1). “The blast effect: How bullets from an AR-15 blow the body apart”, Mar. 29, 2023, N. Kirkpatrick, Atthar Mirza Manuel Canales, 1,021 words, The Washington Post.
2). “A tragedy without end: Survivors of Sutherland Springs church massacre endure lifelong disability and trauma”, Mar. 29, 2023, Silvia Foster-Frau & Holly Bailey, 3,680 words, The Washington Post.
3). “Varmints, soldiers and looming threats: The advertising used to sell the AR-15”, Mar. 29, 2023, Alex Horton, Monique Woo & Tucker Harris, 2,527 words, The Washington Post.
4). “American icon: The gun that divides a nation”, Mar. 29, 2023, Todd C. Frankel, Shawn Boburg, Josh Dawsey, Ashley Parker, & Alex Horton, 7,234 words, The Washington Post.
~~ recommended by dmorista ~~
Introduction by dmorista: The Washington Post put considerable effort into a series of stories about the AR-15 Assault Rifle, marketed primarily to right-wing Americans and that has become the most common weapon used in Mass Shootings in the U.S., including the Mass Shootings at schools. In addition we increasingly see various types of paramilitaries, criminal strong-arm operatives, and fascist street thugs bringing their AR-15s to political rallies, school board meetings, and other public events. This is done to intimidate the general population and to pave a way for a more overt fascistic takeover in the U.S. The Post is to be commended for this series of articles (which include, but are not limited to, the four that I am posting here). All 4 of these stories, along with a couple of others, appeared in the March 29th edition of the Washington Post. A few other stories appeared in the March 28th and March 27th editions.
In keeping with the tradition of the Capitalist Media the really horrific material, the horrible crime scene photos, the screams of the children in Uvalde for help while 475 heavily armed police cowered in the hallways of the school there, and the aftermath of these mass shootings are not presented to the public. This is a typical practice for the Corporate Controlled Media owned and operated by a ruling class that has murdered tens of millions of people around the world, primarily in the poor countries of The Global South.
Of the 4 articles I am posting here. Item 1). “The blast effect: How bullets from an AR-15 blow the body apart”, briefly discusses the devastating effects of the very high-speed bullets, that the AR-15 fires, on human bodies. It includes short passages discussing two children killed in two separate school Mass School Shootings, the one in Newtown, Connecticut, and the one in Parkland, Florida. Item 2, “A tragedy without end: Survivors of Sutherland Springs church massacre endure lifelong disability and trauma”, discusses the many terrible after effects suffered by the Mass Shooting survivors in Sutherland Springs, Texas. That was where a disturbed Navy Veteran killed over 20 people during a Sunday service at their Baptist Church. Many of these survivors have various health problems caused by the bullets that hit and wounded them. We have to remember, that this sort of litany of shattered lives, has to be multiplied by the number of the various Mass Shootings, using AR-15s, around the country.
The article from Item 3)., “Varmints, soldiers and looming threats: The advertising used to sell the AR-15”, goes into some of the different advertising campaigns to persuade people (overwhelmingly men) to buy an expensive assault rifle that is only useful for killing people. The appeals to manhood and protection of the home and family from the dark and evil forces of the outside world worked and tremendous profits were realized by a wide variety of gun manufacturers. Finally the article in Item 4)., “American icon: The gun that divides a nation”, discusses the business decisions involved in producing and marketing the AR-15s. It also looks at the image of the AR-15 loved by reactionaries and hated by progressives. The popularity of the AR-15 with gun nuts and fascistic types rises with every Mass Shooting. It is a truly bizarre and an “only in America” story.
There are some other interesting articles in this series. I will do the work to bring them to TCS if there is any interest among our readers and commenters. So let me know in the comments.
1). “The blast effect: How bullets from an AR-15 blow the body apart”, Mar. 29, 2023, N. Kirkpatrick, Atthar Mirza Manuel Canales, 1,021 words, The Washington Post.
Byline: N. Kirkpatrick, Atthar Mirza and Manuel Canales
The wounds show the lethal force of the AR-15, but they are rarely seen.
The gun is the weapon of choice for many mass killers. It fires bullets at such a high velocity - often in a barrage of 30 or even 100 in rapid succession - that it can eviscerate multiple people in seconds. A single bullet lands with a shock wave intense enough to blow apart a skull and demolish vital organs. The impact is even more acute on the compact body of a small child.
"It literally can pulverize bones, it can shatter your liver and it can provide this blast effect," said Joseph Sakran, a gunshot survivor who advocates for gun violence prevention and a trauma surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
During surgery on people shot with high-velocity rounds, he said, body tissue "literally just crumbled into your hands."
The carnage is rarely visible to the public. Crime scene photos are considered too gruesome to publish and often kept confidential. News accounts rely on antiseptic descriptions from law enforcement officials and medical examiners who, in some cases, have said remains were so unrecognizable that they could be identified only through DNA samples.
As Sakran put it: "We often sanitize what is happening."
The Washington Post sought to illustrate the force of the AR-15 and reveal its catastrophic effects.
This account is based on a review of nearly 100 autopsy reports from several past AR-15 shootings, including those at schools in Connecticut and Florida,as well as court testimony and interviews with trauma surgeons, ballistics experts and a medical examiner.
The records and interviews show in stark detail the unique mechanics that propel these bullets - and why they unleash such devastation in the body.
Any bullet can kill, and instantly, when it hits a vital organ. The higher speed of a bullet from an AR-15 causes far more damage after it hits the body and drastically reduces a person's chances of survival.
"As that bullet slows down," said trauma surgeon Babak Sarani, an authority on casualties from mass killings, "that energy is so massive it has to go someplace, and your body will literally tear apart."
In the scenario depicted, a typical handgun bullet from the same distance takes a relatively linear path and causes far less damage. With immediate medical care and minimal bleeding, the victim would have a chance at surviving that gunshot.
The bullet from the AR-15, however, would cause torrential bleeding that is quickly lethal.
- - -
When multiple bullets from an AR-15 strike one body, they cause a cascade of catastrophic damage.
This is the trauma witnessed by first responders - but rarely, if ever, seen by the public or the policymakers who write gun laws.
The Post determined that there is a public interest in demonstrating the uniquely destructive power of the AR-15 when used to kill.
What follows is a detailed depiction showing the impact of bullets fired from AR-15s at two young victims. It is based on autopsy reports for Noah Pozner and Peter Wang that The Post obtained through public records.
Because of the unusual visual nature of the presentation, The Post took the added step of seeking - and receiving - the consent of the victims' families before proceeding with this account. The Post offered the families the opportunity to view the depictions in advance of publication, which they declined to do.
The families also declined to be interviewed for this story, but a spokesperson for the Wang family offered a statement explaining why Peter's parents, Hui and Kong Wang, provided their consent to The Post.
"Peter's parents want people to know the truth," said Lin Chen, their niece and Peter's cousin. "They want people to know about Peter. They want people to remember him."
This presentation may be disturbing to some people.
- - -
Noah was found dead on the floor of Classroom 8 at Sandy Hook Elementary on Dec. 14, 2012. He was 6. He was wearing a red Batman sweatshirt, black pants and black sneakers.
He loved Batman. He was full of energy, his family said, curious and imaginative. He wanted to be an astronaut, and he also wanted to manage a taco factory, because he loved tacos. Noah would tease his sisters that when they went to bed, he was going off "to his third shift" at the factory, so convincingly that they would wake up to make sure he was still in bed.
It was cold that morning when his father, Lenny, dropped him off at school, "but he jumped out not wearing his jacket and he had one arm in one sleeve and his backpack in his other arm, and he was kind of juggling both and walking into the school that way," Lenny Pozner would later testify.
"And that's the last visual I have of Noah."
The first visual that Connecticut State Police Sgt. William Cario has of Noah is this: 15 children and two educators are piled on top of one another in a small school bathroom on the southwest corner of the classroom. Cario proceeded to pull them out one by one. All were dead.
One of them was Noah.
- - -
Peter was found dead in a third-floor hallway of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Valentine's Day 2018. He was 15. He was wearing his Army JROTC uniform.
He kept notes in his bedroom drawer about his plans. He had joined the military training corps, with its mission to "motivate young people to be better citizens," as an important step toward attending the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
Born in New York to parents from China, he was always helping everyone around him, friends and family said. Once, at Disney World, he held a friend's child aloft in a crowd for 20 minutes so she could see a fireworks display.
When gunfire broke out in Parkland, Peter was in study hall, playing chess with a friend. He held the door open for other students to escape.
A few of them made it. He did not.
2). “A tragedy without end: Survivors of Sutherland Springs church massacre endure lifelong disability and trauma”, Mar. 29, 2023, Silvia Foster-Frau & Holly Bailey, 3,680 words, The Washington Post.
Byline: Silvia Foster-Frau and Holly Bailey
SUTHERLAND SPRINGS, Tex. - Multitudes of purple freckles dot Morgan Workman's legs, arms, chest and cheekbone - tiny shards of metal from bullets and shrapnel that struck her as she worshiped in her church more than five years ago.
The fragments are leaching lead. Workman suffers from toxicity symptoms, including body pains, fatigue, depression - and has been told by doctors that she probably can't have a baby.
