This election season you can expect to hear a lot of news, some of it meaningful, much of it not.

Give the Up First Podcast 15 minutes, sometimes a little less,

and we'll help you sort it out what's going on around the world and at home.

Three stories, 15 minutes, up first every day.

Listen every morning, wherever you get your podcasts.

This is Fresh Air.

I'm Terry Gross. We've postponed our interview with former Hollywood stuntman and director of the new film The Fall Guy

so that we can address what's on everybody's mind right now, the attempted assassination of former President Trump, and the other victims of the

shooter. Two were seriously injured, one was killed. The shooter used in AR-15, an assault weapon

that has become the preferred weapon of mass shooters.

My guest Todd Frankel wrote about how the civilian rifle was adapted from the military

combat automatic rifle, the M16, and how, with the help of clever marketing and lobbying,

the AR15 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.

Frankel was the lead reporter on the main story of a Washington Post investigation into the history of the AR 15.

The Series I won a Pulitzer Prize this year for National Reporting.

Frankel is an Enterprise reporter on the financial desk of the post.

We're going to hear the interview we recorded this morning.

Then we'll dive deeper into the gun's history and current place in gun culture and listen

back to the interview we recorded last year when the AR-15 series was

published.

Todd Frankel, welcome back to Fresh Air.

...