When my colleague Tom Nichols, who taught at the Naval War College for 25 years, warns people that Donald Trump might be a threat to democracy, they often ask him to prove it. Yes, Trump has said dictator-like things, but if he won a second term, aren’t there barriers in place to prevent him from acting on his rhetoric? Would he really be able to persuade senior command in the military to use force against American citizens? Would he be able to get past the Geneva Conventions? Wouldn’t Congress or the courts intervene to stop him from acting on his worst impulses?

Nichols has never served in the military, but he knows its rules and its culture well. And he has watched over the years as some of his students became more openly partisan. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, Nichols explains how a reelected President Trump could bend the military to his will and how political schisms in the military could happen. He emphasizes how close Trump came to achieving some of his goals in his last term, how ill prepared we are as a democracy that assumes a “minimum level of decency in the people who are elected to public office.” And he breaks down his personal nightmare scenario.

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Last Tuesday, during a town hall on Fox News, Sean Hannity asked Donald Trump the question, straightforwardly.

Sean Hannity: Do you in any way have any plans whatsoever, if reelected president, to abuse power, to break the law, to use the government to go after people?

Rosin: Now, Hannity is friendly to Trump. So this seemed like a question that was supposed to quiet some worries. Because lately, Trump and his allies have been sending a lot of strong dictator-like signals, saying they would “come after” or “crush” people who are unfriendly to them or disloyal. But Trump did not treat it like a softball. And the exchange continued:

Hannity: You are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody.

Donald Trump: Except for day one.

[Crowd cheers]

Trump: He’s going crazy.

Hannity: Except for?

Trump: Except for day one.

Rosin: But Trump was not done.

Trump: We love this guy. He says, “You’re not gonna be a dictator, are you?” I said: “No, no, no. Other than day one.”

Rosin: If you ask people who study how dictators rise, they’ll often say that would-be dictators don’t hide their intentions. It’s just that the people they’re talking to fail to take them seriously until it’s too late, which honestly makes a whole lot of sense to me.

Because I have read about the many recent dictator-like statements by candidate Trump. And yet, I experience them like I’m watching a movie about the rise of a dictator somewhere else or, like, in some other time, not right now in the country I actually live in. But I want to take this more seriously.

I’m Hanna Rosin. And in this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk to Tom Nichols. He’s a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he often writes about the U.S. military.

Now, Tom wasn’t in the military himself, but he spent 25 years teaching officers at the Naval War College, and a big part of his job was to talk to them about the Constitution and their role in American democracy.

Tom Nichols: You know, over the years when people like me have said, Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, well-meaning people, people of goodwill, have said, Okay, I get that you’re concerned, but what would that actually look like?

[Music]

Rosin: Tom recently wrote a story with the headline: “A Military Loyal to Trump.” And in our conversation, he fills in a critical part of the Trump-as-dictator scenario, which is how a reelected Trump could bend the military to his will.

[Music]

Nichols: It’s easy to just get your hair on fire and say, Oh, Trump’s a fascist. He’s a threat to democracy. He would do terrible things. I think it was important to say, Here’s how it could happen in a concrete way. Here are the steps he would have to take. Here are the things he’s done that would get him closer to that goal of being an authoritarian leader.

Rosin: You’ve said that if he’s elected, Donald Trump will attempt to make the U.S. armed forces loyal to him, and not to the Constitution. That’s a very big thing to say. Why are you so sure about that?

Nichols: Well, if you look at Donald Trump’s first term, he viewed the senior command of the U.S. military and the senior civil servants of the Defense Department as obstacles and opponents to things that he wanted to do, including using force against American citizens in the streets. So I have no doubt that he views the military, and particularly senior commanders, as obstacles to his exercise of power.

He’s talked about wanting Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, executed. You know, we don’t have to think very hard about Trump’s intentions because he says the quiet part out loud all the time.

Rosin: I know. That’s the hard part about Trump, I feel like. It’s like, it’s hard to understand what’s talk, how plausible anything is. And whenever he says things like this, I immediately think, Well, this is America. We have a system in place. That system keeps somebody like that, a president even, in check.

Nichols: Except that at the very end of his first term, he actually did try to purge the senior ranks of the Defense Department by dumping the secretary of defense. He tried to install Anthony Tata, this retired one-star general who’s kind of a kook and a conspiracy theorist, into the number-three slot in the Defense Department.

He’s made pretty plain that he’s actually willing to engage in those kinds of personnel changes to get what he wants. The difference is the first time around, he didn’t really know what he was doing and there were people around him who were determined to stop him.

This time around, there just won’t be anybody determined to stop it.

Rosin: Tom, you know a lot more about military culture and operations than most people. Inside that culture, how does politics or partisanship—how does it get expressed?

Nichols: When I began teaching at the Naval War College, I was there long enough ago that I actually had people who were prior-enlisted folks in Vietnam. And the thing I’ve noticed is that our officers are resolutely nonpartisan. They serve the Constitution. But the willingness to think in very partisan terms was growing over the years. By the time I retired, in 2022, I was hearing officers saying things almost verbatim from, you know, talking points from Fox the night before. You know, officers, for example, you know, were asking me about why we’re not doing more to reveal the Chinese George Soros hoax about climate change, kind of stuff.

And that worried me. I started hearing a lot more kind of fever-swamp, conspiracy-theory stuff. Because, you know, the military, we have a citizen-soldier military. It’s one of the great strengths of our democracy, but every military, to some extent, lives in something of a bubble. And I feel like over the years that I was teaching, that I could see that bubble getting thicker and thicker and more detached from society in general, I think—at least among a relatively small number of officers, but much more than I would have expected and certainly more than I was comfortable with by the end of my career.

