Staff of The Washington Post

This is how bullets from an AR-15 blow the body apart

By N. Kirkpatrick, Atthar Mirza and Manuel Canales

The scenes of chaos and terror are all too familiar in America.

The AR-15 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.

The first part of this report is a 3D animation that shows the trajectory of two different hypothetical gunshots to the chest — one from an AR-15 and another from a typical handgun — to explain the greater severity of the damage caused by the AR-15.

The second part depicts the entrance and exit wounds of two actual victims — Noah Pozner, 6, and Peter Wang, 15 — killed in school shootings when they were struck by multiple bullets.

This account is based on a review of nearly 100 autopsy reports from several AR-15 shootings 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.

This is a .223-caliber-sized round inside an AR-15. What makes the weapon so deadly is the speed of that bullet.

It is small and light. Its cartridge holds enough propellant to send the bullet flying out of the barrel at a speed that would cross six football fields in a second.

This is a 9mm-sized round, a common choice in handguns. Its bullets are larger, inside smaller cartridges. They don’t hold enough gunpowder to match the velocity of the .223.

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 this hypothetical scenario, the bullet bursts into the chest cavity. It shreds lung tissue, severs nerves and vessels and causes massive bleeding. It also begins to tumble, taking a chaotic path in the body.

The speed at impact creates a blast effect, like the wake that follows a boat, causing internal injuries far outside the bullet’s path. Here, the blast destroys large veins that carry blood back to the heart.

A 9mm bullet from the same distance takes a relatively linear path. Because that bullet doesn’t produce the same blast effect, it causes far less damage.

The bullet from the AR-15 leaves behind a gaping exit wound. The 9mm bullet fired from the handgun has a much smaller exit wound.

In this scenario, with immediate medical care and minimal bleeding, the victim has a chance at surviving the 9mm shot to the chest.

The bullet from the AR-15, however, causes torrential bleeding that is quickly lethal.

Two children, many bullets

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.

Due to 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 Pozner, 6

Newtown, Conn.

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.

Noah was shot three times. Adam Lanza took his mother’s AR-15 rifle to the school and fired 80 rounds into the bathroom. Here are the wounds that killed Noah.

The bullet that struck Noah’s left thumb caused the smallest of his wounds. His hand was badly mangled.

The bullet that struck Noah’s back crossed through the center of his chest, filling it with blood. It broke apart into fragments, according to 2019 court testimony from chief state medical examiner Wayne Carver.

The bullet that hit Noah’s face caused an almost “complete destruction” of the lower lip and jaw.

Noah’s wounds were not survivable, Carver testified. “This particular kind of projectile, it’s got so much energy that it just breaks up.” The pattern of metal over a wide area, he said, “would give me a marker of ... what organs were destroyed and how completely.”

Peter Wang, 15

Parkland, Fla.

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 at 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.

Peter was shot 13 times. Nikolas Cruz used an AR-15 he bought legally and fired at least 139 rounds. Here are the wounds that killed Peter.

Peter was running down the hallway when he was shot. He was struck once in the foot, twice in the thigh, once in the torso, five times in his arms and, finally, four times in the head.

One of the bullets that hit his thigh fractured his hipbone and then broke partially apart before exiting through his abdomen.

Two bullets tore Peter’s chest apart. One entered his torso and flew upward, fragmenting and perforating his chest muscle, which bruised his lungs and created a cluster of three large exit wounds. The other struck the back of his upper right arm, pierced the shoulder joint and opened up a gaping hole on the way out.

The four bullets that obliterated Peter’s head were the last four he received, medical examiner Wendolyn Sneed, who performed the autopsy, testified at Cruz’s sentencing trial last year. Surveillance video showed that Peter’s legs were moving as the killer came closer to him and fired rapidly.

The combined energy of those bullets created exit wounds so “gaping” that the autopsy described his head as “deformed.” Blood and brain splatter were found on his upper body and the walls. That degree of destruction, according to medical experts, is possible only with a high-velocity weapon.

Peter was one of 16 Parkland victims who were shot several times. The shooter had equipped his AR-15 with the ability to fire dozens of rounds without pausing to reload, preventing people from escaping.

In many of America’s mass killings, shooters hit multiple victims, multiple times. In seconds.

About this story

Reporting by N. Kirkpatrick and Atthar Mirza. 3D modeling and animations by Manuel Canales and Ronald Paniagua. Jon Swaine and Alex Horton contributed to this report.

Design and development by Aadit Tambe, Anna Lefkowitz and Rekha Tenjarla. Design editing by Madison Walls.

Editing by Ann Gerhart, Peter Wallsten, Chiqui Esteban and Wendy Galietta. Additional editing by Jordan Melendrez, Kim Chapman and Tom Justice.

Additional support by Frank Hulley-Jones, Angela M. Hill, Natalia Jimenez, Sarah Murray, Courtney Beesch, Angel Mendoza, Bishop Sand, Kyley Schultz, Brandon Carter, Ashleigh Wilson and Bryan Flaherty.

Video credits: Bystanders take cover outside the Odessa Cinergy Theater during a shoot out with law enforcement in 2019 in Texas.

People flee as shots ring out at a Las Vegas concert on in 2017. (Twitter/Morgan Marchand/Storyful)

Students raise their hands as armed law enforcement officers enter a classroom at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in 2018 (Alexander Ball/Storyful)

The models and animations were constructed from academic research reviews, interviews, autopsy reports and other records The Post obtained, in consultation with the following: Babak Sarani, director of trauma and acute care surgery at George Washington University Hospital; Joseph Sakran, vice chair of clinical operations and a trauma surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital; Cynthia Bir, chair of biomedical engineering at Wayne State University; and Victor Weedn, deputy medical examiner for Washington, D.C.

The Post relied on post-mortem and autopsy reports and medical examiner testimony at trials to illustrate with precision the entrance and exit wounds that were identified in the bodies of Noah Pozner and Peter Wang. The depictions are as precise as could be determined from the records, which included the medical examiner’s hand-drawn diagrams for Peter. Those documents do not detail the position the victims were in when they were struck, or the full sequence of the bullets and their precise path through the body.

The calculation that a .223 round fired from an AR-15 can reach speeds of up to six football fields in a second was made using a 55 grain .223 Remington full metal case round fired at a horizontal trajectory. The muzzle velocity of this round is 3,240 feet per second. This estimate accounts for drag as the bullet slows down over distance and time. It does not account for weather or other interference. Nor does it account for horizontal drop as the bullet would probably hit the ground before reaching six football fields. The Post consulted with mechanical engineer John Greenawalt and Cynthia Bir, chair of biomedical engineering at Wayne State University.

Ten of the 17 deadliest U.S. mass killings since 2012 have involved AR-15-style guns. (Handguns are involved in the bulk of U.S. gun homicides, responsible for 90 percent of cases in which the type of firearm is known.)

The Washington Post defines mass killings as a shooting event in which at least four people are killed, not including the gunman.

The timer at the conclusion includes 10 mass killing events that involved AR-15s. The time elapsed from the first shot to last were all under 11 minutes. That timing is approximate and based on official reports and news reports.

By Silvia Foster-Frau, N. Kirkpatrick and Arelis R. Hernández

Mass shootings involving AR-15s have become a recurring American nightmare.

The weapon, easy to operate and widely available, is now used more than any other in the country’s deadliest mass killings.

Fired by the dozens or hundreds in rapid succession, bullets from AR-15s have blasted through classroom doors and walls. They have shredded theater seats and splintered wooden church pews. They have mangled human bodies and, in a matter of seconds, shattered the lives of people attending a concert, shopping on a Saturday afternoon, going out with friends and family, working in their offices and worshiping at church and synagogue. They have killed first-graders, teenagers, mothers, fathers and grandparents.

But the full effects of the AR-15’s destructive force are rarely seen in public.

The impact is often shielded by laws and court rulings that keep crime scene photos and records secret. Journalists do not typically have access to the sites of shootings to document them. Even when photographs are available, news organizations generally do not publish them, out of concern about potentially dehumanizing victims or retraumatizing their families.

Now, drawing on an extensive review of photographs, videos and police investigative files from 11 mass killings between 2012 and 2023, The Washington Post is publishing the most comprehensive account to date of the repeating pattern of destruction wrought by the AR-15 — a weapon that was originally designed for military combat but has in recent years become one of the best-selling firearms on the U.S. market.

This piece includes never-before-released pictures taken by law enforcement officials after shootings inside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., in 2022, and the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Tex., in 2017, that were obtained by The Post. It is also based on Post interviews with survivors and first responders from multiple shootings as well as transcripts of official testimony provided by law enforcement officials who were among the first to witness the carnage. Read a note here from the executive editor about how The Post decided what to publish and why.

The review lays bare how the AR-15, a weapon that has soared in popularity over the past two decades as a beloved tool for hunting, target practice and self-defense, has also given assailants the power to instantly turn everyday American gathering places into zones of gruesome violence.

This is an oral history told in three parts that follows the chronological order of a typical AR-15 mass shooting. It weaves together pictures, videos and the recollections of people who endured different tragedies but have similar stories to tell.

PART 1: SHOTS ARE FIRED

To some it sounds like fireworks, to others a deafening roar. The initial burst from the AR-15 is often the first sign that something unusual is happening. Moments later, bullets riddle walls, windows, shelves and notebooks. Some people are shot and others scramble for safety. Later, investigators identify dozens or hundreds of bullet casings.

All of a sudden, out of nowhere, you just hear the loudest, most unbelievably piercing sound you’ve ever heard in your life. Danielle Gilbert, high school student. Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Parkland, Fla.

People started screaming, and there was hysteria and people were dropping to the ground. Heather Brown Sallan, vendor. Route 91 Harvest festival, Las Vegas.

I turned around and ... looked at the back doors, just trying to get my bearings and figure out, is this some kids throwing firecrackers? David Colbath, church congregant. First Baptist Church, Sutherland Springs, Tex.

I heard what sounded like metal chairs falling, and I figured that was for the holiday program or something. Abbey Clements, teacher. Sandy Hook Elementary School, Newtown, Conn.

I just saw things flying off the walls, and that’s when it hit me — that it was bullets, that it was a gun that was firing off. Arnulfo Reyes, teacher. Robb Elementary School, Uvalde, Tex.

The face my wife made the moment we heard shots and she started to run with the stroller … super tense — I don’t know how to describe it. Daniel Seijas, shopper, Allen Premium Outlets, Allen, Tex.

Smoke filled the place up from the constant shooting inside here. ... You could smell the smoke. David Colbath, church congregant, Sutherland Springs.

Since it was pitch black, I could see the muzzle flashes coming from that left side. ... There was drywall fragments falling from the ceiling. Anthony Burke, police detective and SWAT officer. Tree of Life Congregation, Pittsburgh.

To be able to cope with being in a position where I couldn’t do anything, I did the most useful thing that I can think of: I was counting rounds and reloads. Morgan Workman, church congregant. Sutherland Springs.

The bullets were ricocheting off the street. ... You could hear the pinging and the ricocheting of them hitting the cars around you. It was the chaos of it — it just kept going and going and going. Heather Brown Sallan, vendor. Las Vegas.

Before he ever came in, there was really hardly anybody that could rise up and challenge him. But with these bullets just flying through the air, there was nobody going to be able to do it and nobody could. David Colbath, church congregant. Sutherland Springs.

I got shot four times ...I thought I got hit with a ton of bricks … so I looked behind me to try to see if there’s anyone to help me. And all I could see was blood. Maddy Wilford, high school student in classroom 1213, Parkland.

There’s dust everywhere. There’s debris. ... I had like dust and debris coming off of my hands. … I was still just covered from head to toe. Danielle Gilbert, high school student. Parkland.

When I could hear the gunfire, I knew where he was. When I didn’t hear the gunfire, I’m thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, he’s coming this way.’ I kept thinking that everyone was dead. There’s no way they’re not all dead. Dallas Schwartz, employee. Old National Bank, Louisville.

I only thought he got shot one time, and it was five. ... As the police and them come to us I just grab on my dad and just kept telling him I loved him before he died. Dion Green, bar patron. Oregon Historic District, Dayton, Ohio.

PART 2: THE ATTACK UNFOLDS

In minutes, injured and dead fall to the floor. Some are able to flee, others are rushed to safety by police. Smoke from the rifle fills the air. The Post obtained never-before-published photographs from Robb Elementary School classrooms 111 and 112 in Uvalde. They show the carnage left behind, including the large volume of blood that collects. The photos, along with personal accounts describing young children’s lifeless bodies, echo descriptions provided 11 years earlier by witnesses at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

He shot the students there under the table. And so, I didn’t hear any yelling or crying. But I think it was due to the bullets, the gun, being so loud. Arnulfo Reyes, teacher. Uvalde.

I was stunned. I was hurt. I couldn’t move. Two kids fell on my back. Another two kids fell on those two kids’ back. We were stacked up right here like cordwood. David Colbath, church congregant. Sutherland Springs.

I saw my right arm get blown open in two places and my right hand. The pain was the worst pain I ever felt. I looked at it as I felt it, and it looked like shredded raw meat. And there was a lot of blood. Andrea Wedner, synagogue congregant. Pittsburgh.

It was a war zone and there was injured, there was blood everywhere. There was magazines, there was bullets. Danielle Gilbert, high school student. Parkland.

I notice on the whiteboard it looked like somebody had taken, like, their hand and, like, it just, it was wrote in blood — it looked like they wrote LOL on the whiteboard. Travis Shrewsbury, Border Patrol agent. Uvalde.

I could hear a little girl say, ‘Officers come in, we’re in here,’ and she sounded far away so I knew it was in the other room. And she said that once. And then maybe two or three minutes later she said it again. And then I just heard him walk into that other room. And he shot some more. So after that I didn’t hear her no more. And so I had figured he had killed her. Arnulfo Reyes, teacher. Uvalde.

My breathing was changing, it was getting more shallow, more rapid. I was salivating. I was losing my ability to expand my lungs. I was drooling. The pressure in my abdomen was getting greater by the minute and through my rectum. I felt that I was leaving. ... I felt that I was dying. Daniel Leger, synagogue congregant. Pittsburgh.

I could hear people screaming, and I could hear people — you know, last words were uttered, things that were — fear, and just really awful sounds. And then it eventually started getting quieter. And that was the worst part. Was knowing that the quiet meant the worst. Morgan Workman, church congregant. Sutherland Springs.

After a while, I could see she was shot and she wasn’t going to survive. … I kissed my fingers, and I touched my fingers to her skin. ... I cried out, ‘Mommy.’ Andrea Wedner, synagogue congregant. Pittsburgh.

One of my cousins — the cops dragged him in the hallway when they were taking us out. I saw the bullet in his head. Jaydien Canizales, elementary school student. Uvalde.

Two 6- or 7-years-old girls followed by two older, taller boys came out the east exit and approached. One little girl was heavily blood spattered and dazed. … Her friend said that she was all right and ‘stuff got on her.’ ... I told the two to hold hands and go. Paul Lukienchuk, state trooper. Newtown.

The kids, some are scared, some are quiet, some are crying, some don’t know what’s going on. Some thought it was a practice fire drill. But they were ready to see us. … We told them: ‘Single file. Get your kids. Let’s go. Let’s go. Let’s go.’ Alexander Cuellar, Border Patrol agent. Uvalde.

They came, these three police officers with long guns. ... I was instructed to unlock the door and to raise my hands and we all came out at gunpoint and were evacuated. Marcus Kergosien, store manager. Allen.

As I exit the classroom, there’s two more bodies on the right-hand side in the hallway, a girl and a boy both face down. Danielle Gilbert, high school student. Parkland.

It was emergency vehicle sounds, and I couldn’t even look up. I looked at my feet, and the cold air in my chest, we had no coats and we were running toward the firehouse and it was — we didn’t know that it was over, so the trauma continued there. And then it’s just the worst scene you can imagine. You had chaos, and kids couldn’t find their siblings. Abbey Clements, teacher. Newtown.

I remember when we ran out and there was the police. … The look on his face, the terror on his face. He had people under his car. In his car. And I remember him just screaming: ‘Run for your fucking lives. Do not stop.’ ... I remember my mouth being bone dry and my lungs were burning and I was so physically uncomfortable and I was so thirsty and I couldn’t stop. I just kept running and running and running. Heather Brown Sallan, vendor. Las Vegas.

He threw me down on the ground and got on top of me. … I think that moment was him grabbing my face and saying, ‘This is happening, like there are actual bullets flying at us now.’ ... I just remember that feeling, I swear it was the moment that photo was taken, when he opened my eyes to what was actually happening. Dani Westerman, concertgoer. Las Vegas.

PART 3: DEVASTATION

When the shooting ends, police, coroners and other first responders bear witness to the destruction. They check for signs of life, attempting to separate the barely living from the dead. They collect evidence, photograph the scene and remove the bodies. A once familiar place is now forever changed.

It was dim. The movie was still playing. The alarm was going off. … I could smell the gas. ... Then I began to notice the bodies. ... There was blood on seats, blood on the wall, blood on the emergency exit door. Pools of blood on the floor. Annette Brook, police officer. Century 16 movie theater, Aurora, Colo.

I walked in there, and you’re, like, slipping and sliding, trying not to slip because it was bad. And just the thing I won’t forget is the smell. Alexander Cuellar, Border Patrol agent. Uvalde.

