The shooting of former president Donald Trump and three attendees at his rally was just one of nearly 300 mass shootings in the US so far this year.
Amid all the shocking news from that day, there was one depressingly familiar detail. The shooter used an AR-15 style rifle, the kind of semiautomatic weapon that has featured in dozens of mass shootings since the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre of 2012.
Despite the devastation it has brought, the AR-15 has a fierce grip on American politics. The NRA has called the AR-15 “America’s Rifle”, and in 2023 five Congressional Republicans proposed a bill to declare it America’s “National Gun”.