Rosin: What was your sense of their understanding or your students’ understanding of civic duty, how the Constitution works, you know, things like that?

Nichols: Yeah. I think that’s an important question. And I don’t want to be overly alarmist about the men and women that I’ve been teaching and working with for some 30 years. They are resolutely patriotic people who understand that they do not swear an oath to any individual president.

But I think there’s enough concern about that, that Mark Milley, when he retired, made it a point to repeat that, to say, And remember—he said on his way out the door—we do not swear an oath to a particular president.

But I do worry that the lack of civic education in the United States in general has also extended to the military. And I have a particular concern that it will become too easy to smudge the difference between loyalty to, or not loyalty, but obedience to the president’s orders and obedience to the Constitution, because Trump will say, as he has done in the past: I am the ultimate authority on what is constitutional. I am the ultimate authority on what is to be obeyed or not to be obeyed. He has said, you know, If there are things in the Constitution I don’t like, I’ll just terminate them.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Nichols: And, again, you only need a very small number of people at the top to agree with him about that.

And then what they will do is put hope in that the chain of command, that obedience, that if a sergeant gets an order, he assumes that the lieutenant who gave it is giving the right order and that the lieutenant who got it from the captain, that she is giving the right order, and so on, all the way up to the chain of command. If things don’t get stopped at the very top, they can spiral out of control as they go down through the chain of command because you don’t want a bunch of people in the military having to stop and say, No. Wait. I have to go consult the constitutional law books about whether or not I should carry out that order.

That’s something that should happen very close to the president, at the White House, between him and his senior military leaders. Trump has made it clear he just might not care about anybody telling him that something is illegal or unconstitutional.

Rosin: Right, right. Okay, so he doesn’t care. Can we get into some specific examples? Like, how would this actually play out? I just need some specific scenarios to understand it.

Nichols: Well, one thing to consider is that Trump will want to issue orders that are probably unlawful, certainly an ethical problem for the military.

So Trump could, for example, order people to commit war crimes, because he clearly has no compunction about whether our forces actually commit war crimes. Take the example of Eddie Gallagher. Eddie Gallagher was a Navy SEAL, right. The best of the best. He was court-martialed for war crimes, for shooting at civilians, potentially for murder.

The only thing he was actually convicted of when it was over, after the testimony even of his own comrades in the SEALs, was photographing himself with a dead body. Trump intervened to make sure that Gallagher could keep his Trident, his badge of being a Navy SEAL, which is a huge kind of trespass, because normally only the SEALs decide who gets to keep that Trident. So imagine that in the future Trump says, You know what? Let’s desecrate bodies. Let’s commit war crimes. Let’s put the fear of God in these people, whoever they are, wherever we are, by doing, you know, terrible things and photographing it. And don’t worry—I’m the commander in chief. Your obedience to me removes the stain from you. I won’t let you be court-martialed for it.

Rosin: Yeah. But what’s the larger significance of doing something like that, of the president allowing something like that to happen?

Nichols: Because the message from the president will be, especially when it comes time, if we get to that terrible moment where if the president wants to use force against Americans (for example, if there’s another January 6), then he says, Listen, I’m going to send in the Army, and none of my people are going to get arrested. You’re not going to disperse them. The Capitol police are not going to arrest these people. And if they want to march into the House, then they’re going to do it. And if there are protests against me, I will tell them to shoot at people.

You acclimate an institution to getting used to that by issuing these terrible orders and getting them to fulfill them over and over and over again over time. I worry that he will just kind of corrode the norms and traditions. The U.S. military—and I feel that I need to say this again—the people for whom I have intense admiration, their culture is built on honor and loyalty and duty. And if Trump chips away at that every day with a small number of people at the top, I worry about what happens at the ultimate moment when Trump says, You know what? I didn’t lose an election, and we are marching to the Capitol, or, I don’t feel like having any protests against me in Washington today.

Remember, he actually wanted to call out troops against the protesters in Washington, and his own secretary of defense said, That’s a really bad idea. Don’t do that.

He won’t make that mistake again. The next secretary of defense is going to be somebody who nods and says, That’s a great idea, sir. Let’s get ’em out there.

[Music]

Rosin: We’re going to take a short break. When we come back: What barriers normally exist against these nightmare scenarios?

[Music]

Rosin: Okay, we’re back. So Tom, in Trump’s first term, we got used to the idea that certain institutions of government held off some of his worst impulses. What would stop him in a second term?

Nichols: There are two institutions that are the most likely to stand in Trump’s way, if he returns to power, when it comes to attacking his opponents, undermining democracy, breaking the rule of law, and squelching any kind of dissent or protest against him. He needs to control two institutions: the Justice Department and the U.S. military. And if he can get control of both of those, he’s most of the way there to be able to do whatever he wants.

And I’m not hypothesizing. We saw him try to do it. We came within a whisker of it just before January 6, where his own appointees of the Justice Department walked in and said, If you do these things—including appointing people like Jeffrey Clark, you know, making him the acting attorney general—you’re going to have mass resignations. Now maybe that would work, but Trump at this point, I think, would say, Great. Mass resignations, and I’ve got a whole list of people now who will step into those jobs. I think lists of people who would take these jobs are already being compiled by Trump loyalists. And I think the answer would be, if someone walks in and says, Mr. President, if you do this, I’ll resign, he’ll say, Don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out.

