| Mike Spies
A reporter who has written extensively about the gun lobby  Stormy Morse and her son, Myles. Photograph by Logan White for The New Yorker For the past decade, in my reporting, I’ve focussed on the gun industry and the dramatic ways in which widespread, lightly regulated access to firearms has shaped life in every corner of America. One subject of that coverage, of course, has been the National Rifle Association. Before the N.R.A. was diminished by its own financial corruption, the organization had built one of the most powerful cultural movements in modern American history. It marketed a kind of gun-based empowerment that appealed to many working-class white men, whose status began to wane during the economic and social disruption of the late twentieth century. These men were drawn to the gun-rights movement by a central message: they were being forced to the country’s margins by Democratic élites, and they had to fight back. But behind the N.R.A.’s potent messaging, which helped drive firearms sales, there was a devastating reality. White men, who dominate the ranks of gun owners in the United States, also account for some eighty per cent of gun suicides. Researchers drew a link between the two data points; the N.R.A. insisted to the public, and to its followers, that it did not exist. This denial has long stayed with me, calling to mind the claims made by opioid manufacturers, who assured customers that their products, when used correctly, did not pose risks. That claim unravelled in the face of years of litigation, and I wondered if anyone who had lost a loved one to gun suicide had sought to take the N.R.A. to court. By chance, I came across an obscure legal filing, which opened the door to the unbelievable, heartbreaking saga of a woman named Stormy Morse. Morse lost two partners to gun suicide: her husband, in 1991, and her partner Lewis Tabler, in 2012. Tabler had been subsumed by the N.R.A.’s anti-Obama propaganda, which convinced him that the country was on the brink of left-wing tyranny. Before Tabler’s death, he secretly removed Stormy as the beneficiary of his retirement account, leaving it to the N.R.A. instead. Distraught and penniless, Stormy desperately needed the funds, but it was the N.R.A. that came to collect. In my years examining the subject of guns in America, I’ve encountered no other story that so starkly illuminates the predatory side of the firearms business. This story was published in partnership with The Trace, a nonprofit news organization covering guns in America. | 
