by Corey G. Johnson

For years, America’s most iconic gun-makers turned over sensitive personal information on hundreds of thousands of customers to political operatives.

Those operatives, in turn, secretly employed the details to rally firearm owners to elect pro-gun politicians running for Congress and the White House, a ProPublica investigation has found.

The clandestine sharing of gun buyers’ identities — without their knowledge and consent — marked a significant departure for an industry that has long prided itself on thwarting efforts to track who owns firearms in America.

At least 10 gun industry businesses, including Glock, Smith & Wesson, Remington, Marlin and Mossberg, handed over names, addresses and other private data to the gun industry’s chief lobbying group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation. The NSSF then entered the gun owners’ details into what would become a massive database.

The data initially came from decades of warranty cards filled out by customers and returned to gun manufacturers for rebates and repair or replacement programs.

A ProPublica review of dozens of warranty cards from the 1970s through today found that some promised customers their information would be kept strictly confidential. Others said some information could be shared with third parties for marketing and sales. None of the cards informed buyers their details would be used by lobbyists and consultants to win elections.

Warranty card from Remington with common usage disclosure language The warranty card disclosure reads, “Thanks for taking the time to fill out this questionnaire. Your answers will be used for market research studies and reports — and will help us better serve you in the future. They will also allow you to receive important mailings and special offers from a number of fine companies whose products and services relate directly to the specific interests, hobbies, and other information indicated above.” (Obtained by ProPublica)

The gun industry launched the project approximately 17 months before the 2000 election as it grappled with a cascade of financial, legal and political threats. Within three years, the NSSF’s database — filled with warranty card information and supplemented with names from voter rolls and hunting licenses — contained at least 5.5 million people.

Jon Leibowitz, who was appointed to the Federal Trade Commission by President George W. Bush in 2004 and served as chair under President Barack Obama, reviewed several company privacy policies and warranty cards at ProPublica’s request. The commission has enforced privacy protections since the 1970s.

Leibowitz said firearms companies that handed over customer information may have breached federal and state prohibitions against unfair and deceptive business behavior and could face civil sanctions.

“This is super troubling,” said Leibowitz, who left the commission in 2013. “You shouldn’t take people’s data without them knowing what you’re doing with it — and give it or sell it to others. It is the customer’s information, not the company’s.”

The undisclosed collection of intimate gun owner information is in sharp contrast with the NSSF’s public image.

Founded in 1961 and currently based in Shelton, Connecticut, the trade organization represents thousands of firearms and ammunition manufacturers, distributors, retailers, publishers and shooting ranges. It is funded by membership dues, donations, sponsored events and government grants. While not as well known as the chief lobbyist for gun owners, the National Rifle Association, the NSSF is respected and influential in business, political and gun-rights communities.

For two decades, the group positioned itself as an unwavering watchdog of gun owner privacy. The organization has raged against government and corporate attempts to amass information on gun buyers. As recently as this year, the NSSF pushed for laws that would prohibit credit card companies from creating special codes for firearms dealers, claiming the codes could be used to create a registry of gun purchasers.

As a group, gun owners are fiercely protective about their personal information. Many have good reasons. Their ranks include police officers, judges, domestic violence victims and others who have faced serious threats of harm.

In a statement, the NSSF defended its data collection. Any suggestion of “unethical or illegal behavior is entirely unfounded,” the statement said, adding that “these activities are, and always have been, entirely legal and within the terms and conditions of any individual manufacturer, company, data broker, or other entity.”

The gun industry companies either did not respond to ProPublica or declined to comment, noting they are under different ownership today and could not find evidence that customer information was previously shared. One ammunition maker named in the NSSF documents as a source of data said it never gave the trade group or its vendors any “personal information.”

ProPublica established the existence of the secret program after reviewing tens of thousands of internal corporate and NSSF emails, reports, invoices and contracts. We also interviewed scores of former gun executives, NSSF employees, NRA lobbyists and political consultants in the U.S. and the United Kingdom.

