at the death of legal gun owners, like when police outside Saint Paul killed Filando Castile during a traffic stop. It rallies for more aggressive policing and backs racist politicians. It's this worldview that contributes to the reality that many of the PEW Parties participants existing the odd looks and stares at gun ranges, the distinct feeling that everyone's not going to
light them or what they represent. Every black male we interviewed was acutely aware of toxic images portrayed of black men with guns, which is why Jay the Shooter says he hosts events like these. You said one thing about you know, and I think this is crazy that I got to revisit, But you said that when it comes to firearms, that black people have really been a victim of poor marketing. Yes, what has that marketing been and who has put that marketing out there?
Well, you know, be honest. Let's let's take some accountability here, right. We have to stop conducting the acts that put ourselves in a negative life. Let's start there. Let's start with first accountability. I believe in black accountability first, and then we can start working on the values and everything else that we need to do to really clean up a lot of the negative images that are being perceived and promoted and projected on us.
But a lot of times. So like some of the racist anti black images, like gun companies not all. I'm not saying the industry isn't a monolith, but gun companies have made a lot of money off of off of making people.
Afraid of black people.
Yeah, how does that? How do you fit into how do you deal with that?
Right?
Right?
Look, at the end of the day, every every company has their business model. We have to see it for what it is, right and not be subject to it. Yeah, the fear mongering is there. It is there. I see it, but I choose not to look at that because my mission is not to combat that. My mission is to push legitimacy when it comes to African Americans and incubating consumers to merchants. That's my mission. I can't stop what I'm doing to go look at what they're doing. Like,
we know it's there. But how do I combat that is by throwing advance and bringing more community awareness to what it is. How many times did you pass by somebody today and you saw first time shooters shooting suppress, first time shooting shooter, shoot machine gun, first time hands on with this platform from this company. That's my mission. I focus on that I can. Would I be able to combat what they're doing. No, But I'm putting good media in good press, and I'm putting my own marketing
out there that I can control. So instead of send back and complaining about what they're doing with their targeted marketing when it comes to the black community, I also have to target my community and put the positive messages out there. That's how I combat what they're doing.
Essentially, it's a form of exposure therapy, and Jay wasn't alone in his sentiments of trying to take the fear out of the image of a black man carrying a gun in the broader American consciousness, and things like this event and training seminars and social media were ways for them to do it. When it comes to the broader gun industry and how they market. A lot of the attitude was not too dissimilar from the modit if you can't beat them, join them, but perhaps with the caveat
to change them from within. Throughout the day, though, we had plenty of conversations about self defense, about the power of black dollars, and it's easy to get lost in the money to be had in this industry. But a woman at the event named Crystal Harper reminded us of another reality that Black people are also the most victimized by firearms.
There's a lot of trauma surrounding firearms within our community that just needs to be dealt with in addition to lack of knowledge, lack of history. But we don't talk about that trauma.
And we don't talk about it. Gun violence and all forms has increased sharply for Black Americans in recent years. Black people now experience twelve times the gun homicides, eighteen times the amount of shooting injuries, and nearly three times the fatal police shootings of their white counterparts. The Wanda Akosua, a firearms trainer, says she sees the consequences of those statistics.
It happens a lot, you know, especially in certain areas. I know, I get a nice percentage of my students that do have trauma. Actually have one girl who broke down like anxiety, full anxiety attack on the range. But it's just a matter of kind of coming at it from behind and being able to relate to them because I'm able to relate because I've also been in that situation.
And many black people can relate. Our community is tight knit. Although we only account for about thirteen percent of the population, we absorb a disproportionate amount of America's gun violence. So this means that seventy one percent of Black adults know someone who's been injured or killed by gun in their lifetime. It's a violence even I've tasted myself.
After you've experienced trauma, there is I think I believe there's a point in time where you have to say, I am not going to be a victim to this trauma, and I have to take measures into my own hands to be able to heal from this trauma from the inside out, going inward in healing and starting that process. But you have to be the one to start that healing process. So at the end of the day, I
think you are responsible for it. In the perfect world, we don't want anyone, you know, of course the person that's given the trauma, but usually a person that's presenting trauma, they don't care about anyone at all. You know, they don't care. So when they don't care, you have to care about yourself, you know. And I think that's the ultimate goal, is being able to self love, love yourself, respect yourself enough to come out of that dark space and train.
For me as a reporter and a black gun owner, I'm always driven to this space, this fundamental conflict because on one side, the gun industry and the Second Amendment community needs to diversify to survive. But on the other the only way it can do so may me facing down its racist past and a latent fear is that fuel the industry, and with all the guns in the world,
that prospect is still the scariest. On the next episode of The Gun Machine, we meet the man who wrote the playbook for a successful gun company.
He was somebody who I would say had enormous charisma an incredible drive, but as I say, I wouldn't trust him.
So after America secured its freedom and used its weapons to secure its enslave workforce, what next, Well, it's time to expand, and with that expands The gun Machine. The gun Machine is production of WBR in partnership with The Trace. I'm your host, Alon Stevens. If you want more on this or any of our other episodes, you should visit the Trace dot org Slash gun Machine or wr dot
org Slash gun Machine. If you feel like we are telling an important story, review the show on your podcast app and fill out the Gun Machine survey at WR dot org slash survey. You can sign up for the Traces newsletter to find more on this reporting at the Trace dot org. Our producer who always has My six is wr's Grace Tattered. Our editing fellow from The Trace is Aja Annick. Orchestrating our bat drops is sound designer
Emily Jankowski. Our production manager is Paul Viks. Our editors are Kevin Sullivan and WBR podcast executive producer Ben Brock Johnson. Additional editing from Miles Corman. Our WR Managing Producer is Samata Joshi, and our Engagement editor at The Trace is Gracey McKenzie, Audio engineering from Tim Felton, and our artwork
is by Diego Maichong. Support for The Gun Machine comes from the Joyce Foundation, a nonpartisan philanthropy that invests in racial equity and economic mobility in the Great Lakes region. For more than twenty five years, Joyce has supported research, education, and policy solutions to reduce gun violence and make community safer. To learn more, go to joycefdn dot org. Additional funding provided by the Candida Fund