TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. How did we get to the point where there is a mass shooting nearly every day, and yet it keeps getting easier to purchase guns, including assault rifles? That's what my guest, Mike McIntire, has been trying to track. He's an investigative reporter for The New York Times and has covered gun violence during much of his four-decade career in journalism.
His new book, "Ricochet: Guns, Greed, And The American Way Of Violence," includes new insights into the National Rifle Association and the gun rights movement. They're based in part on NRA documents he got access to, as well as the papers of the late John Dingell Jr., a longtime congressman who, while in office, simultaneously served on the board of the NRA. Dingell was a leader in popularizing the interpretation of the Second Amendment as applying to individual rights as opposed to the collective rights of a well-regulated militia.
McIntire's book also includes some fascinating early history, including how controversial the Second Amendment was at the time it was written. Among the other subjects McIntire has been covering for The Times is a recent story about ICE's legal cases against people charged with assaulting ICE agents and how those cases are crumbling in the courts. McIntire has been part of teams that have won three Pulitzer Prizes.
Mike McIntire, welcome to FRESH AIR. I really learned a lot from your book, so I'm glad you wrote it. Let's start with the AR-15 case before the Supreme Court 'cause they, at the end of this previous term, agreed to hear it, so we'll probably get a verdict at the end of next term, and this case is going to determine the standard for how the legality of gun laws are determined. And the question is the use of the word common use. Can you explain what the wording is about?
MIKE MCINTIRE: Thanks, Terry, for having me. Yeah, this particular case that the Supreme Court's agreed to take up promises to be pretty controversial and, I think, impactful. As you pointed out, you know, when they take up these arguments in the fall and eventually come to a decision, the outcome is likely to turn not on big debates about public safety, but on this rather arcane technical question of whether or not an AR-15 can be considered to be in common use. This is a test that the Supreme Court itself created in an earlier gun rights case, and essentially what it says is that if a gun is commonly used - if a lot of people have it, it's popular - it's protected by the Second Amendment and can't be banned. And I think it's likely, given the court's recent history, that they probably will decide - the majority will - to overturn these bans.
There's nothing in the Constitution - the text or history of the Second Amendment - that reflects this idea of a common-use testing. That is one of several things that the modern-era Supreme Court, since the Heller decision in 2008, has created to try to help lower courts navigate the possession and use of firearms - what's legal and what's not.
GROSS: But how is a jury supposed to decide what common use means? And why should that be a determining factor? I mean, it could be a marketing thing - like, the guns with the best marketing are the guns that get to be most legal. (Laughter) Is that the way it's going to work?
MCINTIRE: This is a question that the federal appeals court in Illinois actually raised a few years ago when this very issue came up, and the appellate justices took a very dim view - or at least a couple of them did - of the common-use test, and they raised some of the issues you just did. And one is just a simple logic problem, OK? So let's say, in the case of fully automatic machine guns, for example, which are essentially - not - I don't want to say outlawed, but they're very, very difficult to get in the United States. That was because of a law passed in 1934. Had that law not been passed, I have no doubt that a lot of gun enthusiasts would love to have a machine gun, and they probably would be in common use today, and therefore they would be considered protected under the Second Amendment.
So this kind of circular logic of when, you know, constitutionality kind of winks on and off depending on how popular something is, is an issue that has really kind of confounded lower courts. And it will be interesting to see how the Supreme Court tries to clarify that, if at all.
GROSS: Another thing is, like, there's - what? - at least three justices who consider themselves originalists, which means reading the Constitution as literally and as close to the Founders' intent as possible. And the Founders seemed to have no intent to determine the legality of guns based on common use. Where does that come from?
MCINTIRE: So this arose from the Heller decision that I mentioned earlier, in 2008, which was a landmark case in which the Supreme Court, for the first time, found that the Second Amendment did protect an individual right to possess a gun, in that particular case for defense - self-defense - at home. That was a big break from what had sort of been the conventional wisdom that the Second Amendment is intended to do what it says it does, which is to preserve the ability of citizens to come together in the form of a well-regulated militia in defense of the state because the Founders were deeply fearful of having a professional standing army that could be used against the people.