We always talk about, Well, the Senate won’t confirm these people. That’s the bar. Well, what if Trump says, as he already has—it’s not a what-if; he’s actually done this—Okay, fine. You didn’t confirm him. I’m sending him over to the Pentagon to sit next to the guy who’s in that job?

That’s a lot of pressure on appointees to say, you know, to be the people to stand up and say, I am not going to follow the orders of the president of the United States, and especially in a military organization where that is just anathema. That’s heresy.

And in normal times, that’s a good thing. In a normal democracy, you don’t want military officers saying, I have your order and now I’ll think about it.

Rosin: Yeah.

Nichols: Donald Trump, he wanted to kill Bashar al-Assad. He called the Pentagon and said, Let’s take this guy out. And the then secretary of defense said, We’ll get right on that, Mr. President. And then he hung up the phone and he turned to an aide and he said, We’re not doing any of that.

And I think there will be more and more of those, kind of, fork-in-the-road moments where Trump, if Trump is president, he’ll say, I want to do this, and someone behind a desk or in uniform is going to have to sit back and say, Am I really going to do that?

Rosin: Right. I mean, I like to think that there are a lot of Jim Mattises, a lot of Mark Milleys out there—these are people who had some power, appealed to their own conscience at some point, you know, understood who they were serving, which was the Constitution in the end—and that there are more of them.

Nichols: I would like to think there are more of them too. And I think most of the military is like—the people that I knew are certainly a lot more like Mark Milley and Jim Mattis than they’re going to be like some of the other people that surrounded Trump. But as I’ve often wondered, you know, how many more of these people are like Anthony Tata, the guy that Trump tried to, you know, stick into the third slot at the Defense Department? Or this retired colonel, Douglas MacGregor, that he tried to make an ambassador to Germany and then, when that failed, sent him over to the Pentagon?

Again, there are a lot more Milleys and Mattises out there, but there’s also a lot of Tatas and MacGregors out there—not as many, I think, but as I keep wanting to emphasize, you only need a handful. That’s the real problem, that if you control a handful at the top, you can gain control of a lot of the institution very quickly.

Rosin: So if Trump gets what he likes to call “my generals,” and then he wants to do something that feels blatantly unconstitutional, are there not checks in place that would stop him if he gives an unlawful command?

Nichols: Well, the first barrier to an unlawful command is the officer to whom it is given saying, I decline that order. Let’s just take an example: I don’t know, you know, Commit a war crime, right? Kill POWs, which is flatly illegal. (We are signatories to the Geneva Conventions. You can’t do that.) And Trump, as he often did during his rallies, for example, would say, Go ahead and do it. I’ll cover you. I’ll be your top cover for this.

That first barrier is an officer or a secretary of defense, even, who says, I am not going to transmit that order. And in a normal country, back when America was, you know, in the pre-Trump days, even the threat of that would be enough to stop a president from considering some of these things.

But what if Trump says, Well, okay. You’re relieved, as he did with so many of his national security advisors, or with Secretary Esper, who he fired. You know, Great. You’re not on board; you’re out. I’m gonna take the next guy behind you and the next guy behind him, until somebody fulfills this order.

The next barrier to that would be, what? A court? The Senate? The Congress? But again, what do you do if the president of the United States says, I am the Article II power. Article II, Section 2, says I’m the commander in chief of the armed forces, and I don’t recognize your authority. I don’t care?

Rosin: Is that a thing? Do we misunderstand something fundamental?

Nichols: I don’t know. We’ll find out, right? If the president says, I don’t recognize your authority to do this, and so I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing, what does Congress do at that point? Congress says, Well, we cut off funding to the Defense Department? We use the power of the purse?

These things take time. Remember, Donald Trump tried to create an entirely separate foreign policy regarding Ukraine than the one his own administration was publicly committed to. Like, in public, he said, Of course we support Ukraine. They’re our friends. And then privately, he said to a handful of people, Forget all that. Call Ukraine. Tell them that unless they investigate Joe Biden, they’re out of luck. And then he denied it.

I mean, I guess the bottom line for all of this is our system of government, and our Constitution, is not set up to deal with intentionally and flagrantly criminal behavior from the president of the United States. Our entire Constitution is based on a minimum level of decency in the people who are elected to public office. It’s not designed to cope with somebody like Donald Trump.

And in the end, the only weapon that you would have against Donald Trump would be impeachment and removal, which, I suppose could get ugly if Trump said, Well, I’m not leaving the White House. Then you literally have to go in and drag him out. But as we’ve already seen, the Republicans are not going to be a break on Donald Trump’s behavior.

He was impeached twice and the Republicans have acquitted him twice, and I just don’t see any of those guardrails functioning this time around if Trump is returned to office, in part because he’s going to make the case of: The country is with me. The people are with me. The Army is with me. He used to say that, which, you know, is a pretty uncomfortable thing to hear. And I just don’t—is it a thing? That’s a great question. I hope we never find out.

Rosin: Can I ask you—it sounds like you are genuinely worried—what is your actual biggest fear? Like, if you actually let your mind wander to the worst place, what is your scariest scenario?

Nichols: Two things keep me awake at night. One is that Trump provokes a schism within the armed forces in the United States—that we have pro- and anti-Trump factions within the armed forces that don’t necessarily come to open blows with each other but that paralyze our effectiveness as a military.