The insider accounts and trove of records lay bare a multidecade effort to mobilize gun owners as a political force. Confidential information from gun customers was central to what NSSF called its voter education program. The initiative involved sending letters, postcards and later emails to persuade people to vote for the firearms industry’s preferred political candidates. Because privacy laws shield the names of firearm purchasers from public view, the data NSSF obtained gave it a unique ability to identify and contact large numbers of gun owners or shooting sports enthusiasts.

It also allowed the NSSF to figure out whether a gun buyer was a registered voter. Those who weren’t would be encouraged to register and cast their ballots for industry-supported politicians.

From 2000 to 2016, the organization poured more than $20 million into its voter education campaign, which was initially called Vote Your Sport and today is known as GunVote. The NSSF trumpeted the success of its electioneering in reports, claiming credit for putting both George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump in the White House and firearm-friendly lawmakers in the U.S. House and Senate.

In April 2016, a contractor on NSSF’s voter education project delivered a large cache of data to Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm credited with playing a key role in Trump’s narrow victory that year. The company later went out of business amid a global scandal over its handling of confidential consumer data.

The data given to Cambridge included 20 years of gun owners’ warranty card information as well as a separate database of customers from Cabela’s, a sporting goods retailer with approximately 70 stores in the U.S. and Canada.

Cambridge combined the NSSF data with a wide array of sensitive particulars obtained from commercial data brokers. It included people’s income, their debts, their religion, where they filled prescriptions, their children’s ages and purchases they made for their kids. For women, it revealed intimate elements such as whether the underwear and other clothes they purchased were plus size or petite.

The information was used to create psychological profiles of gun owners and assign scores to behavioral traits, such as neuroticism and agreeableness. The profiles helped Cambridge tailor the NSSF’s political messages to voters based on their personalities.

GunVote is in full swing this year, but it is unclear what role, if any, the database is playing in the election.

The pro-gun candidates the NSSF helped send to the White House and Congress in the last two decades have secured major political victories for the industry. They blocked Congress from extending a ban on assault weapons sold to civilians and granted gun companies sweeping legal immunity from lawsuits related to the misuse of firearms.

As the body count from mass shootings at schools and elsewhere in the nation has climbed, those politicians have halted proposals to resurrect the assault weapons ban and enact other gun control measures, even those popular with voters, such as raising the minimum age to buy an assault rifle from 18 to 21.

In response to questions from ProPublica, the NSSF acknowledged it had used the customer information in 2016 for “creating a data model” of potentially sympathetic voters. But the group said the “existence and proven success of that model then obviated the need to continue data acquisition via private channels and today, NSSF uses only commercial-source data to which the data model is then applied.”

The NSSF declined to elaborate or answer additional questions, including whether the trade group notified people in its database about how it was using their information.

In 2022, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., sent the NSSF a list of questions after reading leaked documents that made a passing reference to the database. In its answers, the NSSF would not acknowledge the database’s existence.

“The hypocrisy of warning about a governmental registry and at the same time establishing a private registry for political purposes is stunning,” Blumenthal said after learning about the program from ProPublica. “Absolutely staggering.”

“We Didn’t Have Any Friends in That Room”

It started with a school shooting.

On Jan. 17, 1989, a man armed with a Chinese-made AK-47 walked onto the campus of an elementary school in Stockton, California. He fired more than 100 rounds in approximately two minutes, killing five children and injuring more than two dozen others.

The shooter had an extensive criminal history but had no trouble buying the weapon from an Oregon gun store. Oregon and federal laws didn’t require background checks for purchasing semiautomatic rifles like an AK-47.

The rampage shocked the nation.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives suspended imports on foreign made semiautomatic weapons. President George H.W. Bush, an avid hunter and NRA member, made the suspension permanent, blocking 43 types of internationally made weapons from being sold in the U.S. California banned more than 50 brands and models of rifles, shotguns and pistols. Chief among them was the TEC-9, a semiautomatic pistol popularized in TV shows like “Miami Vice” that had become the weapon of choice for gangs and drug dealers. New Jersey passed legislation forbidding the sale of TEC-9s in the state.

