ST. LOUIS — The politics of guns can be deeply divisive. With bipartisan agreement so far from reach, it can almost start to seem as though it's always been that way.
So, let's Check the Record.
It turns out one of the most popular Republicans ever —an Illinois native who won 49 states in 1984— was vocal about gun control.
President Ronald Reagan, who survived an assassin's bullet, supported restricting access to assault weapons. In 1983, Reagan told the NRA "We will never disarm any American who seeks to protect his or her family from fear and harm."
The month after leaving office in 1989, President Reagan said "I do not believe in taking away the right of the citizen to own guns for sporting, for hunting and so forth, or for home defense; but I do believe that an AK-47, a machine gun, is not a sporting weapon or needed for defense of a home."
Five years later, in 1994, Reagan penned a letter to Congress and wrote, "While we recognize that assault-weapon legislation will not stop all assault-weapon crime, statistics prove that we can dry up the supply of these guns, making them less accessible to criminals."
The President's push prodded Congress to change the laws. A decade later, the law expired. The markets took advantage. The culture changed, and the crime stats did, too.
During the 2004-2014 ban, the number of people killed during a mass shooting where an assault weapon was used was 53. In the decade immediately after the ban, the number was nearly four times higher: 199.
Data from 2015, 2016 and a portion of 2017 shows 153 people died at the hands of a mass shooter with an assault weapon, and that doesn't account for mass shootings at the country concert in Las Vegas.
Since 2017, several major mass shootings involving the use of assault weapons weren't included in the data set; just to name a few :
When we checked the Record, one of the only gun-related charts we found with this same rapid rise over that same span of time was the stock price of the companies selling those guns.