Category: Anti Civil Rights ideas & “Friends”
IN HER role as editor of TCW, Kathy Gyngell did what British journalism has fought to do since John Wilkes and the North Briton; with leonine grit and courage she upheld freedom.
For 12 years, seven days a week, she made sure dissent was heard. She built TCW into one of the few places in Britain where the official story could still be challenged without apology. Lockdown. Vaccines. The BBC. Mass immigration. Net Zero. The degradation of childhood. The assault on the family. The collapse of policing. The cowardice of the Conservative and Labour parties. The long march of the managerial state. TCW took them on when most of the press was either asleep, captured or afraid.
That is why it had to be killed.
No minister announced the closure of TCW. No censor put a seal on Kathy’s office door. The British state is too slippery for that. It does not usually ban dissent outright. It smothers it through the pipes: advertising, mobile access, social media, search, platform rules, ‘brand safety’, ‘online safety’, ‘media literacy’ and the ever-ready smear of ‘misinformation’.
This is the new censorship. It does not argue. It obstructs. It does not defeat you in public or by debate. It makes you harder to find, harder to fund, harder to share and harder to trust. That is what happened to TCW.
The site was banned by online ad agencies. It was hit by Facebook during lockdown. Kathy was thrown off Twitter, along with vaccine-injured people whose testimony threatened the official covid narrative. The site was blocked on mobile phones for months after being caught by the British Board of Film Classification’s filtering regime. Readers trying to reach a lawful conservative website were obstructed as though they were looking for filth.
A serious daily website needs oxygen. It needs readers, advertisers, links, shares, search, mobile access, payment routes, donors and confidence. Break those routes and the publication bleeds. The state does not need to prosecute it. The platforms do not need to admit censorship. The advertisers do not need to explain themselves. Everyone hides behind process. Everyone says they are enforcing rules. Everyone claims clean hands.
Then the site dies, and the same people say, ‘Nothing to do with us.’ That is a lie.
TCW is closing as a daily site because the British state and its allies have made honest dissent increasingly impossible to sustain. The cowardice began under a Conservative government.
During covid, lawful doubt was treated as a public danger. Citizens who questioned lockdowns, masks, vaccine mandates, school closures and the destruction of livelihoods were smeared as cranks or extremists. Platforms were encouraged to police opinion. The MSM supinely obeyed.
The BBC was, as usual, complicit. Conservative ministers talked about liberty while presiding over one of the greatest assaults on free speech in modern British history.
Then the Tories put the machinery on the statute book.
The Online Safety Act was driven through under a Conservative government and received Royal Assent in October 2023. The Act passed into law on October 26, 2023, and made Ofcom responsible for implementing the new online safety regime.
It was sold as ‘protection for children’. In reality, it created a vast regulatory structure for online speech and made Ofcom the policeman of the internet. Platforms were pushed into permanent risk-avoidance. Lawful speech became a compliance problem. ‘Safety’ became the master word. Once that word rules, freedom withers. Free speech has never been ‘safe’.
This was one of the great betrayals of modern Conservatism. The party that should have defended liberty built the legal runway for censorship. It handed power to Ofcom, trained platforms to fear liability, and wrapped the whole operation in the language of harm prevention.
The result was predictable. Companies do not defend free speech when regulators are watching. They protect themselves. They over-remove, over-block, over-filter and over-comply.
That is how dissent gets buried.
The same Act reinforced Ofcom’s media literacy role. That matters. Media literacy sounds harmless. It is not harmless when the regulator, the Government, public broadcasters and tech platforms are all marching in the same direction. It becomes the polite name for teaching the public which sources to trust and which to distrust.
This is the bridge to the next phase. First the state regulates platforms in the name of safety. Then it works with broadcasters, tech companies, charities and public bodies to shape what citizens are taught to regard as reliable. Then it proposes to promote ‘trusted news’ above rival voices.
That is the censorship escalator. Labour is now riding it with enthusiasm.
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology’s 2026-2029 Media Literacy Action Plan, A Safe, Informed Digital Nation, dresses control in the language of confidence, safety, critical thinking and resilience. Published on March 16, 2026, it sets out the steps departments across government are taking to strengthen media literacy over the next three years, including helping people ‘think critically about online content’ and ‘find trustworthy information’. The state wants to shape how citizens consume information online. It says it wants people to find trustworthy information. That sounds innocent until you ask the only question that matters: trustworthy according to whom?