"It feels like it was yesterday, like we're still going through all of it," Workman, 25, said. "Very uncommonly does a Sunday go by that I don't think: 'What if? How would I get out? Would I get out? Would I be able to do something?'"
Workman was shot twice when a gunman opened fire in the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, slaying worshipers gathered for Sunday service. More than two dozen of her fellow parishioners and closest friends died in the Nov. 5, 2017, attack.
Twenty others were wounded, sentenced to lives of unending pain and illness.
David Colbath, shot nine times, has high levels of lead in his blood. He can barely stand or use his hands without pain. Kris Workman, Morgan's brother-in-law who was shot twice, was paralyzed from the waist down and told by doctors he'd probably never walk again or conceive children.
John Holcombe and his now-12-year-old daughter, Evelyn, cling to each other for support. His pregnant wife, Crystal, had shielded Evelyn from the gunman and was killed along with Evelyn's three siblings and grandparents.
Some of the survivors have moved away from Sutherland Springs. Some have contemplated suicide.
The physical impact of the bullets and the number of lives lost were magnified by the shooter's chosen weapon. Devin Patrick Kelley, wielding a Ruger AR-556 rifle, fired 450 military-grade bullets inside the church within minutes, all of which left the barrel at a velocity of around 3,200 feet a second.
The devastation was incomparable to damage from a handgun or shotgun. Doctors who treated the victims likened the wounds to something they might have seen on a battlefield.
"The high-velocity firearm injuries, when they come in, you're missing body parts, and there's bleeding," said Lillian Liao, a trauma surgeon at University Hospital and UT Health in San Antonio. "You don't see muscle. There's just bone and skin and missing parts."
Five years on, many in the working-class town of 600 - nestled in the dusty-road countryside an hour southeast of San Antonio - still attend services every Sunday. They pray in a new church built next to the old one. The sanctuary, funded by donations from around the country, has fortified walls and security cameras. Many of the congregants - in addition to those in the church's new security team - carry guns on their hips for protection.
Every Sunday, they chime a bell in the church's tower where 25 portraits of those lost hang high, along with an image of angels to honor Crystal's unborn child. Children hobble through the pews with leg braces, men carry colostomy bags that sometimes leak. Some, like Workman, are marked by sprays of odd-looking freckles.
In the years since the shooting - years of weekly doctor's appointments, therapy to cleanse her blood and severe bouts of depression - Morgan Workman has been, in the words of a co-worker, "an island of hope in a sea of despair." She clings to that. Not because she believes it to be true, but out of hope that one day it could be.
"I want to be the person that's happy and positive even if they're struggling. I want to be smiling even if I'm having a really hard day. I want to find what's good in the day," Workman said. "But some days, the birds, the breeze - that's all you can find."
- - -
As David Colbath's blood pooled on the church's red carpet, as his friends were shot and killed around him - he thought of his children, and his savior.
Eyes shut, he recalled whispering again and again: "I love you Morgan, I love you Olivia, I love you Jesus."
The first gunshots sounded like fireworks.
On the lawn, 26-year-old Kelley - clad in body armor, his face concealed by a mask of the Marvel character the Punisher - was firing his rifle at the outside walls and front door of the tiny church.
Colbath was one of the first people to be hit, catching a glimpse of the shooter from the church entranceway before his arm was shot. "Get down!" he recalled screaming. "Get on the floor!"
As parishioners ducked for cover, Kelley stormed the church and stalked the aisles, shooting people at point-blank range. He fired 196 times inside the church in 16 separate bursts, according to a report based on recovered bullet casings and analysis of a church video. The dead ranged from age 1 to 77.
Terry Snyder, a longtime Texas Ranger among the first on the scene, later described seeing victims where bullets had "disintegrated the skull" - including a toddler's. Testifying in a civil trial, Snyder twice choked up on the witness stand.
"Even the survivors, the wounds that I saw . . . it was unbelievable, just the damage that the bullet would cause," Snyder said.
In testimony as part of a lawsuit against the U.S. Air Force for failing to report Kelley's criminal history to the FBI, John Holcombe described the horror he saw when he emerged from the sound booth.
"The kids were just laying there piled up with their faces blown off," Holcombe testified. "I couldn't even see [Crystal's] beautiful face anymore. It was just a crater."
Rusty Duncan, a paramedic from a neighboring town who happened to be driving by and was one of the first responders to enter the church, recalled "walking into a war zone where everyone was already dead."
"It looked like a bomb went off in there," Duncan said. "Just pieces of people everywhere."
Kelley fled the scene and killed himself hours later. Police later said they believe the gunman was targeting some relatives who attended the church because of an ongoing "domestic situation." One of the relatives, his mother-in-law, Michelle Shields, was not at church that day, but her mother, Lou White, was. She was killed.
- - -
The past is so precious to Holcombe that he has frozen time.
A wastebasket filled with Crystal's crumpled papers and empty Dr Pepper cans still sits on one side of his bed. He's kept a foam Polar Pop cup, lid and straw intact; it was the last drink she sipped on. The registry for the baby they never had is still online.
"One of the most important things we have is time," he said on a recent afternoon. "I regret not spending more time with the rest of my family when they were here. That's something I can never get back."
Holcombe lost both of his parents in the attack. His brother and niece were also killed. Only Evelyn, his youngest daughter, and Philip, his oldest son, survived. Holcombe wasn't shot, but fragments of shrapnel were lodged in his back and picked out later at the hospital. Evelyn, 7 at the time, was saved by her mother, who threw herself on top of her.
Holcombe has never stopped questioning why he survived instead of the other members of his family. "It would be better if I had gone and Crystal would've stayed," he said.
He can't dwell for too long. He has an energetic, wild-haired middle-schooler to feed and entertain and put to bed every night. Evelyn pulls him into the present in the moments when he smells Crystal's purple robe for too long, willing her scent to return to the fabric.
"Daddy, grab my feet!" she called to him on a recent afternoon, interrupting him as he examined the faint crayon writings of Megan and Emily, her deceased sisters, on the living room blinds.
Evelyn lay on a blue blanket on the living room floor, her blond hair splayed around her as she pushed her feet out into the air so that he could pull her around like a human mop.
"Woo hoo!" she said as he did. Soon, Philip would come home from work and be her next target for attention.
Later, John confessed: "If they weren't here and it was just me - I would be gone."
Evelyn loves Subway sandwiches that ooze with mayo and bounding on her trampoline in the backyard. Her mind wanders quickly from subject to subject.
But she can talk almost encyclopedically about mental health and depression.
"People don't know how to handle their depression," Evelyn said on a recent afternoon. "Depression isn't just a feeling, and you can't just snap out of it. It's like . . . a hatred that's sucking inside of you and you have no happiness, no joy, and you don't know what to do, you're lost."
After losing three siblings and her mother, she struggles to imagine herself as an adult. When John was explaining that he saved Evelyn's Hello Kitty playhouse - a gift from her mother - because she might want it when she gets older, Evelyn interjected. "I don't think I'll grow up," she said.
She shivers at loud noises. When Evelyn attended a church sleepover on a recent Friday with a handful of other girls, she ran up to another parishioner who survived the shooting and cupped her hands over her ears silently, her eyes pleading: She wanted earmuffs to dull the sounds of the other girls' loud screaming.
On the day of the shooting, Evelyn was found underneath her mother. She was covered in so much blood and body matter that a rescuer initially thought she might be dead.
Over the years, Evelyn has slowly opened up to Holcombe about what she saw and heard that day - how Evelyn locked eyes with Kelley and heard her mother's pleas for mercy. "One thing that she shared with me was that Crystal begged Kelley not to kill the kids," Holcombe testified at trial. "And so he shot them . . . in front of her. He shot them first."
Crystal was a gardener and an animal lover, Holcombe said. Holcombe bought Evelyn three baby white Pekin ducks for her birthday. When one got hurt, he drove from vet to vet, emptying his wallet and gas tank to try to save it. He wants his children to know that life is sacred, even though they've grown up around so much death.
Evelyn takes home-schooling classes online, which allows the Holcombe family to travel. In the past year, they have gone to Redwood National and State Parks, Mount Rushmore and Wyoming's Devils Tower National Monument.
Next, Evelyn wants to see a big waterfall and visit a Brazilian cocoa farm. So John is spending his time after work looking up places where they can do that.
"My main thing in life," he said, "is for her to be happy despite all the hell she has been through."
- - -
Colbath was shot nine times in the arm, leg and back.
He recalled needing six surgeries in the weeks after the shooting, as doctors decided which bullet fragments to remove, and which were buried so deep they were better left inside him. In the years since, bullets were also removed from his left side and back.
When he returned home from the hospital, Colbath could no longer do simple tasks independently. He had to submit to being cared for and asking for help, his family and health-care workers tasked with changing the bandages covering gruesome wounds on his buttocks and back.
One of his arms is numb, with a chunk of flesh cut out from his forearm and knotted skin stretching across it. The other hand is hypersensitive, with frequent nerve pain and uncomfortable sensations at the slightest touch. His ankles have scars from bullet wounds and are often swollen, preventing him from standing too long. His lead levels are above average, he said.
Colbath, now 61, gained more than 65 pounds after the shooting, and he had a gastric bypass procedure in December to help manage his weight. In the first year, his injuries prevented him from working as a fence repairman, and sky-high medical bills meant he had to rely on donations from the church and friends to get by. He no longer receives money from the state's victims' crime fund, he said, and hasn't applied for disability payments from the government.