And in the Heller decision, Justice Antonin Scalia looked back to one of the very few cases in the past in which the Supreme Court ever even took up the Second Amendment. It just didn't come up very much. And it was a 1939 case involving a career criminal who had violated the law by possessing a sawed-off shotgun without paying the proper registration fee and licensing requirement. And the challenge to that law was that the gun - in this case a sawed-off shotgun - was protected by the Second Amendment.
The court decided it was not, but they had a very cramped, kind of odd decision (laughter) that explained it. And what they said was - is that they looked back and thought about, would this be the kind of gun that would have been commonly used by a citizen militia? Would it have been useful for a militia? And they decided, no, it would not, and therefore it was not protected by the Second Amendment.
This is kind of a passing reference in a very short and kind of convoluted decision that Scalia seized upon and then turned into a test which has been used going forward ever since. So there's a lot of debate amongst constitutional scholars about the wisdom of that particular decision that he made and how the test has been used and deployed by lower courts.
GROSS: Say the justices uphold the decision that if a gun is in common use, it's OK - it's legal to sell it, it's legal to buy. How would that change the future of guns?
MCINTIRE: Well, it's sort of a case-by-case basis in terms of the type of firearms we're talking about. So the Heller decision was looking specifically at handguns that were being kept at home for self-defense purposes, and it's pretty clear that, you know, there are a lot of them out there. You can say they're in common use. The AR-15 is a slightly different animal because it's - first of all, you know, the pedigree of it only goes back to the 1950s, and it's really only taken off as sort of a cultural icon among gun owners since the early 2000s. A number of things happened during that period that caused a huge escalation of AR-15 type weapons in circulation. They went from maybe 400,000 or so that were sold, manufactured and imported in 2006 to the millions each year by the time you get to, like, 2010 and beyond.
So there are, no doubt, a lot of them in circulation, but I think the question becomes what qualifies as common use, right? I mean, this is what some lower courts have been grappling with. As a percentage of the people in the United States population-wise, the number of people who actually have an AR-15 is quite low. But then within the group that - the gun owners, there's - you know, it's quite popular.
So these are the kind of conundrums that I think the court has created for itself that they need to sort out. And I think a lot of people on both ends of the divide when it comes to gun rights and gun control are looking to this case to do it.
But I do think, given statements that some of the justices have already made in the past, including Justice Kavanaugh - who, as an aside, in an earlier case just sort of mentioned he thought that AR-15s were unquestionably in common use - I think it's likely that they're going to decide that this type of gun is and that therefore these bans are unconstitutional.
GROSS: So much of, like, gun rights and gun-safety laws depend on interpretations of the Second Amendment. Let's look at the Second Amendment 'cause you have stories of the Second Amendment that I was not familiar with, and I assume there will be other people who aren't either. So when the Bill of Rights was written, the Second Amendment was controversial among the people writing the Bill of Rights. What made it controversial?
MCINTIRE: Well, at the time that the Founders were drafting first the Constitution and then the Bill of Rights, there was a lot of concern about the role of the citizens' militia going forward because a big fear of the founding generation was that a professional standing army could be misused by a despotic ruler against the people. And a militia was the answer to avoiding that, they felt. And so that was an existential threat that they wanted to deal with. And the Second Amendment...
GROSS: 'Cause a militia could stand up to the Army that was...
MCINTIRE: Yes. The militia...
GROSS: ...Imposing...
MCINTIRE: ...Could stand up to the Army.
GROSS: ...On the states. Or?
MCINTIRE: And it could also serve in the role of defending the state against an external threat. So it was sort of intended to be both kind of a bulwark against potential federal tyranny and also just a simple security function. And antifederalists, who were those that were concerned about states' rights, were complaining that, you know, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as it was shaping up, didn't go far enough to protect gun rights, essentially.
And James Madison, who wrote the Second Amendment, was getting somewhat annoyed with some of the arguments that were being raised as potentially, he felt, unrealistic scenarios of government oppression. And he had a great quote that I've always liked. He called these the misjudged exaggerations of a counterfeit zeal, rather than the sober apprehensions of genuine patriotism. And what he was basically saying was that, you know, enough with the phony outrage because it's getting in the way of considering reasonable policies, which he thought in the end the Constitution and the Second Amendment would achieve.