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport has gone further. Its Green Paper, Watch this space: a new strategic direction for UK media, proposes a new media literacy duty for public service media. Published on June 23, 2026, it sets out a new strategic direction for Government media policy and sits alongside plans to improve access to ‘reliable news sources’ online. The BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and others would not merely produce programmes. They would help train the public in how to judge information.
That means the same broadcasters whose failures TCW exposed would be enlisted as guardians of public understanding.
The Government is also considering forcing platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and TikTok to give greater prominence to ‘trusted news’ providers, including the BBC, ITV and Channel 4. Reuters reported on June 22, 2026, that the proposal would require social media platforms to prioritise content from trusted news providers as part of the fight against misinformation. That proposal tells us exactly where this is going. The state will bless approved sources. Platforms will push them. Rival voices will be downgraded, distrusted or buried.
Ofcom’s little-known Making Sense of Media programme fits into the same scheme. Ofcom wants media literacy to become ‘everyone’s business’. It works with broadcasters, platforms, charities, local bodies and other organisations with public reach. It presents this as education. In reality it helps build a national information network in which the state, the regulator, public broadcasters, tech companies and approved civil society all pull in the same direction.
Do not be fooled by the language. This is not about helping vulnerable people spot email scams. It is about power.
The state wants to decide which sources are trusted. It wants the BBC and other approved broadcasters to instruct the public in how to judge information. It wants platforms to promote the right voices. It wants regulators to organise the field. It wants dissent managed before it becomes politically dangerous to their interests.
‘Misinformation’ is the weapon.
During covid, that word was used to silence questions which later proved legitimate. On lockdown, vaccine harms, school closures, masks, mandates, excess deaths and the origins of the virus, dissenters were attacked before the evidence was in. The same word is now used against those who challenge Net Zero, illegal immigration, gender ideology, two-tier policing, grooming gangs, Islamism, the BBC and the failures of the British state.
Call something misinformation and the work is half done. Advertisers panic. Platforms throttle. Donors hesitate. Investors vanish. Readers are warned off. A lawful opinion becomes a reputational hazard.
TCW lived through this before the system was fully formed. It can now be seen as a test case in practical censorship. It showed how a lawful dissenting publication can be worn down without ever being formally banned.
The Conservative government built the first serious machinery. Labour is now putting a sharper blade on it. This is why TCW’s closure matters. It is not just the end of a website. It is a warning about Britain.
A country with a free press does not need the state to define trusted news. A free people do not need Ofcom, DSIT, DCMS, the BBC, Google and Meta to teach them how to think. A democracy does not protect itself by privileging approved voices and starving the rest.
Kathy Gyngell and TCW did more for public debate than half the subsidised, self-regarding, award-winning media class put together. They kept the argument alive when argument itself was being recast as harm.
For 12 years, Kathy kept open a space where writers could say what the respectable press would not say. She did not have a wealthy institution behind her. She did not enjoy the protection given to fashionable magazines of approved dissent. She did not flatter the establishment. She did not launder conservative defeat as sophistication. She did not pretend that Britain’s governing class had merely made a few mistakes. She saw the rot and published those willing to name it.
That is why readers trusted TCW. It did not ask permission. It did not trim its sails to please donors. It did not become the safe, neutered, decorative conservatism the establishment can tolerate. It published through smears, bans, blocks, abuse, financial strain and institutional contempt.
The closure of TCW as a daily site should shame every politician who claims to care about free speech. It should shame Conservative MPs who cheered or tolerated the Online Safety Act. It should shame ministers who mouthed support for liberty while online dissent was being throttled. It should shame the broadcasters who now expect to be treated as ‘trusted news’ while they helped create the climate in which dissenting outlets were cast as dangerous.
The fight will continue on Substack. The archive will remain. The network will endure. But do not soften the meaning of this moment.
A heroine of free speech has been forced to retreat from a platform she built by steely resolve and courage because Britain’s censorship state has made the cost of dissent too high.
TCW was not defeated. It was starved of oxygen by people who could not answer it.