He takes eight to 12 ibuprofen pills a day, he said, in addition to a handful of Tylenol at night.
"I've normalized pain every night. I've normalized pain every day," he said recently. "I'll never be normal again."
Brief moments of terror interrupt his daily life; unexpected loud noises send him into a tailspin of fear. He has struggled with the guilt of having been unable to stop the gunman. "I've had a really hard time in being able to overcome not being able to do anything," he said. "You grow up as a man's man and you think you can conquer the world, maybe. And it's amazing how one bullet hole in your arm stops you from doing everything."
Despite his struggles, Colbath has continued to attend First Baptist Church, the center of his social life in the town. Three years ago, he married Sheri Kay, a fellow parishioner who lost her nephew and niece - Robert and Shani Corrigan - in the attack. They wed in the church's new building.
"In spite of everything that I've been through, I have a big joy in my heart, not a big hole," Colbath said. "When I wake up, I am smiling and happy. And that's not a joke - that's the absolute truth. I believe the Lord has given me that and said, 'You've got another chance, what are you going to do with it today?'"
- - -
A nurse slowly inserted a needle into Morgan Workman's arm, funneling a mixture of vitamins into her bloodstream. Workman receives this treatment every week to help with her lead levels and takes nearly 30 pills daily to manage her symptoms.
"I'm still always at the doctor's," she said as the yellow-green liquid began to flow.
Workman developed problems with her feet soon after the shooting from the lead in her system, she said, and she relied on various leg braces for years until 2021. She still suffers from piercing headaches, sustained dizziness and an inability to sleep through the night.
In the first couple of years after the shooting, Workman's metal toxicity levels were dangerously high, she said. Doctors put her on a chelator, which filters out lead from the blood. As part of the treatment, doctors drew between 16 and 30 vials of her blood every Friday. The treatment required her to go through an intense diet; she lost 40 pounds.
When her symptoms were still not improving, Workman stopped the chelation and began an alternative treatment.
The lead in her body is also detrimental to fetal development, several doctors told her. As a result, Workman was advised not to have children with her husband of four years, Kyle Workman. They yearn for a future they cannot have.
"I almost feel like I'm mourning that loss," Morgan Workman said. "People describe how you have this incredible connection with this child because it's in your body, you can feel them moving, you can feel them kick. . . . It's never going to be something that's not hard to deal with."
Kyle is a survivor, too. During the shooting, he found a moment to flee the church - the only congregant to do so - racing across the street to the gas station, his shirt splattered in blood. The store owners opened the locked door for him and he ran in before collapsing to a crawl and sliding up against the back wall, in shock.
"Almost any little thing can bring me back to it. Gunshots still, loud noises still, funerals still. There's a lot that can bring me back to five years ago," Kyle Workman said.
Both Kyle and Morgan live like that together, jolted by the thud of a forklift or the sound of a critter digging under their house. Snippets of music remind them of their closest friends who were murdered. And a court case requires them to recount and relive the day of the shooting again and again.
The couple got married about two months after the shooting. They left empty chairs at their wedding for six guests who were killed.
Every Monday, they join their sisters and brothers at her parents' mobile home to cook a meal together. The trailer is the church's old youth room. It was put up for sale after the shooting because the new church includes the space.
It still has the faded blue carpet from back then, with stains from iced tea spilled by children who are now dead. Stickers on the restroom doors were placed there by Karla Holcombe, who was killed.
And there are two bullet holes: one visible on the outside, a green arrow drawn by first responders pointing to it. Another is at the bottom of a window, its spiderweb of fractures covered up with neon green tape.
"It's a little strange" living in that space, said Unitia "Nish" Harris, Morgan Workman's mother, as she looked around at their living room, a pew from the old church resting along one wall.
Morgan Workman talked and joked with her siblings and brothers-in-law as she ate an egg roll bowl, a tattoo of the badge number of the first responder who had found her the day of the shooting just visible on her ankle.
"I'm glad that I had dinner with my family. Before I left the house I was just, I was struggling," Workman said teary-eyed after the meal. Her family, she said, has saved her. "It's a really, really big blessing to have that and to have gone through hell and high water together and know that everybody has each other's backs."
- - -
On Sept. 25, Pastor Frank Pomeroy, who had led services at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs for more than 20 years, and who held the congregation together during the biggest tragedy of their lifetimes, took to the pulpit one last time.
The service, weeks before the shooting's five-year anniversary, would be his last one as pastor before retirement.
He wore a light blue collared shirt and one of his signature quirky ties - this time, his Winnie the Pooh and Tigger one. Sherri Pomeroy sat proudly in the front row, tears in her eyes and overwhelmed by the significance of the moment.
It had taken years for the horror of the shooting to catch up with Sherri. The couple were not at church that day. Frank had been in Oklahoma City, taking a firearms class, and Sherri had been in Florida working for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Their 14-year-old daughter, Annabelle, was there. She was killed.
In the hours and days after the attack, the Pomeroys had little time to grieve. They served as spokespeople for mourning families and de facto mental health counselors. They distributed donations and fended off conspiracy theorists who approached the church with cameras claiming that the shooting was a hoax.
They were so busy that their family frayed. At one point, their five surviving children told them: "'We didn't just lose Annabelle, we lost y'all too,'" Sherri said.
The Pomeroys said they struggled to help their family and friends through a tragedy that had occurred when they were out of town. They said they wondered if they could have saved their daughter if they had been at the church that day - and they questioned why God would allow her to be killed while sparing them.
About three years after the shooting, Sherri wanted to end her own life.
"I was suicidal," she said. "I didn't want to struggle to get out of bed or do anything anymore. I just wanted to succumb."
Immediate intervention from her husband and close friends coupled with group therapy helped her mental health. But when Frank had his own health scare last year, the couple decided they would step away from church leadership, sell their things and move into a camper to travel. It was time to let themselves heal.
All around them on their final day leading the congregation were the survivors.
The worship band performed as it always had, with Kris Workman at the helm. Guitar propped on his lap, legs settled on his wheelchair's footrests, he bellowed the lyrics: "Death is swallowed up forever by the fury of your love."
David Colbath sat a few rows from the front, smiling with his eyes closed as he held hands with his wife, Sheri Kay Colbath.
In the back, John Holcombe fiddled with his computer, monitoring the church services' various live streams online, smiling as Evelyn rushed by him with three other girls. They made their way to the front of the pews where she knelt and prayed.
Morgan Workman sat just behind Holcombe, still working the sound booth as she had been doing on the day of the shooting, singing with the worship band despite another debilitating migraine that sliced through her head.
Beside her was her sister Colbey Workman, who had been told for years that the paralysis of her husband, Kris, would prevent them from having children.
But there she sat, her hand on a round belly - their "little miracle," she called it. The doctor's due date: Nov. 5, 2022, five years to the day after the shooting. Ronen Anthony Rivas Workman was born five days early.
"If you go through awful and can only see awful then you're going to never move forward," Morgan Workman said. "The only way you're able to move forward and make that progress is to look and see what good we're able to still have."
3). “Varmints, soldiers and looming threats: The advertising used to sell the AR-15”, Mar. 29, 2023, Alex Horton, Monique Woo & Tucker Harris, 2,527 words, The Washington Post.
Byline: Alex Horton, Monique Woo and Tucker Harris
The Colt AR-15 looked more like a laser blaster than dad's trusty rifle when it hit the market in 1964.
It was made from aluminum and plastic, not the heavier metals and wood used in traditional firearms. Its cartridges were tiny compared with typical hunting ammunition. And it was all black - a dour monochrome far from the rich walnut accentuating many guns at the time.
In short, the AR-15 presented a litany of challenges for those tasked with trying to sell it.
Many gun enthusiasts and industry executives were initially skeptical that an offshoot of a weapon originally designed for combat could sell in a marketplace focused on extolling the virtues of rifles for hunting and handguns for self-defense.
But in the ensuing decades, the AR-15 would become a powerful symbol for whoever invoked it, from gun-control advocates decrying it as a preferred tool for mass killers to gun owners who championed it as the pinnacle of Second Amendment rights.
Through it all, the gun also became a point of emphasis for gun companies that turned to tactical weapons as an emerging and lucrative market.
An examination of the ads used to sell the AR-15, from the 1960s until today, reveals how the gun industry followed social and cultural changes as it sought to broaden the appeal of an unusually polarizing consumer product.
This analysis is based on a review of more than 400 advertisements, catalogue entries, brochures, social media posts and other messages produced by gun manufacturers and ad agencies. Many of the ads appeared in gun-oriented publications, including American Rifleman and Guns & Ammo - and some have been cited over the years in lawsuits and Federal Trade Commission complaints filed by victims of gun crimes or their families. The Washington Post sought additional analysis from experts on the intersection of marketing and culture.
The ads show how an industry attuned to public opinion across the decades, particularly among its heavily conservative customer base, has heralded the AR-15 as a weekend toy, an effective tool for hunting and home defense, and an expression of masculine energy - at times, all at once. Frequent images of police and soldiers wielding tactical rifles in the field urged civilian buyers to, as one ad put it, "use what they use."
Unless otherwise noted, gunmakers whose ads are referenced in this story did not respond to requests for comment.