A young lobbyist representing the weapon’s small Miami-based manufacturer, Intratec, watched gun executives testify at a hostile congressional hearing in the early 1990s. He wondered how the industry could fight back. “We didn’t have any friends in that room,” Richard Feldman recalled recently. “I thought if the people who actually used and liked the TEC-9 were here, maybe we could have an impact.”

Richard Feldman at his home in Rindge, New Hampshire. Feldman, while working as a gun industry lobbyist, originated the idea of using product registration forms as a political tool to mobilize gun owners. The National Shooting Sports Foundation later used warranty cards and other data to locate and persuade hunters, shooters and gun enthusiasts to vote for the industry’s preferred candidates. (T.J. Kirkpatrick for ProPublica)

After the hearing, Feldman said, he asked Intratec for the firm’s warranty cards. Almost immediately, Intratec sent him boxes upon boxes for his review. They contained more than 90,000 names of owners across the country. Building a database would be a monumental task, one beyond the resources of the lobbying organization Feldman worked for. But Feldman said he saw the idea’s potential for the gun industry. About 4 in 10 households nationwide owned guns, and only a small fraction of those people belonged to the NRA. If the massive numbers of gun enthusiasts could be mobilized, Feldman thought, the fight over gun control would be fairer. (Intratec went out of business in 2001.)

Then on July 1, 1993, a failed businessman, armed with two TEC-9s and a grudge, killed eight people and injured six inside a law office in San Francisco. At the time, the tragedy was the deadliest shooting in Bay Area history, and again the nation’s attention was focused on high-powered guns.

With the support of President Bill Clinton’s White House and over the vehement protests of the gun industry and the NRA, Congress banned the sale of assault weapons for 10 years and required background checks on firearms purchasers. In a sign of bipartisan support, dozens of Republican lawmakers voted for the assault weapon ban, and it was endorsed by former Presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

Worried about the gathering momentum of gun control, Feldman said sometime in the mid-1990s he shared the warranty card idea with James Jay Baker, a lawyer who had been the chief lobbyist for the NRA. Baker at that time represented the firearms industry and reported directly to the president of the NSSF.

First image: Wayne LaPierre, CEO and executive vice president of the National Rifle Association of America; James Jay Baker, then executive director of the NRA’s Institute of Legislative Affairs; and Feldman at an NRA convention in 1992. Second image: Feldman with President Bill Clinton and U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno at a White House ceremony in 1997. (Courtesy of Richard Feldman)

Feldman flew to Washington, D.C., and met Baker at his small office. As Feldman explained the political benefits of an industrywide warranty card project, Baker became excited, Feldman remembered.

“He loved the idea,” Feldman said. (Baker didn’t respond to messages and hung up when a ProPublica reporter reached him by phone.)

By June 1997, Bushnell, which makes rifle accessories, had given the NSSF a list of customers who had filled out warranty cards, according to an NSSF monthly report to its members. (A spokesperson for Vista Outdoor, which acquired Bushnell in 2014, said the firm has “no evidence that such information was shared under prior ownership” and that the “NSSF reports that no such information was ever shared by Bushnell.”)

In a letter sent to gun industry executives two months later, Baker complained that only two companies had provided data. The letter, sent to the leaders of Marlin, Remington, Smith & Wesson, and 17 other major companies, urged manufacturers to join the warranty card sharing and stressed the need for more tools to politically mobilize gun owners.

Baker urges firearms industry leaders to share their warranty cards The letter from James Baker reads, “I’m told that only two companies have forwarded their database, and unless we wish to rely upon other groups’ efforts, this as-yet-uncompiled database will be our single greatest resource for both grassroots work and PAC development. Anything you can do to assist in the compilation effort would be greatly appreciated.” (Excerpt of a letter from James Jay Baker to members of the Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers’ Institute executive committee. Obtained by ProPublica.)

“This as-yet-uncompiled database will be our single greatest resource for both grassroots work and PAC [Political Action Committee] development,” Baker wrote. “Anything you can do to assist in the compilation effort would be greatly appreciated.”

“Initial Participation in the Database Has Been Very Positive”

It was another school shooting that accelerated gun control reforms in the late 1990s and propelled a dramatic change in the way the industry would respond.