The Supreme Court is seen Tuesday, June 30, 2026, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (Jose Luis Magana/AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
WASHINGTON – Connecticut’s ban on semiautomatic weapons, passed in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings, is under renewed legal threat.
The U.S. Supreme Court announced Tuesday that it would be hearing a challenge to the law filed by two former state corrections officers, a firearms instructor and two gun advocacy groups.The court agreed to hear the case alongside a challenge to a similar law in Chicago, with arguments likely in the fall.
The decision comes less than a week after the court struck down gun restrictions in Hawaii, and the court’s conservative majority makes it possible that the state’s near ban on the sale of most semiautomatic and automatic weapons – put in place after the 2012 shootings that killed 20 first-graders and six educators in Newtown – will be overturned.
Both a lower court and a federal appeals court previously blocked this challenge to the law before the plaintiffs successfully appealed to the Supreme Court.
On Tuesday, state Democrats blasted attempts to challenge the law in court, describing it as part of a national campaign against restrictions on guns.
“Connecticut’s assault weapon ban is lawful, lifesaving, and broadly supported. The gun lobby has flooded the courts in states across the country to get an assault weapons case up to this Supreme Court,” Attorney General William Tong said in a statement. “We are prepared for this fight, and we are going to go in with everything we’ve got to keep these weapons of war off our streets, out of our schools, and away from our families.”
In a statement, Democratic state senate leaders Martin Looney, D-New Haven, and Bob Duff, D-Norwalk, expressed confidence that the court would ultimately uphold the law, pointing to the lower court rulings.
Republican leaders in the state, including presumptive gubernatorial nominee Sen. Ryan Fazio, R-Greenwich, did not immediately weigh in on the court’s decision. Two of the three lawyers who brought the lawsuit – state Reps. Doug Dubitsky, R-Chaplin, and Craig Fishbein, R-Wallingford – are also Republican lawmakers.
State Rep.Doug Dubitsky R-Chaplin during a hearing on a bill that would ban the sales of certain handguns that have the potential for conversion into automatic firearms, on Wednesday, March 11, 2026, at the Legislative Office Building in Hartford. (Jim Michaud/Hearst Connecticut Media)
The Second Amendment Foundation, a national gun rights group that has backed the suit, praised the court’s decision on Tuesday as a step towards greater freedoms for firearm owners in the state.
“Lawmakers have long relied on fearmongering to pass laws that infringe on the Second Amendment, especially when it comes to common, semi-automatic rifles,” SAF Executive Vice President Alan Gottlieb said in a statement. “We’re hopeful the Court will finally put to rest the idea that these rifles are not covered by the Second Amendment simply because of their look and features.”
The decision is a win for gun rights activists who had previously seen the case stymied in federal court.
Last August, an appeals court concluded that the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms was “not unlimited” in this case. The court ruled that Connecticut’s gun laws imposed reasonable restrictions on unusually dangerous weapons that were “uniquely designed to create mayhem.”
At the time, the trio of lawyers prosecuting the case vowed to bring their lawsuit to the highest court in the nation.
“The Second Circuit’s decision ignores the U.S. Supreme Court’s clear and specific directives, and elevates ideology over constitutional rights,” Dubitsky, Fishbein and attorney Cameron Atkinson said at the time. “The Supreme Court must put a stop to our courts treating the Second Amendment as if it were not part of the Bill of Rights.”
This story includes previous Hearst Connecticut Media Group reporting.
Few things expose the hypocrisy of anti-gun activists and their allies more clearly than the recurring spectacle of so-called “violence interrupters” and their own violent tendencies. The story has become repetitive but worth reiterating because the pattern keeps “pattern-ing.” In theory, the idea of “credible voices within the community” (typically, “reformed” criminals with knowledge of local criminal networks) stepping in to squelch beefs and stop violence before it erupts is unobjectionable. But, like a lot of ideas in modern “gun violence” policy, the yawning gap between theory and real life is instructive.
Law-abiding gun owners are treated by gun control activists as nothing more than nascent criminals. They have to be vetted, surveilled, registered, and treated with ongoing suspicion, to the degree they are tolerated at all. Meanwhile, these same activists treat actual criminals victimizing others in their own communities as the inevitable byproducts of an unfair system who have to be understood, sympathized with, and repeatedly given the benefit of the doubt. In the case of “violence interrupters,” this extends to providing them with public money and free reign to associate with active lawbreakers. In either case, the gun control activists will insist it’s all for the “greater good.”