- - -
A modest debut
The industry's initial advertising messages often sought to portray the AR-15 as an enhancement for hunters and others who used their guns for recreation.
The earliest ad reviewed by The Post was a 1964 clipping from Guns magazine in which Colt pitched its AR-15 Sporter.
The ad suggested "this is part of what you already do," said Grant Reeher, a political science professor and director of the Campbell Public Affairs Institute at Syracuse University, who is at work on a book about gun politics and culture.
The focus on hunting was premature, Reeher said. Early rifles were inaccurate for varmint hunting, and the newly developed .223 cartridge was too slight for bigger game. The rifle did not yet have an identity. One had to be crafted.
Colt was "fumbling around, looking for the angle to take," Reeher said.
Yet soon after launch, Colt would get a boost of legitimacy from the Vietnam War. The company's AR-15 was the civilian variant of the M16 rifle, which the U.S. military adopted as its service rifle, and the conflict helped popularize both weapons.
"Now you can buy a hot new combat rifle for sport," Popular Science wrote in early 1965, welcoming the new AR-15.
Despite reliability problems of the M16 voiced by soldiers in the late 1960s that triggered congressional inquiries, Colt and other companies continued to highlight the AR-15's military progeny as a growing part of the weapon's cultural identity.
"The Sporter looks like, feels like, and performs like its military cousin," Colt said in a 1977 brochure.
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Promoted as protector
As public concerns about crime mounted in the 1980s and 1990s, manufacturers drifted from a focus on hunting and outdoor imagery to emphasizing self-defense and law enforcement themes. The shift coincided with moves by numerous states to expand the rights of residents to carry concealed weapons, helping transform gun culture into one centered on personal protection, studies have shown.
AR-15 marketers started to adjust their depiction of what was on the receiving end of the barrel.
"People, rather than animals, were the target," Reeher said. "That allows it to be sold more as a self-defense weapon, particularly inside the home."
While police officers became a fixture in AR-15 ads, gunmakers also chose images that suggested professional-grade weapons were necessary for civilians seeking protection from violent crime.
One print ad for Stag Arms rifles spoke to police and prospective buyers. "When you go Stag, you're not alone," it read, showing what appears to be a nighttime crime scene.
According to experts, police imagery has the additional effect of conferring increased legitimacy.
"It signals the practical benefit to the consumer and the sort of symbolic benefit," said Aimee Huff, an associate professor at Oregon State University specializing in marketing and gun culture.
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A second chance
The 2004 expiration of the federal assault weapons ban, which for 10 years had prohibited the sale of many AR-15s, gave the gun industry a chance for a reinvention. Some manufacturers, seeking to reintroduce the AR-15, latched on to tactical imagery and phrasing, inventing jargon along the way.
"The introduction of distinctive colors and patterns, decorative handguards, and models like Panther Arms' 'Sportical,' which incorporated multiple features that appeal to sport shooters buying their first AR, are all examples of efforts to differentiate from the competition," said Michelle Barnhart, an associate professor who researches gun culture and marketing at Oregon State University.
Other companies boasted about their ability to shape their products, such as the now-defunct Sabre Defence, which said in a 2008 print ad that "we don't simply assemble our rifles, we also craft key pieces that go into them."
"It's one of the ways Sabre Defence stood out from its competition," said Sarah Mota, the director of operations at New Empire Industries, the company that acquired Sabre's holdings.
Gun advertising in the last decade and a half has also increased its focus on capturing the female shooter market. Often that would include a twist on traditional gender associations, like Colt's pink hue that it coined "muddy girl camo."
The turn has been apparent in recent years at National Rifle Association conventions, Barnhart said. "The exhibition floor included an abundance of promotional imagery featuring women wielding AR-15-style rifles," she said.
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In the shadow of war
The sunset of the assault weapons ban in 2004 allowed another way to channel military valorization unleashed by the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, prompting gunmakers and accessory companies to add tactical appeal to their wares, Huff said. Austere combat environments became common backdrops in ads for AR-15s and accessories, and rifles once sold almost exclusively in black became available in desert tan and foliage green.
The bearded commando decked out in tactical gear emerged as a potent pop culture image, playing a central role in video games like the Call of Duty series and box office smashes like "Lone Survivor."
"It's no accident that when you get to the 2000s, you're seeing people in uniform over and over again," Reeher said. The Special Operations raid to kill Osama bin Laden in 2011 was a key moment in the development, and after that, "everybody wanted to be a Navy SEAL."
Gunmakers seized on the fantasy. In 2012, Daniel Defense produced an ad featuring a short-barreled rifle using a rail system for attaching accessories that the company says is designed for Special Operations Command.
The advertisement then links the AR-15 with the country's overseas wars, showing how a weapon first described as a hunter's tool was now being presented as the everything rifle.
"Whether you are patrolling a foreign land, the city streets, or your own home," the ad said, "your rifle can't let you down."
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A message of masculinity
Bushmaster presented a problem and a solution for men concerned about evolving notions of gender when it launched its ad campaign: "Consider your man card reissued."
The advertisement, which ran in magazines including the men's publication Maxim, is notable for the placement of the rifle itself. Firearms in ads are typically shown flat with the barrel pointing in an innocuous direction, Huff said. But in this ad, the rifle is canted toward the audience and pointed left, positioning that, according to Huff, suggests conflict.
"The text and the imagery clearly signal power and vaguely implicate some enemy that the gun user needs to employ their masculinity against," Huff said.
The ad drew widespread scrutiny in 2012 after a gunman slaughtered 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., using a Bushmaster like the one in the image. It became a centerpiece exhibit in a lawsuit against Bushmaster owner Remington Arms filed by the families of survivors that challenged how it marketed guns. The company settled for $73 million in 2022.
Other advertisements tapped into masculinity in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Smith & Wesson declared its M&P 15-22 could help you "kick brass" and save money firing the more economical .22 cartridge.
Self-defense and defending loved ones are keystone desires for many gun owners, said Barnhart, with Oregon State. That often translates to a traditional social norm of men as strong protectors shepherding family values, she said.
In a social media post published by Daniel Defense in May, a child holds an AR-15-style pistol in his lap as an arm wearing what appears to be a man's watch - presumably that of a father - gestures to him. An ammunition magazine is nearby. The caption, taken from a Bible verse, reads: "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it."
The ad could be interpreted as "you need to teach this kid how to use this firearm so he can defend himself in the future," Barnhart said.
Daniel Defense was widely criticized for the image, which was tweeted a week before a gunman used one of the company's rifles to carry out a massacre at a school in Uvalde, Tex., killing 21. The company took the ad down soon after. Marty Daniel, who last month stepped down as the chief executive of Daniel Defense, told lawmakers in July that the post meant to convey gun safety. "We took it down because children had just been killed and we didn't think it was appropriate," he said.
Even some gun advocates may have felt the inclusion of a child went too far, Reheer said.
"There is a lot going on with this one, for people to despise and like," he said.
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Timeline
1957: Armalite makes a prototype: Gunmaker Armalite starts work on a prototype based on the U.S. military's desire for a lightweight rifle capable of automatic fire. The company dubs it the Armalite Rifle Model 15, or AR-15.
1959: Colt acquires the AR-15: Unconvinced its gun had a military future, Armalite sells the rights for the AR-15 to Colt's Patent Firearms Manufacturing Co. Colt would later produce the rifle for the U.S. military, which designates it the M16.
1964: AR-15 enters the civilian market: Colt releases the AR-15 Sporter, a semiautomatic variant of its military rifle, for civilian buyers.
1968: Gun Control Act of 1968: Prompted by the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, this act mandates that only a licensed dealer can sell a rifle or shotgun to someone at least 18 and a handgun to someone at least 21. The act also required serial numbers for firearms.
1977: Expiration of Colt's patents: An active marketplace emerges for other manufacturers to produce and sell their own semiautomatic rifles built on the AR-15 platform. The term "AR-15" is derived from Armalite's original design rather than a specific brand and has been used since as a catchall to describe the rifle style.
1989: Executive order bans imports of some rifles: President George H.W. Bush signs an executive order banning the importation of semiautomatic rifles after a gunman used a Chinese-made AK-47 variant to kill five students outside a school in Stockton, Calif.
1994: Federal assault weapons ban: President Bill Clinton pushes the assault weapons ban through Congress with some bipartisan support. The Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act outlawed firearms with common semiautomatic rifle features, such as adjustable stocks and detachable magazines. People who already owned such guns were allowed to keep them.
2001: Sept. 11 attacks prompt U.S. wars: Imagery from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq shows troops carrying M4 rifles, the military cousin of the modern AR-15.
2004: Ban expires: The assault weapons ban sunsets, allowing civilians to once again purchase such rifles, including versions of the AR-15, depending on local laws and restrictions.
2007: "Lone Survivor" is a bestseller: The Navy SEAL memoir and subsequent film introduce shadowy commandos to audiences, helping create waves of interest in tactical weapons and gear.
2009: Launch of "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2": The video game, what many fans consider the high-water mark for the Call of Duty series, is released. An AR-15 is the closest a civilian can get to wielding one of the most popular guns in the game, the M4 carbine rifle.