And it's pretty clear from just the wording of the Second Amendment that the intended purpose was to preserve the militia. And there was reason to believe that even at that time, the Founders viewed bearing arms for different purposes in different ways. Some state constitutions preserved the right also to bear arms for hunting or self-defense. Others did not. Madison and the Congress were aware of this when they wrote the Second Amendment and yet chose not to include that and simply leave it as the purpose being a well-regulated militia.
GROSS: So what does the actual Constitution, as opposed to the Bill of Rights, have to say about gun ownership and gun rights?
MCINTIRE: I mean, it talks mainly about the militia. It doesn't really go any further than that. And so you only really begin to see the bearing of arms as a right articulated in the Bill of Rights, not in the Constitution itself. I always found it interesting that some, you know, state constitutions did have both a bearing-of-arms right for the militia and other purposes. I think it's important to note that this isn't to say that the Founders didn't believe that people didn't have a right to have a musket for self-defense or hunting or other purposes. They just didn't see those purposes as being existential in the same way that the militia was.
So Second Amendment advocates today, gun-rights advocates, would argue that an individual right is probably just self-evident in the Second Amendment because how could you be expected to have a gun for a militia participation if not then also being able to use it for other purposes? And if the purpose of the Second Amendment was only to really safeguard the ability of people to come together for a militia, which the - that idea has been defunct for over a century - then states and localities would have an easier time imposing limits on guns. But if the Second Amendment also included an individual right for nonmilitia purposes, that becomes a huge speed bump, if not a roadblock for states and local governments to do anything.
GROSS: Well, let me reintroduce you here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Mike McIntire. He's an investigative reporter for The New York Times, a Pulitzer Prize winner. His new book is called "Ricochet: Guns, Greed, And The American Way Of Violence." We'll be right back after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Mike McIntire, an investigative reporter for The New York Times and author of the new book "Ricochet: Guns, Greed, And The American Way Of Violence."
So a really important chapter in our understanding of how the interpretation of the Second Amendment has changed over time is the story of John Dingell junior, a Democratic congressman from Michigan who was a leader of the effort to broaden the interpretation of the Second Amendment and make sure that the popular interpretation and a lot of the judicial interpretations would be based on a much broader reading of the Second Amendment that included an individual's right to own a gun, not just a member of a well-trained militia. And during his time as a congressman, he was also on the board of the NRA.
MCINTIRE: So Congressman Dingell, who succeeded his father in that seat in Michigan, was raised in a family that was comfortable with guns, and he was a young member of the NRA as a kid. And he always had a very strong interest in gun rights.
As early as 1963, after President Kennedy was assassinated, it was Dingell who took to the floor during a congressional hearing and actually opposed some bills that were being considered that would restrict the ability of people to order guns through the mail, because that was how Lee Harvey Oswald had gotten the rifle he used to kill President Kennedy. Dingell objected to that. He said that, you know, these attempts to restrict guns were pointed in the wrong direction and should be focused on criminals.
So from very early on, he articulated a - you know, a pretty strong view of what he felt was a threat against gun rights in America. This continued through the 1960s with passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968, which is really one of only two major bills - the other being in 1934 - that restricted firearms in any meaningful way. And he opposed that as well. And it was after that that he really, I think, was determined to try to do something more than just simply be a voice in Congress to protect what he saw as an erosion of Second-Amendment rights.
GROSS: How did he become a member of the board of the NRA? That seems like a huge conflict of interest.
MCINTIRE: So one of the surprising things I learned in my reporting on this over the years is that members of Congress - they are allowed to serve on the boards of nonprofit groups as long as they're not paid. And I think some people might be surprised to know that the NRA itself is a tax-exempt nonprofit organization. And they've had quite a few members of Congress, actually, serve on the board going back at least to the 1960s, and Dingell was one of them. He joined the NRA at the end of that decade, and he very quickly came to dominate the discussion on the board about, you know, the role of the NRA in reshaping gun rights.
And he occupied a very, as you say, you know, potentially conflicted perch because he, on the one hand, is helping this modern-day lobbying group kind of shape its own actions and policies and plans on this very important issue of gun rights, and at the same time, he's a member of Congress that is effectively being lobbied by the same organization and in that role in Congress is also, you know, shaping public policy.
