The symbiotic relationship between the gun industry and the government goes all the way back to the 1790s when the Founding Fathers created an open-source think tank in Massachusetts, the Springfield Armory. Its mission: Make the best guns in the world.
Brian DeLay: From the founding of the country, the state and the arms industry have been partners. They've been intertwined. The state has been the patron of the arms industry. It was true in the 1790s, in during George Washington's presidency, and it's true today. Alain Stephens: At the time, the revolutionaries sourced by smuggling, making due with weapons coming out of France.
Alain Stephens: But the other location is Springfield, Massachusetts. Nestled in a river valley, with rich farmland, the location provided a number of tactical advantages. It’s at the meeting point of four rivers; it’s a midpoint between a bunch of other cities: Boston to the east, Albany and Montreal to the north, and New York to the South.
[Scott Gausen: Scott Gausen. I'm the education specialist for Springfield Armory National Historic Site in Springfield, Massachusetts.] [Newsreel: In 1781, a New England farm boy, named Eli Whitney, was beginning to make a name for himself as a manufacturer of hat pins for ladies bonnets.] [Kevin Sweeney: You know, everyone was aware of what everyone was doing, and to an extent the government was promoting that.]
[Scott Gausen: I mean, go to Raytheon today and ask 'em to wander through their facility, right? Like, it's not, it's not gonna happen.] [News anchor: U.S. gun manufacturers made 187 percent more firearms in 2020 than they did just 20 years ago.] Alain Stephens: Unless you’re really into guns, you probably don’t know who Richard Fitzpatrick is. Well, he’s one of the industry's most influential inventors of the modern age. You probably wouldn’t know anything else about him from searching online, where there’s almost no trace of him. There's a few pictures, one with him in a cowboy hat, looking like the Marlboro man. Apparently, he's a fan of Ayn Rand, classic guitars, the blues, and flying helicopters.
Alain Stephens: Magpul’s main offering was a series of slickly designed and innovative polymer magazines, available in a variety of colors. The first reliable, plastic, STANAG 30-round magazine to hit the market. Within a few years, they started showing up in images of Special Forces operators combating the war on terror. You probably don’t spend your time pouring over photos of guns being used in conflict zones.
Alain Stephens: Fitzpatrick himself would testify against the law at the state capitol in Denver. One Republican state senator would even remind lawmakers that these were the magazines used to kill Osama Bin Laden. But in the end, Democrats pushing for gun reform would prevail: HB 1224 would pass and be signed into law by Governor John Hickenlooper. And Magpul was faced with a startling conclusion — their chief product was now illegal in their own home state.
Alain Stephens: In Magpul-friendly Texas, Fitzpatrick would finally tap into that mainline of funding the company had been waiting for for all those years — the Department of Defense. After moving to Texas, the company would reap $37 million to supply the Army, Marines, and Air Force — essentially the world's largest fighting force — with boatloads of their little bullet boxes and other weapon accessories. So yeah.
Brian DeLay: All of us are investing in guns, all the time, through our tax dollars. These very gun companies that are simultaneously pursuing and getting big state contracts at multiple levels are also bankrolling the NRA. And they are pouring money into, you know, decades-long, broad-based effort to roll back firearms restrictions on all kinds of fronts.
Carol Anderson: The issue of protecting the United States of America defined as white and defined as white males with guns. And so those ideas were anathema, forbidden for Black people.The Gun Machine is a production of WBUR in partnership with The Trace. I’m your host, Alain Stephens. If you want more on this, or any of our other episodes, you should visit the thetrace.org/gunmachine or wbur.org/gunmachine.