2009: Gun industry introduces the term "modern sporting rifle": As sales of AR-15s cooled after a 2008 spike, the National Shooting Sports Foundation adopts this marketing term as a way to describe modular semiautomatic rifles like AR-15s.
2009: President Barack Obama's inauguration: Soon after Obama's election, domestic production of semiautomatic rifles surpasses the previous year by nearly 60 percent, according to industry data, representing the first major production spike since the assault weapons ban expired.
2012: Mass shooting in Newtown, Conn.: Armed with two handguns, one shotgun and a Bushmaster XM15-E2S rifle, a gunman kills his mother in their home and then 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School before he fatally shoots himself.
2012: AR-15 production doubles after Sandy Hook: According to industry data, production soars, suggesting consumers feared a new ban would be passed.
2014: "American Sniper" is released: This film about a Navy SEAL become the highest-grossing war film ever released in the United States.
2016: "America's Rifle": The National Rifle Association dubs the AR-15 "America's Rifle," part of an effort to bolster the image of a weapon coming under attack from gun-control advocates.
2016: Production surges leading up to the 2016 election: Production of rifles spikes by 53 percent, according to industry data, as gun rights advocates and industry allies stoke fear of new gun-control laws if Hillary Clinton succeeded in securing the presidency.
2020: Instability fuels sales: AR-15 production spikes by 51 percent, prompted by the uncertainty surrounding the coronavirus pandemic, racial justice protests and a bitter presidential campaign.
4). “American icon: The gun that divides a nation”, Mar. 29, 2023, Todd C. Frankel, Shawn Boburg, Josh Dawsey, Ashley Parker, & Alex Horton, 7,234 words, The Washington Post.
Byline: Todd C. Frankel, Shawn Boburg, Josh Dawsey, Ashley Parker and Alex Horton
It is revered as a modern-day musket.
It is reviled as a tool for mass killers.
The AR-15 wasn't supposed to be a bestseller.
The rugged, powerful weapon was originally designed as a soldiers' rifle in the late 1950s. "An outstanding weapon with phenomenal lethality," an internal Pentagon report raved. It soon became standard issue for U.S. troops in the Vietnam War, where the weapon earned a new name: the M16.
But few gunmakers saw a semiautomatic version of the rifle - with its shrouded barrel, pistol grip and jutting ammunition magazine - as a product for ordinary people. It didn't seem suited for hunting. It seemed like overkill for home defense. Gun executives doubted many buyers would want to spend their money on one.
The industry's biggest trade shows banished the AR-15 to the back. The National Rifle Association and other industry allies were focused on promoting traditional rifles and handguns. Most gun owners also shunned the AR-15, dismissing it as a "black rifle" that broke from the typical wood-stocked long guns that were popular at the time.
"We'd have NRA members walk by our booth and give us the finger," said Randy Luth, the founder of gunmaker DPMS, one of the earliest companies to market AR-15s.
Today, the AR-15 is the best-selling rifle in the United States, industry figures indicate. About 1 in 20 U.S. adults - or roughly 16 million people - own at least one AR-15, according to polling data from The Washington Post and Ipsos.
Almost every major gunmaker now produces its own version of the weapon. The modern AR-15 dominates the walls and websites of gun dealers.
The AR-15 has gained a polarizing hold on the American imagination. Its unmistakable silhouette is used as a political statement emblazoned on T-shirts and banners and, among a handful of conservative members of Congress, on silver lapel pins. One Republican lawmaker, Rep. Barry Moore of Alabama, introduced a bill in February to declare the AR-15 the "National Gun of America."
It also has become a stark symbol of the nation's gun violence epidemic. Ten of the 17 deadliest U.S. mass shootings since 2012 have involved AR-15s.
This transformation - from made-for-combat weapon to mass-market behemoth and cultural flash point - is the product of a sustained and intentional effort that has forged an American icon.
A Washington Post investigation found that the AR-15's rise to dominance over the past two decades was sparked by a dramatic reversal in strategy by the country's biggest gun companies to invest in a product that many in the industry saw as anathema to their culture and traditions.
The Post review - based on interviews with 16 current and former industry executives, some of them talking publicly in depth for the first time, along with internal documents and public filings that describe the changes in previously unknown detail - found that the U.S. firearms industry came to embrace the gun's political and cultural significance as a marketing advantage as it grasped for new revenue.
The shift began after the 2004 expiration of a federal assault weapons ban that had blocked the sales of many semiautomatic rifles. A handful of manufacturers saw a chance to ride a post-9/11 surge in military glorification while also stoking a desire among new gun owners to personalize their weapons with tactical accessories.
"We made it look cool," Luth said. "The same reason you buy a Corvette."
Through it all, even after repeated mass killings involving the AR-15 that accounted for some of the nation's darkest moments, efforts in Congress to resurrect an assault weapons ban repeatedly fizzled.
Calls by Democratic politicians to renew the ban fell short, with some in their own party voting against it at key moments. Almost no Republican would even entertain the idea. President Donald Trump briefly considered pushing for a ban, asking aides at one point why anyone needed an AR-15, but backed away after advisers warned he would anger his base as well as the NRA.
"The protection of the AR-15 has become the number one priority for the gun lobby," said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a vocal supporter of stronger gun laws. He added: "It makes it harder to push this issue on the table because the gun lobby does so much messaging around it."
Free from congressional scrutiny, the AR-15 has become a consumer product like none other - a barometer of fear and a gauge of political identity, its market success driven by the divisions it sows.
While handguns are involved in the bulk of U.S. gun homicides - responsible for 90 percent of the deaths in cases where details are available, compared to less than 5 percent for rifles, the FBI says - AR-15 sales jump the most with each school shooting and contentious presidential campaign.
They soared in the run-up to the election of Democrat Barack Obama in 2008 and after the mass killings at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., in 2012 and a high school in Parkland, Fla., in 2018, and again ahead of the turbulent 2020 presidential election.
Today, the industry estimates that at least 20 million AR-15s are stored and stashed across the country.
More than 13.7 million of those have been manufactured by U.S. gunmakers just since the Newtown massacre in late 2012, with those sales generating roughly $11 billion in revenue, according to a Post analysis of industry estimates through 2020, the most recently available data. In other words, at least two-thirds of these guns have been made in just the past decade.
Supporters of the AR-15 say its popularity reflects its legitimacy as a tool for law-abiding people. "This firearm is lawfully owned by millions of Americans - used in shooting competitions, for recreational purposes, hunting and home protection," said NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam.
Others say this was not the original idea behind the gun.
Eugene Stoner, a World War II veteran who invented the AR-15 in the late 1950s while working at Armalite, a small engineering firm in Hollywood, had no interest in civilians using his invention, said C. Reed Knight, who owns a Florida gunmaking company and considers Stoner his mentor.
"He looked at this thing as only for the military side of the house," Knight said. Stoner, who died in 1997, thought his invention was past its prime by the mid-1990s, Knight said. He added that Stoner would have been horrified by the idea that "he invented the tool of all this carnage in the schools."
Harry Falber, a former executive at Smith & Wesson, one of the country's best-known firearms brands, saw how Stoner's invention changed the gun industry. The AR-15's success came at a huge price, he said.
"The firearms industry, in the aggregate, is very small," Falber told The Post. "And look at the havoc it wreaks."
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A firearm initially unintended for civilians
Smith & Wesson made its name with handguns, such as Dirty Harry's "Feeling Lucky?" six-shooter.
The company had never mass-produced a rifle in its storied history stretching to 1852.
That began to change in 2005.
It was a tough time for the firearms industry. Gun sales had been flat for several years, according to federal background check data, the best available proxy for the number of firearms sold. Data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives shows that American gunmakers produced fewer pistols, revolvers, rifles and shotguns in 2005 than they had five years earlier.
At Smith & Wesson, executives were looking around for new lines of business when, corporate filings show, a company survey detected strong consumer interest in one gun it didn't make: a tactical rifle.
"The long gun market is a terrific opportunity," Michael Golden, then the company's chief executive, told financial analysts in August 2005.
And the power of the Smith & Wesson brand meant "we have got one foot in the door," he said.
Neither Smith & Wesson nor Golden, who is no longer with the company, responded to multiple requests for comment.
The market for tactical rifles, such as the AR-15, was still largely untapped. None of the big gunmakers made one.
The AR-15 - Armalite Rifle Model 15 - was different from other military rifles, which had always used big, heavy rounds.
Designed around the Pentagon's desire for a lightweight weapon to match Soviet rifles such as the AK-47, the AR-15 fired small bullets at very fast speeds. The higher velocity meant the tiny projectiles became unstable when they penetrated a human body, tumbling through flesh to create devastating wounds. But the real innovation was the addition of a small tube to redirect the gas from fired cartridges. This dampened recoil, making it easier to keep steady aim on a target.
The U.S. military started using the rifle during the Vietnam War, with Colt - which had acquired the gun's patent rights from Armalite - winning the contract to produce the M16. The new gun was met by complaints that it was prone to jamming, even mid-firefight, until Colt revamped the design. Despite its mixed success, the new gun won over military leaders.
Colt held exclusive rights to the semiautomatic, civilian version of the AR-15 until 1977, when the patent expired. Then, other gunmakers could make and sell AR-15s of their own.