And I think it is indisputably a conflict. And he himself acknowledged it, actually, years later, in the 1990s, when he resigned from the board when a very important bill in Congress - the Assault Weapons Ban - came up in 1994. He, you know, said that there was a - he had a conflict between his two roles. But that was decades later, after he had already served in that capacity and presided over a wholesale change in not just the NRA itself but gun rights in general.
GROSS: Yeah. And while we're on the subject, I mean, he voted for the Assault Weapons Ban.
MCINTIRE: He did, and it was very painful for him to do so. It was a - you know, the proponents of that ban cleverly kind of wrapped it in a much larger crime bill that provided tens of millions of dollars for policing, expanded prisons, did a lot of things that would have been hard for somebody who wanted to be seen as cracking down on crime to oppose. And he was pretty upfront about that.
I mean, he was stuck between a rock and a hard place, really. He did not want to vote for the Assault Weapons Ban, but he was heavily lobbied by President Clinton at the time. And he eventually did come around to holding his nose and voting for that bill, although he immediately regretted it afterwards. There are documents...
GROSS: He got death threats, among other things.
MCINTIRE: He got death threats. He immediately became a villain amongst some of the very same people who had viewed him as a hero for so long. And he did consider the idea of trying to join an effort to repeal the ban, get it reversed, which of course never came to pass.
GROSS: So he thought that in order to broaden the gun laws and redefine the meaning of the Second Amendment, you need to change popular opinion and influence the courts.
MCINTIRE: The NRA in the 1970s still kind of reflected the old guard of the organization's view that it was focused mostly on hunting, sports shooting, conservation for much of its existence, and he was trying to turn it into something else. He was trying to turn it into basically a modern gun-rights juggernaut. It wasn't even a registered lobbying group up until the 1970s.
And so his vision was to create what eventually became known as the Institute of Legislative Action. It's a lobbying organization that the NRA created that he was really the primary author of. This was his idea. And this became - you can almost consider it to be sort of the Death Star of lobbying in Washington, D.C., by the time you get to the '90s - very powerful.
And, you know, as I said, I mean, he came up with a plan that - to create this sort of unit that would function under the auspices of the NRA. And the idea was to use all the levers of power, both at the state level and the federal level, to influence legislation, impede and harass gun-control groups with lawsuits and other means and, very importantly, subsidize and sponsor scholarship, legal research and court cases that were designed to kind of reframe, you know, this idea of the Second Amendment into something that would be an individual right as opposed to just simply militia-centric.
And this didn't exist before he came on board. This was not something the NRA had contemplated, and there was a lot of objections to it with the leadership at the time. But by the time we get to the end of the 1970s, that leadership has gone. They were - had been ousted, basically, by the membership that was getting increasingly kind of radicalized and really viewed Dingell as sort of a - you know, the de facto leader, even though he was just simply a member of the board. But he had really, by that time, solidified himself as sort of the champion of this new, more aggressive approach.
GROSS: Well, we have to take another break here, so I'm going to reintroduce you. My guest is Mike McIntire, an investigative reporter for The New York Times. His new book is called "Ricochet: Guns, Greed, And The American Way Of Violence." We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday with New York Times investigative reporter Mike McIntire. He's the author of the new book "Ricochet: Guns, Greed, And The American Way Of Violence." He's been part of three teams that won Pulitzer Prizes for their reporting. When we left off, we were talking about the late Michigan Congressman John Dingell Jr., his activist role in helping the NRA and his time as a board member while he was serving in Congress.
So it was time for a new executive director of the NRA, and Dingell supported Harlon Carter. This is a really interesting story because Harlon Carter kind of offered himself as a model gun user, but there was a secret that he had.
MCINTIRE: He's a fascinating character in this whole story of the evolution of the NRA. He had previously been a head of Border Patrol in the United States. His father had been a border agent. And in the 1950s, while he was head of the Border Patrol, he actually was engaged in similar, you know, sort of immigration crackdowns that you see today. There's not a lot of difference between them. But then he also joined the NRA, Harlon Carter did.