There may be talented and experienced officers who will simply resign or refuse to carry out orders that are unconstitutional, and then operations that we actually may need to be conducting get bogged down in internal fights about who’s giving which orders, and Who am I supposed to listen to? Do I listen to the guy that was the appointee, or do I listen to the guy who’s obviously the president’s pick, who’s sitting right next to him? What do I do if the chief of staff in the White House calls me, who has no power, but says the president wants X?

And that can happen even in the best of times just through miscommunication. I really worry about what happens if that becomes something that happens because of a partisan political divide within the military. I can’t even imagine the words partisan political divide in the American military.

Like, I’ve never really—I’ve spent years lecturing at the Naval War College saying how fortunate we were not to have that problem.

Rosin: Mm- hmm.

Nichols: But Donald Trump will actively try to create that problem if he thinks it serves his purposes.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Nichols: The other thing that keeps me up at night is Donald Trump in control of nuclear weapons.

Rosin: Yeah.

Nichols: There’s no way around that. Nuclear weapons, colloquially, are referred to as the president’s weapon. Only the president of the United States can authorize the use of nuclear weapons. I just worry about the fact that Donald Trump, who I think is a deeply unstable person, shouldn’t be anywhere near America’s nuclear arsenal. And if he’s commander in chief, he will have that daily code, that little biscuit in his pocket that lets him unleash nuclear disaster if he really wants to.

We are relying on people who have been trained to follow the orders of the commander in chief. We are relying on men and women in uniform to say, I’m not going to do that.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. And that’s not in their nature, generally.

Nichols: And it’s not in their nature, and it’s not fair to them.

[Music]

Rosin: Tom, thank you for laying that out in such great detail. I feel like one of the issues we have with this Trump-as-dictator discussion is a failure of imagination. Like, we just can’t get our heads around what it would actually look like, and you definitely help with that, and I appreciate it.

Nichols: Thank you.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Sara Krolewski, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer for Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present, surface delightful treasures, and examine the American idea. Sign up here.

Not so long ago, an Atlantic writer set out to defend the former president, a notorious liar with a knack for escaping jams—and one who derived an unseemly joy from impunity. Hand-wringing about this sort of behavior, Roy Blount Jr. wrote, not only smacks of self-righteousness, but also misunderstands the very business of politics, which is to get things done, not be a moral exemplar. Despite the whining of elite classes, the public was getting what it wanted:

The American people like being lied to. Hence Ronald Reagan. But even for a President who is not a professional actor, misrepresentation is part of the job. Commentators who do not bear this in mind are like critics in the audience shouting “Tell us what you really think” at an actor who is trying to bring off a drama.

Falsity is so fundamental to U.S. politics that to even speak about the personal integrity of a president is to indulge in oxymoron, which is why people shouldn’t get so censorious about the former president, Blount argued: “Maybe Bill Clinton was sent from heaven to preserve us from those who would present themselves as unimpeachable.”

Okay, so Blount wasn’t talking about Donald Trump. But as Americans wrestle with the apparently interminable presence of that former president, as well as the widely dreaded prospect of a second Trump–Joe Biden election next year, Blount’s ideas about what exactly we should look for in our presidents are useful for thinking about the dangers and virtues of partisanship.

Though just over 20 years old, Blount’s essay is a time capsule from a moment when the stakes of politics didn’t feel quite so immediate and existential. The ability to write about Washington with ironic detachment was dead even before the 2022 passing of its great exponent P. J. O’Rourke—although, as my colleague McKay Coppins wrote five years ago, today’s apocalyptic vibes are a white-elephant gift from the Clinton era. “If we thought of a President less as a role model than as a character in fiction, we would see him more clearly,” Blount wrote. “Bill Clinton may not have had a great character, but he has been one.”

This is exceedingly true of Trump, but few of his critics would be eager to say so, for reasons that Blount explained when I asked him about the differences between the two ex-presidents. “I hasten to state that I do not regard Trump in the same light as Clinton. Or if the same light, then Trump shows up much more nastily in it,” he wrote me in an email. “Trump has no sense of humor or respect for the law or tradition. Clinton, like any successful politician, had Teflon. Trump’s coating is poison.”

Blount made another point in 2001 that feels as fresh as ever: “We must resist the temptation to dismiss all candidates for president as beneath us. Otherwise we’ll never forgive ourselves for voting for any of them. We must compare them not with ourselves but with each other. One of them is always less deeply beneath us.” Or as Biden likes to put it: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative.”

Cringing at presidential candidates is easy, because they are all cringe, at best. Pundits and voters obsess over whether politicians are “authentic” or sincere, but Blount proposed a more pragmatic metric: “I want a president who caters, effectively and constructively, to the right people.” Given how coalition politics work, an election is maybe better understood as a choice about which electorate to empower, rather than which candidate. The problem, then as now, is the very subjective business of determining who the “right” people are. Everyone believes they’re on the right side, and all of them get a vote.

Illustrations by Adams Carvalho

This article is a collaboration between The Atlantic and The Trace.

One Saturday night in April 2017, Jenn Jacques and Bob Owens stayed up late drinking at an outdoor bar in Atlanta. They had worked together for more than two years, and Owens had become like an older brother to Jacques. On this Saturday, Owens seemed relaxed and was looking forward to the future; he talked about an upcoming family vacation. “That was such a special night,” Jacques told me. “I can say that there was no warning.”

They were both in their 40s, and had spouses and kids back home. Jacques lived in Wisconsin, and Owens in North Carolina. They were in town for the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting. Together, they edited a popular gun-rights news and opinion website called Bearing Arms.