On April 20, 1999, two teenagers stalked the halls of Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. They wore black trench coats and were armed with a TEC-9, a carbine rifle, two shotguns and pipe bombs.

The pair sprayed 188 rounds of ammunition, killing 13 people and injuring 24 others, before ending their murderous spree in suicide.

The news roiled the titans of America’s gun companies. They were already panicked over a succession of cataclysmic threats. Domestic production sagged throughout the decade as the ranks of their prime customer base, hunters, grew older and fewer.

Two months before the Columbine massacre, a federal jury for the first time held 15 firearms makers liable for shootings in New York. The verdict came in a lawsuit that used a novel theory arguing that manufacturer negligence was a key contributor to the violence. A procession of cities, aided by gun control groups and high-powered law firms, filed similar suits that threatened to force much of the industry into bankruptcy. Two companies — including one of the nation’s largest handgun makers — closed.

Now, in the wake of the Colorado school shooting, congressional leaders were calling for tighter gun restrictions and expanded background checks. Vice President Al Gore would make gun control a central part of his presidential campaign the next year.

For weeks, firearms industry executives from as far as Oregon and New York flew into NSSF meetings held in Bridgeton, Missouri; Dulles, Virginia; and Phoenix to hammer out an action plan. They eliminated the NSSF’s self-imposed prohibition on campaigning and agreed to hire lobbyists for a Washington, D.C., office, according to internal NSSF board records.

The lurch toward electioneering represented a seismic shift for the NSSF. Since 1961, the organization’s bylaws blocked any involvement in politics. For most of that time, gun companies had been content to allow the NRA and other groups to speak publicly on behalf of firearms interests.

In late 1999, 22 executives were tapped to oversee a new group created by the NSSF, the Hunting and Shooting Sports Heritage Foundation. The foundation’s purpose was to defend the gun industry from the legal onslaught and transform its public image, according to NSSF records.

In an interview with ProPublica, Larry Keane, senior vice president of the NSSF since 2000, downplayed the scope and significance of the database. Only two manufacturers provided warranty cards to the NSSF, he said. The trade group, he initially claimed, did not keep the information but simply converted the warranty cards into data that was returned to the manufacturers.

But internal organization records paint a different picture.

“Initial participation in the database has been very positive and we will have 400,000 names on file and available by year’s end,” said a November 1999 NSSF board document. Five manufacturers had already turned over data from warranty cards. One state conservation agency had offered hunting license information, according to the document, which didn’t name the agency.

“We also propose to sell the database to NSSF members, as well as non-shooting related companies and organizations to offset the cost of data entry and maintenance,” the record said.

A draft copy of the policies and procedures for the Hunting and Shooting Sports participant database said purchasers of the list could buy a segment or all of it.

“At no time will any outside party be provided with any information relating to the source of the names,” the draft said. The document did not address customer consent or privacy issues.

The NSSF did not respond to a ProPublica question asking whether it had ever sold the data.

The database drew on warranty cards, hunting licenses and NSSF mailing lists, the draft of the policies and procedures said. The customer items captured included first and last names, addresses and dates of birth. Additionally, it would include age of the gun owners, gender, income, education, email addresses, profession, number of firearms, household size, dates of gun purchases, whether they were a hunter or target shooter, and average days at the gun range or on the hunt.

Gun company warranty cards often asked detailed personal questions of their customers

Various manufacturers inquired about customers’ major life events, annual income, education and occupation.

(Obtained by ProPublica)

Nearly 100 companies committed a percentage of their sales to the Hunting and Shooting Sports Heritage Foundation. The foundation raised about $10 million in the months before the 2000 election, according to NSSF documents, and spent $6 million on direct mail, TV and radio ads for the presidential and congressional races. The NSSF’s first-ever election campaign, Vote Your Sport, was born.

The goal was to galvanize gun owner, shooting sports enthusiast and hunter support for George W. Bush and the Republican ticket. The NSSF picked 11 states — Arkansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Washington. If turnout was successful in those areas, Bush would pick up nearly half of the 270 electoral votes needed to win.