There were shoes scattered, blood in the street, bodies in the street. Straight out of a nightmare. Dion Green, bar patron. Dayton.

It looked like a bomb went off in there. When you can tell the difference between, you know, when somebody is alive and somebody is dead, it’s because there were pieces of people just laying everywhere. And those were the dead ones. The ones that were alive were barely moving but were moving. Rusty Duncan, volunteer firefighter. Sutherland Springs.

We were standing there looking at the scene and the phones kept ringing and ringing and ringing in the backpacks and on the desk of the parents calling their children. ... They kept calling and calling and calling. Eulalio Diaz, justice of the peace and coroner. Uvalde.

As we were clearing the rooms, we came across a classroom which I thought at first was an art room because I saw a lot of red paint all over the walls and in the far left corner I thought I observed a pile of dirty laundry. … As I continued to stare at the room not being able to figure out what I was looking at, I realized that the red paint was actually blood and the pile of dirty laundry were actually dead bodies. Carlo Guerra, state trooper. Newtown.

As I stared in disbelief, I recognized the face of a little boy on top of a pile. ... I then began to realize that there were other children around the little boy and that this was actually a pile of dead children. … I tried to count the number of dead between rooms #10 and #8, but my mind would not count beyond the low teens and I kept getting confused. William Cario, police sergeant. Newtown.

You can only imagine that gun being pointed down and shooting as much as you can into a body, what it would do. It’ll make you unrecognizable in a heartbeat. So, yes, I believe it, because I saw it with my own eyes. Rusty Duncan, volunteer firefighter. Sutherland Springs.

About this story

Reporting by Silvia Foster-Frau, N. Kirkpatrick and Arelis R. Hernández. Additional reporting by Jon Gerberg, Holly Bailey, Robert Klemko, John Harden, Jon Swaine, Elyse Samuels, Sarah Cahlan, Joyce Lee and John Woodrow Cox. Public records requests by Nate Jones.

Design and development by Shikha Subramaniam and Aadit Tambe. Design editing by Madison Walls and Matthew Callahan. Visual editing by Kainaz Amaria. Additional photo editing by Robert Miller and Natalia Jimenez. Additional video editing by Angela M. Hill.

Editing by Peter Wallsten, Rosalind S. Helderman, Kainaz Amaria and Wendy Galietta. Additional editing by Jordan Melendrez, Brian Cleveland, Kim Chapman and Tom Justice. Additional support from Sarah Murray, Ashleigh Wilson, Kyley Schultz and Brandon Carter.

The following people were interviewed by The Post: Jaydien Canizales, Abbey Clements, David Colbath, Eulalio Diaz, Rusty Duncan, Danielle Gilbert, Dion Green, Marcus Kergosien, Arnulfo Reyes, Heather Brown Sallan, Dallas Schwartz, Daniel Seijas, Dani Westerman, Maddy Wilford and Morgan Workman. Seijas was interviewed in Spanish.

Comments from Annette Brook, Anthony Burke, Daniel Leger and Andrea Wedner are drawn from court testimony. Comments from William Cario, Alexander Cuellar, Carlo Guerra, Paul Lukienchuk and Travis Shrewsbury are drawn from police investigative files.

While other weapons, including various types of semiautomatic rifles, are used in violent crimes, AR-15s have been used in 10 of the 18 shootings since 2012 in which 10 or more people were killed — making it the most commonly used weapon in the country’s deadliest mass killings. This data is drawn from a database maintained by the AP, USA Today and Northeastern University and analyzed by The Post.

Photo and video credits:

Introduction: Office of the District Attorney for the 18th Judicial District of Colorado; David Becker/Getty Images; and Texas Department of Public Safety/Obtained by The Post.

Part 1: Texas Department of Public Safety/Obtained by The Post; Connecticut State Police; U.S. Justice Department; Dayton Police Department; Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department; and Office of the District Attorney for the 18th Judicial District of Colorado. Videos by Las Vegas Video Archive/YouTube; Danielle Gilbert.

Part 2: Texas Department of Public Safety/Obtained by The Post; Dayton Police Department, Jonathan Mattise/AP; Shannon Hicks/Newtown Bee/Polaris; David Becker/Getty Images. Video by Ryan Deitsch via Storyful.

Part 3: Office of the District Attorney for the 18th Judicial District of Colorado; Texas Department of Public Safety/Obtained by The Post.

Texas Department of Safety photographs were not released by the agency but were separately obtained by The Post.

Crime scene photos from the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh have been cropped to remove labels placed by investigators.

The video provided by Danielle Gilbert from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland was originally played in open court during the trial of the gunman. The Post spoke to four people who were in the classroom including Maddy Wilford, who identified herself as one of the wounded students who can be heard in the video.

The photograph of the large field strewn with bodies from the Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas was posted on Reddit and 4chan on Oct. 2, 2017, the day after the shooting. The Post verified the time and location of the photograph by comparing it to body-camera footage, social media videos, police reports and other pictures taken at the scene. The Post could not determine the original online post or the photographer. The Post consulted Siwei Lyu, a computer science and engineering professor at the University at Buffalo and an expert on photo and video manipulation, who found no signs of manipulation.

The AR-15 thrives in times of tension and tragedy. This is how it came to dominate the marketplace – and loom so large in the American psyche.

By Todd C. Frankel, Shawn Boburg, Josh Dawsey, Ashley Parker and Alex Horton 

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

Maybe, he said, it will help Smith & Wesson sell the AR-15. “But,” he added, “how many more guns can they possibly sell?”

About this story

Reporting by Todd C. Frankel, Shawn Boburg, Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey and Alex Horton. Additional reporting Hannah Allam and Jon Swaine. Videos by Jon Gerberg. Motion graphics by Osman Malik. Illustration by Blake Cale for The Washington Post.

Design and development by Aadit Tambe, Anna Lefkowitz and Rekha Tenjarla. Design editing by Madison Walls. Photo editing by Natalia Jimenez. Video editing by Angela M. Hill. Graphics editing by Chiqui Esteban.

Editing by Peter Wallsten and Wendy Galietta. Additional editing by Jordan Melendrez, Kim Chapman and Tom Justice.

Additional support from Meghan Hoyer, Sarah Murray, Courtney Beesch, Angel Mendoza, Kyley Schultz, Brandon Carter, Ashleigh Wilson Jai-Leen James and Bryan Flaherty.

Reflecting on a decade of mass killings and surging AR-15 sales, four current and three former senators recant some or all of their 2013 positions on gun laws in emotional interviews with The Post

By Peter Wallsten and Paul Kane

Just a few months had passed since Ben Wheeler was slaughtered by a gunman with an AR-15 at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and his mother was on Capitol Hill pleading with a U.S. senator to understand her grief.

Francine Wheeler wanted to know what Sen. Heidi Heitkamp would do if it had been her 6-year-old child who was murdered.

“She would not look at me,” Wheeler recalled recently about the April 2013 encounter with the newly elected Democrat from North Dakota, a conservative state with deep support for gun rights. Heitkamp was “defensive, unkind, and not interested in helping or listening to the stories of our loved ones.”

When the session ended, Heitkamp stayed in her office “sitting at the table with her head down,” recalled David Thomas, a lobbyist who escorted Wheeler and other Sandy Hook parents to the meeting. As the entourage left, Lara Bergthold, another consultant helping the families, said she heard the senator “break out into sobs.”

Over the course of nine wrenching days that spring, mothers, fathers, siblings and other loved ones touched by the Sandy Hook massacre shared their raw feelings with senator after senator. They exhorted lawmakers to expand the federal background check system — a measure that would not have stopped the Sandy Hook assailant, a mentally disturbed 20-year-old who stole guns his mother had legally purchased, but that experts said could save lives and, more to the point, was so overwhelmingly popular among the public that it could win enough votes to pass.

The family members exposed their anguish to the harsh glare of the political spotlight, handing out postcards with smiling pictures of the young victims — one wearing a Superman T-shirt, another holding a pink umbrella — alongside admonitions such as “Honor Her Life.” The card for Ben Wheeler, featuring his first-grade school portrait, asked, “What is worth doing?”

If there was ever a moment when major gun laws stood a chance of passing, this was it.

The nation had been seized with horror by the Dec. 14, 2012, massacre in Newtown, Conn., that killed 20 children and six adults — the deadliest shooting ever at a K-12 school and, for many Americans, a gruesome introduction to the carnage that a gunman with an AR-15 can inflict. President Barack Obama, who had just been reelected, called for dramatic new gun restrictions. Even the National Rifle Association, which had held the line on gun policy for nearly 20 years, was engaged with lawmakers about a possible legislative response.

The question facing members of Congress that spring was whether they would act to try to prevent future Sandy Hooks — or if the shattered windows, blood-soaked classrooms and decimated bodies of Newtown foretold the inevitable future of a nation in which the tools of mass death would remain readily available.

They would do nothing.

Days after her meeting with Wheeler, Heitkamp joined three other red-state Democrats and 41 Republicans to successfully block the background check bill the Sandy Hook families had begged her to support. A more sweeping proposal that would have banned many semiautomatic weapons failed that day by an even wider margin, with opposition from 16 members of the Democratic caucus. A ban on high-capacity magazines like the one used by the Sandy Hook shooter also fell short.

Now, as mass shootings have become more frequent in the decade since Sandy Hook, four current senators and three former senators have taken the remarkable step of recanting some or all of their 2013 positions. In emotional interviews with The Washington Post in recent weeks, some expressed deep regret for not pushing at the time for measures to restrict made-for-combat weapons or taking other steps to slow the violence that would only grow more common in the years to come.

“Not that I agree with the exact language of these bills, but it was my obligation looking backwards to provide leadership, even though I was there a hot minute, to make those bills better,” Heitkamp, who was sworn into office a few weeks after the Sandy Hook massacre, said in one of two recent interviews. “And I didn’t do that. My activity was passive, not active, in searching for a solution, and that I regret.”

Heitkamp said she did not recall the meeting with Wheeler but was “extraordinarily sorry” for leaving families with the sense that she didn’t care about the children who were killed or the experiences of their grieving parents.

“If any person was left with the impression that I had anything other than the most supreme sympathy and just hurt, that is a failure on my part, and I couldn’t apologize more,” she said.

The six others who described to The Post their changed perspectives on gun policy were Sens. Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.), Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Angus King (I-Maine) and Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), as well as former senators Mark Begich (D-Alaska) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.).

It is rare for politicians to shift their views on policy issues as culturally divisive as gun rights. But the expressions of remorse underscore how the failure to change laws in response to Sandy Hook continues to haunt many who held power at the time — prompting some of them to openly wonder if they allowed short-term political considerations to cloud their judgment on votes that might have saved lives. Obama, addressing Sandy Hook families last year at an event commemorating the 10th anniversary of the shooting, called Congress’s inaction that spring despite his personal lobbying “perhaps the most bitter disappointment of my time in office, the closest I came to being cynical.”

Udall, who voted against the assault weapons ban that spring, said if he was “in a time machine and going back” he would bring a grim message to his younger self: “This is going to get worse and worse. More and more people are going to be deeply affected by this.” If he could do it again, Udall said, he would vote for the ban and “take the political heat.”

Looking back, Heitkamp said, only later in her term did she begin to assert herself more aggressively on issues where she felt the long-term consequences of a vote outweighed the difficulty of going against the views of most North Dakotans — a “process of becoming more certain” in her role as a senator, she said.

“You are going to take votes that will upset, probably in those cases, the majority of your constituency,” she said. “But these are votes that have a permanency beyond your service.”

The senators’ changing views also reflect how the Democratic Party has moved in recent years toward supporting more aggressive gun control.

Many Democrats had long refused to consider strict gun limits, blaming their party’s steep losses in the 1994 midterm elections on the enactment that year of an assault weapons ban. The ban’s expiration in 2004 preceded a new era of soaring semiautomatic weapons production, escalating after Sandy Hook, that has made the AR-15 the country’s best-selling rifle. Today, a well-financed advocacy network — sparked by the 2013 defeat in the Senate and supercharged by the mobilization of young people after the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Fla. — has heightened pressure on Democrats to unify around stronger gun-control policies.

The momentum culminated in the passage last year, after the elementary school massacre in Uvalde, Tex., of the first significant defeat to the NRA in nearly three decades — a bipartisan measure adding modest firearms restrictions while spending billions on mental health services and school safety.

Still, the changes sought in the trio of measures that failed to pass in 2013 remain largely unrealized. And advocates acknowledge that enacting anything that far-reaching today would require Democrats to control the White House and Congress, with majorities large enough to overcome a Senate filibuster or eliminate that procedural obstacle altogether.

Gun rights advocates say the popularity of the AR-15 and other semiautomatic weapons shows the political danger for lawmakers in any attempt to restrict firearms.

“Politicians who aggressively push gun control run the risk of going against voter sentiment and risk their reelection by challenging these deeply held American values,” Randy Kozuch, executive director of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, said in a statement to The Post.

Some of the senators who spoke to The Post acknowledged they had been influenced by the political power of the NRA and its allies and now feel they had been wrong to elevate the convenience of law-abiding gun owners over the opportunity to limit gun violence.

Some said that they changed their minds after emotional conversations with victims’ families or their own children and that they are hoping for a second chance to finally do right by Newtown.

Heinrich, a lifelong gun owner and hunter, said that after the Parkland massacre, his son, Carter, then in high school, joined other young people in demanding new gun laws at the March for Our Lives on the National Mall.

“When your kid tells you you’re wrong with that much conviction, you need to stop and think about it,” Heinrich said.

He voted against the 2013 assault weapons ban proposal. The bill was not perfect, Heinrich said, “but when you weigh that against what we’ve experienced in the intervening years, if that were on the floor would I vote for it? Yeah.” He added: “I didn’t feel at the time like this was my issue. And I think after you experienced a decade of mass shootings, it’s everyone’s issue.”

Heinrich and two other senators who voted against the assault weapons ban 10 years ago — Bennet and King — recently introduced legislation that does not go as far in eliminating dangerous firearms but instead would limit ammunition magazines and restrict other lethal features from certain semiautomatic weapons. They sponsored the bill with Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), whose wife, then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, was injured in a 2011 mass shooting in Tucson.

Back in 2013, many senators felt pressure when their offices received phone calls from NRA members in numbers that dwarfed the calls from supporters of gun restrictions, a sign of the pro-gun group’s entrenched organization. Some, like Udall, were heading into reelection a year later, facing the potential that backing strict gun laws could spark a voter revolt.

Heitkamp said she could tell where most of the voters in her state stood. “The NRA in some ways reflects the constituency,” she said.

But Wheeler, knowing that Heitkamp would not face voters for another five years, said she left the senator’s office feeling “angry, sad and confused as to why she would not help us.”

“I don’t know what was worse,” Wheeler added, “the senators who wept for Ben and then voted no, or the senators like [Heitkamp] who never even listened in the first place.”

‘Our only shot’

The first conversations in Newtown about mobilizing to demand new gun laws took place almost immediately after the Friday morning massacre. By Sunday, several dozen neighbors and local leaders, still in shock, filled a community room at the public library.

“We went around the room and asked people, what do we want to push for, what do we need to do?” recalled Po Murray, who had been involved in local politics for years and lived in the same neighborhood as the gunman. “I vividly recall that the majority wanted to ban assault weapons.”

Some thought a federal ban could happen. Even Sen. Joe Manchin III, a pro-gun Democrat with an A rating from the NRA, had said on national TV three days after the shooting that he was open to it.

In the coming weeks, though, the efforts in Newtown splintered.

Murray and other activists who were successfully pushing the Connecticut legislature to toughen its gun laws argued that the community should push Congress for a ban, later forming a new gun-control group called the Newtown Action Alliance. Others pressed for a more tempered approach that might appeal to the political middle — eventually creating Sandy Hook Promise, the advocacy group that would help lead the charge for the upcoming fight in Congress.

Several of the families who had lost loved ones, still grieving and traumatized, soon threw themselves into the discussions, flying to Washington for meetings with the president and vice president as well as leading lawmakers and others involved in the gun debate. For some, it was their first experience in politics — and suddenly they were the unwitting spokespeople for an issue they knew little about.

“I didn’t even know what the NRA was until this happened,” Nicole Hockley, whose 6-year-old son, Dylan, was killed in the shooting, recalled in a recent interview.

The families met with a Washington-based think tank, Third Way, as they assessed what types of federal legislation they should pursue. Matt Bennett, an executive vice president for the group, told the families that the “most obvious thing to do” in response to the tragedy was to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. But he warned them that such measures had no hope in the Republican-led House or the Democratic-led Senate, where a bipartisan majority remained skeptical of gun restrictions.

Bennett offered a more realistic goal: persuading lawmakers to close loopholes in the federal background check system, which is supposed to prevent criminals and those with documented mental health issues from buying guns. Polls showed broad support for the proposal that these families could amplify.

“With the moral authority that you now have,” he recalled telling them, “it is conceivable that we can do that.”

Senators and advocates said later it had become immediately clear that banning anything would be a political nonstarter. Even restricting the types of high-capacity magazines that had allowed the Sandy Hook gunman to fire 154 rounds in less than five minutes failed before it began when Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who as a House member had represented Newtown and had gotten to know many of the families, couldn’t persuade a Republican to co-sponsor the measure.

“I remember being a little bit more hopeful about the high-capacity magazine ban, but, again, that hope got dashed pretty quickly,” Murphy recalled.

The setback made an impression on the Sandy Hook families.