He was president of the NRA for a while. And by the time you get to the '70s and Dingell is trying to find somebody to head up this new lobbying organization, he thought Carter was just the guy because they shared a very aggressive view of the Second Amendment. But what nobody knew at the time that he had taken over the role of, basically, the NRA's chief lobbyist is he had a hidden past that included the shooting death of a Mexican teenager in the town that Carter lived in when he himself was a teenager.
There was a confrontation that happened in the 1930s in which he confronted a couple of Mexican kids, who had basically passed through the backyard of Carter's mother's house. And she got into a little bit of a verbal tiff with them. And Carter went to find them, to bring them back to his house to have his mother talk to them. He brought a shotgun with him. And they had an argument by the side of a creek. And he ended up shooting and killing a Mexican teenager in the course of this argument.
He was charged with manslaughter, and he was convicted. And the case ended up being overturned. And ultimately, the case was never - it was dropped. It was never retried. And so it kind of was put into the past. But Carter moved on, and in so doing, changed the spelling of his first name from Harlan, with an A, to Harlon with an O at the end. And he effectively covered this up. No one knew about it until the 1980s when The New York Times discovered it and confronted him at a NRA meeting. I believe it was in Colorado. And at first, he denied it. Then he eventually had to admit that, yes, this is what happened. But he still insists he didn't do anything wrong.
GROSS: So I think it's pretty remarkable that the head of the NRA had shot somebody to death. And whether it was in self-defense or not, that's not the person you want to lead the NRA.
MCINTIRE: Well, you would think that it would be something that members of Congress, especially when they were hearing testimony from Harlon Carter, which they did quite frequently in the 1970s about gun laws, would've wanted to know that. And there was a kind of a really interesting moment in one of these hearings where Carter was opposing some gun control bills that the NRA didn't like. And at one point, he says, you know, I want to put this in very personal terms. And when you see him saying this, you're kind of expecting, well, gee, is he going to finally talk about this? Is he going to find some way to kind of maybe bring it to his rhetorical advantage somehow?
And he didn't. And in fact, he said, you know, I've never abused the right to have a gun. I've never killed anybody with a gun. And that wasn't true. And so you can see that this was something that, you know, he was extremely self-conscious of and probably was aware of, you know, how it could color the interpretation of not just his but the NRA's opposition to some of these laws.
GROSS: You got access to NRA papers. Tell us something that you learned that really surprised you and educated you.
MCINTIRE: One thing that stood out to me in these documents was the effort by the NRA to really focus on cultivating children as the next generation of gun owners. And there was some interesting papers from the early 1980s, where there were basically word-for-word transcripts of meetings amongst the NRA leadership talking about the need, the really urgent need, to get more kids involved with guns. And it was not just because they wanted to ensure the continued membership of the NRA. But they also kind of wanted to win the bigger argument of just, you know, imbuing the culture with a sense of gun ownership. And they thought that getting kids involved in this would be a way to do that.
And in some sense, it's similar to the tobacco industry - right? - you know, that had for years had, you know, tried to appeal to children, get them hooked on smoking with the whole Joe Camel cartoon. All that kind of thing. There's a little bit of that going on here, too. But what struck me was what specifically they wanted to do, as it was laid out in these documents, was get, basically, you know, shooting programs, marksmanship programs, rifle training integrated into public school phys ed curriculums. And the way they wanted to do it was to go through state education departments.
And they talked about how this was going to be a good way to do it because they could - and this is their own words now. They could slip it in and nobody would notice, because they knew that it would be controversial if they tried to do that. And I found that to be really fascinating because it showed a self-awareness on their part that what they were proposing to do would be objectionable, perhaps, to many people. There was one board member who mentioned that they had successfully done this at a school district in Florida, where they went through the biology curriculum in school to introduce the idea of, first of all, wildlife biology, which would lead then to the idea of the need to conserve wildlife, you know, wildlife management.
And then that would lead to the idea of hunting being a tool for wildlife management, which eventually would come to the idea of firearms being a necessary component of hunting. And this is literally spelled out. This is, like, the step-by-step process they wanted to take in order to get guns into the hands of kids. I found that to be something that was really kind of eye-opening.
GROSS: In keeping with the idea of influencing young people, you know, children and teenagers to have an interest in supporting gun rights and in purchasing guns, the gun industry has basically bought product placement in a lot of video games. So tell us how that works and what impact you think it's had.