Most in the gun industry remained wary. For decades, the AR-15 was regarded as an outsider. Then came the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
As the U.S. military was sent to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, gunmakers looked to play off the conflict-zone images of soldiers in tactical gear holding M16 and M4 carbine rifles. The next best thing for civilians was buying an AR-15.
"There has never been a better accidental advertising campaign in history," said Doug Painter, a former president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), a firearms industry lobbying group.
Smith & Wesson's first AR-15 was unveiled to the public in February 2006 at the industry's marquee annual convention, the Shot Show in Las Vegas. It was called the M&P 15.
While the name indicated the gun was for professionals - "M" for military and "P" for police - the company always had its eyes on the consumer market, according to corporate filings and statements from executives. Golden told financial analysts a few months after the M&P 15's debut that "our intent when we launched the new tactical rifle was to first penetrate the consumer market."
Many gun company executives saw military and police sales as less profitable, due to lower prices and precise specifications, according to documents and interviews. But they were still important because of the "halo effect," as a 2009 document prepared for Smith & Wesson called it, in which buyers would be attracted to what they saw professionals using.
The consumer "does pay attention to that," a Smith & Wesson executive at the time, James Debney, would later explain to financial analysts in 2016.
The M&P 15 was a hit. Smith & Wesson reported revenue from this line of tactical rifles more than quintupled in the gun's first five full years on the market - from $12.8 million to $75.1 million.
Other big gunmakers soon followed Smith & Wesson's lead.
New Hampshire-based Sig Arms, later renamed Sig Sauer, said in late 2006 that it planned to make an AR-15 - soon after the firm had been "about two seconds away from imploding," chief executive Ron Cohen later told Management Today.
The new rifle was credited with helping save the company. Sig Sauer did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Wall Street noticed the sales blitz, too.
A private equity firm called Cerberus Capital Management had rolled up several gunmakers into a single conglomerate called Freedom Group. In late 2007, it purchased AR-15 maker DPMS, which was bringing in nearly $100 million in annual sales, said Luth, its founder.
"They saw the AR-15 as the cash cow, which it was," Luth said.
The change in attitudes toward the AR-15 occurred with "mind-boggling" speed, recalled Ryan Busse, who wrote about his turn from gun industry executive to critic in his 2021 book "Gunfight."
The AR-15 was suddenly being celebrated after years of being widely viewed with suspicion, Busse said. Gunmakers were no longer avoiding the gun that many had once regarded as the kind of weapon that society would disdain.
He recalled the pressure within the industry to either get on board with the AR-15 or keep quiet. In 2007, prominent hunting writer and TV host Jim Zumbo lost his industry jobs after calling for a ban on hunting with AR-15s. His fate became a watchword: Cross the AR-15 and you might get Zumboed. Zumbo did not respond to requests for comment.
"Nobody thought AR-15s were a good idea just a couple years ago," Busse said. "And then you couldn't criticize them without getting fired."
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A marketplace and rebrand for the AR-15
In 2008, economic crisis and political upheaval bolstered the AR-15's market appeal, according to several industry insiders, as the stock market collapsed under the weight of soured mortgage securities and the country elected its first Black president, a Democrat portrayed by conservatives as an anti-gun radical.
Obama's victory created an opening for pro-gun groups to tease the potential for a new assault weapons ban - a claim that industry executives have credited with energizing AR-15 sales.
In 2008, when growing demand led U.S. gunmakers to increase production of all firearms by 15 percent, AR-15 production rose by 65 percent, according to government and industry figures. These AR-15s were rapidly becoming a larger share of the overall firearms market - reaching 10 percent of all guns made that year for the first time.
Jeff Buchanan, then-chief financial officer at Smith & Wesson, recalled several years later at a business conference that Obama spurred sales "because he was a pronounced liberal" and "people buy because they are afraid of future legislation."
Obama was mockingly crowned 2009's "gun salesman of the year" by the gun-friendly news service Outdoor Wire.
That same year, in what many industry insiders saw as a watershed moment, another legendary American gunmaker, Ruger, entered the AR-15 market with its SR-556. The Southport, Conn.-based company had a reputation for high-end firearms. Its corporate motto was "Arms Makers for Responsible Citizens."
Michael Fifer, the gunmaker's CEO at the time, described to financial analysts in 2009 how Ruger brought in roughly $200 from each handgun - but each AR-15-style rifle brought in $1,000.
"That's kind of a 5-to-1 ratio there," Fifer said.
Ruger declined to comment through its general counsel.
AR-15 fans saw Ruger's new rifle as validation of a once-taboo gun.
"There is no better illustration for this change than the Evil Black Rifle itself which has just joined the Ruger product offering," Steve Johnson wrote on his popular Firearm Blog, using a sarcastic name popular with gun owners for AR-15s.
Getting comfortable with the AR-15, industry allies worked to soften the image of the "black rifle."
NSSF executives recalled in interviews with The Post that they bemoaned that the public mistakenly thought the "AR" stood for "assault rifle."
"We should not cede the rhetorical high ground to our political enemies," Larry Keane, the NSSF's general counsel, recalled saying during a 2009 meeting.
They brainstormed ways to rebrand the gun and win over traditional hunters.
"I just said, 'It's a modern sporting rifle,'" recalled Painter, then the NSSF president. "And there the phrase stuck."
The NSSF just needed to persuade others to use the term, which it shortened to "MSR."
Glenn Sapir, then the NSSF's director of editorial services, recalled that executives pressed gunmakers and industry publications to adopt the name. It slowly began popping up in gun magazines and catalogues. Companies used it during earnings calls. Gun owners were given pocket fact cards with the preferred talking points.
A four-page ad from the NSSF's foundation spelled out the campaign.
"Some hunters look askance at AR-style rifles, and that's understandable," read the ad in the November 2009 issue of Outdoor Life magazine. "They don't look like any type of rifle they, their dads or granddads ever carried into the woods. Looks can be deceiving, however, and in the case of AR-platform rifles, they certainly are."
Some AR-15 supporters saw the MSR campaign as a phony attempt to make the black rifle seem less ominous - even though what many loved most about it was the threatening look.
"The true AR enthusiasts, they kind of saw through it," Luth said. "It stuck, but not with the true believers."
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How gunmakers craft 'realistic' gaming experiences
Video games introduced a new generation to the AR-15 through popular first-person shooter games such as "Call of Duty." Players got to simulate using military weapons with down-to-the-bolt realism.
The firearms industry was eager to help out.
In 2010, representatives of two gun manufacturers and a video game maker converged at an outdoor shooting range north of Las Vegas. Employees from two Freedom Group subsidiaries deployed a stockpile of weapons, including AR-15s, while technicians from Infinity Ward, developer of "Call of Duty," carefully recorded the sounds, according to participants. Infinity Ward's parent company, Activision Blizzard, declined to comment.
No detail, even the click of inserting a magazine, was too small to capture, participants said.
"We went through all the guns slowly and methodically, shooting until they got the quality sound they needed," recalled Cory Weisnicht, who was an employee with a Freedom Group company tasked with firing the guns at the Clark County Shooting Complex.
The meeting reflected a move by some gunmakers at the time to strike licensing agreements with gaming firms to feature certain firearms, according to lawyers and experts, along with interviews and documents obtained by The Post.
"We wanted the brand exposure," said a former employee of a Freedom Group subsidiary familiar with the Las Vegas meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal company strategy.
The push for realism in shooting video games was influential for some buyers, retailers said. Many gun owners bought real-world versions of the firearms they used online, said Lucas Botkin, founder of the gun gear outfitter T.Rex Arms. And they could accessorize their guns in the same way.
Botkin recalled how he fixed up his first AR-15.
"I built it out very similarly to what I had in 'Modern Warfare,'" he said, referring to the M4 in a game in the Call of Duty series. "It was my reference point."
The AR-15 also was winning over new fans in other ways.
In the Philadelphia suburbs, Bill Shanley saw his first AR-15 up close when one of his adult sons came home with one in 2010. Shanley was in his mid-50s and had been raised around guns. He'd taught his own children how to shoot, too. But he'd never given much thought to the AR-15.
"It never would've occurred to me to get a gun like that," Shanley recalled.
Father and son took the AR-15 to a gun range. Shanley couldn't believe how loud it was, even with ear protection, the sound crashing off the range overhang. But the black rifle had little recoil. It was fun to shoot. Three shots with his old hunting rifle bruised his shoulder. Fifty rounds with the AR-15 felt like a breeze. Shanley was sold. He soon bought his own, a Smith & Wesson M&P 15.
The AR-15 changed Shanley's thinking about these kinds of weapons. Now, he saw them as no different from the traditional firearms owned by his great-grandfather or the shotgun his uncle gave him when he was a teenager. His dad used to keep a shotgun at home for protection. Shanley, a manufacturing sales manager, started keeping an AR-15 in his bedroom.
"The AR is the modern-day musket," he said.
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An uneasiness over AR-15 marketing
Harry Falber knew little about the gun world when he joined Smith & Wesson, first as a consultant and then as head of licensing at the gunmaker's headquarters in Springfield, Mass.
But he knew how to sell big consumer brands after years of working on ads at Volvo, Polaroid and Hallmark.
"A consumer wants to be identified with the product they are using, and a gun is no different," said Falber, speaking publicly in detail about his tenure at Smith & Wesson for the first time.
Falber thought Smith & Wesson's line of M&P firearms was "a brilliant marketing name." And he loved Smith & Wesson's strong reputation and long history.