Vote Your Sport received a boost when retailer Cabela’s decided to help. Founded in 1961 and headquartered in Sidney, Nebraska, the company specialized in selling guns and related accessories to hunters, shooters and outdoor enthusiasts. On its website, the Hunting and Shooting Sports Heritage Foundation publicly listed manufacturers, dealers and other contributors; Cabela’s was not included. But an NSSF summary of its electioneering said the retailer shared data on 356,000 customers.

Cabela’s privacy policies in 2000 told customers their information would not be shared for commercial purposes but their postal addresses could be given to “reputable companies” in “order to keep you informed of other outdoor products and manufacturers.” There was no mention of using the information for political purposes.

Contrasting Cabela’s data sharing with its privacy policy

NSSF board documents and privacy policy excerpts

First image: Excerpt from documents given to NSSF board members for a Nov. 14, 2000, meeting in Tampa, Florida. Second and third images: Cabelas.com as it appeared on Nov. 14, 2000. (First image: Obtained by ProPublica. Second and third images: Screenshot of cabelas.com via web.archive.org.)

Bass Pro Shops, which bought Cabela’s in 2017, said in a statement that the company had been unable to find evidence that Cabela’s had taken any action “that would violate our long-standing policy of protecting our customers’ privacy.”

Less than two weeks before the 2000 election, the Vote Your Sport campaign used Cabela’s names and a list of hunters purchased from a data broker company to send mail to more than 2.5 million people in the targeted states.

It’s difficult to assess Vote Your Sport’s impact. But the NSSF claimed in a public report the next year that it was a “critical component” of Bush’s victory.

“Given the closeness of the election, it’s easy to imagine a different outcome” without the gun industry’s get-out-the-vote effort, the report said.

About 3 million more people in the targeted states voted than in 1996. Seven million hunters and shooters lived in the 11 states, the NSSF estimated. An overwhelming majority of those voters nationwide favored Bush, according to the report, which cited a survey of hunters and shooters. Fifty-two percent of respondents said they received a Vote Your Sport letter and supported the message.

The NSSF was now fully in the election business.

A Vote Your Sport advertisement created by the NSSF in 2004 (Downloaded from voteyoursport.com via web.archive.org)

Mark Joslyn, a professor of political science at the University of Kansas who has studied the influence of gun ownership on political behavior, said voter surveys show a massive shift occurred in 2000. Although registered Democrats and independents together account for the majority of gun owners, Bush won 66% of the gun owner vote, he said. And in every election since — even in 2008 and 2012 when the national electorate picked Barack Obama as president — the top choice of firearm owners remained the Republican Party, Joslyn said.

Ken Strasma, former national data director for John Kerry and Barack Obama, said rumors had swirled for years in Democratic circles that Republican campaigns were aided by some special database.

“There hasn’t been a publicly available list like that. We certainly haven’t gotten anything from the NSSF,” Strasma said. “They want to keep their advantage by only sharing it with the Republican side.”

“There Will Be No Looking Back”

Six months after the 2000 election, more than 100 executives from gun-makers and shooting sports organizations gathered for an invitation-only lunch in Kansas City, Missouri.

Addressing the crowd was Chris LaCivita, then the political director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee who now serves as campaign manager for Trump. LaCivita praised the industry’s election work but warned the executives they would “face ferocious opposition” if they didn’t intensify.

“Without the support of the [industry] I think it’s safe to say that we would be suffering through a continuation of the most anti-gun administration in the history of our nation,” LaCivita said. “If you can repeat your success in 2002 and 2004, there will be no looking back.”

(In response to questions from ProPublica, LaCivita did not say whether he knew about the database when he gave his speech but said he does not support “a database of gun owners, but rather 2nd Amendment supporters. There is a difference.”)

In the months after Bush’s razor-thin victory, the NSSF expanded the database. Boxes of warranty cards were regularly delivered to NSSF headquarters at the time in Newtown, Connecticut, a white colonial-style, multilevel building that rested on top of a hilly road, according to interviews with several former NSSF employees who worked on the project.

On the first floor was a huge stuffed bear, shot and killed by an NSSF president during an Alaskan hunt. A vault that once belonged to a bank doubled as a records room and a shrine to guns, displaying a vast assortment of old and new pistols, rifles and shotguns.

