Assault firearms with ‘phenomenal lethality’ have flooded the US market, with firms making more than $1bn profit in the last decade
In September 2021, the gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson announced that it was relocating from the Massachusetts town in which it was incorporated in 1852 to a new location – Maryville in Blount county, Tennessee.
“We have been left with no other alternative,” the company complained, pointing to proposals in the Massachusetts legislature that would extend the state’s ban on AR-15 style rifles to the selling of all semi-automatic firearms. Some 750 jobs would be moved to Tennessee, the gun maker said, for a number of reasons, the first of which was that the state supported the second amendment right to bear arms.
Bill Lee, Tennessee’s Republican governor who has overseen the loosening of state gun laws in recent years including signing into law the ability of most adults to carry handguns without a permit, was ecstatic. “We’re proud this company has chosen to relocate to Blount Co,” he gloated.
Eighteen months later, and 180 miles away from Smith & Wesson’s sparkling new headquarters, a shooter entered a private Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee on Monday and gunned down three nine-year-old children and three adult staff. The killer was armed with two semi-automatic firearms – an AR-15 style rifle and a semi-automatic pistol, both of which would be banned under the Massachusetts bill.
The shooter also carried a third weapon, a handgun. Manufacturer: Smith & Wesson.
In the wake of the Nashville tragedy, social media platforms have lit up with chatter about the shooter identifying as a transgender man. But another, far more common and far more urgent, factor lies behind the carnage at the Covenant school: the sheer prevalence of assault firearms based on military designs that are marketed to American civilians by the gun industry.