As a blogger, Owens was often combative and blunt. He had a tendency to mock those who disagreed with him; he believed that gun-control advocates were performative and that they ignored inconvenient facts. A few days earlier, he’d written that protesters who were planning a “die-in” near the NRA convention were staging “a dramatic hissy fit.”

But the man Jacques knew was different. “His personality was as calm as his southern drawl,” she said. “The man was so levelheaded and thoughtful and kind, deliberate and generous.” Owens had coached his older daughter’s soccer team, and he went to equine therapy with his younger one, who had been diagnosed with autism. He had a sarcastic sense of humor, but he also sang karaoke and watched Disney movies with the kids and his wife, Christine.

Another time when he and Jacques were out drinking, Owens decided he didn’t like the way a man was talking to her. “Sir, I would never hope to get in a fight with anyone,” Owens said to him, “but I will take you down if you go near this woman again.” Jacques laughed and told him to stop. “He was so serious in protecting others,” she said.

That night in Atlanta, Owens and Jacques were in a reflective mood. They discussed their families and aging.

“My grandma is going to be 86,” Jacques said.

“I hope I make it that long,” Owens said.

At one point, the conversation drifted to suicide.

“The most selfish thing you can do is take yourself away from your kids,” Jacques said.

“I could never do it,” Owens replied.

From time to time, Owens wrote fiery posts about public figures he saw as antagonistic toward gun rights. One subject was a doctor named Arthur Kellermann, whose research had indicated a troubling link between guns and suicide.

In 1984, Kellermann, then 29, was earning a master’s degree in public health at the University of Washington in Seattle. One day, he was sitting in the student center between classes when he heard on the news that the singer Marvin Gaye had been fatally shot with a .38-caliber revolver by his own father.

Kellermann had grown up in a conservative household in Tennessee. His father owned guns, and had taught Kellermann to shoot at the age of 10. But Gaye’s shooting, which had happened at home, got Kellerman thinking about his recent experience working in an emergency room. He had seen a number of gunshot victims, but he couldn’t remember treating a single patient who had been shot while breaking into someone’s home.

[Daniel Levitin: The ineluctable logic of gun ownership]

This prompted Kellermann to seek out research measuring the risks and benefits of keeping a firearm in the home. But he couldn’t find much, so he decided to embark on a simple study of his own.

With the help of the local medical examiner, Kellermann reviewed every gunshot death that had occurred in King County, where the university was located, from 1978 through 1983. During that period, there had been 398 fatalities in homes that contained a firearm. Fifty had been homicides—and of those, only nine involved self-defense. Twelve shootings had been accidents, and three deaths couldn’t be categorized. The remaining 333 incidents—almost 85 percent of the deaths—were suicides.

Kellerman’s study, titled “Protection or Peril?”, was published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1986. Because the data set was limited, he avoided drawing firm conclusions, but the numbers immediately attracted attention. A New York Times article summarizing the analysis began, “Keeping firearms in the home may endanger, not protect, the individuals who live there.” At the time, research suggested that half of all American households contained at least one gun.

Kellermann wanted to perform a case-control study, a methodology that would be more definitive. With CDC funding, he set out to investigate whether homes where guns are kept are more likely to be scenes of suicide than similar households without firearms. He and his team focused on the period from 1987 to 1990, in King County, Washington, and Shelby County, Tennessee, where Kellermann had moved. The researchers identified 565 suicides that occurred in or near a residence, almost 60 percent of which involved a gun. In 1992, the results were also published in The New England Journal of Medicine, and again the finding was clear: “The ready availability of firearms appears to be associated with an increased risk of suicide in the home.”

The danger was not unique to those who were known to have mental illness, or to those who had newly acquired a gun—most of the victims had owned their weapons for months or years. The article ended with a warning: People who keep a firearm in the home “should carefully weigh their reasons” against the “possibility that it may someday be used in a suicide.”

Kellermann’s results aligned with a long-running trend. From 1953 to 1978, the rate of gun suicide increased by 45 percent, while the rate of suicide by other methods remained steady. Gun suicide outpaced gun homicide, as it still does. Since 2017, firearm suicide has been the cause of roughly 25,000 deaths each year. Nearly 80 percent are white males ages 15 and older.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, please know that you are not alone. If you’re in danger of acting on suicidal thoughts, call 911. For support and resources, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or text 741741 for the Crisis Text Line.

Social scientists and other researchers have looked extensively for explanations behind America’s swelling suicide rates: deindustrialization, addiction, a lack of new opportunities for working-class men, the breakdown of once-tight-knit communities. But the most crucial—and controversial—ingredient is the gun itself. Suicide is typically an impulsive act; the difference between life and death can thus turn on whether a person has access to a lethal weapon. In one study, survivors were asked at the hospital how much time had passed between ideation and attempt. About half said 10 minutes or less. And when a firearm is involved, according to a 2019 analysis in Annals of Internal Medicine, there is a 90 percent chance a suicide attempt will be fatal. One statistic is particularly clarifying: Only 5 percent of suicide attempts involve a firearm—but a gun is used in more than 50 percent of suicide deaths.

After Kellermann published his findings, the National Rifle Association told Americans that he could not be trusted. In an interview with The Morning Call, an NRA representative denounced Kellermann’s study as “dishonest,” adding, “Worldwide, nationwide, regionally there is no relationship between gun availability and suicide rates.” But in the three decades since, other studies have consistently echoed Kellermann’s conclusions.

The core of the gun-rights movement—and the firearms market—is made up of white men who live in suburbs or rural areas. These buyers are among the least likely to encounter gun violence, but the most likely to die by their own hand using a firearm. And yet the gun industry has so far avoided any real public reckoning over whether the strategy that keeps these customers buying could also be placing them in danger.