Yet it is increasingly difficult to sustain that delusion when so-called community “violence interrupters,” along with other high profile anti-gun activists, repeatedly find themselves accused of serious violent crimes, as we have previously reported on, including here and here.
Last week brought yet another case of a violent interrupter, this time out of Baltimore, charged with the very crimes he was supposed to be preventing. A worker with Safe Streets, a taxpayer funded community program that uses “violence interrupters” to hopefully intervene and prevent violent conflicts, was charged with attempted first-degree murder and several firearm violations after a shooting.
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott properly called the latest episode a disgrace but then erred in claiming the shooting was an isolated incident, “and should not be used to undermine the proven work that Safe Streets does each and every day.”
The problem is that these repeated incidents don’t just expose individual failures or isolated embarrassments but undermine the credibility of a larger movement that insists it has the solution: focus on eradicating firearms, instead of arresting and strictly punishing violent actors, and intervene in conflicts with criminals instead of police officers.
Far too often – as gun control groups lecture law-abiding gun owners about public safety, responsibility, and the “dangers” of firearm ownership – the silence is deafening when individuals they champion as community leaders on violence prevention are charged with serious violent offenses. Or worse, when their own champions fall from grace, it often becomes just another occasion to call for even more gun control. The Second Amendment community is not only entitled to question their judgment but also their motives. Proponents of these programs should be prepared to answer the growing list of examples that call their credibility into question.
Safe Streets is a program that receives millions of taxpayer money via city, state, and federal funds and has already been subject to formal investigations on misuse of the money, as well as possible gang infiltration. Credibility is earned through consistency and outcomes, not rhetoric. And nothing prevents a violent recidivist from preying upon innocent members of his own neighborhood like putting him in prison for an extended period of time.
Indeed, law-abiding armed citizens have contributed far more to supporting safe communities and preventing “gun violence” than pie-in-the-sky “interrupter” schemes. Research consistently shows hundreds of thousands to millions of defensive gun uses happen every year across America, usually without a shot being fired. So as a broader point for the state of Maryland, if public safety is truly priority, why does Maryland continue to prioritize gun control focusing on law-abiding citizens rather than focusing on violent offenders?
The community programs approach relies heavily on informal, unstructured intervention and personal influence rather than proven fundamentals of public safety. While the right mentorship can play a supporting role, it is not a substitute for policies that produce meaningful results through targeting violent criminals, repeat offenders, urban gang activity, and the small percentage of people responsible for a disproportionate share of serious violent crime.
For decades, NRA has argued that if policymakers are serious about improving safety, they must confront criminals rather than burdening law-abiding citizens. Communities deserve a better approach than programs that make a questionable, and sometimes dangerous, assumption that those closest to violence are in the best position to stop it.
Today, the Justice Department opened an investigation to determine whether Philadelphia Police use a vague “good cause” standard to cancel permits to carry legal firearms.
The U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment protects the civil right keep and bear legal firearms — including the right to legally carry firearms where allowed. The investigation focuses on the Philadelphia Police’s permitting system; the investigation does not support any armed obstruction of federal or local law enforcement.
“I have directed the Civil Rights Division, through our Second Amendment Section, to defend law-abiding citizens from local authorities who infringe the right to safely carry legal firearms,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “Law-abiding Americans, regardless of where they live, should not have to worry that their city will revoke their means of self-defense.”
It is a violation of the Second Amendment for government officials to use vague, personal discretion when determining whether to issue or revoke permits to carry firearms.
In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court, in its landmark decision District of Columbia v. Heller, held that the Second Amendment protects the right of law-abiding citizens to possess weapons that are in common use for lawful purposes.
In 2022, the Supreme Court held, in another case, that permitting officials may not base licensing decisions merely on their personal discretion. Here, it is alleged that Philadelphia Police use just such a discretionary standard to improperly limit Second Amendment rights.
The Civil Rights Division’s Second Amendment Section enforces the Second Amendment. If you believe your right to keep and bear arms is being infringed, please submit a complaint through www.justice.gov/crt/second-amendment-section.
