From WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Thursday, April 13th.

The latest mass shootings, the one at the bank in Louisville that left five people dead and eight others injured, and the one at a school in Nashville that killed six, seemed to be leading to at least a little gun law reform.

You know, we always talk about the gridlock.

Maybe there's a little crack in the gridlock after these two.

We'll explain what's changing.

But a little context first. It was a 25-year-old

employee of the bank and a 28-year-old former student at the school, both with grievances against

their institutions, reportedly, both described as having mental health problems, reportedly,

both nevertheless making recent legal purchases of the

AR-15s they used in their attacks. Police say the Nashville shooter got off 152 shots from the

semi-automatic gun, which fires more quickly than a regular handgun before police could intervene.

Another difference between an AR-15 and non-semit automatic,

as NBC News explains that AR-15s inflict much more damage to human tissue than the typical handgun.

That's largely because of the speed at which projectiles leave the weapons. They're much

faster out of the muzzle of an AR-15 or similar rifle and deliver a more devastating blow to

bones and organs. So people who might survive being shot by something else don't survive

being shot by AR-15s in many cases. And NBC says those projectiles are also more

likely to break apart as they pass through the body, inflicting more damage. Now, the change is

coming in Tennessee, where the Republican governor, Bill Lee, is now supporting more background

checks relating to

potential gun buyers' fitness to own a dangerous weapon. The change is also coming in the growth

of the gun law reform movement that the governor felt the need to respond to, at least in that one

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