Listen Now: The Gun Machine

Produced by WBUR, in partnership with nonprofit newsroom The Trace, The Gun Machine is a new podcast that looks to the past for a story that most Americans never learned in history class: how early partnerships between mad scientist gunsmiths (located at the heart of the American Revolution itself, Massachusetts) and a fledgling United States government created the gun industry — and how that industry has been a partner to the government ever since.

Listen to the first two episodes of The Gun Machine on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

"The gun industry is notoriously one of the hardest-to-report-on industries, opaque and uniquely unregulated," says Alain Stephens, a staff writer for The Trace and host of The Gun Machine. "And the government agencies in charge of enforcing our gun laws aren't much better. I've dedicated my journalism career to it, because helping people understand guns, the evolving technology and the industry that makes them can help us understand solutions to the epidemic of gun violence — the toll of which I am all too familiar with in my own life. This podcast is the culmination of years reporting on this beat, as well as my experience as a gun owner and in the military. No matter what you think you know about guns, we'll surprise you."

The Gun Machine's lead producer, Grace Tatter, formerly worked at WBUR's On Point and was also the lead producer for Here & Now's The Great Wager, a series exploring how the world's two largest economies emerged from Nixon's historic trip to China in February 1972. Like many Americans, Tatter felt there was a timely need to re-engineer the gun debate.

"A year ago, I felt like any coverage about guns was doomed to repeat the same debates about policies like assault weapons bans that many people are frankly tired of hearing," Tatter says. "But by starting with the origin story of the gun industry and the Revolutionary War, and seeing how the first armory built in Springfield, Massachusetts shaped not only manufacturing at large, but capitalism as we know it today, I gained a much deeper understanding of the role that guns play in our nation's identity. The Gun Machine will upend everything you think you know about guns in an exciting new way that just might bring unlikely allies together."

Listeners can also hear The Gun Machine every Thursday on Here & Now, a co-production of NPR and WBUR, in collaboration with public radio stations across the country. Here & Now, which airs weekdays from 12 p.m. to 2 p.m. ET, reaches 4.79 million weekly listeners on 480 NPR member stations.