Nashville shooting: what it reveals about Americans’ love of military-style guns

Assault firearms with phenomenal lethality' have flooded the US market, with firms making more than $1bn profit in the last decade

In September 2021, the gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson announced that it was relocating from the Massachusetts town in which it was incorporated in 1852 to a new location - Maryville in Blount county, Tennessee.

We have been left with no other alternative," the company complained, pointing to proposals in the Massachusetts legislature that would extend the state's ban on AR-15 style rifles to the selling of all semi-automatic firearms. Some 750 jobs would be moved to Tennessee, the gun maker said, for a number of reasons, the first of which was that the state supported the second amendment right to bear arms.