Bob Owens was the oldest of three boys, raised in a Christian household in Greenville, North Carolina. He grew up hunting deer, fishing, and playing soccer. His father liked to remind Owens and his brothers that they alone were responsible for their actions. “You made that bed,” he would say. “Now lie in it.”

As an undergraduate at East Carolina University, Owens majored in English, covered sports for the school paper, and aspired to be a novelist. An old classmate, who also worked on the newspaper, told me that she never heard him express strong political opinions or take a position on guns. He was mild-mannered, an introvert with a small circle of close friends.

One night, at a downtown pool hall, one of those friends introduced him to a nutrition major from New York named Christine. He’d seen her at parties; she had bright blue eyes, blond hair, and a warmth that made people feel comfortable and accepted. She loved music and played the violin. Christine worked at a restaurant, and when they started dating, Owens would hang out there during her shifts, just wanting to be nearby.

When the two had been together a year, Christine’s parents came to town for a birthday dinner at Owens’s childhood home. In front of both families, Owens revealed an engagement ring. “Will you?” he asked Christine. “He could barely get the words out,” she told me. “He was so nervous.”

In 1997, after they’d both graduated, the couple moved to Charlotte. Christine managed a restaurant; Owens went into IT. They liked spending time outdoors together, hiking in the North Carolina mountains. Owens kept a shotgun in the house for hunting, which was new for Christine, who hadn’t grown up with firearms and was uncomfortable around them. Mostly, the gun remained out of sight. Being a gun owner wasn’t yet a key part of Owens’s identity. “It was more of a history thing,” Christine said. “He knew the background and history of these old guns from wars … It was kind of a hobby.”

They got married in 1998 and had their first child, Maya, two years later. “Bob was over the moon,” Christine said. In 2001, she and Owens moved to Newburgh, New York, to live with her family, then rented a home of their own. The house had a lovely view of the Hudson River, but Newburgh, sitting at the intersection of two interstate highways, was a hub for crack-cocaine trafficking, and a frequent site of violent crime. The place next door to the Owens’s home was abandoned, and drug dealers and prostitutes hung out in the area. Owens and Maya tended to make their fun inside. They invented a game they called Table Ball; he would kneel in front of a table, acting as the goalie, and Maya would try to kick a ball underneath it.

When strangers loitered near their house for too long, Owens and Christine often called the cops, and sometimes Owens would go outside and confront people himself. He’d knock on a car window and ask whoever was inside to leave. At the time, he didn’t carry a gun.

Though Owens had been conservative his whole life, he wasn’t particularly outspoken about his political views until after 9/11. In the early 2000s, he was still working in IT, but he missed writing and was eager for an outlet. Then, in 2004, he started a blog called Confederate Yankee. Its slogan: “Because liberalism is a persistent vegetative state.”

In his early entries, Owens offered a vigorous defense of President George W. Bush and the Iraq War. His online writing had a brashness and a commanding authority, as if he were test-driving a new persona. In one post, Owens declared, “There is something inherent in the character of Americans that makes us want to fight for and nurture the freedom of others.” And yet the Democratic Party, he wrote, has “fought against this fine trait.”

Owens could be irreverent and contemptuous. His opponents were “idiots,” “morons,” or “dumb as a stump.” But he also strove for moral consistency, even when it was inconvenient. He was adamantly opposed to abortion while chastising “small-minded people who find a bit of satisfaction in the thought of an abortion doctor burning in Hell.” He called the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy “antiquated” and declared, “We’ve seen this kind of discrimination before from our military, but it is past time for it to stop.”  

Owens posted multiple times a week, and his following grew. On Christmas Day 2004, he was feeling joyful and gracious. He commanded his readers to “go spend time with those you love,” and assured them, “I’ll be back posting tomorrow as my regular obnoxious self.”

Bob Owens. Courtesy: Maya Owens

A year later, Owens discovered an essay titled “Tribes,” by the conservative author Bill Whittle. “Tribes” argues that people belong to one of two groups, “Pink, the color of bunny ears, and Grey, the color of a mechanical pencil.” The Pink tribe, Whittle writes, is concerned with “feeling good about yourself!” For the Grey tribe, “emotion is repressed because Emotion Clouds Judgment.” Whittle’s Grey tribe knows “that sometimes bad things happen, and that these instances are opportunities to show ourselves what we are made of.” He elaborates: “My people go into burning buildings. My Tribe consists of organizers and self-starters, proud and self-reliant people who do not need to be told what to do in a crisis. My Tribe is not fearless; they are something better. They are courageous.”

The piece ignited something in Owens. He called it “the single best essay I have ever read,” and wrote that it prompted him to do “a lot of soul-searching about what it means to be Grey.” Whittle incorporated ideas from an author and a former Army Ranger named Dave Grossman, who had become a prominent right-wing thinker on the psychology of violence. Reading “Tribes” led Owens to “On Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs,” Grossman’s most influential essay, which divides society into three categories. Sheep are “kind” and “gentle,” and “can only hurt one another by accident.” They are prey to wolves, who “feed on the sheep without mercy.” And then there are sheepdogs—the animals that “live to protect the flock and confront the wolf.” Sheepdogs, Grossman says, have both “a capacity for violence” and “a deep love” for “fellow citizens.”