MCINTIRE: Yeah. It's a very controversial area, because there are people who are very, you know, worried about the impact of violent video games and movies in general on especially impressionable or troubled young men and boys. And the industry, I think, starting in the early 2000s, really kind of found this to be a useful way to market their products. And today there's a whole subculture of consultants and influencers online that exist to kind of help the industry market their guns and accessories in this way, getting them embedded in video games.
Look, I mean, there's not a lot of research that directly shows that, you know, a kid playing a violent video game is more prone than anyone else to commit violence. I mean, my own son, who's an adult now, liked shoot-'em-up games when he was young, and nothing bad ever happened there.
Having said that, there are some examples of mass shooters who turned out to be fully absorbed in these things. And one of the most troubling ones was Adam Lanza, who was the person who killed 26 children and adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. He was fully enthralled with "Call Of Duty" and other video games. He would play them in the basement constantly.
When he committed the shooting, it was - afterwards it was discovered that he had used a staggered pairing of high-capacity magazines, using duct tape to be able to more quickly, you know, empty his gun and put a new magazine in. And this staggered pairing using tape was something that one of the characters in one of these video games had done. And the lawyers for the family of, you know, Sandy Hook victims pointed this out in their lawsuit, you know, and which, you know, pointed out that the company that marketed that particular weapon - it really had a concerted effort to get it embedded in video games.
GROSS: My guest is Mike McIntire, an investigative reporter for The New York Times and author of the new book "Ricochet: Guns, Greed, And The American Way Of Violence." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Mike McIntire that we recorded yesterday. He's an investigative reporter for The New York Times. His new book is called "Ricochet: Guns, Greed, And The American Way Of Violence."
Another way that the gun industry and, I think, the NRA are marketing guns is associating gun ownership and gun use with masculinity. You write that guns are being marketed like an erectile dysfunction drug, which I thought was really funny.
MCINTIRE: So there's - there is a whole culture of, you know, fun and guns that has, I think, you know - it to some extent has always kind of been there, going back to when men especially liked to, you know, join gun clubs. And they'd go off into the woods at - for - at a lodge, you know, for a week. But they would kind of be - they were sort of genteel affairs, and I think the gun industry has taken this and put it on steroids in the last several decades.
And there are a number of these things that I consider to be sort of, like, you know, oases of violence dotting especially the Southwest. Places like Arizona, New Mexico, where you can go, and you can pay a lot of money to spend a lot of time with very, you know, powerful weapons - sometimes even, if you're under proper supervision, fully automatic machine guns, which otherwise you cannot get or use in the United States. Most people can't.
And yeah. I mean, they're kind of marketed as not only - not just, like, family-friendly. Some of them are. But then there's also, you know, a whole kind of, you know, element of masculinity, manhood-affirming things about guns, which I think a lot of, you know, people who kind of look at the gun violence problem are concerned about because they think it's sort of appealing, perhaps, in some cases, to especially troubled young men who want to feel powerful. And they're looking for some quick and easy way to do that.
And the marketing - some of it is very bald and out in the open. I mean, there was advertising for the Bushmaster AR-15-type rifle at one time that basically said, in a world of rapidly depleting testosterone, the Bushmaster man card declares and confirms you're a man's man. I mean, that was paired up with an ad for marketing of an AR-15, and, you know, it's subtle as a brick.
So, I mean, it - they know what they're doing. You know, they know that this works. And they know that this is a - you know, an effective marketing tool. It just - what it says about, you know, the culture around guns and the state of, you know, kind of young men and boys today, which is a whole nother issue which I think people are concerned about.
GROSS: So I want to quote a couple of programs that you refer to. There's Rolling Thunder. And in its promotional materials, it describes how you can race through obstacles, take sharp corners and shoot on the move, navigate rugged desert terrain in a UTV while engaging targets in real time. And at something called the Bullets and Burgers program, you get access to eight machine guns of your choice, a flamethrower, a gigantic 50-caliber tripod-mounted sniper rifle, quote, "used in several Hollywood" hits, including "Jumanji" and "Rambo 2."
And I was thinking - this is not only about, like, the thrill of using the weapons. It's about playing a Hollywood star. It's about being Rambo (laughter). So that shows another desire to, like, act out your Hollywood fantasies.