“How hard is it to convince someone, like maybe don’t give somebody the opportunity to have 30 rounds in a magazine?” asked David Wheeler, Francine’s husband and father of Ben. “When that went down, we were shocked. That’s when I think we all got a real flavor for how difficult this was going to be.”

Ultimately, the Sandy Hook Promise group made the decision to focus its efforts on expanding background checks to internet and gun-show sales, not on assault weapons or magazine bans that seemed destined to fail.

Mark Barden, whose 7-year-old son, Daniel, was killed in the shooting, said he and his wife felt they owed it to Daniel and his two older siblings to make any difference while they could — and background checks had a chance.

“We found ourselves in a moment in time when people would actually listen to us,” said Barden, who had worked until the shooting as a professional guitarist and now helps run Sandy Hook Promise with Hockley. “We felt that was our only shot.”

The families found an unlikely ally in Manchin, who had easily won election in conservative West Virginia in 2010 after running an ad in which he fired a bullet from a rifle into the text of an Obama-backed bill to limit carbon emissions. Manchin, who is not seeking reelection next year and is weighing an independent presidential bid, was so moved by the slaughter of children about the same age as his grandchildren that he hung photos of the Sandy Hook victims in the hallway to his private office and made himself a central figure in the debate. He dialed back support for an assault weapons ban, worked GOP friends and contacts at the NRA, and rallied votes for the background checks bill.

“Let’s just walk before we go into sprinting and running,” he recalled saying.

By early April, however, even the background checks proposal was becoming a steep political climb.

The NRA vowed to oppose the legislation. And despite Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) teaming up with Manchin as a co-sponsor, several Republican senators said they would block the measure by filibuster, meaning that supporters would need 60 votes for passage.

Obama, who had first met the families when he visited Newtown days after the tragedy, returned to Connecticut — telling a raucous crowd at a Hartford basketball arena that some senators were planning “political stunts” to prevent gun legislation from coming to the floor. That night, the White House said, the president flew 11 Sandy Hook family members to Washington on Air Force One.

The lobbying push would begin the next day.

9 days, 37 senators

The Sandy Hook families arrived on Capitol Hill on the morning of April 9, 2013, their schedule packed with media appearances and private meetings with senators. Their goal: to make emotional connections with potentially persuadable Republicans and pro-gun Democrats.

“We weren’t interested in shaming senators for their position,” Barden said. “We thought this was such a modest request.”

Multiple Republicans told the families upfront that they had no intention of voting for the background checks bill, though family members recalled that those meetings were often cordial.

“I have an obligation to listen,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who vividly recalls the conversation and has stayed in touch with Barden over the years. “But I weigh that with where I come from and in the views of the people that I represent.”

Some Democrats and Sandy Hook families had hoped that they might find a Republican ally in Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, who weeks before their meeting had announced his support for same-sex marriage, noting that his son is gay.

However, Portman had separately told at least one colleague during negotiations over the bill that he would not back gun restrictions because it was difficult to represent a conservative state and take more than one controversial liberal position, according to two Democrats who heard the comments and described them on the condition of anonymity because they were made in a private conversation.

In the meeting with the families, Portman told the group that he would not support the background checks measure even though he believed it could save lives.

Hockley said that she responded with a piercing personal question: “So, you can vote to protect your son, but you can’t vote to protect mine?”

Portman, who retired from the Senate this year, declined to comment for this story.

There were also frustrating conversations with some Democrats, family members said.

When the families arrived for their meeting with Begich, the Alaska senator who was up for reelection in 2014, they were told by aides to sit at a conference table in an outer lobby area rather than being invited to a private space, according to Thomas and Bergthold, the consultants escorting the families.

The staff refused to close the door to the noisy hallway, they said.

“Can we go back to your office?” Thomas recalled asking Begich when the senator emerged. Begich said no. The conversation, however emotional, would happen in the lobby, in full public earshot and view.

Begich, in a recent interview, said he did not intend to be disrespectful, noting that his lower-level offices did not have much meeting space. “If they took it that way, then I apologize,” he said. “But I took what they told me very seriously.” He said the pictures of the children that the parents had handed him remained beside his computer until he left the Senate after losing his reelection bid the following year.

The weekend before the votes would occur, Obama took the unusual step of turning his weekly presidential video address over to the Wheelers. Francine, fighting back tears, described how Ben had “experienced life at full tilt,” sang with perfect pitch and had just played at his third piano recital. She pleaded with viewers to contact their senators: “Please help us do something before our tragedy becomes your tragedy.”

By the time the final votes would be cast on the afternoon of April 17, the families had met with 37 senators in nine days, according to Sandy Hook Promise’s records.

As the Sandy Hook group sat in the public gallery overlooking the Senate floor, joined by survivors and families of victims from other mass shootings, many held out hope that the lobbying campaign had worked. If the background checks bill survived, they knew the GOP-led House loomed as the next step, but maybe a bipartisan win in the Senate would give them the boost they’d need.

Heitkamp’s office had been swamped with calls from constituents urging her to oppose the measure, but she did not make up her mind until hours before voting, she recently told The Post. Though she believed that the Manchin-Toomey measure would not stop mass killings like Sandy Hook or effectively prevent other forms of gun violence, she saw the bill as a way for senators to show they cared.

Heitkamp voted no, as did three other Democrats from conservative states — Begich, Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Max Baucus of Montana.

“This was a tough vote in a tough state on a piece of legislation that I didn’t think was particularly useful to solve the problem,” Heitkamp said in a recent interview.

In the end, just three Republicans other than Toomey — Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Mark Kirk of Illinois and John McCain of Arizona — voted for the legislation.

Moments before the gavel fell, 55 senators had voted yes — a majority, but five short of choking off the filibuster.

A decade after the failure, Manchin still laments that neither he nor Democratic leaders tried to force several more votes to pressure senators. “Just one and done,” Manchin said. “One and done on that was wrong.”

The families, and some senators, wept.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who had hours earlier admonished his fellow Democrats over lunch to not be “bystanders” in the face of rising gun violence, later said that day remains one of the worst of his tenure — now tied with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

“I thought the magnitude of the tragedy and the effectiveness of these families and the popularity of what was on the table, you know, I just thought all of those things, we’re going to get there,” Kaine said. “And I just remember feeling that we let them down. We let them all down, and they were right there to watch it.”

Hockley, a former marketing executive who had been planning to open a health and fitness shop until the shooting turned her into a full-time advocate, described the vote as another gut punch.

“This was one thing I could do and I couldn’t even do this,” she said. “ ... For something so simple not to be able to pass. I genuinely felt like, you know, I failed to protect Dylan from getting killed, and then I failed to do something for his legacy or protect my surviving son’s future.”

The families left the gallery and rode with Vice President Joe Biden, who had presided over the vote in his capacity as president of the Senate, in his motorcade back to the White House.

Obama was preparing to address the nation from the Rose Garden, where he would accuse senators from both parties of caving to pressure from the gun lobby.

Barden, who would introduce the president, said that before they stepped outside from the Oval Office, Obama grabbed him by the shoulders.

“He was pissed. I mean, he was visibly, personally mad, which you don’t see,” Barden said. Then, he recalled, as they prepared to step outside, Obama added, “Let’s go rip the bark off of it.”

Regrets and revised positions

With all the intensity surrounding the demise of the background checks bill, the measures that many advocates believed would be the most effective way to prevent future Sandy Hooks had become mere afterthoughts.

A ban on high-capacity magazines was defeated 46-54. The assault weapons ban failed 40-60.

One of the Democrats to vote against the assault weapons ban was Bennet, of Colorado. Two weeks earlier, he had attended an Obama speech in Denver to rally support for the background checks bill. There he met Sandy Phillips, whose daughter, 24-year-old Jessica Redfield Ghawi, was killed by an AR-15-wielding gunman during the movie theater massacre in Aurora, Colo., just five months before Sandy Hook.

Phillips sat in the Senate gallery on April 17 and witnessed the defeat, but background checks were never her primary goal. Even as some major gun-control groups continued to push for more incremental changes, Phillips began what would be a years-long quest to persuade Bennet to support an assault weapons ban, the law she felt would do the most good. Over coffees, lunches, meetings in Washington and Colorado, after subsequent mass shootings, she made her case. “This is the right side of history to deal with,” Phillips recalled telling Bennet, “and this is the moral right.”

For nearly a decade, Bennet didn’t budge. Then came the 2022 shooting at a July Fourth parade in Highland Park, Ill. Phillips visited Bennet in his Washington office, leaned in, touched his forearm and asked him to look into her eyes.

“It’s time,” she recalled saying. Both of them teared up.

Bennet said later that Phillips did not need to spell out the specific request. “I knew what she meant, and she was right,” he said.

It took a few months — after Bennet had won reelection by nearly 15 percentage points, his largest margin ever, and another mass shooting in his state, in which a gunman used an AR-15 to kill five in a Colorado Springs nightclub — before he publicly announced his support for the assault weapons ban.

Other current and former senators expressed remorse for their votes and, in some cases, their conduct during the 2013 debate.

Heitkamp, now the director of the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, told The Post that she wishes she had inserted herself into the debate more aggressively despite having just arrived in Washington.

“I can look back and say I could have done much better at the time, and I do feel that I could have had a more honest discussion,” she said, adding later: “The Sandy Hook parents still deserve a response. And to the extent that I was part of a failure in that response, it’s a regret.”

Heitkamp said that the “time has come to examine the kind of weapons that we allow people in the general public to own. … As a society we cannot seem to keep these weapons out of the hands of people who will do incredible damage.”

Begich, too, wonders today if his focus back in 2013 on hyperlocal concerns — such as the fear that instant background checks wouldn’t work in remote Alaska villages or that some on the North Slope used AR-15s to protect themselves against polar bears — prevented him from weighing the potential national benefits of additional gun restrictions.

“In retrospect, I look back and say sometimes you’ve got to sacrifice those elements for the greater good,” he said.

Udall, retired from politics, lives near Boulder’s King Soopers grocery store where, in March 2021, a gunman used an AR-style pistol to kill 10 people. Every time he goes shopping there he thinks about the shooting. He said the growing toll of mass killings has eaten away at what he calls the “emotional security in a civilized society.”

“You got to think it’s contributing in some ways to just the sense in America that things aren’t quite right,” Udall said.

Udall, who voted for the background checks bill and the ban on high-capacity magazines and is now on the board of Giffords’s anti-gun-violence group, lamented having a “misguided belief” during much of his term that he could develop a fruitful working relationship with the NRA. He said he appeared once at a news conference with the group’s leaders — only to learn later that they would oppose his reelection anyway.

“All the time they were working with me, they were organizing to take me out in 2014,” he said.

Kozuch, of the NRA, said that Udall was a “gun-control advocate,” saying that he can “try to revise history but his anti-gun voting record speaks for itself.”

Several of the current Democratic senators who have come to support the assault weapons ban represent states that have tilted more liberal since 2013, making their changed positions an act of political expedience as well as an expression of regret.

Warner, who voted against the ban, had come up in politics courting traditional Democrats in Virginia’s rural outposts and small towns, sponsoring a NASCAR entrant during his 2001 governor’s race. He likes to consider himself a “radical centrist,” but by 2018, the political map had changed. The path to victory in Virginia now ran through the Washington suburbs, where gun control is popular.

Soon after Sandy Hook, Warner’s three daughters began what would become a nearly six-year effort to persuade their father to switch his position and support an assault weapons ban. With each successive mass shooting, they became more direct with their pleas.

“That kid went to school the same way I did,” Eliza Warner, now 29, recalled telling her father after one of the massacres. The senator would defend his position as “the art of the possible,” but still his daughters pushed him. At one point, Eliza asked, “How can we think having clear backpacks is the solution?” Another daughter, Warner said, texted him after a mass shooting to say simply, “wtf.”

Almost eight months after the 2018 Parkland shooting, Warner came around to their point of view. He wrote an op-ed declaring he had changed his mind, regretted that vote and now supported banning assault weapons.

Reflecting during a recent interview, Warner recalled that the Sandy Hook families had never pressed him to support the ban. Asked what he would have done if they had, the senator paused.

“I don’t know how I would have turned them down,” he said. “I don’t know how I could have looked them in the eye.”

About this story

Reporting by Peter Wallsten and Paul Kane. Portraits by Matt McClain and Chet Strange.

Design and development by Aadit Tambe. Design editing by Madison Walls. Photo editing by Natalia Jimenez. Graphics editing by Chiqui Esteban.

Editing by Philip Rucker and Wendy Galietta. Additional editing by Kim Chapman and Jordan Melendrez. Additional support from Sarah Murray, Ashleigh Wilson, Kyley Schultz and Brandon Carter.

Survivors of 2017 Sutherland Springs church massacre endure lifelong disability and trauma left behind by a gunman’s use of an AR-15

Story by Silvia Foster-Frau and Holly Bailey 

Photography by Lisa Krantz

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, suffers from 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.”

‘It looked like a bomb went off’

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.

‘It would be better if I had gone’

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.”

‘I’ve normalized pain every night’

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?’”

‘Mourning that loss’

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.”

‘Life continues’

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.”

About this story

Reporting by Silvia Foster-Frau and Holly Bailey. Photography by Lisa Krantz.

Design and development by Anna Lefkowitz and Aadit Tambe. Design editing by Madison Walls. Photo editing by Natalia Jimenez.

Editing by Amanda Erickson, Peter Wallsten and Wendy Galietta. Additional editing by Jordan Melendrez, Kim Chapman and Tom Justice.

Additional support from Sarah Murray, Courtney Beesch, Angel Mendoza, Kyley Schultz, Brandon Carter, Ashleigh Wilson, Jai-Leen James and Bryan Flaherty.

Armed groups on the right and left exploit the AR-15 as both tool and symbol

Story by Hannah Allam

Photography by Jim Urquhart

DURHAM, N.C. — The five friends had spent the morning stalking through the trees and crossing a creek in military formation.

Now, after a quick lunch, it was time to shoot.

The first one up borrowed a trainer’s rifle, peered through the scope at the target 35 yards away and pulled the trigger. “Hit!” an instructor called.

It was the first time that D, a nonbinary community organizer, had fired an AR-15.

The weight of the moment hit them later, once the adrenaline faded, as D described feeling simultaneously empowered by a new self-defense skill and burdened by a fear that made it seem reasonable, even prudent, to buy a semiautomatic rifle.

“I never wanted to be here,” said D, voice trembling and eyes brimming with tears, speaking on the condition that only their first initial be used due to security concerns. “Because someone’s going to shoot up a drag show?”

Until last year, D contributed to far-left activism by serving as a street medic in the thick of racial justice demonstrations. The decision to take up arms came gradually, D said, in tandem with a rise in right-wing attacks on LGBTQ people. By June, D owned a handgun, and in early fall they began training with other leftists and saving up for a rifle.

Now, D’s reluctant embrace of the AR-15 adds one more foot soldier to the volatile mix of armed movements that have proliferated over the past decade, a predominantly right-wing mobilization whose violence has fueled far-left “community defense” organizing in response.

Confrontations have erupted in Texas, Oregon and elsewhere in recent months as leftists with long guns protect LGBTQ gatherings from armed right-wing agitators who baselessly smear trans people and drag-show artists as “groomers” and pedophiles. Such scenes look ominous to extremism analysts who warn of an elevated risk of political violence from vigilantes who wield the AR-15 as both tool and symbol.

Militants say they favor the AR-15 for all the same reasons mainstream enthusiasts do — it’s easy to handle, affordable and customizable — but they also exploit the fear surrounding the weapon.

“It’s just a tool, an inanimate object, but it is polarizing, and it’ll make people treat you differently,” said Cody, 26, a member of an anti-government militia group near Norfolk, who spoke on the condition that his full name be withheld for security reasons. “It will make people treat you differently if you are armed with an AR-15.”

The AR-15’s image as an instrument of domestic terror has been crystallized in recent years by its use in a string of hate-filled mass shootings. AR-15-wielding extremists targeted elderly congregants at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, the deadliest anti-Jewish attack in U.S. history; Jewish families on the last day of Passover in Poway, Calif., in 2019; and, last year, Black customers at a supermarket in Buffalo, to name a few.

Other far-right factions throughout the country have shown up with AR-15s to intimidate voters and local officials, harass Muslims outside of mosques, and stand as self-appointed guards at pro-Donald Trump rallies. Anti-government militias also have brandished AR-15s in armed standoffs with federal agents, such as the one in 2014 led by rancher Cliven Bundy in Bunkerville, Nev. “Boogaloo” extremists, part of a right-leaning movement calling for violent revolution, have made the AR-15 a core part of their look, sometimes adorning their weapons with coded symbols.

“It is one of several ways they are articulating that what they are doing is warfare,” said Kathleen Belew, a historian at Northwestern University and author of “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.” “The AR-15 remains the emblematic cultural weapon.”

Two armed groups — one on the far right, one on the far left — agreed to allow a Washington Post reporter and photographer to document training sessions on two weekends last fall, on the condition that identifying details be withheld. The gatherings were a rare look at how militants on opposing extremes of American society are arming in anticipation of unrest, and overlap in the belief that civilians with rifles — and specifically, AR-15s — provide an important check on federal powers.

There is no parallel, however, when it comes to the use of violence by the extreme right and left. FBI and Homeland Security officials repeatedly have called far-right extremists the most urgent domestic terrorism concern; the White House strategy document on domestic terrorism specifies that white supremacists and violent militia groups “are assessed as presenting the most persistent and lethal threats.”