Owens republished Grossman’s essay on his blog in 2006. “I’ve been thinking a lot about sheepdogs lately,” he wrote. “Most of us can define where we fall in Grossman’s essay if we are honest with ourselves. Most won’t be honest of course, including many of you reading this. Dishonesty to one’s self is, after all, the defining characteristic of Sheep, even perfectly nice Sheep.”

By this time, Owens and his family had moved back to North Carolina and were living in a newly built home in Fuquay-Varina, a quiet suburb 30 minutes outside of Raleigh. The school system was good. Their middle-class neighborhood had fields and a brook, and there was a park near their house.

For a while, Owens had a part-time job working the gun counter at a sporting-goods store. He could talk at length about “00-buckshot” and its ability to “penetrate 22 inches of ballistic gelatin,” or a .410 pump shotgun, which, he once blogged, was ideal for home protection because the weapon’s “low-recoil, low-report” made “follow-up shots considerably easier than would a larger-bore shotgun.” One time, Owens wrote about customers who’d come into his store asking for a whistle to scare away potential muggers. He suggested a concealed handgun as a better option, but the customers were wary. When recounting the incident, Owens wrote, “Whistlers, however you cut it, are sheep.”  

Adams Carvalho for The Atlantic

In 2008, Owens got a permit to carry a concealed firearm, which he described as a transformative experience. “There’s a certain kind of freedom that comes with the responsibility of carrying arms that is hard to properly express to those who don’t,” he wrote. “Yes, guns can take lives. But far more often, experience truly bearing arms helps hone and reveal character.”

His timing coincided with a landmark Supreme Court decision, District of Columbia v. Heller, which declared that the Second Amendment guaranteed the individual right to own a firearm. One article about the decision, in Reuters, quoted Kellermann discussing the risks of keeping a loaded firearm in the home. The story infuriated Owens, who referred to Kellermann on his blog as a “radically anti-gun doctor.”

[Timothy Zick and Diana Palmer: The next fight over guns in America]

The next year, Barack Obama took office. For men like Owens, Bush represented the Grey tribe, and the new president represented the Pink. According to a former NRA staffer, who at the time was involved with membership communication and requested anonymity out of fear of retribution, “It was easy for [the] NRA to take an aggressive approach, and fearmonger.” The organization’s pitch, the former staffer said, was succinct and urgent: “Obama was coming for our guns.” Owens seemed to agree. He wrote that the president—who supported policies such as an assault-weapons ban while clarifying that he respected legal gun ownership—“continues to lie to the public about his intentions towards our Second Amendment rights.”

During the summer of 2009, a 29-year-old named Jennifer Perian was working for the NRA. She loved horses and baseball, and aspired to visit every Major League stadium in the country. Perian, who was from Colorado, hadn’t grown up around guns, but she attended George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where the NRA is located. She took the job after graduating, and soon purchased a handgun.

Perian began dating someone new, but the relationship quickly grew tumultuous. Then one day Perian’s dad, Jim, was at work when the police called. Jen had fatally shot herself. “They said it was impulsive,” Jim told me. “They called it an ‘emotional suicide.’”

The NRA paid for the funeral and flew Jim out to Virginia. “They were very nice to me,” he said. “I can tell you that.”

Three years after Perian’s death, an NRA field representative named John quietly attended a Sandy Hook memorial ceremony near the small town in Indiana where he and his family lived. John, at 45, was tall and sturdy. He had two daughters in high school, and he had worked for the NRA for 10 years, running fundraising banquets in his region. Before that, John had been a field artillery officer in the Army. Now he was in the Reserves.

The NRA had hired him with the understanding that he could still be deployed overseas. In 2011, he was sent to Iraq for most of the year. He earned a Bronze Star, one of the highest honors bestowed by the armed services. According to his certificate, he was “engaged in stability operations under constant threat and frequent attack.”

But after he returned, John was clearly suffering. His wife, who asked that her name and her family’s surname be withheld, told me that the NRA made him feel like his job was in constant jeopardy. “The expectation was to jump right back in and have all of the other stressors on top of it,” she said. When Sandy Hook happened on December 14, 2012, John had been back at work for a year, and had earned his second Field Representative of the Year award. His wife said that her husband believed in the NRA with his “whole heart.” He would tell people: “This is not a traditional job, because this is a lifestyle. This is about our Second Amendment.”

[Read: 10 years after Sandy Hook, here we are again]

John’s wife was a teacher at a local high school and had helped organize the Sandy Hook memorial event; John attended to support his wife. “He wanted me to be very clear that, if anybody asked, he was there as himself, not as a representative of the NRA,” she said.

After the new year, John started drinking heavily. On April 5, he got arrested for a DUI while driving an NRA vehicle. “That just sent him over the edge,” John’s wife said. “He feared he was going to lose his job.” On April 7, he spent the day in his home office, working on NRA business. The next day, around lunchtime, he took one of his handguns, got on a bicycle, and rode half a mile into the woods near his home, where he shot and killed himself. “I’m not anti-gun,” John’s wife said, “but having a gun right there and accessible definitely made it easier.”

When she discovered that her husband had spent the last day of his life working for the NRA instead of with his family, she was livid. She remembers calling John’s boss and telling him, “You need to come and get this NRA stuff out of my house.” Twenty-four hours later, the boss and a colleague came and took the materials away. No one from NRA headquarters reached out to the family to express condolences, she told me.

A federal bill proposing expanded background checks for gun buyers was defeated in the Senate the following week. The NRA released a celebratory statement underscoring that the legislation would have undermined a “fundamental right,” but noted that the organization would continue to work on “fixing our broken mental health system.”