MCINTIRE: Yeah. They've - the gun industry's done a very good job of kind of selling the idea of self-defense in this kind of sugary wrapper of fun and excitement. So, you know, at its core, they still rely a lot on fear of crime to market guns. And it's very successful. If you ask most gun owners, you know, what's the reason they bought their gun, it would almost always be self-defense.
But at the same time, you do see the industry kind of providing this entertainment aspect to it and, you know, which I find fascinating because years ago, when I was writing about these issues in the 1990s, I visited a place similar to this in Kentucky. And even at that time, they were doing similar things. So you could pay to use a flamethrower. You could pay to use a machine gun and shoot it at barrels of gasoline that would explode into little mushroom clouds. And, you know, a lot of people find this to be fun.
And I was surprised, though, how, you know, in the years since and up to the present, the demographics of who kind of goes to these places have somewhat changed. And they require money to go. I mean, you have to be - they're expensive. Thousands of dollars, you know, often, to fully enjoy these things.
And it just - it sort of underscores the point that gun ownership in general has changed a lot over the decades in the United States. And you're far more likely now to have people, for instance, making over $100,000 a year having a gun than somebody making like, let's say, less than $50,000 a year. Education levels have risen, too. So, you know, gun culture has broadened in ways that were different from maybe a half-century ago. And they've really become embedded in sort of the notion of, you know - of daily life and what it means to be an American.
GROSS: Well, we need to take another break here, so let me reintroduce you. My guest is Mike McIntire, an investigative reporter for The New York Times and author of the new book "Ricochet: Guns, Greed, And The American Way Of Violence." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Mike McIntire that we recorded yesterday. He's an investigative reporter for The New York Times. His new book is called "Ricochet: Guns, Greed, And The American Way Of Violence."
I want to talk about your family history with guns, which has helped inform you as a reporter. You say you grew up in a trailer park in a sketchy neighborhood. What was the gun culture that surrounded you?
MCINTIRE: So I did, when I was very young, live in a trailer park that was literally backed up against a junkyard. It was near a Navy base. My father was in the Coast Guard, my mother was a bank teller, didn't have a lot of money. It was a low-income, blue-collar community. This was the 1970s. And back then, there was a scourge of what they called Saturday night specials, which were cheap, imported handguns.
And it seemed like every father I knew - every kid I knew in the neighborhood, their dad had one of these, had a gun, including my own father. He had a handgun, plus other guns. I mean, I grew up in a family that was comfortable with guns. He was a veteran. One of my grandfathers was a cop, the other was an outdoorsman. He was a registered guide in Maine. He would take hunters and trappers into the wilderness. So I learned how to shoot an early age. But I also, you know, living where I did, encountered things that - you know, I was lucky I didn't either kill someone or myself.
In the junkyard near the trailer park, my little friends and I - probably 9, 10 years old - we'd play in the wrecked cars. And one time, we found one of these Saturday night specials stuck under the front seat of one of these cars. And of course, being boys, we immediately took it out and started pointing it at each other and pretending to shoot each other with it. Thankfully, by some miracle, the cylinder was jammed, so you couldn't fully depress the trigger. Did this for an entire summer, never told our parents about it.
Later, when I was about maybe 12 or 13, we had moved to kind of a semirural area. Back our house - behind our house was the woods. One time, I took my father's .30-06 hunting rifle, a very powerful bolt-action gun. It's the same kind that was used to kill Charlie Kirk. The bullets resembled small missiles. I took the rifle when my parents were away, and I opened up the back window of the house, and I fired a shot into the woods. And then I disposed of the shell casing and stashed the gun away.
I mean, I was lucky not to have killed someone. These bullets fired from that particular gun can travel miles before it hits something. I bring these up in the book, you know, in the context of how easy it is, I think, for accidental shootings to happen, especially with kids, and the sort of magnetic attraction that boys have to these things. I mean, I knew better than this. My father had taught me to, you know, be respectful and responsible with the guns, but I went ahead and did it anyways. And so when I was - find myself years later writing about accidental shootings with kids, this kind of informed my thinking.