By comparison, attacks by militant leftists are almost never deadly, according to attack records, and typically involve “melee violence” at protests rather than the premeditated mass shootings or standoffs carried out by the far right. Far-left violence in the past decade, according to a report by George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, “pales in comparison” with other categories of extremism, though the report warns that “ongoing trends in American society could lead to increased frequency and lethality.”

Experts say there is no firm count of armed extremist groups in the United States on the left or the right.

These groups “repeatedly form, splinter into separate units and dissolve, as members’ interests wax and wane,” writes militia researcher Amy Cooter of Middlebury University’s Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism.

More concerning, analysts say, is that the violent rhetoric of once-fringe movements has now seeped into the Republican mainstream, with extremists exploiting white-grievance politics and anti-LGBTQ bigotry at all levels of political office. In 2022, according to an Anti-Defamation League report, more than 100 candidates who expressed extremist views ran in local, state legislative and congressional races, including at least a dozen with documented connections to far-right militant groups.

After federal prosecutions of extremist groups involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol attack, several far-right factions dissolved or went underground, saying they were unsure of how far the crackdown would extend. The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a global conflict monitoring group, says at least 56 far-right, militia-style groups were active in 2022, a decrease from 83 in 2021, and 159 in 2020.

Militant leftists, a tiny fraction of armed movements that have been documented nationwide, likewise are impossible to count because of the fluidity of groups and the secrecy involved in the organizing, analysts say. Even among other racial justice activists, armed antifascists have been viewed skeptically for years; groups sometimes were asked to leave by Black Lives Matter protesters who insisted on gun-free events.

The picture has changed since, with wider tolerance from other leftists and liberals whose faith in state protection has eroded after law enforcement failed to prevent the Capitol attack or stop the mass shooting of schoolchildren in Uvalde, Tex. For months during the unrest of 2020, Americans watched racial justice demonstrations in the Pacific Northwest in which the police either intervened with violence or left protesters feeling vulnerable to attack by right-wing provocateurs.

The scenes prompted wider interest in the militant left, with more visibility for independent local networks, some of them organizing under “John Brown Gun Club,” named after the militant abolitionist who was executed in 1859.

“We deserve to be able to defend ourselves, and whether that is against the state or against other folks that would come at us, it’s defense,” said a 33-year-old anarchist organizer who spoke on the condition that they be quoted using only their gun-club nickname, “Paper.” The activist, who identifies as queer, owns two AR-15s and offers firearms training for marginalized communities, including the cohort with D in North Carolina.

D said that at this stage in life — a 40-something parent with a professional job — they never expected to be in the woods learning how to cross a creek in a simulated ambush.

“I view these tools and this training for situations when it is life and limb,” D said. “And I don’t view that as remote.”

A few weeks after that prediction, on a Saturday night just before Thanksgiving, a gunman with an AR-15 opened fire inside an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, killing five people and wounding 18 others.

The bloodshed only reinforced D’s decision to get an AR-15, though they were reluctant to just go out and buy one. Instead, D said, they eased into the idea by building their own rifle, ordering the components in stages starting in late fall.

“I’m picking up the lower receiver from my gun dealer later this week,” they texted.

The next month, on the same evening as a drag performance that far-right groups had tried to stop, a mysterious attack on electrical substations in Moore County, N.C., knocked out power for tens of thousands of people. Though investigators have yet to make arrests or describe a motive, social media posts speculating that the drag event was the target went viral.

D was a longtime fan of one of the performers; they’d hung out in the same drag scene around Durham. This attack was close to home, just a couple of hours from where D lives.

Within days of the Moore County incident, D texted a photo of a shiny black rifle lying on a table.

The AR-15 was almost ready.

A deterrent to ‘tyranny’

One sunny day this past fall, members of an anti-government militia group leaned their guns against tree trunks and huddled in the same wooded patch of southeastern Virginia where revolutionaries fought British forces more than two centuries ago.

“This is where the Founding Fathers were,” one member, 28-year-old Harrison, told the others. “I don’t know if y’all can feel it, but I do.”

The men view militia training as an extension of that legacy, preparation to defend the republic from radical leftists and “tyrannical” federal authorities. They see their AR-15s as modern-day muskets, though the rifles shoot 30 times faster, from distances up to 10 times farther.

“It gives you your voice,” Harrison said. “It’s the surest guard to freedom that I can think of.”

Beyond zero tolerance for gun control and deep suspicion of the federal government, there’s little ideological cohesion among the members. The six men who met for training that day — five White, one of Puerto Rican descent, ranging in age from their 20s to 40s — expressed libertarian stances mixed with influences from Christian nationalism and the boogaloo movement’s call for violent revolution.

Three military veterans were among the group. One, a former soldier, engraved his AR-15 with a favorite piece of scripture: “Blessed be God, my Rock who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle.” The other two are former Marines, one of whom said he was discharged a year ago after refusing to be vaccinated against the coronavirus.

The gun is a point of bonding. All but one owns an AR-15; most have at least two.

“Even if it sits in your closet,” Harrison said, “the government still knows there’s someone out there with a rifle, and if they go too far, that person may be there.”

The men took turns recording one another running the course, leaves crunching under boots and gunfire interrupting birdsong. Harrison said a neighbor complained recently that the area was beginning to sound “like Afghanistan.” The men laughed.

They believe that something dangerous is bubbling within American society, that a conflagration is coming, even if the battle lines aren’t quite clear yet. That’s what brings them back to the woods with their rifles. Just in case, they said.

“A lot of people think militia groups fantasize about the police coming down on their house and they get into this big shootout and they’re martyred. That’s the last thing I want,” Cody said.

Cody sported a yellow T-shirt paying homage to Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who successfully argued that he acted in self-defense when he killed two people with an AR-15 during unrest in Kenosha, Wis., in 2020. In right-wing circles, Rittenhouse’s acquittal was celebrated as a Second Amendment victory. The Rittenhouse case, Cody said, convinced people who were unsure about buying an AR-15 for self-defense “what you can use that rifle for under stress.”

Members of the group first met in online gun forums and coalesced around Second Amendment activism. They no longer use a formal name, they said, partly because of the post-Jan. 6 federal prosecution of militia groups and partly because they don’t fit a single ideology. Cody said he sought out the group after leaving Oath Keepers and Three Percenter formations that he considered “too racist.”

They describe themselves as a “constitutionalist militia,” their term for what terrorism analysts consider an anti-government armed group promoting Second Amendment extremism. The group’s argument — which runs counter to decades of court rulings — is that ordinary citizens should have access to the same weapons as the government.

The men balk at being lumped in with white supremacists under the “far-right extremists” label, noting that they’ve marched alongside armed black nationalists in Richmond. Manny, who expressed pride in his Puerto Rican heritage, said he wouldn’t have joined a racist group: “Gun rights are civil rights.”

Members said their vetting of recruits includes intense questioning to weed out “St. Dylann crap,” a reference to racist fans of the neo-Nazi mass shooter who attacked a historically Black church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015. They say they also reject applicants who seem eager for violence, a way to filter for undercover informants or mentally unstable people.

“I don’t wish to have a war against my government, but if it comes, hopefully I got the right group of people around me,” said a member who goes by Hoss.

“Be honest with yourselves; we’d be out,” one of the former Marines said.

“But there’s 300 million firearms in the United States,” Hoss countered.

“That’s if the country can manage to come together,” the former Marine said. “There’s a lot of division right now.”

“That’s why you find your group before s--- falls apart,” Harrison said.

An asymmetrical fight

The five far-left activists in North Carolina who met for shooting practice did not match the conservative media’s depictions of antifa as masked, black-clad youths burning down American cities.

They were White, middle-aged, college-educated professionals. Three of them identify as queer, and some said they have spouses or children of color whose safety is a primary reason they were in the woods learning Army Ranger techniques for moving in formation.

“We don’t know where the country is going,” said Paper, the firearms instructor. “Jan. 6 was crazy. We came that close to things going in a different direction, and who knows how things would’ve spiraled out from that, which is why we do the training.”

They started in the morning with replica guns as they crept through the foliage on simulated patrols, training on how to react if they came under fire. Scenarios they talked about — rescuing pinned-down comrades at a protest, escorting patrons to a drag brunch — were ripped from recent headlines. After a midday break, they began target practice with real AR-15s and handguns, their own or borrowed from the trainers.

Along with Paper, a co-organizer of the session was Dwayne Dixon, who teaches in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of North Carolina. Dixon was the only participant comfortable with being fully identified — his activism has long been public, drawing repeated right-wing attempts to get him fired.

Dixon, 50, said his radical politics emerged from reading about the Holocaust and apartheid-era South Africa as an adolescent. By adulthood, his belief in armed civilian resistance was cemented, but the idea of owning an AR-15 came much later, in 2013 during a trip to visit anarchist friends in Philadelphia. He recalled being stunned by their weapons.

“Who would’ve thought these dudes — punk kids from South Jersey and Philly — would end up owning ARs? It was kind of like a mind bend,” Dixon said. “This has moved into ‘You might get attacked by the government.’”

Later that year, Dixon decided it was time to buy his own rifle, inspired by his deep mistrust of the government and police coupled with a rise in far-right violence. He said he didn’t publicly carry an AR-15 until four years later, in 2017, when he was in Charlottesville during the deadly Unite the Right rally.

Dixon and Paper, the anarchist organizer, said they had been among roughly 20 antifascists with long guns who showed up at the request of a local anarchist group. Racists with tiki torches had just rampaged through town and were poised to come back for a second day. Dixon recalled their group struggling to sleep that night, clear-eyed about the risks of an armed encounter: “We thought we were going to get killed.”

They rose early and stood guard outside a local park where an anti-racist demonstration was to be held. Soon, a column of white supremacists marched toward the park, heading toward Quaker volunteers who were there early to prepare food, Dixon recalled.

Adrenaline was “so high,” Dixon said, as the activists with rifles waited for the white supremacists to spot them. When they did, he said, there was visible shock, then a retreat.

“They stopped and turned around and went back,” Dixon said. “They clearly got more than they expected by seeing armed leftists.”

Any sense of relief was short-lived.

That afternoon, a neo-Nazi rammed his car into a crowd of racial justice protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and wounding 19 other people. The horror, captured in photos of bodies tossed in the air, catalyzed far-left organizing throughout the nation — with armed backup becoming a presence at some public events.

After Unite the Right, armed leftists say, a surge of recruits signed up to fight against the “fascism” unleashed in the Trump era. Groups pooled money for weapons and grew more disciplined in training. Dixon was invited to speak at Harvard about Charlottesville; he used the stipend for body armor.

“Heather Heyer’s murder solidifies the stakes. This really is about life and death,” Dixon said. “There are people here who are ideologically motivated to kill. It’s not abstract anymore; it’s very real.”

Though still only a sliver of antifascist activism, armed leftist groups are becoming increasingly visible, especially on social media, where some borrow and subvert the right-wing militia aesthetic, showing off their tricked-out rifles and bullet-riddled targets. When they face off against far-right groups in public, sometimes the only visible differences are the patches on their clothes and gear — rainbow flags and “FCK NAZIS” vs. Gadsden flags and “Antifa Hunter.”

A John Brown group carried AR-15s on armed patrols of a self-declared police-free zone that Seattle activists briefly held during the protests of 2020. The year before, an early member of that group, carrying a home-built AR-15, died in a fiery standoff with authorities at an immigration facility where he was protesting Trump-era family separation policies.

The growing popularity of guns in segments of the far left has drawn criticism from some liberals, who cite gun violence statistics and argue that more armed vigilantes will only make matters worse — particularly for people of color who are often the victims.

But with those communities facing targeted attacks, the nonviolent movement’s language is being drowned out by a call and response at protests: “Who protects us? We protect us!” And militant leftists say the stakes are now too high for complaints that the embrace of AR-15s will cost the moral high ground.

“It took us awhile to get appropriately militant on this issue,” a Connecticut-based John Brown group tweeted in December. “Folks wrung their hands over ‘optics’ and we came to realize they didn’t want community defense, they wanted us to die first. We don’t always open carry, but we no longer go out just to be martyred.”

Paper and Dixon, who met in early 2017 at a community defense meeting, built one of the country’s earliest John Brown formations. They said they were intentional about not copying the right-wing militia model. No command hierarchy, no Second Amendment worship, no fetishizing of the AR-15.

The North Carolina activists said they picked the AR platform simply because it’s cheaper and “there’s a million YouTube videos” to teach new shooters the ins and outs of the rifle. Paper’s first was a Ruger AR-556 that they said cost around $450.

For a time, the group was part of a national network of leftist organizers before dissolving and reconstituting with a focus on local, low-profile work. These days, their circle has no formal name or regular meetings.

They were leery of allowing observation of the training, worried it would look like an “armed insurgency” and reinforce the idea of two equal extremist threats. In their world, they said, the rifle is a last resort, not a rallying point.

“The AR is not at the apex of people’s capacities,” Dixon said, citing civil rights demonstrations of 2020 and earlier, Native-led protests against an oil pipeline in the Midwest. “People have a real capacity to make physical, material change in the world that’s really disruptive. And they don’t need an AR to do it.”

Anne, a 35-year-old academic and activist, said she started out as an ordinary liberal protester calling for the removal of Confederate statues in North Carolina and elsewhere in the South. By speaking out publicly, Anne landed in the crosshairs of white supremacists and, later, members of the Proud Boys, a far-right group with a history of violence.

The men relentlessly harassed her with threats of rape and death, according to screenshots and messages she provided. They yelled out her home address when they saw her at rallies and have posted photos of her car and apartment, forcing her to move two times in the past three years. In 2021, she bought her own AR-15, not long after posing on Twitter with a friend’s rifle as a warning to her stalkers.

“Nazis get very arrogant and think that because they have AR-15s, they can do anything or kill anyone who disagrees with them,” she said. “When I posted that photo, they can tell that I’m serious about defending myself and they should think twice before trying to murder me.”

Real threats prompted her to buy an AR-15, Anne stressed, not the far right’s hypothetical scenarios of gun confiscations or a communist takeover. Two of her harassers, according to the materials she provided, are Proud Boys who have since pleaded guilty for their roles in the Capitol attack.

Until they stormed the Capitol, Anne said, the Proud Boys targeted her and other leftists with impunity. She recalled spending hours taking screenshots of the threats so that there would be a record in case they attacked her and she was forced to use her rifle.

“I was in favor of banning guns for a long time and still think the world would be better without them,” Anne said. “But now I’m more practical."

About this story

Reporting by Hannah Allam. Photography by Jim Urquhart.

Design and development by Anna Lefkowitz, Aadit Tambe and Rekha Tenjarla. Design editing by Madison Walls. Photo editing by Natalia Jimenez.

Editing by Peter Wallsten and Wendy Galietta. Additional editing by Jordan Melendrez, Kim Chapman and Tom Justice.

Additional support from Sarah Murray, Courtney Beesch, Angel Mendoza, Kyley Schultz, Brandon Carter, Ashleigh Wilson, Jai-Leen and Bryan Flaherty.

In tiny Mayodan, N.C., the Ruger plant is a source of jobs, not controversy — a sign of how conservative areas are welcoming an industry increasingly shunned by liberal states

Story by Ashley Parker and Josh Dawsey 

Photography by Jabin Botsford

MAYODAN, N.C. — Kelly Menard had been working the front counter at the Sunrise gas station here for a few months when she began chatting with the man who stopped in every day a little after 5 p.m.

Menard was making $7.25 an hour, and when she learned that her regular customer worked for the Sturm, Ruger & Co. gun manufacturing plant on the outskirts of town, she asked if they were hiring. She was eager for a better-paying job. Ruger was always looking for people, he said. If she wanted to work, he’d put in a good word.

Menard put in an application and got a call the next day.

She started in December 2020 and nearly doubled her minimum-wage salary, making $14 an hour plus overtime for five 10-hour shifts a week. The money allowed her and her husband to buy their first house — a white vinyl and brick three-bedroom ranch home, with a yard and large carport. Working the predawn first shift allowed her to spend her afternoons with her son Bryson, now 3.

Since she joined Ruger, Menard, 24, has been working on the AR-15 line, helping to assemble the hundreds of semiautomatic rifles the plant produces during each of its two daily shifts. Putting together the weapons requires speed and precision, and the workers are on their feet for hours. It is a complicated process with about 30 stations. Some workers put in the trigger and the hammer; others assemble tubes and barrels; others work on the muzzle and the grip. Menard switches stations based on the day.

Menard said that she has heard the AR line is the fastest one in the plant — adding that she’s one of the fastest workers on that line.

“I’m so used to the work, I can put one together in my sleep,” she said.

Ruger, which is based in Southport, Conn., announced it was coming to town in 2013, less than a year after the mass killing at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., that left 26 dead — including 20 children — and prompted Connecticut to pass some of the nation’s strictest gun laws. They include requiring universal background checks, expanding the state’s assault weapons ban, and banning the sale of gun magazines with a capacity of more than 10 rounds.

The laws did not affect the ability of gun companies to manufacture in the state, but they served as a forceful cultural rejection of the industry. Ruger began production at its North Carolina facility in 2014. The company now also has production facilities in Arizona and New Hampshire, part of the trend of gun companies that in recent years have relocated or expanded from largely Northern, Democratic states with restrictive gun laws to largely Southern, Republican-leaning ones with less-restrictive laws.