Today, May 26th, Governor Lamont signed away more 2nd Amendment rights of law-abiding Connecticut residents by signing H5043 – A bill he himself requested that bans future manufacture, sale, and importation of many commonly owned handguns in Connecticut.
It also puts new restrictions on unfinished frames and receivers. This legislation erodes the freedoms of law-abiding manufacturers, dealers, and residents rather than stop individuals performing already illegal modifications to notably mainstream firearm platforms.
From The NRA
Three major gun-rights organizations filed a federal lawsuit against Maryland’s new ban on Glock-pattern pistols within hours of Gov. Wes Moore signing the legislation into law.
The lawsuit — NRA v. Moore — was filed May 26 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland by the National Rifle Association, the Second Amendment Foundation, and the Firearms Policy Coalition. Defendants include Gov. Moore, Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown, and acting Maryland State Police Superintendent Michael Jackson.
The same-day filing reflects how prepared gun-rights organizations have become to challenge state-level firearms legislation as soon as it becomes law — and how clearly the Maryland bill telegraphed its constitutional vulnerabilities during the legislative process.
What Maryland’s law actually does
The legislation, SB 334, makes it unlawful in Maryland to manufacture, sell, offer for sale, purchase, receive, or transfer a “machine gun convertible pistol” beginning January 1, 2027. The law defines that category as:
“Any semiautomatic pistol with a cruciform trigger bar that can be readily converted by hand or by using common household tools into a machine gun by the installation or attachment of a pistol converter as a replacement for the slide’s backplate.”
The technical definition matters because of what it actually covers. The “cruciform trigger bar” is a standard internal component in many of the most popular handguns sold in America, including the entire Glock lineup, the Sig Sauer P320 (the U.S. military’s current standard sidearm), and several Smith & Wesson M&P variants. The cruciform shape is a design feature of these pistols, not an aftermarket modification.
Under Maryland’s new law, the legal status of these handguns turns not on what has been done to them, but on whether they could theoretically be modified using “common household tools.”
The pattern across states
The Maryland law closely tracks the convertible pistol provisions New York included in its state budget bill earlier in May. Both states use the cruciform trigger bar framework. Both target the same class of widely-owned handguns. Both make possession of standard, legally-purchased pistols a crime based on theoretical convertibility rather than actual modification.
The synchronization isn’t coincidental. State-level gun control legislation increasingly moves across multiple jurisdictions on similar timelines and with similar legal architecture, suggesting coordinated drafting and advocacy. New York and Maryland have now created what amounts to a template that other restrictive states are likely to consider.
The federal context for “Glock switches”
So-called “Glock switches” or “auto sears” — small aftermarket devices that convert semi-automatic Glock-pattern pistols to fully automatic fire — are already illegal under federal law as unregistered machine guns under the National Firearms Act. Possession is a federal felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Manufacturing, selling, or installing one carries the same penalties.
The federal framework already heavily criminalizes the actual conversion devices. Maryland and New York have chosen to also criminalize the host pistols on the theory that they could be converted, regardless of whether they have been or ever will be.
Gun-rights advocates have warned for years that the “Glock switch” issue would eventually be used to justify banning the underlying pistols. Maryland’s law makes that warning concrete.
The constitutional argument
The lawsuit argues that Maryland’s law violates the Second Amendment by banning common firearms protected under the Supreme Court’s Heller framework.
NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action framed the central legal argument plainly in a legal update on the lawsuit:
“In District of Columbia v. Heller, the U.S. Supreme Court held that ‘common’ firearms cannot be banned and specifically struck down a handgun ban as unconstitutional. Maryland’s prohibition on many of the most popular handguns in America blatantly defies the Court’s precedent.”
SAF Executive Director Adam Kraut characterized the law’s logic as fundamentally backwards.
“Maryland has now attempted to ban these firearms because a subset of criminals illegally modifies them, using conversion parts that are themselves illegal to possess, and then commit crimes with the modified handguns,” Kraut said in an SAF news release. “Not only is this law as foolish as banning hops and barley to prevent drunk driving, but these commonly owned arms are clearly protected by the Second Amendment, the ratification of which takes certain policy choices — including this one — off the table.”
FPC President Brandon Combs used sharper language.