I knew these things happened a lot, based on my own experience. And in fact, we - my colleague and I at The New York Times ended up doing a story showing that they happen about twice as many times as people think, as the official records show. Because many homicides - many shootings involving children are misrecorded as homicides and not accidental shootings. So there are a number of things that I sort of tried to bring to bear in my own personal life that I think were useful in explaining these more abstract issues in the book.
GROSS: So you played with guns as a kid. And then you learned how to use a real gun. When you learned how to use a real gun, did guns seem any different to you? Did a real gun come with a sense of responsibility that you didn't have before you were taught to use a gun and you just, like, took your father's gun and shot it out the window?
MCINTIRE: Yeah. I was, as an adult - and I now have about - I have four guns now as an adult. And I taught my own kids how to shoot. I think when you, you know, become a grown-up, especially a parent, you do have - you look at these things in a different way, or you should. And I did. But I think, you know, one of the point I wanted to - one of the points I want to make is that I'm sure my father did, too. I mean, he thought that he taught me to, you know, do all the right things with a gun. He thought that he had them stashed away or I wouldn't find them. And, you know, the answer was no to all those things.
I knew I shouldn't have done what I did as a kid, but I did it anyways. I knew where his stuff was hidden, even though he thought I didn't. So just having the gun around, I think, the house and easily available is something which can often induce its use. And I think that's one of the - kind of the intractable problems of the gun, is just the thing itself. Having it around can cause problems. If a gun is just sort of available and there's a domestic dispute going on or somebody's feeling down or someone's drunk or on drugs, that gun can all of a sudden be an opportunity for something far worse to happen.
GROSS: And then there was the time - you were, I think, a kid at the time. Your mother forgot her keys to the front door. So she tried to get in through the back door, which the family, like, never really used. Your father thought it was an intruder and got his gun. So describe what happened afterwards.
MCINTIRE: I was very little when this happened, and I still remember it because it was - it made such an impression. Yeah. I was - it was late at night, or at least I thought it was. And my mother had forgotten her key and was trying to come in the back door of our trailer, which opened into my parents' bedroom, this being a trailer. And they never used it. And my father, I guess, had just heard somebody, you know, fiddling with the lock and assumed the worst and kind of kicked open the door and pointed his gun, and it was my mother. And, you know, she, of course, screamed and cried.
And it was a - you know, a very, for me, terrifying incident. And it kind of was not unusual, I want to say, in this neighborhood we lived in. I mean, there were occasional gunshots. There were domestic disputes. A good friend of mine at the time - her father in the neighborhood had gotten assaulted one night. He drove a dump truck. He was attacked with some guys. One of them had a gun.
So, I mean, look. I mean, the - I think my experience in that way is probably not unusual for many Americans, and especially growing up at that time. And, you know, it just sort of, again, kind of speaks to the issue of the danger that these things can cause by just their ubiquity, having so many of them around.
GROSS: I have one more question for you. You have had to read so many documents during just even the recent part of your investigative reporting career. Do you skim them? Like, how do you read, like, tens of thousands of documents?
MCINTIRE: You have to love documents. The...
GROSS: You love documents?
MCINTIRE: I love documents. You know, it's - it - I teach a class in investigative reporting at New York University. And I tell my students that, you know, a lot of this is tedious work. You have to get used to, you know, spending time poring over records, tracking down documents, interviewing people. And oftentimes you're going to go down a dry hole. You know, in fact, probably more often than not, you're not going to find what you think you're going to find or hope to find. But you need to love the process. You have to love the hunt because if you don't, you're going to drive yourself crazy, and you're going to get burned out.
And so I've just always enjoyed the part of it where I'm just trying to track down information that I think will pan out and reveal something new that I didn't know. And for me, there's nothing more, you know, heart-fluttering than finding a document that's stamped - confidential, not for public use - you know, where it shouldn't be. And I - those are the - often the moments where you discover something that some - you know, somebody in power, some institutional authority just decided they didn't want the rest of us to know about it, and we should know about it.
GROSS: Mike McIntire, thank you so much for being with us.
MCINTIRE: Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
GROSS: Mike McIntire is an investigative reporter for The New York Times and author of the new book "Ricochet: Guns, Greed, And The American Way Of Violence."
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GROSS: Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our engineer today is Adam Staniszewski. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show.
Our co-host is Tonya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.
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