In Arizona, where Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot a little over two years ago in a rampage that left six people dead, including a federal judge, the legislature and the governor have devoted themselves to protecting the firearm supply.
For police, this moment comes after an eight-month, cross-border drug and firearm supply investigation.
During this session a law forbidding the sale of firearms and supplies to Native Americans was repealed, and a law was passed to authorize the minting of gold coins.
There is a great deal of misinformed, superficial, fear-based reporting and writing about firearms, often supplied by reporters who have little familiarity with the weapons they discuss, the lingua franca of gun culture, or the conception of firearms as anything more than instruments of murder.
And while the NSSF doesn't give a figure for the number of guns actually purchased by all these new female consumers (the importance of this data gap will be discussed below), they estimate that the gals spend an annual average of more than $1,000 for guns and firearm-related supplies.
A judge dismissed criminal charges against a Phoenix gun shop owner accused of supplying firearms to Mexican drug cartels.
Hutchinson-Foster was jailed in February for the assault and firearms offences, including supplying the same firearm to Duggan on the day he was fatally shot by police on 4 August 2011.
Bohdan Bushell, a special effects coordinator at J & M Special Effects in Brooklyn, which supplies firearms for independent films and Broadway shows like "The Phantom of the Opera" and "Jersey Boys," said any uncertainty could drive studios to move out of state.
In contracts this year, Sturm, Ruger says its firearms should be supplied only "to federally licensed firearms dealers selling exclusively from their regular place of business," William B. Ruger Jr., the president and vice chairman of the Southport, Conn., company, said in a telephone interview yesterday.
During the American Civil War, his factory in Hartford supplied firearms only to the North and not to the South.