At times, the NSSF hired college-aged temporary workers to enter data. Posted up in a small, nondescript room on the second floor, they sat at flashing LCD computer screens on long tables. Nearby, boxes full of aged, fading warranty cards were stacked high. An NSSF staffer sometimes watched to ensure the temps didn’t goof off.

Violating their promises of strict confidentiality on warranty cards or failing to mention that consumer information could be given to the NSSF may qualify as a deceptive practice under the Federal Trade Commission Act, privacy and legal experts said. Under the law, companies must follow their privacy policies and be clear with consumers about how they will use their information.

Typically, the FTC focuses enforcement on companies that profit from their misuse of consumer information. Leibowitz, the former chair of the commission, said gun-makers could claim they didn’t share the data for a commercial purpose or to make money. But, he said, sharing the information with a third party in a way that would mislead a reasonable person could still violate the law, regardless of the motive.

The database contained 3.4 million records by May 2001, according to an NSSF board document. Of those, 523,000 came from warranty cards supplied by the group’s members. The additional names were acquired from lists of voters and hunting licenses.

By February 2002, the database, now called Data Hunter, had grown to include 5.5 million names of hunters, shooters, outdoor enthusiasts and other voters, according to another NSSF board record. Manufacturers contributing names included Glock, Marlin Firearms, Mossberg, Savage, Sigarms and Smith & Wesson. The document said other sources included Remington, Hornady, Alliant Powder and USA Shooting, which has trained Olympic sharpshooters since the 1970s and oversees local, state and national rifle, pistol and shotgun competitions.

An update on NSSF’s database in 2002 Excerpt from documents given to NSSF Board members for a Feb. 28, 2002, meeting in Orlando. The selected text reads, “In 2001, NSSF developed a master relational database of hunters, shooters, outdoor enthusiasts and voters called Data Hunter. Our database now includes 5.5 million names, many of which have been enriched with appended data.” (Obtained by ProPublica)

Alliant Powder said it had “not provided personal information to the NSSF or any of its vendors.” Glock, Mossberg, Savage, Smith & Wesson, Olin Winchester and Hornady did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did Sig Sauer, which now owns Sigarms. An executive with Sturm, Ruger & Co., which bought Marlin Firearms in 2020, said “we cannot, and will not, comment on something Marlin may or may not have done 20 years ago.”

Remington has since been split into two companies and sold. Remarms, which owns the old firearms division, said it was unaware of the company’s workings at the time. The other portion of the company is now owned by Remington Ammunition, which said it had “not provided personal information to the NSSF or any of its vendors.” Two other gun companies identified in the NSSF board document either no longer exist or did not respond to a request for comment.

The records reviewed by ProPublica do not say where the NSSF focused its Vote Your Sport campaign in 2002 or provide exact insight about how the customer data was deployed.

But an email written by a Cambridge Analytica executive in 2016 mentioned that an NSSF contractor had been running the trade group’s voter education campaign “since 2002 and it has been almost entirely direct mail.” The contractor, he wrote, “was leveraging a database of fire arms manufacturing warranty cards (collected by the fire arms companies) to determine his targeting in key states (millions of people, if they bought a gun, and what kind of gun they bought).”

The 2002 midterm elections saw Republicans pick up seats in the Senate and House to control both chambers. Two years later, Bush won reelection and Republicans gained another four seats in the Senate as staunch supporters of the gun industry were swept to victory.

The new Congress and the White House rolled back many of the gains gun control advocates had made in the 1990s.

Despite preelection promises to support a renewal of the assault weapons ban, Bush took no action as the ban expired in 2004 and was silent as Republicans stymied reauthorization attempts.

His appointment of John Ashcroft — an ally of the gun industry and the NRA — as attorney general led to a reversal of the federal government’s philosophy and regulatory approach toward guns. Under Ashcroft, the Department of Justice for the first time interpreted the Second Amendment as guaranteeing an individual right to gun ownership, and not a state militia privilege, as had been its position since the 1970s.