In the past decade, at least 20 firearms, ammunition and gun accessory companies have made the move, shifting their headquarters or production to gun-friendly states, often wooed by tax incentives and the promise of a cheap and willing workforce, according to Washington Post reporting and firearms industry groups.

The migration of the gun industry out of blue states into red ones underscores how the sharp divide among Americans over weapons like the AR-15 has cleaved the country into two different lands: one in which the manufacturing of such guns is anathema and the other in which it is a marker of patriotism — or, at the very least, part of the fabric of American life.

For Mayodan — a sleepy town of roughly 2,400 in Rockingham County, about a 40-minute drive north of Greensboro — the story of Ruger is one of economic rebirth and jobs in a county that has long been losing them. The old Washington Mills Co. building, which made textiles until it shuttered in 1999, sits vacant and faded downtown by the river, across from Wall Lumber Co. The town is hoping to transform the site and surrounding area into an outdoor public space, but for now, cobwebs cling to the bell that used to ring in lunch break at the mill.

It is also the story of a gun company in a company town where nearly everyone who walks into the Beach House Grille on Main Street during lunch hour is wearing a shirt or cap that sports their employer’s name, and where customers at Mayodan Outdoor Sports almost always ask the price of Rugers.

Ruger’s subtle influence can be felt throughout the three-square-mile town, which was named after its two neighboring rivers, the Mayo and the Dan. There’s the 10 percent Ruger discount at Junior’s — officially, Downtown Jr’s 23 Sports Grill — where Ruger employees often gather at the dimly lit bar on Friday when the first shift lets off in the late afternoon. There are the dozen semiautomatic weapons that the company donated to the local police department. And there’s the smell of burning metal that wafts off Ruger employees before they’ve changed out of their work clothes that some locals say they instantly recognize.

A small-town welcome

The fortresslike brick Ruger plant — surrounded by barbed-wire fencing and signs for video surveillance and no trespassing — rises up off a road that dead-ends into a water treatment plant. The company declined repeated requests for interviews and a tour of the factory, and did not respond to a detailed list of questions from The Post.

“Ruger is a publicly traded company and therefore … we are extremely careful not to selectively disclose material, nonpublic information which, of course, many of your ‘facts’ touch upon,” Mickey Wilson, the company’s vice president of operations for Mayodan, wrote in an email. “I am not at liberty to discuss these matters with you for that reason.”

Mayodan Mayor Chad Wall, who spent college summers working in the Ruger building back when it was a dye factory, noted during an interview at Mayodan Town Hall how essential it was to bring new industry to the area. The town’s population has shrunk some in recent decades, he said.

“We’re a small town,” said Wall, clad in work boots and a baby blue T-shirt emblazoned with the name of his company, Dan River Oil. “You try to welcome as many businesses as you can.”

Ruger is now the second-largest employer in town, with 754 employees, according to 2022 Rockingham County data. The company offers jobs that pay “well above average,” Wall said. Ruger employees make a minimum of $38,000 a year, according to Leigh Cockram, director of economic development and tourism for Rockingham County — far exceeding the per capita income in the town (roughly $22,872) and surrounding county (roughly $27,092).

This same county used to be home to Remington Arms, the now-defunct gunmaker that produced the AR-15 used in the Sandy Hook massacre.

After Ruger arrived here, its AR-15 rifle and pistol variants were used in some of the nation’s deadliest mass killings. The shooter who massacred more than two dozen people in Sutherland Springs, Tex., in 2017 used a Ruger AR-15 rifle, and the shooter who gunned down 10 people in Boulder, Colo., in 2021 used a Ruger semiautomatic pistol, according to a House Oversight and Reform Committee report in 2022.

Town officials and residents said they had no qualms about the company staying after the shootings, and there had been no discussions to reconsider a recent expansion by Ruger.

“This isn’t a story about guns,” said Tony Copeland, who served as the state’s commerce secretary when Ruger announced its expansion in North Carolina in 2020. “It’s a story of economic development, maybe giving people the chance to enjoy a life larger than they were born into.”

For her part, Menard has long been ambivalent about firearms. “They’re loud, they’re heavy — it’s not my thing,” she said.

But her husband does like guns, and Ruger offers employees a nearly 50 percent discount, she said. So in October 2021, Menard bought her husband an American flag-themed AR-15 for his birthday. The plant sometimes customizes guns with scratches and blemishes by painting American flags on them, she said. And when she saw the plant was testing out a shade of purple — her favorite color — she bought one for herself, too, modifying the gun to make it more versatile and adding a front and back sight.

The two AR-15s stay in a large safe locker in the corner of their bedroom. She went out shooting twice in 2022, she said: One Saturday in December and over Easter weekend at a friend’s property nearby.

“You don’t think about it until you go out and shoot them, and you realize you’re making them all day,” she said.

‘The plant is going to go somewhere’

The history of guns and Connecticut is inextricably bound, so much so that the Hartford office of Sen. Chris Murphy (D) is located in the renovated East Armory building of the Colt factory — part of the Colt Gateway development.

Samuel Colt famously built his armory in the state capital, and about a century later, William B. Ruger and Alexander M. Sturm opened their gun factory in the “red barn” complex on Station Street in Southport, according to R.L. Wilson’s 1996 book “Ruger & His Guns: A History of the Man, the Company and Their Firearms.”

Ruger began with no administrative staff, according to the book, and the initial prototype was for a .22 pistol. The company’s first ad, in the August 1949 issue of American Rifleman, boasted: “For simplicity, strength and handsomeness it has no equal.”

In fact, Wilson writes, at first Ruger did not even make rifles or consider itself a competitor of its fellow gun companies.

Yet gun manufacturing defined Hartford and much of Connecticut from the 19th century into the 20th, Murphy said, making for what he calls “a very strange psychology.”

“Our state is very concerned about gun violence, our state is defined by what happened at Sandy Hook, but our state’s history and culture has also been defined by the firearms industry, which really started in Connecticut,” he said.

After Sandy Hook, none of the state’s new laws were aimed at shuttering gun manufacturers. But the general climate in Connecticut felt undeniably less hospitable to gun companies.

“There were companies that thought they could impact the debate by threatening to leave, and I think for people in Connecticut, their perspective was: ‘You don’t support universal background checks on your guns? That’s a you problem, not an us problem,’” said Murphy, who said he believes both in the Second Amendment and common-sense gun restrictions.

Then, in August 2013, North Carolina’s governor at the time, Republican Pat McCrory, announced that Ruger was coming to Rockingham County. The gun company promised to invest more than $26 million and create more than 450 jobs in the community. In exchange, it was eligible to receive up to $9.46 million from the state’s Job Development Investment Grant program.

McCrory said in an interview that his team was aggressive in recruiting, competing with other states — especially neighboring Tennessee — as it tried to lure manufacturing jobs to North Carolina.

“Where we were hurting most were the rural areas and manufacturing, because so many jobs had left the state and gone overseas or to Mexico, so we were looking for people who could build things and make things, especially for rural towns that were losing population,” the former governor said. “We would make efforts to recruit any legal industry where we thought we had the workforce to meet their needs.”

Asked if he had any concerns at the time about helping to bring a gun company — and all the associated controversy — to his state, McCrory chuckled.

“The plant is going to go somewhere, the product is going to be sold,” he said. “And I wasn’t a supporter of woke policies involving products that were legal according to state and federal laws.”

And Ruger, the former governor added, is “a quality company.”

Ruger took over the 220,000-square-foot space left vacant when Unifi, a major textile company, closed its Mayodan plant. The gun manufacturer began production in 2014, when the state’s rural counties were struggling with high unemployment rates.

Sharon Decker, who was the North Carolina secretary of commerce in 2013 and helped woo Ruger, said, “I do not recall any pushback.”

“Here was the opportunity for job creating, and good-paying jobs, that was positive for a county that needed them,” Decker added.

By the end of 2020, the company had received $3.2 million in state grant payments and created 452 eligible jobs, according to the North Carolina Commerce Department.

In December 2020, Ruger announced an expansion at its Mayodan site, promising the creation of 60 jobs and an additional investment of $10 million in the community, a Commerce Department spokesman said.

Under the 2020 expansion agreement, in exchange for meeting its promises — which include offering a minimum average wage of $38,000 annually — Ruger is eligible for two performance-based incentives: a $150,000 grant from the One North Carolina Fund and a $500,000 rural development grant, said Cockram, the county’s economic development director.

Mark O. Kinlaw, president of Rockingham Community College, whose offerings include workforce training programs that help prepare students to join area companies, said the community is “very, very rural” and “certainly more acceptable to possession of guns and so forth.”

But, he added, he believes the appeal of Ruger is less what the factory produces and more the company’s culture, work environment and financial incentives.

“People are mainly looking for a good place to work where they’re treated well and get some good company benefits,” Kinlaw said. “If I enjoy guns but the pay is not going to be as much as someplace that makes windows, for example, I’m probably going to go to the place that makes windows because I want to make more money.”

Remington Arms, the nation’s oldest gunmaker, also previously had a major presence in Rockingham County, in neighboring Madison, but began laying off employees at the facility around the end of September 2020 and closed by the end of the year amid bankruptcy filings. Remington manufactured and marketed the AR-15 used in the Sandy Hook massacre and faced criticism and legal ramifications afterward. In February 2022 it settled with families of nine of the Sandy Hook victims for $73 million.

Since the 2016 election of Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, North Carolina has not placed a premium on luring other weapons manufacturers to the state.

Dan Blue, the Democratic leader in the North Carolina Senate, said that while he would not rule out giving incentives to gun companies in the future — and that he was glad Ruger had produced jobs in Mayodan — bringing in gun companies is no longer a priority of the state.

“I don’t think we are actively recruiting gun manufacturers to the extent they were in 2013,” Blue said. “I was not in agreement of rescuing a gun manufacturer after Sandy Hook. The state was under total Republican control then.”

He added: “I will assure you from my perspective and vantage point now, recruiting gun companies is not a high priority in the Department of Commerce. They are much more interested in recruiting companies that pay $100,000 a year.”

A presence in the community

Menard sets her first alarm for 3:45 a.m. and usually gets up no later than 4 — roughly an hour before she needs to punch in. She likes to get to work a little early, so she pilots her silver Toyota Corolla through the inky darkness the 2.8 miles from her home to the Ruger plant, where she sits in the parking lot and eats her breakfast — usually a cereal bar or a Jimmy Dean bowl.

“I don’t mind waking up early because I know I get off at a decent time,” Menard said.

She clocks in at 4:40 a.m. so she has time to go to the bathroom, fill her cup with water and get on the line before her 4:50 pre-shift meeting. Then she puts on her headphones — Metallica “just puts me in the mood where I go through my day”— and gets to work.

Menard said the company posts a daily production goal on a board that indicates which type of gun — and how many of each — employees need to make. When she began working at the factory during the pandemic, she recalled, they at one point were being asked to produce as many as 600 AR-15s during each shift — roughly one gun per minute. The production goal is now about 200 AR-15s per shift, she said.

“They told us people just aren’t buying as many guns as they were,” she said.

In 2021, Ruger sold 190,374 AR-15s, according to the House Oversight report, up from 16,665 in 2012. The company is responsible for a large share of the AR-15s sold in the United States, the House report said.

On the broad question of gun rights, Menard’s views trend conservative: She says she understands why felons can’t own guns but wonders whether, depending on their charges and history, there should be exceptions. She thinks metal detectors in schools are a “big help” to guard against school shootings, and she also believes that teachers should be able to carry weapons. She said she liked former president Donald Trump — specifically “how cheap gas was” while he was in office — but she did not vote. She was raised Christian but no longer regularly attends church, she said.

It bothers her when she sees news stories about mass shootings, she said, but she doesn’t see much point in agonizing over the policy implications. “I couldn’t have stopped it,” she said. “I don’t understand what goes through their mind when they do it.”

During her 10-hour shift, Menard gets two 15-minute breaks — the first at 7:45 a.m. and the second at 1:45 p.m. She also gets 30 minutes for lunch; she usually brings leftovers to save money. She says she takes most of her breaks in her car, where she checks in with the babysitter and FaceTimes her two sons; in addition to Bryson, she has Maverick, born in October.

Her favorite part of the day is picking up her boys after her shift: “Bryson — he’s so happy to see me.”

In some ways, Mayodan can feel a bit like a family. News and word of out-of-town visitors travel fast, and Kathleen Patterson, the town manager, likened the community to the “Gilmore Girls” TV show — “wonderful people, a lot of pride.” Nearly everyone in Mayodan seems to either own a Ruger or know someone who does.

Throughout Mayodan, residents, town council members and business owners said they were generally not concerned about school shootings, too many guns on the streets of their town, and, more broadly, crime in Mayodan. Some said more guns would be better than fewer guns.

Inside the Beach House Grille — where a T-shirt over the bar features a silhouette of an AR-15 and the words “Defend the Second” — server Ashleigh Tilley said she prefers Rugers because they are affordable, quality guns.

“Every firearm in my house is from this plant,” she said. She got her Ruger, a pistol, from her husband as a Valentine’s Day gift.

Since Ruger arrived, town council members Letitia “Tish” Goard and Buck Shelton have both acquired the company’s weapons.

“I did not own a Ruger before they came here,” said Goard, whose family now owns two Ruger pistols.

“Me either,” said Shelton, who also now owns two Ruger pistols. “I just liked the fact that they were manufactured here.”

The two council members say Ruger coming to town felt like a natural cultural fit. “When we were in high school, you could see pickups with shotguns in the window, so we don’t think anything of it,” Shelton said.

“I think you’re in the middle of a very pro-gun world,” Goard added.

But, Goard explained, at least from her perch as a member of the council, her personal politics come second to what’s best for the community.

“If Nike moved here, I wouldn’t want them here because their politics are so different. I’d want them packing and to send them north,” she said. “But sitting in this seat, it doesn’t matter — a job is a job.”

Goard said that the town faces a range of financial challenges and that many of its residents move away after high school and don’t return.

“We do have to make difficult choices in towns like this. They more often go bankrupt than they don’t,” she said.

Ruger, said Gregg Stegall, the manager of Mayodan Outdoor Sports, has “given a lot of people jobs.”

“We don’t have a problem with them at all,” he said.

Gesturing out his shop’s window to Main Street, quiet in midday, Stegall alluded to how his small town is still hurting for revenue: “Look at our streets — you don’t see anybody on our streets.”

Wall.

Charles Caruso, the chief of the Mayodan Police Department, said that when the department was in the market for AR-15s, Ruger provided it, free of charge, with a dozen semiautomatic rifles — one for each officer on the force at the time.

Ruger has also established a presence within the community in other ways. The company has contributed money to the town’s annual fall festival and Christmas stroll and has privately helped a few sick people in the community with their bills, said Patterson, Mayodan’s town manager.

When it was time to replace the force’s handguns, the police department switched from Glocks to Rugers, sending its business to the hometown employer.

“We tested … and we liked them, and we felt like they supported our community,” said Caruso, who went on to praise Ruger’s impact on the town: “We like anyone who comes and provides jobs.”

Menard spent much of her most recent pregnancy working on the Ruger line. The work is physical, and some of the guys complain at times, she said.

“They’ll walk around like, ‘My legs are hurting, my back is hurting,’” she said, laughing and gesturing at her swollen belly, just several weeks before she gave birth. “And I look at them like, ‘Oh yeah? Your legs are hurting?’”

She added: “My team lead can tell you I can do more stuff than half those boys on that line.”

Many new workers don’t last long, she said, and she can often tell which ones are going to make it.

Menard likes the work, and she likes the benefits. Most of her medical co-pays are $20, she said, less than the $30 to $40 her husband usually pays, and Ruger also gave her additional paid time off when she and her son Bryson had covid last year. Her job afforded her family their first vacation together, to the beach. She said there were quarterly bonuses based on production: At times, she has received $1,500 or more a quarter, but for the last quarter, with slower production, she received $600.

She especially appreciated how Ruger made accommodations when she encountered complications during her pregnancy and required weekly doctor appointments. Near the end, she said, her bosses were understanding when she needed to sit down.

She is doubtful that other companies would have been so accommodating. “As long as you do good and do your work,” she said, “they work with you.”

About this story

Reporting by Ashley Parker and Josh Dawsey. Photography by Jabin Botsford. Alice Crites contributed to this report.

Design and development by Anna Lefkowitz and Aadit Tambe. Design editing by Madison Walls.

Editing by Matea Gold, Peter Wallsten and Wendy Galietta. Additional editing by Jordan Melendrez, Kim Chapman and Tom Justice.

Additional support from Sarah Murray, Courtney Beesch, Angel Mendoza, Kyley Schultz, Brandon Carter, Ashleigh Wilson, Jai-Leen James and Bryan Flaherty.

As cops patrol America’s gun-saturated streets, the AR-15 can be a deadly threat — or a source of protection

Story by Robert Klemko

Photography by Joshua Lott

COLORADO SPRINGS — Chris Burns tore the AR-15 out of his patrol cruiser, wrapping the rifle sling around his body, feeling he might be forced to shoot a man for the first time in more than two decades as a police officer.

He was training his weapon on a suspect who had leaped from a wrecked stolen car and appeared to be carrying a tactical rifle of his own. The man had stopped outside a car parked at a gas station fuel pump. Burns didn’t know if anyone was inside the vehicle.