“Maryland’s politicians just declared war on an entire class of constitutionally protected handguns and the peaceable people who want to own them,” Combs said in an FPC news release. “This ban is immoral, unconstitutional, and tyrannical. FPC and our Grassroots Army are going to force Maryland to respect the Second Amendment, full stop.”
The 4th Circuit problem (again)
The Maryland Glock ban lawsuit faces the same procedural reality as the SAF coalition’s Virginia assault weapons lawsuit: it will be litigated in the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has been the most hostile federal circuit to gun-rights challenges in the post-Bruen era.
The Fourth Circuit upheld Maryland’s existing assault weapons ban in Bianchi v. Brown (August 2024). The Supreme Court denied certiorari in the renamed Snope v. Brown case in June 2025, leaving the Fourth Circuit’s reasoning intact as binding precedent. The same court that upheld Maryland banning one category of firearms will now be asked to strike down Maryland banning another.
Gun-rights advocates have a stronger handgun-specific argument here than in the assault weapons context. Heller explicitly addressed handgun bans and explicitly struck one down. The Maryland Glock ban is much more directly analogous to the D.C. handgun ban Heller invalidated than the Maryland assault weapons ban was to anything the Supreme Court has previously addressed.
That distinction may or may not matter in the Fourth Circuit. It almost certainly will matter if the case reaches the Supreme Court.
What’s next
The law takes effect January 1, 2027, giving the plaintiffs roughly seven months to obtain preliminary injunctive relief before enforcement begins. Preliminary injunction motions typically follow within weeks of complaint filing — meaning the first significant court rulings on the Maryland Glock ban are likely before fall 2026.
For Maryland gun owners, the law’s January 1, 2027 effective date means current Glock and similar pistol owners are not yet criminalized. The question is whether they will be on January 1 — which depends on whether the lawsuit produces injunctive relief in time.
The Maryland lawsuit joins a growing list of post-Bruen legal challenges that the federal court system is working through. Combined with the NSSF’s parallel lawsuit against Virginia’s gun control package, the 2nd Circuit’s vampire rule ruling, and the pending SAF cert petition on Maryland’s sensitive places framework, the courts will be deciding multiple consequential Second Amendment questions over the next 12-18 months.
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The Gun Industry Knows That Gun Laws Save Lives. It Just Doesn’t Care.
A series of articles by The Trace and Rolling Stone dive deep into the gun industry’s sacrifice of public safety in its pursuit of profit.
Last year, investigative journalist Mike Spies published an extraordinary series of articles about how the firearm industry operates—and the lies it tells to juice gun sales.
Called “The Secret Files of the Gun Industry” and published in partnership with The Trace and Rolling Stone, this reporting should’ve shaken the industry to its core. But gun industry CEOs have a tendency to get away with dangerous and questionable behavior, so they ran their usual playbook and rode out the crisis until the news cycle moved on.
But we didn’t forget, and we’re not letting anyone else move on either. The documents Spies uncovered illuminate a persistent dynamic in American gun politics: What the gun industry privately knows is very different from what it says publicly.
Gun Industry Polling Reveals Americans Support Gun Laws
Now, this probably isn’t very surprising. But consider the market for large-capacity magazines, which are magazines with the capacity to hold 10 or more rounds. They’re often used in mass shootings because they allow a shooter to fire a lot of rounds before stopping or pausing to reload, in turn increasing casualties and reducing the likelihood of escape or intervention.
Internal industry analyses show how carefully gun companies tracked the proliferation of large-capacity magazines in the US, and how commercially important these deadly devices are to them. After all, they’re high-volume and relatively inexpensive—the gun industry is making millions from them.
The article also illustrates just how dangerous large-capacity magazines are in practice, despite protests from the gun lobby:
“The NSSF’s claim [that any capacity-based ban on the manufacture and sale of magazines would be arbitrary and infringe upon Second Amendment rights], according to research by economist Lucy Allen, lacks empirical support. For litigation, she and a team analyzed 736 incidents, between January 2011 and May 2017, in which the National Rifle Association documented a person using a firearm for self-defense… Her analysis found that the people in the database fired 2.2 shots on average, and out of the 736 total incidents, only two involved a person reportedly firing more than 10 bullets.
