And I fear what it has become.

Why would a billionaire go wear a badge and a gun in a tiny desert town? To obtain something that’s impossible to buy.

Meet Mel Bernstein. He goes by the name Dragonman, and he’s one of the largest independent purveyors of firearms in the western United States, and the self-proclaimed most armed man in America. At Dragonland—his home, shop, shooting range, and military museum outside Colorado Springs—no gun sells quicker than the weapon used in the most recent mass shooting. Amidst a new gun conversation, it’s business as usual. But even here, it turns out there’s a price to pay.

What should a father teach his sons?

Taurus sold almost a million handguns that can potentially fire without anyone pulling the trigger. The government won’t fix the problem. The NRA is silent.

Detroit, 1987.

The article that became New Jack City.

After a cop walks into his station and confesses to murder, an investigation reveals the toll of lethal force on both sides of the gun.

Three teenagers, their futures, the concept of alternate realities.

There’s no telling how many guns there are in America—and when one gets used in a crime, no way for the cops to connect it to its owner. The only place the police can turn for help is a Kafkaesque agency in West Virginia, where, thanks to the gun lobby, computers are illegal and detective work is absurdly antiquated. On purpose.

On the insanity of America’s gun laws.

“If we’re sitting here bored, getting high and we got guns around, it ain’t nothing else to do.”

There’s a growing gap between the gun lobby’s leadership and its rank-and-file.

How America’s 10 biggest gunmakers do business.

Three days, 64 people shot, six of them dead: Memorial Day weekend in Chicago.

The U.S. Department of Justice investigates the Blackwater founder’s new firm.

Most of the country is trying to keep guns out of schools. A town in rural Idaho is taking the opposite approach.

Ten stories on guns, ranging from competitive shooting, to girl gangs in Chicago, to the sisters and mothers of mass shooting victims.

Her 4th day of college was a mass shooting. Here is what life is like afterward.

We know that certain programs can help prevent gun deaths among black men. No one in Washington seems to care.

On the manifestos that mass shooters leave behind.

The woman trophy hunter, notorious for her controversial “hero shot” beside a dead giraffe, profiled.

Their paranoid existence more than two years after George killed Trayvon Martin.

Sex, potential violence, and human awkardness convene on an isolated shore.

"A slight breeze brings slight relief from the heat and a taste of the saltwater lapping against the hard sand. He’s been here many times. Though he has no desire to kill a bird, he loves this place, this lonely beach at the edge of this lonely lake too shallow for boats and too lifeless to attract fishermen. He loves the sand bugs and the sharp edges of the sand grass. Especially he loves the deep shade beneath the willow trees, and the sound of the cicadas’ music in the sun."

Leland Yee was a career San Francisco politician known for championing open government and gun control. For the last few years, he was also the main target of an elaborate undercover investigation, during which he traded political favors for cash, tried to sell $2 million worth of weapons to a medical marijuana kingpin and worked closely with well-known Chinatown gangster named Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow.

A scientific and psychological examination of a gunshot.

"This is how you feel a bullet. You have certain sensory receptors that detect pain, these are called nociceptors. When a nocicpetor receives a painful stimulus, it sends a signal through its neuron to the spinal cord, which sends the signal to your brain, which sends it to a number of different areas for processing. The location and intensity of the stimulus is deciphered by the primary and secondary somatosensory cortex, for example."