For Burns, it was the nightmare scenario: Hefting the weapon of war he’d started carrying after the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, hoping for a fighting chance as he confronted a suspect, knowing the bullet-resistant vests he and his fellow officers were wearing would fail if the man sent a fusillade of high-speed bullets their way.

“We might as well have been naked,” he said, recalling that crisp day in April 2021.

Police departments that once deferred to SWAT teams wielding military-style rifles for active-shooter situations have in recent years started equipping the rank and file with AR-15s and other long guns, as those weapons have flooded neighborhoods and communities.

Many officers welcomed the change, some even buying their own AR-15s and using them for sport or hunting when not on duty. But police often say they still feel outgunned and ill-prepared — struggling to balance demands that they avoid using force against the knowledge that at any moment they could be called to stop a mass killing in progress.

Those potentially conflicting impulses reflect a policing paradox deepened by America’s obsession with the AR-15: The weapon can, depending on the circumstances, be an officer’s greatest threat or a potentially lifesaving tool.

“Police academies often aren’t well equipped to train with long guns,” said Pete Kraska, a professor of justice studies at Eastern Kentucky University who studies police militarization. Years ago, he argued that law enforcement agencies were adding tactical weapons unnecessarily. But with both mass killings and open-carry laws on the rise, he said, “It’s now a credible argument to say we have to engage in an arms race because we’re outgunned.”

The dilemma has emerged as a critical factor in last year’s mass killing at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., according to a recent Texas Tribune investigation, which found police waited more than an hour before confronting the gunman because they feared they lacked the firepower to compete with him. And it looms large every day in Colorado, where open carry is generally legal, many law enforcement agencies have resisted taking guns from risky people, and the map is peppered with the names of towns and cities where mass killings have occurred.

An independent 2022 assessment of the Colorado Springs Police Department’s use of force, commissioned by the city, revealed that more than 8 in 10 officers surveyed said their training on the use of force and how to de-escalate was inadequate, and more than 9 in 10 officers said they needed more training on when to use their firearms.

The police department declined to comment on the survey results, and Police Chief Adrian Vasquez declined an interview request.

“Almost everyone going through the academy has never been punched in the mouth,” Burns said in an interview. “They’re resorting to their Taser and their gun. … You end up with a lot of young, inexperienced police officers cutting their teeth in these really dangerous situations.”

Burns, a training officer, hostage negotiator and former Iraq War helicopter pilot, was no stranger to the risks of confronting heavily armed suspects by the time he arrived on the scene of that 2021 incident at the Colorado Springs gas station.

Six years earlier, he had responded to a shooting at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood, engaging in a five-hour standoff with the suspect before the SWAT team intervened and arrested him.

In the gas station incident, the suspect facing Burns was a 37-year-old man named Richard Quintana, who had been ordered more than 70 times to drop the weapon, a prosecutor would later say.

The muzzle of Quintana’s weapon was under his chin, and it was unclear whether people were inside the car he stood next to. As Burns pondered his options, it was also unclear how skilled Quintana was with a military-style weapon — and whether Burns’s own training had prepared him for this moment. The department requires 40 hours of training to carry the rifle and an annual qualifying exam.

“The average gun owner has trained more hours with their AR-15 than a cop has,” Burns said.

An arms race for police

Police departments’ shift toward tactical weapons began in the wake of two American tragedies, a 1997 bank robbery in North Hollywood, Calif., where police officers equipped only with pistols and shotguns commandeered AR-15s and other weapons from a nearby gun store to match the robbers’ firepower, and the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, in which police waited more than 40 minutes to enter the school.

“That was the sounding alarm for the police community,” Kraska said of the North Hollywood shooting. “Police culture is extremely steeped in a fear of victimization, and this incident accelerates that. It ends up creating a militarized set of assumptions in thinking and gear in everyday policing. It’s a very slippery slope to go from policing a civilian population to policing the enemy.”

In department after department, pistols and rifles with more ammunition and velocity replaced six-shooters and shotguns. Patrol officers and detectives were trained to pursue and confront active shooters immediately, without waiting for backup. Agencies across the country began requiring officers to wear body armor and buying up military-grade weapons and equipment, especially after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“I don’t hear officers saying we don’t need these weapons. The street officer is saying, ‘I need a more efficient sling. I need a better optic,’” said Rob Pincus, a firearms trainer and former sheriff’s deputy based in Colorado. “If the bad guys have these guns, we need them too.”

Gary Darress, another longtime Colorado Springs police officer and friend of Burns, was issued a six-round Smith & Wesson Model 19 .357 revolver when he began his law enforcement career in 1985. The department later transitioned from revolvers to semiautomatic pistols, “because criminals got their hands on semi-autos,” Darress said.

That transition was manageable. The tactical rifle era, he says, was something else.

“It’s urban warfare,” Darress said. “Psychologically, when people have all this armament, that changes who you are and that changes your response to calls.”

Darress was issued his own AR-15 to carry in the car in 2008, but he didn’t tinker with it the way other officers do, customizing every aspect of the gun from the sling to the sight. Asked why, he said the gun was fine as it was. He leaned on what had already carried him through more than 20 years in policing — ever-evolving de-escalation techniques.

But the environment evolved too, with more and more residents openly and legally carrying pistols and rifles. In 2011, the Colorado Springs Police Department responded by telling dispatchers and patrol officers that simply seeing a person with a gun should not automatically prompt a police response. Instead, emergency operators were instructed to ask callers whether the armed person was acting erratically or unlawfully. If the answer was no, officers would probably stand down.

“Obviously, the problem is that when the open-carrying citizen is on their way to commit a crime,” Burns said dryly, “we have limited our ability to respond quickly.”

Colorado Springs saw the worst-case scenario unfold four years later, on Halloween 2015. A 911 caller told an emergency response technician that a man was walking downtown with a long gun and a gas can. Police assigned the call a low priority.

Soon, Noah Harpham began executing people with an AR-15 called the DPMS Classic 16.

Darress was a mile away, using the restroom. He sped to the scene, pulling up across the street from Harpham and a fast-food restaurant.

By that time, the gunman had killed three people.

Darress unholstered his pistol — he didn’t have time to grab his rifle, he said — and took cover behind his open driver’s side door, even though he knew it offered no practical defense against Harpham’s weapon.

But as Harpham began firing at him, Darress found he couldn’t pull the trigger.

“A voice tells me don’t shoot, because I’m facing a Wendy’s,” Darress said. “I pray to God that I’m a good shot. But one shot flies off to the left or right, and I’m going to shoot somebody in Wendy’s.”

Harpham fired eight times in the direction of Darress, who hit the ground and crawled behind his vehicle. Eventually, another Colorado Springs police officer, Randall Scott Hallas, flanked Harpham and shot him to death.

The mass shooting, followed by the Planned Parenthood attack a month later that killed one police officer and injured five other officers, contributed to an exodus from the city police department that year. The Colorado Springs Gazette reported that 52 officers left in 2015, with most departing after less than two years on the job and some citing the rising tide of violence in their resignation letters.

Many officers who stayed prepared for war, Darress and Burns said, with many buying their own rifles and customizing them to the scenarios they imagined they might encounter.

“When I started, I think human beings were much more able to do the job of law enforcement,” Darress said. “I don’t think people are designed for the intensity of law enforcement today.”

Policing’s political divide

The Colorado Springs department issued Burns his first AR-15 in the mid-2000s, without any modifications, he said. Then he responded to a call of shots fired in the dead of night and realized he needed a flashlight mounted to the gun rail.

He bought his own AR-15 in 2008, equipping it with the rail light, a non-magnified red dot sight, and a handle with a tripod for mounting the gun on surfaces, such as the hood of a car. The whole package cost about $1,200, he said.

Burns kept the weapon in his car, between the driver’s seat and the passenger seat. Until two years ago, he had responded to several calls with it but never fired it while on patrol.

By 2021, on-the-job frustrations were mounting, he said. Among them: Too many men carrying guns illegally had entered the back of Burns’s patrol car in handcuffs and walked out of El Paso County courts with a slap on the wrist, he said.

“Weapons violations are not severely prosecuted here,” Burns said. “Very often, if there’s no serious injury, it’s ‘no harm, no foul.’ Now a felon doesn’t care if they get caught because the most they’ll get is probation.”

The district attorney’s office for Colorado’s 4th Judicial District, which covers El Paso and Teller counties, said it filed 236 charges of possession of a weapon by a previous offender against adults in 2022, down from 412 in 2021 and 449 the previous year.

“If the legislature wants to make serious changes with gun crimes — they can raise the level for previous offenders and make mandatory prison for offenders committing a crime with a weapon,” District Attorney Michael J. Allen said in an emailed statement.

An October report by the Common Sense Institute, a conservative think tank, blamed Colorado’s rising crime rates on changes in state law that it said had reduced the prison and parole populations.

While the police community says it’s hamstrung by the legislature, gun-control advocates across the state disagree. They say law enforcement agencies aren’t using measures available to them to reduce violent crime.

One such measure is a red-flag law passed in 2019, a year and a half after a Douglas County sheriff’s deputy was killed by a former Iraq War combat medic wielding an AR-15. Named after the slain law enforcement officer, the Deputy Zackari Parrish III Violence Prevention Act allows citizens and police departments to petition a judge to have a Colorado resident’s weapons confiscated if the petitioner demonstrates that person is a danger to themselves or others.

Similar laws have been passed in 19 states and D.C., leading to more than 15,000 interventions since 2020, according to an Associated Press report from September. Opponents of gun restrictions say the laws open the door to unfair seizures.

Parrish’s widow, Gracie Parrish Miller, said she considered the social backlash she would face for publicly backing a gun-control bill in suburban Colorado and chose to steer clear, despite the legislation bearing her late husband’s name. Douglas County Sheriff Tony Spurlock was the only Republican elected official in Colorado to vocally endorse the bill. For his support of the measure, he faced a bitter recall effort, which ultimately failed. Spurlock, who was term-limited, retired this year.

In neighboring El Paso County, Sheriff Bill Elder vowed that his department would not file any petitions under the new gun-seizure measure. And Elder kept his word until he left office in January, according to the sheriff’s office.

Elder declined to be interviewed for this article. But he said in 2019 that the law failed to address what he believes is the real problem behind American gun violence — mental health. The statute named for the slain deputy, Elder told the Colorado Springs Gazette at the time, focused “on the tool instead of the crisis that brings the thing before the judge.”

Burns said progressive initiatives in the legislature, including measures taken to increase use of personal recognizance bonds, and local law enforcement’s hesitance to make use of some gun-control measures are being felt on the street.

“We’ve always been at full saturation with guns,” Burns said. “Quite tragically, now we’re seeing a lot of lawlessness around that.”

More than 7,000 firearms have been stolen since 2017 in Colorado Springs alone, according to police department data, more than four times the rate of firearm thefts nationally, according to Justice Department statistics. One of those stolen guns, a pistol, was used to shoot a Colorado Springs officer in the head in 2018 — he survived.

The specter of his own death, or that of another officer, loomed for Burns as he confronted Quintana at the gas station nearly two years ago. Quintana reached for the door of the parked car, making Burns’s decision easier.

Burns squeezed the trigger of his AR-15 twice.

The first 5.56 round wedged into a street curb 40 yards past Quintana. The second entered his belly, center mass.

As paramedics arrived, a fellow officer kicked aside Quintana’s gun. Quintana died at a nearby hospital.

None of the officers had a second thought about the weapon until five days later, when investigators revealed it was not a rifle, as it appeared, but a realistic-looking toy gun designed to fire nonlethal plastic pellets.

The discovery stunned Burns. “It’s a conundrum,” he said. “The idea that you would make a kids’ toy to look indistinguishable from a real gun is crazy.”

‘Too much responsibility’

Darress retired in 2020, five years after the mass shooting that ended outside the Wendy’s in downtown Colorado Springs, and 34 years after becoming a police officer.

He began a new career as an Episcopalian deacon ministering to the homeless and marginalized, following the example of his inspiration, St. Francis of Assisi, who is said to have kissed a leper and realized he had kissed the flesh of Jesus Christ.

Even now, he owns three guns, all pistols. He only keeps them for home protection and doesn’t shoot them, or even carry them outside his house.

“It’s too much responsibility,” he said.

Burns retired in August, after 24 years.

He’d always prided himself on not becoming the officer who withdrew emotionally and policed aggressively. Then a man with a facsimile rifle at a gas station interrupted that peace.

Burns spent two weeks after killing Quintana twisting with his decision to shoot, waiting to find out if he’d be indicted. Lying awake in the early-morning hours, he replayed the standoff in his head, reminding himself that Quintana never pointed his gun at anyone.

The day Burns returned to duty he was rolling alone, left without a beat partner because of staff vacancies. He pulled up to the same cluster of businesses where he had encountered Quintana — an area where officers on patrol often discover stolen vehicles — picked up his binoculars and began running license plate numbers. Sure enough, the first plate he plugged into the computer belonged to a car that had been reported stolen.

He drove over and asked a woman to get out of the vehicle. Instead, she reached behind her seat.

“I was already at a 9 out of 10 stress level, being back there, and then when she did that I jumped to a 15,” Burns said.

Palms sweating, heart racing, Burns watched in slow motion as the woman’s hand returned empty. She eventually exited the vehicle and complied with commands.

“She was just being stupid,” Burns said.

The district attorney cleared him of any wrongdoing in the Quintana shooting, saying Burns had a “reasonable belief” Quintana posed an “imminent danger” to the public. Fourteen months later he turned in his department-issued pistol and brought his AR-15 home for the last time. He still trains with it, but it stays locked up in his house when not at the range.

Some Fridays, he has lunch at a local restaurant with Darress and a rotating cast of long-toothed cops.

In September, Burns was honored at a Medal of Valor ceremony for the Colorado Springs Police Department. Wearing a black suit, he stood alongside a parade of honorees in dress blue uniforms who accepted awards for their handling of critical incidents in 2021.

The banquet featured body-camera footage for each of the award-winning interactions and interviews with officers. Burns’s reel never mentioned that Quintana’s gun was a fake.

Burns says he attends a left-leaning church, by Colorado Springs standards, where only a few members carry weapons in church. There’s positive sentiment among the flock for a national assault weapons ban, he said. With a hitch:

“They don’t want to give up their own. They say, ‘Oh, no. I’m okay. I know what I’m doing.’”

About this story

Reporting by Robert Klemko. Photography by Joshua Lott.

Design and development by Aadit Tambe and Anna Lefkowitz. Design editing by Madison Walls. Photo editing by Natalia Jimenez.

Editing by Debbi Wilgoren, Peter Wallsten and Wendy Galietta. Additional editing by Jordan Melendrez, Kim Chapman and Tom Justice.

Additional support from Sarah Murray, Courtney Beesch, Angel Mendoza, Kyley Schultz, Brandon Carter, Ashleigh Wilson, Jai-Leen James and Bryan Flaherty.

The Washington Post and Ipsos asked nearly 400 AR-15 owners why they own the rifle

By Emily Guskin, Aadit Tambe and Jon Gerberg 

The AR-15 is the best-selling rifle in the United States, industry figures indicate. Almost every major gunmaker now produces its own version of the weapon, which dominates gun dealers’ walls and websites.

Critics claim that the military-style gun has no legitimate civilian use — yet about 1 in 20 Americans own one. So who chooses to buy an AR-15, and why?

The Washington Post and Ipsos asked nearly 400 AR-15 owners to explain their reasons for having the weapon, what they use it for and how often they fire it.

The survey found that AR-15 owners come from red, blue and purple states. Compared with Americans as a whole, AR-15 owners are significantly more likely to be White, male and between the ages 40 and 65. They’re also more likely to have higher incomes, to have served in the military and to be Republican. And AR-15 owners are more likely to live in states former president Donald Trump won in 2020 than adults overall.

Self-defense was the most popular reason for owning an AR-15. Other popular answers included recreation, target shooting and hunting, while some pointed to owning an AR-15 as their Second Amendment right.

The Post-Ipsos poll is one of the most detailed nationally representative surveys to date focused on the opinions of AR-15 owners.

The gun industry estimates there are about 20 million AR-15s in circulation. There is no way to independently confirm that number, but polling can estimate how many Americans own them.

National surveys by Ipsos in 2022 found that 31 percent of adults own guns. The Post-Ipsos survey of AR-15 owners estimates that 20 percent of gun owners own an AR-15-style rifle. Taken together, the polls find that 6 percent of Americans own an AR-15, about 1 in 20.

The data suggests that with a U.S. population of 260.8 million adults, about 16 million Americans own an AR-15.

About this story

This Washington Post-Ipsos poll was conducted Sept. 30-Oct. 11, 2022, among 2,104 gun owners, including 399 AR-15-style rifle owners. The sample was drawn through the Ipsos KnowledgePanel, an ongoing panel recruited through random sampling of U.S. households. Results among AR-15 owners have a margin of error of plus or minus 5.5 percentage points. The estimate that 31 percent of U.S. adults own any gun is from an Ipsos KnowledgePanel survey of more than 31,000 adults in November and December 2022.

Reporting by Emily Guskin. Videos by Jon Gerberg. Graphics and design by Aadit Tambe. Motion graphics by Osman Malik.

Illustration by Anna Lefkowitz; iStock. Design and development by Anna Lefkowitz, Aadit Tambe and Rekha Tenjarla. Design editing by Madison Walls. Video editing by Angela M. Hill. Graphics editing by Chiqui Esteban.