Allen also documented and examined 161 mass shootings that took place between 1982 and 2019. For 105 of them, the shooter’s magazine capacity was known. Of those, 63 — or 60 percent — involved LCMs. ‘In particular,’ Allen noted, ‘we found an average number of fatalities or injuries of 27 per mass shooting with a large-capacity magazine versus 9 for those without.”
While the industry has long resisted regulations targeting large-capacity magazines, after the 2018 Parkland school shooting, the National Shooting Sports Foundation commissioned research examining Americans’ attitudes toward gun policy. The results complicate one of the most familiar talking points in gun politics.
According to the industry’s own polling, many Americans who hold favorable views of gun ownership, including gun owners themselves, are open to supporting gun regulations. That is very different from industry portrayals of gun owners as a bloc uniformly opposed to any gun law, no matter how commonsense the laws may be:
“Why have Republican lawmakers largely stood against more significant reforms, let alone any reform at all? As the study indicates, many people with a favorable view of gun ownership appear open to going further than the lawmakers and special interests who represent them.
[…]
For people who the study says have a ‘positive feeling’ about gun ownership, the study ranks the top five arguments for and against it… When told to rank the ‘most effective arguments against firearm ownership,’ these same respondents chose policies that the gun industry and Republican lawmakers actively oppose. The argument the group found to be most effective is: ‘Universal background checks for gun sales and transactions are supported by approximately 85 percent of Americans.’
Other statements deemed highly effective by these respondents included ‘Guns should be licensed just like cars,’ ‘State red flag laws to remove guns from those who show warning signs of violence keep guns out of the hands of those who would harm themselves or others,’ ‘Gun violence is an epidemic in the U.S.,’ and ‘Common sense gun laws to close loopholes in current gun laws will save lives and prevent gun violence.’
And yet, since this survey was conducted, Republicans have blocked efforts to pass universal background checks, which would expand the procedure to all firearms transfers instead of just commercial sales.”
Minimal Support for Concealed Carry
Internal studies reviewed by Spies also shed light on the debate over concealed carry. If the gun lobby had its way, anyone would be able to carry a concealed gun on them anywhere, regardless of local laws.
Gun rights advocates frequently argue that widespread concealed carrying of firearms increases public safety and deters crime. But in the industry-funded research that Spies uncovered, many respondents reported feeling less safe when they believed people around them might be carrying concealed firearms. This lines up with the data: The more guns are in public, the higher likelihood of lethal violence.
A Focus on Extremist Marketing
A chilling part of the series sheds light on gun marketing and its role in fueling violent extremism. Internal research identifies a core consumer demographic for the gun industry: frequent firearm purchasers whose motivations often center on personal protection, preparedness, and perceived threats to social order. As one article explains:
“The NSSF’s research also showed that first-time buyers do not account for the bulk of industry profits, comprising less than 23 percent of sales in 2022, a figure consistent with the years before the pandemic surge. That means once the gun industry brings a customer in, it must keep him, a task that requires not only the selling of guns, but also the culture and politics of gun ownership. What makes white men in particular susceptible to this messaging is a matter of academic study. The sociologist Jennifer Carlson, a professor at Arizona State University, introduced the concept of the ‘citizen protector,’ a man who experiences a sense of dislocation in today’s America. He may be struggling economically, or feel he’s not succeeding as a provider or a contributing member of the broader society. Deprived of a traditional masculine role, these men reimagine themselves as soldiers on the front lines, an honorable identity that bestows power.”
That’s why marketing campaigns for guns and gun-related products frequently draw on those themes, emphasizing danger, instability, and confrontation. These narratives fuel paranoia and extremism, and glorify combat. And for the businesses, they’re successful—these campaigns are very effective at selling guns, even if they do so while driving up crime and violence.
Safety Must Come First, Not Profits
The documents Spies unearthed provide an unusually detailed portrait of an industry that has long operated with limited public scrutiny. They show a sophisticated ecosystem of market research, political strategy, and consumer targeting.
For policymakers, journalists, and advocates trying to understand the dynamics of gun violence in America, that insight matters. The story of gun violence is as much about how guns are sold as it is about how they are fired, and to end gun violence we must understand the industry that works relentlessly to sell as many as possible.
=============================================== Gee whiz the Gun Industry wants to make money! What a shocking observation! Kinda like this author wants a pay check. Huh, now who would of guessed that one? Grumpy