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This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross.

The other day, I was reading an article on the Washington Post about the blast

effect of bullets from the assault weapon the AR-15 and how those bullets blow the body

apart. When I finished reading the article, a message popped up saying, you've been on

this page for eight minutes and fourteen seconds. It took eleven minutes for the shooter to

kill sixty people and injure eight hundred sixty-nine at Las Vegas concert in twenty-seven

minutes. That was a chilling end to disturbing descriptions of what the bullets did to the

bodies of some of its victims. The article is part of an investigation conducted by Washington

Post reporters into the history of the assault rifle the AR-15. The investigation tells

the story of how the civilian rifle was adapted from the military combat automatic rifle

the M-16 and how with the help of clever marketing and lobbying, the AR-15 has become a huge

moneymaker for the gun industry, an icon of gun culture, a favored weapon for perpetrators

of mass shootings, and a flashpoint in the debate about guns in America.

My guest, Tarte Frankl, is one of the series reporters. He's an enterprise reporter on

the financial desk of the Washington Post. Tarte Frankl, welcome to Fresh Air and congratulations

on this series. So let's start with if you could list some of the mass shootings that the

AR-15 was used as the weapon. Yeah, I mean any mass shooting that has made the news that

we've all sort of horrified by, you know, the Eval day shooting down in Texas last year

that involved an AR-15 style weapon. Newtown, most famously back in 2012 was an AR-15,

Parkland, Florida, San Bernardino, the shooting end, the booby theater and Aurora, Colorado,

...