Editing by Scott Clement, Peter Wallsten and Wendy Galietta. Additional editing by Jordan Melendrez, Kim Chapman and Tom Justice.

Additional support from Sarah Murray, Courtney Beesch, Angel Mendoza, Kyley Schultz, Brandon Carter, Ashleigh Wilson, Jai-Leen James and Bryan Flaherty.

By 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 appear 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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

About this story

Reporting by Alex Horton. Additional reporting and photo editing by Monique Woo. Top illustration credits: Bushmaster ad via Maxim magazine (2009); Sig Sauer ad via American Rifleman magazine (2012); Mossberg ad via American Rifleman magazine (2017); Smith & Wesson ad via American Rifleman magazine (2010).

Design and development by Tucker Harris. Design editing by Virginia Singarayar.

Editing by Karly Domb Sadof, Peter Wallsten and Wendy Galietta. Additional editing by Kim Chapman and Jordan Melendrez.

Additional support from Courtney Beesch, Kyley Schultz, Angel Mendoza, Brandon Carter, Ashleigh Wilson, Anna Lefkowitz, Madison Walls and Matt Callahan.

Legislative and legal battles flare over restrictions that experts say could reduce casualties in AR-15 attacks

By Mark Berman and Todd C. Frankel 

The first gunshot cracked through the air just after 1 a.m.

Then came another shot, and another. They kept coming, again and again, each shot thundering across downtown Dayton, Ohio. In just half a minute, more than three dozen gunshots echoed through the crowded streets.

Dion Green recalls hitting the sidewalk next to his father and fiancee, who had come out with him in August 2019. It had been a routine Saturday night: people dancing, drinking, standing in line to get into a bar, waiting for tacos outside. Green barely had time to drop down as the masked shooter ran by and kept firing. All around Green, bullets ripped into people’s heads, chests, backs, arms and legs. People ran from the carnage, diving behind parked cars and scrambling into nearby bars and clubs, piling on top of one another as they huddled on the floor.

“It was like war,” Green said. “And I got angry. Because why was there a full-on war going on in the middle of the street?”

Thirty-two seconds after that first shot, the barrage ended when police killed the gunman. But the toll was already immense.

The gunman, shooting an AR-15-style weapon, had fired off 41 bullets, hitting more than two dozen people and killing nine of them — including Derrick Fudge, Green’s father.

In the aftermath of the Dayton massacre and another hours earlier in El Paso, all the familiar debates ignited over guns, assault weapons bans, mental health interventions and red-flag laws. Yet much of the public discussion overlooked a key factor in Dayton, something that connected the massacre to the carnage unleashed by mass shooters in Orlando, Las Vegas, Buffalo and other communities: the ammunition magazines that can enable gunmen to fire a hail of bullets without needing to stop and reload.

Those magazines are increasingly seen as an area where policy changes could lessen the carnage that has become emblematic of attacks waged with AR-15s and other guns, according to a growing body of research and interviews with experts and law enforcement veterans. An emerging consensus among these experts — and one that has taken hold in some state legislatures — is that mandating smaller magazines would force mass shooters to pause to reload, allowing people to flee or fight back.

Most states do not limit magazine sizes. But within the past year, lawmakers in four states have added restrictions capping magazine sizes at anywhere from 10 to 17 rounds — and Oregon voters in November approved a 10-round limit. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) signed a bill in January that included a ban on the sale of long-gun magazines with more than 10 rounds.

Such efforts, however, face growing legal challenges from gun rights advocates — and the issue could ultimately wind up with the Supreme Court ruling on a pivotal question: whether the right to bear arms extends to these ammunition magazines.

The court’s ruling last year overturning a New York gun law has inspired a new wave of lawsuits by firearms advocates, who argue that magazine restrictions are unconstitutional and endanger law-abiding citizens who could need them for self-defense.

“It’s a different era,” said Dudley Brown, president of the National Association for Gun Rights, a pro-firearms organization mounting several legal challenges to magazine restrictions. “We think the Second Amendment wins on this every time now.”

Proponents of the restrictions say the value of the limits comes down to numbers: Fewer bullets fired means more lives could be saved. Something, they say, has to be done in the face of all the bloodshed — and they reject the notion that larger devices are protected by the Constitution.

“The Second Amendment, which I support and I respect, makes no mention of ammunition,” said Rhode Island state Rep. Justine Caldwell (D), who sponsored a ban that passed last summer. “Nobody has a constitutional right to a 100-round magazine.”

In Dayton, the shooter wielded a 100-round drum magazine for his brief but deadly rampage.

“If he was using a 30-round magazine, he would at least have to reload once,” said Richard Biehl, who was Dayton’s police chief at the time of the shooting. “A 15-round magazine, he would reload twice. That could be six lives saved in that particular incident. That’s why I think it matters.”

The American gun debate over high-capacity magazines

As the AR-15 has become a cultural symbol, so too have magazines, which can jut out from the bottom of guns.

There’s no universal definition for what size is considered “high capacity.” Some states have a narrow definition, passing laws that ban anything with more than 10 rounds. Magazines with at least 30 rounds are considered the standard among larger devices; the largest can hold 100 rounds or more.

Usually made of hard plastic, a typical 30-round magazine is about seven inches long and an inch thick — roughly the size of a television remote control — with a slight curve to trace the bullets within. They are readily available for sale online, often for under $20. Inside, a small spring pushes the new bullets toward the gun, feeding them into the actual weapon.

Magazines with 20 or more bullets have been around in some form at least since the 1800s. They emerged as popular accessories only in recent decades. The first civilian AR-15 rifle debuted in 1964 with a device that held five rounds, and during the Vietnam War era, the military relied on those with 20 rounds.

Over time, technological advances made it easier to produce them reliably and affordably out of plastic.

So when Congress passed the federal assault weapons ban in 1994, it also prohibited magazines with more than 10 rounds. When the weapons ban expired in 2004, that restriction also lifted. Now, in a country with an estimated 400 million guns, there are also millions of magazines with at least 30 rounds, according to gun rights groups and court filings.

They are advertised as easy to use and deeply convenient for gun owners. One company, Magpul, boasts a 60-round drum that it calls “the best high capacity drum in the world.” Sig Sauer touts one with 30 rounds of 9mm ammunition by promising that it will let users “spend less time loading magazines and more time shooting at the range.”

Gun advocates say that today, these devices are the rule, not the exception. Many modern gunmakers now ship their AR-style rifles with 30-round magazines standard.

When one is affixed to an AR-15, it is part of the rifle’s identity, the iconography that has turned the gun into as much a symbol as a weapon. That’s how the gun is shown on protest signs and T-shirts, cementing its image in the culture.

The fight over magazines has now become the American gun debate in a nutshell — an argument over a device that is cherished by some and condemned by others. For the people who own and use them, they are simply a part of life.

Paul Lewis, who owns a property management company in Maryland, extolled the virtues of firing dozens of rounds at a time during a recent visit to a gun range north of Dulles International Airport.

“It’s fun,” Lewis, 39, said shortly before sliding a 40-round device into a Ruger AR-556. And not having to reload so much, he said, “saves your thumbs.”

Lewis took aim at a nearby target and fired, emptying the magazine in nine seconds.

He visits the range at least once a week, both to practice with a handgun he carries for self-defense and to unwind. Since shooting requires full concentration, Lewis said, he stops worrying about anything else.

Limiting the number of bullets in his magazines during these trips “would suck,” he said, “because that’s more times that I have to stop and say, ‘Okay, load up another 10, load up another 10.’”

More importantly, Lewis said, magazine restrictions would make law-abiding gun owners less safe from criminals who might disregard the bans. “How can I protect myself if I don’t have enough ammo?” Lewis said.

A gun restriction could save lives

In 2019, a gunman wielding an AR-15-style rifle burst into a synagogue in Poway, Calif., killing one person and injuring three others while emptying a 10-round magazine.

When the attacker ran out of bullets, he tried and failed to reload another 10-round magazine, then fled as “several members of the congregation moved to confront him,” an FBI affidavit said.

This episode — which ended with the shooter’s arrest after the FBI said he called 911, made antisemitic remarks and confessed — crystallizes what law enforcement veterans and experts say can happen when shooting stops: a break and, for the potential victims, a chance.

“That moment to reload, it’s the linchpin of the event,” said Katherine Schweit, a retired FBI agent who ran the bureau’s active shooter program.

“If there is a way during that time or when the rounds in that weapon are expended to intervene,” she said, “that is the difference between a few and dozens injured or killed.”

Academic researchers agree, with numerous studies in recent years finding that laws restricting magazine sizes reduce casualties.

One study found that almost two-thirds of mass shootings with at least six fatalities over nearly three decades involved magazines with more than 10 rounds — and that the death tolls in those cases far exceeded the number of fatalities in attacks with smaller magazines.

A person with experience using guns can reload quickly, but in most mass shootings a shooter might take eight to 10 seconds to reload, said Louis Klarevas, a research professor at Teachers College at Columbia University who studied nearly three decades of data.

“No matter where you are, stop, look around you,” he said. “How far can you get in six, seven, eight seconds if you bolted? If there was a pause in the shooting?”

Such findings, though, are disputed by gun rights advocates who argue that fighting mass killers requires ensuring that law-abiding citizens are adequately armed. Brown, the president of the National Association for Gun Rights, pointed to a shooting last summer at an Indiana mall. Police said a gunman opened fire, killing three people, before a 22-year-old bystander fired 10 rounds and killed the attacker.

Advocates for larger magazines say they are important for self-defense because gun owners can’t predict how many rounds they may need when facing a threat. In court filings, they argue that people can face grave danger if confronted by multiple attackers or while swapping out magazines.

But other analysts dispute the argument that larger ammunition magazines are necessary for self-defense.

Lucy Allen, a former White House economist, studied cases published by the National Rifle Association about people using guns for self-defense between 2011 and 2017, and found that in those 700 cases, on average, people fired a little more than two shots in self-defense. Many times, she said in a court declaration, these people never fired a shot. Someone fired more than 10 shots in just two cases, she said.

The NRA said the cases Allen cited were based on a collection of news stories and not meant to be exhaustive or representative. “To suggest that any law-abiding individual should diminish their ability to defend themselves is wrongheaded and dangerous,” Lars Dalseide, an NRA spokesman, said in a statement.

While the recent stretch of research validating the restrictions is relatively new, the idea of trying to cap the size of magazines is not. In 1990, New Jersey passed the first modern restrictions. The federal assault weapons ban followed four years later, though it exempted devices manufactured before the law took effect.

Since the federal ban expired, states and local jurisdictions have passed numerous bans and restrictions, often in the wake of tragedy.

After the 2012 massacre at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., lawmakers in that state passed a ban. Lawmakers in Connecticut similarly banned the devices after a gunman slaughtered students at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown that same year.

Lawmakers in Delaware, Rhode Island and Washington state approved restrictions last year, along with the city council in Columbus, Ohio. In January, lawmakers in Illinois — where a gunman using 30-round magazines killed seven people at an Independence Day parade last year — followed suit. That ban immediately took effect after the governor signed it.

All told, 14 states and D.C. have some sort of magazine restriction on the books, along with some individual cities and counties, though the Oregon measure approved by voters last year has been put on hold by a judge.

The bans differ from other gun laws in a key way. Gun manufacturers can easily skirt assault weapons bans by making cosmetic changes to the weapons, but restrictions on magazine capacity are straightforward, said Andrew R. Morral, a behavioral scientist at Rand Corp. who leads its Gun Policy in America initiative.

“You might disagree about what the threshold might be, but once you set a threshold for how many rounds it can hold, or how it attaches to the gun, or whatever the rule is, it’s very easy to define,” he said.

Advocates of the restrictions have found allies in some law enforcement veterans who responded to mass shootings.

Douglas Fuchs, a former police chief in Redding, Conn., was among the first responders at Sandy Hook Elementary, where his own children had once gone to school.

He struggled with what could be done to stop such carnage. He didn’t think the answer was banning any guns or taking them “out of law-abiding people’s hands.” But Fuchs took a lesson from what he heard from children who survived, who told their parents they fled while the shooter was “playing with his gun,” he said.

Fuchs concluded that the gunman was reloading, and that the children “saw that as an opportunity to run.” That proved just how valuable that pause could be, he said.

“Even a child knew,” he said. “They knew it was time to flee.”

A courtroom battle over magazine restrictions

Just as governors in Rhode Island and Delaware were signing magazine restrictions into law last summer, a Supreme Court ruling sent shock waves through groups supporting stricter gun laws and emboldened gun rights groups hoping to overturn the bans and other firearms restrictions.

In June, the court struck down a New York law dealing with gun licensing and declared that Americans had a right to carry handguns for self-defense outside their homes. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority in New York State Rifle & Pistol Assoc. v. Bruen, said that beyond adhering to the Second Amendment’s text, government officials have to prove that their gun regulations are “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition.”

Legal observers say the ruling and its emphasis on “historical tradition” could dramatically reshape how American courts approach gun laws, including magazine restrictions.

The court’s ruling “articulates a test that few gun laws will easily survive,” said Adam Winkler, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles who is an expert on the Second Amendment.

Gun rights advocates and organizations have mounted a number of challenges to the bans in court. In addition to the self-defense and constitutional arguments, some say that the term “high-capacity magazines” is itself a misnomer. Those devices holding more than 10 rounds are “common to the point of ubiquity among law-abiding gun owners,” a group of Republican attorneys general said in a court filing last year.

“The 10-round magazine is the exception, not the rule,” said Brown, of the National Association for Gun Rights. “It’s like saying the car with five gears is a high gear, high-capacity transmission. No, it’s not, it’s the standard capacity, the standard number of gears.”

For years, though, legal challenges to magazine bans generally failed. Brown’s group mounted an unsuccessful challenge to Colorado’s restrictions, which the state’s Supreme Court upheld in 2020.

But now gun rights advocates see the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling as momentous.

“Clarence Thomas handed us a four-ton wrecking ball to go after these ludicrous Second Amendment infringements,” Brown said. After the ruling, Brown’s group filed lawsuits taking aim at bans enacted by four states, including Colorado and Connecticut. Those cases are among at least 15 ongoing lawsuits challenging magazine restrictions across the country.

The Supreme Court’s decision also rippled out into cases that had previously survived court challenges, including bans in New Jersey and California that were sent back to lower courts to reconsider.

Polling suggests such challenges echo the wishes of gun owners. While 74 percent of American adults who don’t own guns supported banning magazines with more than 10 rounds in a Pew Research Center survey in April 2021, only 40 percent of gun owners supported that policy.

States facing legal challenges are battling back. Colorado has argued that its nearly decade-old restrictions are still allowed under the Supreme Court’s recent ruling. A federal judge in December allowed Rhode Island’s new restrictions to take effect, saying the measure did not violate the Constitution and calling it “common sense public safety legislation.” Opponents of the law plan to appeal.

For those who have seen firsthand the toll of mass killings, the political and legal debate over magazine sizes is deeply personal. Biehl, the former Dayton police chief, said he was “haunted” by how much bloodshed was unleashed by a single attacker firing so many bullets in so little time.

“One needs to question why anyone would need so many bullets in a magazine, that kind of capacity, for any legitimate reason,” Biehl said.

About this story

Reporting by Mark Berman and Todd C. Frankel. Audio recording and production by Bishop Sand.

Illustrations by Anna Lefkowitz; iStock. Design and development by Anna Lefkowitz and Aadit Tambe. Design editing by Madison Walls. Photo editing by Natalia Jimenez.

Editing by Tim Elfrink, Peter Wallsten and Wendy Galietta. Additional editing by Jordan Melendrez, Kim Chapman and Tom Justice.

Additional support from Ricky Carioti, Sean Carter, Sarah Murray, Courtney Beesch, Angel Mendoza, Kyley Schultz, Brandon Carter, Ashleigh Wilson, Jai-Leen James and Bryan Flaherty.

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the size of magazines involved in a study on mass shootings that found smaller magazines led to less deadly outcomes. The study focused on magazines with more than 10 rounds compared with those with 10 or fewer rounds. The article has been corrected.

States reeling from gun violence made graphic imagery confidential — part of a charged debate over privacy and public awareness

By Isaac Stanley-Becker

After a burst of gun violence claimed 13 lives at Columbine High School in 1999, a difficult question confronted a Colorado judge: whether to order the release of autopsies sought by local media under the state’s public records law.

The judge, Jose D.L. Márquez, decided to keep the graphic reports hidden, ruling that the rampage was an “extraordinary event” that lawmakers could not have anticipated when they wrote the law. As evidence, he cited the “unique factor” of the community’s trauma, illustrated by an outpouring of grief and a presidential visit.

A quarter-century after Columbine, then the deadliest mass shooting ever visited on a high school, the reactions highlighted by the judge — including public memorials and visits from politicians — are no longer signs of an extraordinary event. They’re routine grief rites.

But as gun violence has grown more common, state lawmakers have increasingly restricted access to government records documenting its destructive impact, such as photos and videos showing mutilated bodies and audio recordings capturing children’s cries.

Some states have crafted new exemptions to public records laws specifically shielding depictions of victims. In Connecticut and Florida, bipartisan majorities curtailed access to government records after school shootings in Newtown in 2012 and Parkland in 2018, respectively. Other states, including Colorado, have wielded existing exemptions, for privacy or law enforcement activity, to withhold similar records.