But he said he struggled with how to sell a military weapon to civilians.
"I didn't care what you did with it," he said. "It was still a black gun."
In late 2010, after he had been with the company for about a year, Falber commissioned a study comparing two Smith & Wesson ads that had recently appeared in Guns & Ammo magazine, according to internal documents obtained by The Post.
One showed Falber's vision for selling guns. It featured a silver revolver and a black pistol, side by side against the light backdrop of a range target, under the block type "FINE-TUNED MACHINES."
The other ad showed what looked like a police SWAT team officer, with dark gloves and tactical helmet, pointing an AR-15 at some unseen target in the distance. "THE CHOSEN ONE," it read.
Consumers gave higher scores to the "FINE-TUNED MACHINES" ad, according to the report, which recommended that future ads be tested "to maximize message, positive image, and consumer motivation."
Falber thought he had won the argument. He wanted to stress craftsmanship.
But Smith & Wesson went in the direction of "THE CHOSEN ONE."
"They went full-bore into a dark, dark milieu," Falber said.
Smith & Wesson was not alone in adopting messages that made Falber uneasy.
Bushmaster was running ads for its AR-15 with the line "CONSIDER YOUR MAN CARD REISSUED." Daniel Defense posted social media ads showing its AR-15 with a helmeted soldier in a war zone under "USE WHAT THEY USE."
"It was just appealing to the worst levels of what you can conjure up in someone's mind," Falber said. "And we'd been nurturing this."
Daniel Defense declined to comment.
By 2011, the AR-15 and similar firearms enjoyed warm welcomes at the gun industry's biggest events. They were the stars. Half the exhibition space at the annual Shot Show was now occupied by AR-15 gunmakers and tactical-equipment makers - even as the convention itself had doubled in size to 500,000 square feet, said Painter, the former NSSF president.
Every exhibitor clamored to be next to the big rifles because that's where the crowds were.
"The best analogy is the AR rifle was like the kids who wore their baseball hats turned around," Painter said. "It wasn't cool until suddenly it became cool."
But Falber wanted out.
"I just couldn't stomach driving up there anymore," he said.
In 2012, he quit Smith & Wesson.
The massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary came two months later.
A little after 9:30 a.m. on Dec. 14, 2012, a man used a Bushmaster AR-15 to shoot his way into the school in Newtown. The gunman fired 154 rounds in minutes, striking children who were just 6 and 7 years old multiple times, according to a Connecticut state's attorney's report. Twenty children and six school employees were killed.
Falber lived 20 miles from Newtown. His wife worked in education. He could imagine the scene inside. He was in disbelief. He took no comfort in the fact that the rifle used in the massacre was made by Bushmaster and not Smith & Wesson.
"It ripped me apart," he said.
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Mass killings, politics fuel division on AR-15
The deadliest mass killing at a K-12 school in U.S. history focused attention like never before on the destructive power of the AR-15.
With Newtown, the weapon so meticulously marketed as a "sporting rifle" had been used as a killing machine that destroyed the bodies of young victims.
Cerberus, the private equity giant, soon announced plans to sell off Freedom Group - the conglomerate it had assembled as a big bet on the AR-15's success and the owner of the Bushmaster brand. Cerberus declined to comment. One of its companies at the time owned Bushmaster, maker of the weapon used in the shooting, which would eventually defend its firearms advertising as lawful in a lawsuit filed by Newtown families alleging the gunmaker's marketing was aimed at troubled young men.
Dick's Sporting Goods immediately stopped selling AR-15s at its flagship stores during what the company called "this time of national mourning."
Collaboration between gunmakers and the gaming industry also came to a quick end, said Glen Schofield, co-director of "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare."
"We all kind of want to leave that era behind us," he said. "Every time there was a mass shooting we got blamed."
Days after the shooting, Obama called for new gun laws, citing public support for banning "military-style assault weapons" and high-capacity magazines. But any notion that the tragedy in Newtown would compel the politically influential NRA to compromise evaporated a week later. Wayne LaPierre, the group's executive vice president, unveiled a school security plan that boiled down to his mantra of "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."
NRA leaders feared there would be momentum for a ban, and they even huddled with companies and lobbyists to begin plotting strategy, former officials said.
But the focus on banning the AR-15 only made the gun more popular with firearms enthusiasts, NRA leaders later said.
"People who never planned to buy one went out and got one," said Grover Norquist, an anti-tax activist who was on the NRA board. "It was an f-you to the left."
David Keene, who was the NRA's president at the time, said that was the moment gun rights became a top issue for Republicans - with the AR-15 at the center.
"It became a political symbol," said Keene, who also served as the longtime chairman of the American Conservative Union.
The NRA's embrace of the AR-15 was also practical, said Joshua Powell, a former longtime NRA adviser and chief of staff to LaPierre. NRA membership numbers were declining, but AR-15 owners remained loyal. Powell said the organization wanted the rifle to be viewed as "America's gun."
"The heart and soul of the NRA membership was hardcore AR folks," Powell said.
The move to defend the AR-15 was off-putting to some NRA members, such as John Goodwin, who worked as an NRA lobbyist in the late 2000s and now belongs to a gun safety advocacy group called 97Percent. Discussions about the AR-15 sounded nothing like how he talked about the shotgun he used for bird hunting.
"They make it sound like the AR-15 is a religious relic," Goodwin said.
The AR-15's resilience post-Newtown was clear weeks later when the organizer of a major gun event in Harrisburg, Pa., the Eastern Sports and Outdoor Show, was forced to cancel amid the backlash from its decision to ban displays of the weapon.
"We're not going to go into business with people saying you can't have this gun or that gun," Tommy Millner, CEO of the outdoor retailing giant Cabela's at the time, recalled saying when he pulled the company's sponsorship.
Any push for a new assault weapons ban seemed destined to fail in Congress. And gun sales were soaring again.
In December 2012, the same month as the Newtown shooting, monthly gun background checks hit what at the time was an all-time high of 2.8 million and stayed elevated for months.
Stores were picked clean of their AR-15 inventory. Prices jumped.
While the government doesn't break out AR-15 sales, the industry group NSSF estimated that companies produced at least 3.2 million AR-15s firearms in 2012 and 2013 alone - more than they'd made in the entire previous decade.
When a new assault weapons ban finally came to a vote in the Democratic-led Senate soon after Newtown, it didn't come close to passing - earning just 40 votes.
Just one Republican, Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois, voted in favor. But even more galling to gun-control advocates was that just 38 of the chamber's 54 Democrats voted in favor.
After Congress failed to act, a handful of states, such as Connecticut, New York and Maryland, moved to pass their own assault weapons bans.
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A firearm at the center of rallies, protests and ads
In March 2013, C.J. Grisham, then an Army master sergeant, decided to sling an AR-15 over his shoulder and take a walk with his son along a dirt road in tiny Temple, Tex. He wasn't breaking the law, but a police officer stopped him.
"Some reason why you have this?" the officer asked, grabbing the rifle.
"'Cause I can," Grisham said.
The officer drew his pistol and pinned Grisham to the hood.
The encounter ended peacefully, but it was caught on video and posted online. Almost overnight, Grisham, who was later convicted of misdemeanor police interference, became the face of a movement.
"It wasn't that I was carrying a rifle," recalled Grisham, a former member of the Proud Boys, a far-right group with a history of violence. "It was the fact I was carrying that rifle."
Grisham went on to create Open Carry Texas, a group advocating for carrying weapons in public. Open-carry demonstrations had been cropping up in conservative states since the 2008 election, typically with holstered pistols, but Grisham's group pushed a new tactic. Its members made a show of carrying hunting rifles, shotguns and AR-15s as they visited places like Sonic, Chipotle and Home Depot.
Even the NRA was uneasy about the brash, public displays. It called the Texas protests "downright weird." But so many gun owners sided with Grisham that the NRA quickly flip-flopped, saying its original opposition had been a mistake.
It became increasingly common to see people openly armed with black rifles at protests and political rallies - their AR-15s gripped in their hands or slung over their shoulders. The practice would take off on the far right, as armed demonstrators would play a prominent role in white-supremacist gatherings such as the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, as well as protests in 2020 against pandemic restrictions and counterdemonstrations against racial justice activists.
The AR-15 seemed to be everywhere. Its cultural profile was rising, not unlike the way the Soviet-made Kalashnikov became a symbol of insurgency and freedom for many around the world.
Companies such as Black Rifle Coffee Co. launched. Youth baseball teams ran AR-15 raffles as fundraisers. Companies offered free AR-15s with a new roof or new car, like banks giving away toasters for new checking accounts.
More political candidates were displaying AR-15s in campaign ads, too - and not just conservatives looking to impress their base. Jason Kander, an Army veteran and Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Missouri, put out a 2016 campaign ad that showed him assembling an AR-15 while blindfolded. Kander did not respond to a request for comment.
In 2016, amid rising political tensions with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump vying for the White House, the U.S. gun industry reported that it had crossed an important threshold: It produced more than 2 million AR-15s for the first time, 63 percent more than were manufactured the year before, according to NSSF estimates.
The AR-15 had truly entered the mainstream.
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America's angst with the AR-15
Manny Oliver tended to view guns like an outsider.