Ashcroft stopped FBI agents investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks from comparing the names of suspected terrorists against federal gun purchase records. And citing the privacy of law-abiding gun purchasers, he reduced how long the FBI could retain background check records from 90 days to a single business day.

Bush and Republican leaders in Congress also championed and passed a landmark bill that gave the gun industry broad immunity from the litigation that threatened its survival. The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act wiped out virtually all of the remaining city lawsuits filed against the industry in the late 1990s.

George W. Bush signs the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act on Oct. 26, 2005. (White House photo by Paul Morse, via the George W. Bush Presidential Library & Museum)

In the years since, lawmakers backed by the gun companies have squashed attempts to ban assault-style weapons and expand background checks, even after high-profile mass shootings. Emboldened by legal immunity, some manufacturers aggressively marketed assault weapons like the AR-15. In the last decade, AR-15-style rifles have generated more than $1 billion in sales, according to a 2022 review by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.

Assault weapons are used in less than a third of mass shootings but account for a much higher portion of their deaths and injuries.

In 2012, less than 3 miles from the NSSF’s Connecticut headquarters at the time, a 20-year-old man armed with an assault rifle killed 26 people, including 20 children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Four years later, 49 people were slain and 53 wounded at a Florida nightclub by a man shooting an assault rifle who had pledged allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State group.

The next year, a gunman at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas opened fire on a crowd attending a country music festival, killing 60 and wounding more than 400. Authorities said he used 14 assault rifles to carry out the slaughter.

On Valentine’s Day 2018, a former student of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School walked onto the Parkland, Florida, campus armed with an AR-15-style rifle and murdered 14 students and three faculty members. He had legally purchased the weapon a year earlier at the age of 18.

The mass killing — the deadliest shooting at a U.S. high school to this day — focused a spotlight on federal law and the laws in many states allowing teenagers to buy rifles modeled on weapons of war. Within weeks, two congressional bills proposed raising the federal minimum age to buy an assault weapon from 18 to 21. Federal law already requires that handgun buyers be 21. Both proposals died quietly in committee.

Over the next few years, at least three more attempts in Congress to raise the minimum age failed to make it as far as a floor vote. Polls taken at the time show an overwhelming majority of Americans supported such a proposal.

Then, in May 2022, an 18-year-old white supremacist who had legally bought an AR-15-style assault rifle killed 10 Black Americans at a market in Buffalo, New York. At the time, the state restricted owning or buying a handgun to people 21 or older, but the law didn’t apply to rifles.

Ten days after the mass killings in Buffalo, another 18-year-old slaughtered 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. The shooter had purchased two AR-15-style rifles and carried out the attack within days of his 18th birthday.

A Pew Research Center survey last year again found overwhelming support among both Democrats and Republicans for raising the minimum age to buy a firearm. But since 2022, at least five more proposals to enact such a change in Congress have gone nowhere.

Last month at a high school in Georgia, a 14-year-old used an assault rifle to kill two students and two teachers and wound seven more people. Law enforcement sources told news outlets that the child’s father purchased the weapon for his son as a gift. Georgia law generally forbids anyone under 18 from possessing a handgun, but the age limit does not apply to rifles. Federal law similarly sets the minimum age to possess a handgun at 18 but has no restriction for possessing long guns.

Today’s gun landscape looks nothing like it did in 1994. Then, Americans owned 192 million firearms. The most recent best estimate now puts the number at 393 million, more than one firearm for every person in the U.S.

For the first time in history, guns are the No. 1 killer of children and teens. And, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more people died from gunshots in a single year in 2021 than ever before.

In June, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared gun violence a public health crisis. He recommended assault weapon bans and universal background checks as strategies to bring down the death toll.

Collage image of Trump: Photo by Brooks Kraft/Getty Images. Collage image of Bush: Photo by John Edwards. Warranty cards obtained by ProPublica.

Gun images and other magazine archival imagery: Shooting Industry Magazine (August 1999); The Small Arms Review (April 2000, October 2001); Guns & Ammo (May 2000); Shooting Times (February 2000, April 2000, June 2000, August 2000, October 2000, November 2000).

Design and development by Anna Donlan.

This post was originally published on ProPublica.