Lawmakers behind the restrictions point to myriad reasons for cloaking crime scene evidence, above all sensitivity to survivors and the families of victims. There’s also concern about interfering with law enforcement investigations or court proceedings and inspiring copycat killers. In the balancing act between privacy and public access, the rise of social media has weighed heavily against access, say people involved in the debates, because of the permanence of digital platforms and their possible manipulation by bad actors.

Even when gruesome images may be available, news organizations have often declined to seek or publish them out of deference to families and fear of public backlash. That approach differs from the media’s handling of casualties overseas — a contrast on display in recent weeks, as explicit footage of violence in Israel and Gaza has appeared in news broadcasts and other media.

In the United States, some family members of victims of mass shootings have become outspoken opponents of publishing images that include bodies.

Nelba Márquez-Greene, whose 6-year-old daughter, Ana Grace, was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, said asking families to disclose pictures of slain children puts an unfair burden on people who are already carrying the enormous weight of grief — particularly, she added, when she sees little evidence that such pictures change people’s minds.

“Why is that my job? We don’t ask rape victims to do this,” said Márquez-Greene, who recently took on a new position as activist in residence at the Yale School of Public Health focused on designing programs to help survivors of gun violence. “I wish her pictures alive moved people as much as people think her picture dead would.”

But the recurring nightmare of mass shootings has prompted others to advocate for releasing and publicizing photographs and autopsy information. They argue that withholding such material has deprived the public of an accurate understanding of the destructive force of weapons including the AR-15, a firearm originally designed for combat that’s now the weapon of choice for many mass killers. Concealing records that depict victims also makes off-limits a whole range of other visuals, including scenes of chaos and unrest left by the gunfire.

Patricia Oliver, whose 17-year-old son, Joaquin Oliver, was killed outside his creative writing class at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, said mere descriptions of that terror have failed to mobilize enough people or focus the public debate on the astonishing power of the gun used to kill her son. She said more graphic material could help.

“Sometimes human beings don’t understand with words,” she said. “If what’s necessary is to show people pieces of Joaquin’s skull everywhere, I’m willing to do that.”

The dilemmas of depicting mass shootings

For media outlets making sense of the spate of mass shootings since Columbine, impassioned appeals for privacy by some families have carried weight.

When the Denver Post mobilized to cover the 2012 massacre at a midnight showing of the superhero movie “The Dark Knight Rises,” the newspaper elected not to seek wide-ranging public records from the crime scene in suburban Aurora. Gregory Moore, the editor at the time of the Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage, said his staff’s approach was informed by past tragedies: “We were probably overly sensitized to victims and their grief here having gone through Columbine.”

“It’s part of our DNA not to traumatize victims and families in this community,” he said.

But the “landscape has changed” in the decade since Aurora, Moore said, and he now believes news organization must do more to “help people understand how out of control this situation is and what the devastation is from having these weapons of war on the streets.”

As part of The Washington Post’s reporting on the AR-15’s role in American life, Post journalists sought crime scene photographs, autopsy reports and court records in an effort to understand how the weapon transforms ordinary scenes — such as classrooms, concerts, shopping centers — and how it maims the human body.

In some cases, authorities released imagery from crime scenes, such as photos of guns, gloves and a gas mask; in others, they denied requests for such records. Government agencies that refused to provide documents most often cited exemptions to public records laws that allow them to withhold information related to law enforcement investigations. Agencies also invoked exemptions covering personal privacy.

After Texas authorities refused records requests related to the 2022 shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Post journalists independently obtained a trove of evidence compiled by state and federal police, including extremely graphic photos and videos taken moments after police entered the classrooms where 19 students and two teachers had been killed.

The families of some Uvalde victims have pushed for disclosure of such evidence. Brett Cross, the legal guardian of murdered 10-year-old Uziyah “Uzi” Garcia, said the reason is that families like his were left in the dark by law enforcement, whose response to the shooting quickly came under criticism.

Cross said crime scene footage is urgent evidence that belongs to the public. Still, he said, parents are entitled to their qualms. “The world needs to see the terrible things these weapons do, but at the end of the day, these are still our babies,” he said.

Two groups that regularly see gunshot victims up close, law enforcement officers and health-care professionals, aren’t in lockstep about public disclosure. Law enforcement is often against it. But the medical community is of a mixed mind, said Joseph Sakran, a trauma surgeon at Johns Hopkins who serves as board chair and chief medical officer for the nonprofit group Brady, which advocates for gun control.

Some who tend to the bodies of shooting victims see the potential for what Sakran called “an Emmett Till moment,” referring to the way in which the public funeral for the 14-year-old Black boy lynched in 1955 — and his mother’s insistence on an open casket — created moral outrage that helped propel the civil rights movement.

“My personal belief is that images could be profound and could make a difference in swaying public understanding of the crisis we’re facing and perhaps even lead to demonstrable change,” Sakran said. But no doctor, he added, would force that on a family.

Paul Slovic, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon who has studied the effects of visual imagery on human behavior, said graphic images can change attitudes, but only in particular circumstances. He drew a parallel to the 2015 photo of a Syrian child lying facedown on a Turkish beach, which brought attention to the war in Syria and caused a surge in humanitarian donations.

“An image, if it catches attention, creates a window of opportunity where people are alert to a problem,” Slovic said. “But if images are repeated over and over again, we become numb to them.”

After shootings, lawmakers restrict access to public records

In communities that have experienced some of the nation’s most traumatic mass shootings, governments have responded by adopting new restrictions on access to public records.

Six months after a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown in 2012, the legislature amended the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act to exempt from disclosure photos and videos “depicting the victim of a homicide” if the records “could reasonably be expected” to infringe on personal privacy.

Momentum for the legislation built after publication of a blog post by Michael Moore, the filmmaker who created the 2002 documentary “Bowling for Columbine,” predicting that someone in Newtown would leak crime scene photos to awaken public outrage. Moore wrote that “when the American people see what bullets from an assault rifle fired at close range do to a little child’s body … every sane American will demand action.”

The prediction set off alarm among families of victims — and an aggressive response by lawmakers “who were shocked and appalled by this suggestion that sensitive images would be disseminated,” said Colleen M. Murphy, executive director of the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission, a state agency that enforces public records rules.

Murphy, who opposed the changes, was among those tapped for a task force set up by the 2013 legislation to make recommendations about the balance between “victim privacy” and “the public’s right to know.”

At the task force’s request, the General Assembly conducted a 50-state survey of public records laws and found that eight other states had rules specifically restricting the release of crime scene photos: California, Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, Pennsylvania and Texas. A law in Texas, written by a Democrat and passed around the same time as the Connecticut measure, restricted photos of victims “in a state of dismemberment, decapitation, or similar mutilation or that depicts the deceased person’s genitalia.”

The review also found that 26 states specifically limited the release of autopsy reports and 16 limited the release of 911 tapes.

A Post analysis of state records laws found that all 50 states and D.C. allow police departments to withhold materials they consider part of ongoing investigations. Many also have broad carve-outs for personal privacy.

A year after the Newtown shooting, reports released by the Connecticut State Police included about 1,500 photos taken by a crime scene investigator. Most were redacted in accordance with the new law, obscured by large black rectangles. Those that weren’t redacted showed firearms, door handles and caution tape. None showed humans.

The full images have never been publicly released, even as conspiracy theorists seized on the shooting with claims that the murders had been faked, turning Newtown into a grim landmark in America’s break with reality.

Some argue that photographic evidence of victims would undercut such claims, while others say that gruesome images would only encourage extremists.

Jeff Covello, the Connecticut State Police sergeant who supervised the Newtown crime scene, brought then-Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to the scene and showed him the unredacted images. He said he believes only some people should see such visuals.

“Who exactly is on that list is not for me to decide,” he said. “Families should have some say — exactly how much I don’t know.”

Deciding what to conceal in the ‘Sunshine State’

Ever since Fred Guttenberg’s 14-year-old daughter, Jaime, was killed in the Parkland shooting in 2018, he has been a gun-control advocate — stumping for political candidates, yelling out in protest during the 2020 State of the Union and petitioning the government to investigate a firearms manufacturer.

He used to think depictions of the damage from powerful rifles could change minds. When he met with Sen. Ted Cruz in the fall of 2019, Guttenberg said, he showed the Texas Republican photos of his daughter’s lifeless body. “It didn’t change a thing,” he said.

Cruz, after the meeting, said it was “productive and respectful.” The senator’s spokesman didn’t respond to a question about Guttenberg’s account.

Now, Guttenberg opposes disseminating such images. “There’s this notion that what we need to do is convince Americans what this looks like, but Americans are already convinced,” he said, citing surveys that show huge majorities favor new gun laws. “In my mind we don’t need to flood television screens and newspapers with images of bodies like my daughter’s.”

The same year as Guttenberg’s meeting with Cruz, the Florida legislature amended the state’s Sunshine Law to shield photographs, videos and audio of the “killing of a victim of mass violence” from public release.

Barbara Petersen, the former longtime president of the state’s First Amendment Foundation, fought the bill, arguing that the exemption makes citizens and media trying to understand mass violence “dependent on what law enforcement tells us.”

“We need to see it for ourselves, as awful as it may be,” she said.

Lauren Book, a Democratic state senator in Florida, was among the members of a public safety commission who saw extensive footage of Parkland’s carnage to prepare a 2019 report on the shooting. In 2019, she voted to make confidential the very sort of crime scene evidence that she had viewed.

“It’s horrific to see a child in a classroom look like a piece of hamburger meat,” she said. “I don’t think anyone needs to see that.”

Few have. Most Americans haven’t seen the mangled human remains left by dozens of mass shootings since Parkland. So while images of her son, Joaquin, are awful, said Patricia Oliver, they reflect a reality that the country must face.

“When will people understand the damage these guns cause?” Oliver asked.

Silvia Foster-Frau, Nate Jones, Arelis R. Hernández and Peter Wallsten contributed to this report.

The toll that the high-velocity rounds exact as they move through human tissue, bones and organs is not widely understood

By Sally Buzbee

In The Blast Effect, The Washington Post shows the mechanics of the AR-15 and the toll its high-velocity rounds exact as they move through human tissue, bones and organs.

The catastrophic damage the bullets from AR-15s cause inside human bodies is rarely made public in detail. News organizations do not generally publish graphic autopsy or crime scene photos because the images could be viewed as dehumanizing, exploitative and traumatizing, or could inflict further pain on the families of victims. As a result, the damage AR-15 fire can do to a human body — a great deal more than handguns — is not widely understood.

When we set out to chronicle the story of the AR-15 in America, we searched for ways to illustrate that effect on bodies in an unflinching but respectful manner. We recognize that this presentation may disturb readers, but we determined the information it contains is critical to the public’s knowledge.

Two principles shaped our approach: to show the impact on a body with precision and to share our findings through visualizations that meet our ethical standards. To accomplish that, we decided it was essential to document and depict actual mortal wounds to actual victims, using animated illustrations that show the entrance and exit wounds in human figures.

As part of our reporting, we filed 13 public information requests with medical examiners and other authorities around the country to obtain autopsy reports of victims in mass killings. We then scrutinized nearly 100 autopsy reports from five mass killings to analyze patterns of deadly wounds. That analysis revealed that in four of those shootings, many victims were shot in close proximity, multiple times.

We also conducted extensive interviews with two trauma surgeons, two ballistics experts and a medical examiner about the hallmark indicators of mortal wounds from the high-velocity rounds from the AR-15. We consulted with those same experts to identify several victims whose multiple injuries are typical of the gun’s explosive power inside the body.

Among them were two homicide victims: Noah Pozner, who was killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting at age six, and Peter Wang, who was killed in the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting at age 15.

The Post identified the details specific to Peter’s death by matching details from anonymized autopsy reports from the Broward County, Fla., medical examiners’ office and the court testimony of Wendolyn Sneed, the medical examiner who performed Peter’s autopsy.

Noah’s post-mortem examination became public in 2014, when his father, Lenny Pozner, released it to try to counter lies and conspiracy theories that spread about the Sandy Hook shooting.

We decided we would not proceed with publishing the depictions of Noah’s and Peter’s wounds without the agreement of their families. Both gave their consent — in Noah’s case, through the Pozners’ attorney, and in Peter’s case, through a cousin who serves as a family representative. They declined to review the presentation before it published.

Using court testimony from medical examiners and autopsy records, a team of journalists created three-dimensional illustrations that depicted where the bullets hit Noah and Peter. We selected a monochromatic palette for the presentation and used color only to direct attention to key findings. To focus on the parts of the body that were struck in both the hypothetical scenario of a chest wound and in the models created from autopsy reports, The Post removed some anatomical references from the illustrations.

The first part of the resulting piece models a hypothetical gunshot to show the effect of a single bullet if it were to hit a person in the chest. The second part features separate illustrations that depict the actual entrance and exit wounds of Noah and Peter, based on the public records we examined.

When writing an autopsy report, a medical examiner meticulously investigates every wound and every inch of a body. We have followed that rigor in creating this account.

By Sally Buzbee

In “Terror on repeat,” the latest story in our series examining the role of the AR-15 in American life, The Washington Post is taking the unusual step of publishing photographs and videos taken during the immediate aftermaths of some of the nation’s deadliest mass shootings.

Like other news organizations, we cover the effects of these tragedies when they occur. But because journalists generally do not have access to crime scenes and news organizations rarely if ever publish graphic content, most Americans have no way to understand the full scope of an AR-15’s destructive power or the extent of the trauma inflicted on victims, survivors and first responders when a shooter uses this weapon on people.

Drawing on the details of 11 mass killings from the past 11 years, this story is the result of a months-long effort to examine these episodes as a cumulative and relatively recent phenomenon that has upended communities across the country.

The story is largely narrated by those who experienced the shootings firsthand. It reveals the commonalities shared by each tragedy — the sudden transition from normal life to terror, then the onset of chaos, destruction and death, and, finally, the gruesome aftermath of investigation and cleanup.

Our decision to publish this story came after careful and extensive deliberation among the reporters and editors who worked on it, as well as senior leaders in our newsroom.

The goal was to balance two crucial objectives: to advance the public’s understanding of mass killers’ increasing use of this readily available weapon, which was originally designed for war, while being sensitive to victims’ families and communities directly affected by AR-15 shootings.

While many types of firearms, including other semiautomatic rifles, are used to commit violent crimes, the AR-15 has soared in popularity over the past two decades and is now the gun used more than any other in the country’s deadliest mass shootings.

In the end, we decided that there is public value in illuminating the profound and repeated devastation left by tragedies that are often covered as isolated news events but rarely considered as part of a broader pattern of violence.

We filed more than 30 public records requests in jurisdictions that had investigated AR-15 shootings since 2012, the year that included massacres at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., seeking medical examiner records, crime scene photographs, police body-camera footage and other investigative files. Most of our requests were rejected, with officials citing ongoing investigations or local laws preventing the release of such information. Officials in some communities released documents in response to our requests, including Dayton, Ohio, Aurora and Las Vegas.

Our reporters also gathered court records and other information that had previously been made public, and scoured social media and websites for photos and videos that may have surfaced after AR-15 shootings and that we could authenticate. They interviewed survivors and first responders willing to share their experiences, searched for official transcripts of witness testimony and compiled relevant interviews conducted in the past by Post journalists — amassing firsthand accounts that are crucial to this story.

The Post separately obtained a collection of evidence from the 2022 shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., compiled by state and federal police, some of which has not previously been made public. Those files include intensely graphic crime scene photos and videos taken moments after police entered the classrooms where 19 students and two teachers were killed.

Before viewing the graphic content, our reporters and editors participated in training by the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, learning best practices for viewing disturbing photos and discussing how publishing them could affect readers.

At the same time, reporters and editors engaged in intensive discussions over the merits of publishing disturbing photographs and videos. We engaged in conversations with advocates, including victims’ families, some of whom see a potential value in publishing content to increase public awareness and others who see such publication as dehumanizing and traumatizing.

Our team grappled with our own standard practices when it comes to publishing graphic content. We seek to be thoughtful about how doing so affects victims of violence and those who care about them, but we also recognize that at times disturbing photos and videos can add to an accurate understanding of events. We also realize that news outlets are often more comfortable publishing pictures of violence overseas, where some of our readers are less likely to have a direct connection.

For this project, we established one ground rule at the start of our reporting: If we sought to publish any pictures of identifiable bodies, we would seek permission from the families of the victims. Some families indicated they would be open to granting permission, but ultimately we decided that the potential harm to victims’ families outweighed any potential journalistic value of showing recognizable bodies. We ultimately included nine photos from the Uvalde files showing scenes inside the classrooms taken shortly after bodies were removed. In addition, we show sealed body bags in the school hallway.

The only photograph in this story showing bodies is one taken immediately after the 2017 shooting at the Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas. We felt the scene captured in this photo — a field strewn with the dead and wounded beneath the Las Vegas skyline — illustrates why witnesses often liken AR-15 shootings to American war zones. The perspective of the photograph, in which the victims are seen from a distance, makes it unlikely that individuals could be identified.

As we prepared to publish this story in recent days, we sought to be sensitive to the people most directly affected — providing advance notice to many families of victims, their representatives and community leaders so they could choose to avoid the coverage if they preferred.

We realize this story will be disturbing to readers, but we believe that publishing these images gives the public a new vantage point into the pattern of AR-15 mass killings in the United States. We hope that readers will share their feedback in the comments section at the end of the story.