Ever since moving to Florida from his native Venezuela years ago, Oliver had noticed how people in his new home tied guns to notions of freedom and patriotism.
"In America, they treat guns like they are their salvation," Oliver said.
He didn't understand it. But like many people, he didn't feel the need to.
By 2018, he and his wife, Patricia, had settled near Parkland, Fla., an affluent suburb outside Fort Lauderdale. Gun violence rarely intruded, except when mass shootings made the news. Oliver recalled talking with his teenage son, Joaquin, about the 2016 shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, where a gunman with a Sig Sauer MCX semiautomatic rifle killed 49 people. And Joaquin had been rattled by the 2017 Las Vegas shooting - where a gunman used an arsenal that included AR-15s to kill 60 people - because his mom had been there on a business trip just a week earlier.
It seemed so random, Oliver said.
Four months later, on Valentine's Day 2018, a gunman walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland armed with a Smith & Wesson M&P 15 and killed 17 people. Joaquin, 17, died after being shot multiple times, according to testimony at the gunman's trial.
The shooting ignited a new kind of anti-gun activism that was intensely personal, such as the student-led March for Our Lives that drew hundreds of thousands of protesters to the National Mall a month later. They were grieving. And they were angry.
"I refused to think this is a normal thing that happens," Oliver said.
He and his wife founded a gun violence prevention group called Change the Ref and focused on attention-grabbing projects such as renting a billboard outside Smith & Wesson's headquarters in Massachusetts with a picture of their son.
The Parkland shooting also highlighted America's growing unease with the AR-15.
Kroger raised the minimum age to buy guns and ammunition from 18 to 21. Walmart - which had quietly stopped selling AR-15s three years earlier, in 2015 - did the same.
Top NRA officials worked to persuade other retailers, such as Bass Pro Shops, not to pull AR-15s from their shelves, according to Powell, the group's former chief of staff.
"The gun folks will go nuts against you, and it's going to be incredibly bad for business, and it's going to get you a lot of bad press," Powell recalled NRA officials telling Bass Pro Shops founder Johnny Morris. In other cases, Powell warned there would be NRA member boycotts.
Morris backed down, Powell said. "He understood who his customers were."
A representative for Bass Pro Shops said Morris had no "recollection" of the conversation. "Decisions on the products and services we offer have always been based on customer preferences in compliance with all federal, state and local laws," the spokesman said.
Unable to just move on, the shooting forced Oliver and his wife to reinvent their lives.
"We are not searching for happiness," he said. "I don't think we're ever going to be happy."
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An uptick in shootings and a stalemate on gun control
Shortly after Parkland, President Donald Trump repeatedly floated the idea of supporting a new assault weapons ban.
He mentioned it on live television to one of the Senate's most vocal gun-control backers, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), and in a private meeting with Parkland families. His comments rattled NRA officials and some of his own advisers.
NRA representatives later warned Trump against taking action. "They came up here and said to him, the base is going to blow you up," according to a former official who sat in during a series of meetings with the NRA. They, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private interactions.
But Trump kept coming back to the idea, according to several former administration officials.
In the summer of 2019, after back-to-back mass shootings in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso involving an AR-15-style pistol and an AKM-style rifle, Trump told aides that he wanted to ban AR-15s, according to people present for the statements.
"I don't know why anyone needs an AR-15," Trump told aides as he flew on Marine One to the White House in August 2019, according to a person who heard his comments.
As one former official put it in describing the real estate developer turned politician, "His reflexes were a New York liberal on guns. He doesn't have knee-jerk conservative reflexes."
But Trump was also petrified of the NRA and others taking him on, former advisers said, and heard from a number of advisers that it would be unpopular. Trump ultimately stopped entertaining the idea of working with Democrats on gun control later that year, when he was caught in a scandal over his now-infamous phone call with Ukraine's president.
"F--- it, I'm not going to work with them on anything. They're f---ing impeaching me," Trump said in one Oval Office meeting, according to a participant.
Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesman, did not respond to detailed findings in this article but said that "there had been no bigger defender of the Second Amendment than President Trump." He said that Trump had offered other proposals after mass shootings, such as adding security guards to schools and allowing teachers who are licensed to carry a weapon to do so.
Murphy, the Democratic senator from Connecticut and a participant in a White House meeting on a potential ban, described Trump's lack of action as a missed opportunity for an unusually powerful Republican leader. "I said this to Trump in that meeting: I think the Republican Party would have followed him wherever he went, and he ultimately decided to stand with the NRA," Murphy said.
But, Murphy said, the burst of post-Parkland activism transformed gun politics among Democrats. Many in the party, he said, started to see gun control as a cause that could energize their core voters - rather than fearing it as one that would rile up the right.
"For whatever reason those kids finally shamed the Democratic Party into running on this issue," Murphy said.
Several months after the Parkland shooting, one of the Democrats who had voted against an assault weapons ban in 2013 in the wake of Newtown announced he had changed his mind.
Sen. Mark R. Warner, who earned the NRA's support as Virginia's governor in the mid-2000s, represented a state that was now trending more liberal. He would go on to co-sponsor new proposed assault weapons bans in the Senate.
"While I was far from the deciding vote," Warner wrote of the post-Newtown legislation in a 2018 op-ed in The Post, "I have nevertheless wrestled with that 'no' vote ever since." Despite his own role in helping to defeat the ban, Warner described Congress's failure to act as part of a "sad pattern of dysfunction."
The AR-15, however, was about to reach new heights of popularity.
In 2020, a year of pandemic lockdowns, racial justice protests and a bitterly fought presidential campaign, U.S. gunmakers produced about 2.5 million AR-15s, according to the NSSF. That added up to roughly 1 in 4 of all guns that ATF said were manufactured in the United States.
Helped by its line of M&P 15 rifles, Smith & Wesson saw its sales nearly double to a record $1.1 billion, according to financial filings. CEO Mark Smith described it as "the most successful year in the 169-year history of the company."
One Smith & Wesson M&P 15 sold in 2020 ended up in the hands of Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who fatally shot two people and wounded a third during that summer's racial justice protests in Kenosha, Wis.
Rittenhouse, later found not guilty based on claims of self-defense, explained during his trial why he chose an AR-15: "I thought it looked cool." Rittenhouse could not be reached for comment.
The AR-15 was also especially alluring to the gunman who killed 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo in May 2022.
"The AR-15 and its variants are very deadly when used properly," he wrote in a manifesto filled with hateful vitriol. "Which is the reason I picked one."
Ten days later, 19 schoolchildren and two adults were shot to death in Uvalde, Tex., with another AR-15, the Daniel Defense DDM4.
The string of attacks prompted President Biden, who as a senator had strongly supported the 1994 assault weapons ban, to promise a renewed effort to stop the sale of military-style weapons.
"For God's sake, how much more carnage are we willing to accept?" Biden said in June.
Then, a gunman with a Smith & Wesson M&P 15 killed seven people at an Independence Day parade in Highland Park, Ill.
Later that month, executives from five gunmakers were called to Capitol Hill to answer questions about AR-15s. The hearing played out in expected fashion. Democrats decried the gunmakers, the Republicans defended them, and the gun executives deflected.
"A firearm, any firearm, can be used for good or for evil," said Christopher Killoy, chief executive at Ruger.
Smith & Wesson's chief executive refused to show up.
A House Oversight report produced for the hearing spotlighted the money earned by the gun industry, saying that Ruger's gross earnings from AR-15 rifles nearly tripled from 2019 to 2021 to more than $103 million.
Two days later, the Democratic-led House passed a new assault weapons ban on a tight party-line vote of 217-213 - the first time the measure had been voted on in nearly three decades. But the Senate, also run by Democrats, never took action.
Amid the growing scrutiny, Smith & Wesson chief executive Mark Smith put out a statement claiming his company's guns were not responsible for any crimes, but politicians and the media "are the ones to blame for the surge in violence and lawlessness."
Smith's comment was a revealing reminder of just how much the firearms industry had changed - from defender of a gun culture familiar to many Americans to a mass producer and leading champion of AR-15s.
That new legacy permeated this year's Shot Show, held in January in Las Vegas.
At the same event two decades ago, AR-15s were shown only in restricted areas in the back.
This year, Smith & Wesson's sprawling exhibit was surrounded by other gunmakers offering their own AR-15s, such as Mossberg, Black Rain Ordnance and Savage Arms. Smith & Wesson promoted its latest addition to its AR-15 lineup: the M&P Volunteer.
The closed-door trade event was open only to people with industry ties. But photographs and video reviewed by The Post showed racks of matte black Volunteer rifles in different configurations, such as the M&P 15 Volunteer XV Pro, with a suggested retail price of $1,569.
Back home in Connecticut, Falber, the former marketing executive, still admired the "M&P" name. But "Volunteer" felt different to him. He shrugged off the suggestion that it was just a nod to Smith & Wesson's decision to begin moving its headquarters from liberal Massachusetts to conservative Tennessee, whose nickname is the Volunteer State.
Putting that name on such a powerful rifle evoked scenes of armed civilian patrols along the country's southern border and at racial justice protests, Falber said.
"It's just appealing to the worst levels of what you can conjure up in someone's mind," he said.
Maybe, he said, it will help Smith & Wesson sell the AR-15. "But," he added, "how many more guns can they possibly sell?"
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