When Gunmakers Knew They Had to Shut Down Columbine… Forever

“You guys need to watch the news… There is some s#*t going down in Denver.” 

 Secretary to senior executives at Kimber America, a high-end gun manufacturer, about to depart for an NRA convention, April 20, 1999

You’d think a mass shooting would prompt both legislators and gunmakers to rethink the proliferation of guns, particularly military assault weapons that can seriously multiply the number of fatalities that can be inflicted by a single shooter in the shortest amount of time. But if we learned anything from the decades and decades that tobacco companies were fully aware of the cancer risks and realities before our political and judicial machines began to grapple with those issues, those who manufacture products that kill (and cannot be rendered harmless) will lie, manufacture mythologies and rationalizations to keep those products on the market with the fewest restrictions possible. 

Big tobacco hired doctors to present biased and fabricated safety papers, they engaged in marketing practices aimed at luring children into addictive tobacco and they completely hid the medical evidence they had that cigarettes cause cancer. Eventually, states and the federal government clamped down on big tobacco, and literally billions of dollars in damages were assessed against these purveyors of death.

Big gunmakers have even more “weapons” at their disposal (real and fabricated for the occasion): fear of crime and other people with guns, fear that “they are coming to take our guns away,” a Congress that has limited how much civilian gun-killing information can be tallied and released to the public, a Supreme Court ruling over two centuries after the Second Amendment was passed reinterpreted that Amendment into a fundamental and ubiquitous right for Americans to own firearms, a political extremist rightwing that wishes to retain guns in case they wish to overthrow a government they disagree with, and a gunmaker-funded political lobby that takes down politicians running for office who wish to impose reasonable gun control. 

So, when very avoidable gun violence, particularly mass shootings, happen here, after the “thoughts and prayers” and “it’s only mentally ill people killing,” a massive public relations political machine swings into action. Instead of responding to the extremely obvious reality, reinforced that fact that we are the only country not at war that has such staggering gun death statistics, that allows civilians to own military assault weapons, they find reasons why that violence should convince more people to buy more guns. Truth is irrelevant. That only one out of every thirty US civilian gun homicides is justifiable… is a reality that is only ignored. Instead we get “open” and “concealed” carry laws, lower age limits and fewer restrictions on gun purchasers and statutes (“stand your ground” and “home as a castle”) that encourage using a firearm as a first resort for confrontation.

So, lets go back to April 20, 1999, one of the first mass shootings. In the Denver suburb of Columbine. A high school. Ryan Busse, a 25-year executive at gunmaker Kimber, was slammed hard by the news of that notorious shooting, shaken to his core. At that moment, he understood the toxicity of America’s gun culture and his role in it. His newly released book, Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry That Radicalized America, exposes the radicalization of the industry from a first-person perspective. He also contributed this summary excerpt for the April 26th FastCompany.com:

“The early reports of the shooting at Columbine High School indicated that two students had used a variety of guns and explosives to kill 13 and wound 24 more. My usually loud and gregarious sales staff sat quiet and motionless as we waited for each new bit of information.

“Photos that slowly flashed across my screen began to answer our questions. We saw screaming kids, distraught parents, and teachers comforting students. People raced across the parking lot to escape the carnage. For those of us in the sales office, a single question on all our minds remained unanswered: What guns did they use? One of the sales guys let it slip: “Was it a Kimber?”

“Not long after the entire nation began learning about the massacre in Columbine, my phone rang. ‘You watching this?’ [My wife] Sara said, her voice trembling. ‘Those poor kids! The gun industry is okay with this s#*t?” I must have stammered for a few awkward moments before she added, ‘Are you okay with this, Ryan?’… ‘No, I am not okay with it,’ I whispered into my phone, careful not to let anyone in the office know how upset Sara was. ‘Look, I’m pretty sure that they did not use any Kimbers’… ‘That’s what you have to say for yourself?’ she retorted. ‘That they didn’t use your guns?’”

Looking only at mass shootings at pre-K through 12 schools, there have been 377 mass shootings and 349,000 students who have experienced gun violence since Columbine. It is only getting worse. There were more school shootings in 2022 — 46 — than in any year since at least 1999. Across all such incidents, The Washington Post has found that at least 199 children, educators and other people have been killed, and another 425 have been injured. That’s without looking at church and synagogue shootings, open field shootings like the 60 people who died and the 413 who were wounded from that October 2017 shooting from the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, or the daily gangland violence that takes out thousands every year. 

How do gun companies respond? Busse continues: “It began with [Kimber co-founder] Greg Warne’s admonition from years earlier: ‘We don’t want Kimber to be a company that makes guns found in crime scenes.’ Greg and I both knew that there was an unspoken line of bifurcation in the gun business. We all knew that higher-quality, more-expensive, lower-capacity guns were far less likely to be used in crimes. Lower-quality, less-expensive, high-capacity ‘assault’-style guns were far more likely.

“The industry wrestled with this reality too, but it also understood the basic laws of economics. In order for a company to grow, it needed new business. Less-expensive products would appeal to a higher number of customers. Edgy or ‘dangerous’ products also had an upside because they could garner press attention, or maybe they’d have a chance at selling at higher numbers. The trick, as I saw it, was to try to find just the right balance. I’d build a growing company that focused on high-quality products. And this meant that I’d have to find a way to buck the basic laws of economics. To pull it off, we’d need a trained eye for style and more than a little bit of luck.

“‘These dealers think there might be a sales spike,’ one of my salesmen told me after I stuck my head into his office. Dealers were parroting three years of NRA talking points: ‘The Democrats are going to use this to jam more gun-control s#*t down our throats. So they’re doubling and tripling their orders!’… This quick and fearful reaction was a relatively new development. The passage of the Brady Bill and the assault weapons ban had simmered over time. To gain maximum advantage, the NRA realized it needed to keep the ingredients ready, to keep stirring the pot. So it set out to supercharge the nation’s political landscape.

“For that to happen, the NRA needed constant heat. In fact, it had started priming the reaction to the Columbine massacre three years earlier at its 1996 national convention, an event conspicuously held on the first anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. When industry members like us asked about holding the convention on this solemn anniversary, we were told that consideration had been given to changing it but that no one in the NRA wanted to show any sign of weakness. I attended that 1996 convention in Dallas. It was a presidential election year, and I could feel the fear pulsing through the attendees as they stumbled out of dim ballrooms following speeches meant to drive down reason and to drive up sales.” 

Red states have been following the NRA playbook, and it works. They have loosened restrictions on firearm ownership and kicked their massive fear-based campaign that sell more guns than ever. Over the last two years, the FBI was charged with processing a major record-breaking 39-million-pre-gun purchase background checks. Has that helped? NO!

I’m Peter Dekom, and it is now a statistical fact that the more guns that exist in society, the more gun homicides will proliferate and increase… substantially.