At least two more NRA employees would die by gun suicide after John. On a Monday in November 2019, Ryan Phipps, who worked in the NRA’s affinity-and-licensing department, did not show up for work. Phipps, 27, had been with the organization for half a decade. He enjoyed hunting and fishing. He played the drums and had built his own bicycle.

But privately, Phipps had a history of depression, according to a source who knew him well. Over the years, Phipps had sought treatment, and he’d seemed to be doing well until the day he used one of his own handguns to attempt suicide. He initially survived the shot, but died in the hospital two weeks later.

That same year, the NRA fired a program coordinator named Mark Richardson. HuffPost had published emails that showed him, in conversation with a prominent conspiracy theorist, raising questions about the 2018 Parkland high-school shooting. Richardson was almost 60, and he had worked at the NRA for a decade. His friend and former NRA colleague Stephen Czarnik invited him to live on his farm in West Virginia, where they raised chickens.

Richardson’s mental health was deteriorating, according to Czarnik. He was drinking alone. In October 2020, Czarnik recalled to me, another friend from the NRA was visiting the farm. He and Czarnik were hanging out in an upstairs room when Richardson walked in. Richardson embraced them and said, “God is good,” and that he loved them. “Then he ran downstairs,” Czarnik said, “and we knew something was wrong.” Czarnik and his friend followed Richardson, who dashed to the front porch. Before anyone could reach him, he shot himself with a handgun.

When Richardson died, it had been almost 30 years since the NRA had publicly disputed Kellermann’s research. Billy McLaughlin, an NRA spokesperson, said in an email that the organization “observes that according to many criminologists and researchers” Kellermann’s work is “interpreted as junk science.” He added that the NRA does not comment on its employees, and that there is “nothing more important to us” than the staff’s “safety and security.”

In 2013, Owens was out of work in IT, but his profile as a writer had risen. He was done with Confederate Yankee, and was now a regular contributor to the long-standing conservative site PJ Media, where he focused almost singularly on firearms. He was especially fixated on the trial of George Zimmerman, who, a year earlier, had fatally shot Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager who was unarmed. Owens seemed to identify with Zimmerman. Martin, he wrote, “was a very troubled young man who believed very strongly in impulsively trying to get whatever he wanted, and did not care if others were hurt if it made him feel better”; he found Zimmerman, meanwhile, to be a “generally honorable man with idealistic goals about the role good men should play in protecting their communities.”

Owens and Christine now had two children. Maya was in her early teens; their second, Kate, was 6. Owens took the family on trips to North Carolina’s western mountains, and cooked them pork butt on the grill. They attended church every Sunday. Owens always had a handgun on him, though the only real hazard in their neighborhood was the occasional car accident on a busy road called Judd Parkway. When that happened, Christine said, Owens was the first to rush outside and offer help.

On the night of the Zimmerman verdict, he tweeted to his thousands of followers, “Trayvon Martin tried to kill George Zimmerman. He just failed at that as he did everything else in his life.” Stephen Gutowski, a journalist who reports on firearms and was close with Owens, told me, “When he felt like a media narrative was developing that was unfair to gun owners, he would go and push back as hard as he could.”

[Read: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Trayvon Martin and the irony of American justice]

Christine recalled that Owens half-jokingly turned to Twitter for help finding full-time work, suggesting that there must be an organization out there that could use his skills. Katie Pavlich, a conservative commentator and friend, saw his tweet. She worked for a conservative media company called Townhall, which had recently launched BearingArms.com. It needed someone to run the site, and Pavlich thought Owens would be a good fit. He was soon hired at a salary of $80,000 a year. “This was like a dream job to him,” Christine told me.

The self-defense gun market is defined by contradiction. In a 2015 study conducted by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF)—the trade group for the firearms industry—white respondents had the highest level of gun ownership, and were the ones most likely to claim that they carried weapons out of a “duty to protect” family and worries over “random acts of violence.” But at the same time, they were also less likely than Black and Hispanic respondents to report that they actually live in dangerous neighborhoods.

These results aligned with other research. In his book Dying of Whiteness, Jonathan Metzl, a psychiatrist and sociologist, looks closely at gun owners in a Missouri county that is 85 percent white. He told me that many of his subjects “imagined a threat around every corner.” He added, “One guy was talking about ‘gangbangers’ who would come through his window and steal his television.” Another man “imagined that he could be carjacked at any moment.” Angela Stroud, a sociologist whose book, Good Guys With Guns, explores similar themes, writes that the men she interviewed were fixated on imagined violence. “Though they may never be in a position to carry out heroic fantasies of masculine bravery,” she wrote in her book, they were “positioning themselves as brave leaders of their families.”

At the NRA’s 2015 annual meeting, in Nashville, Tennessee, Dave Grossman held a seminar called “Sheepdogs! The Bulletproof Mind for the Armed Citizen.” “Of all the violence we could engage in, violence to protect our families, to protect our children, is what we’re wired to do,” he told attendees. “You are the Special Forces. We are at war.”

Nearly two-thirds of the roughly 40,000 annual gun deaths that were occurring at the time were suicides. The statistics were bleak enough that even the NSSF felt compelled to publicly address them. In August of 2016, the group launched a high-profile campaign aimed at combatting gun suicide, in partnership with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP), the largest private suicide-prevention organization in the country.

On its face, the partnership seemed promising. Robert Gebbia, the CEO of AFSP, said in a press release that his organization saw “this relationship as critical to reaching the firearms community.” That same press release quoted Stephen Sanetti, then the NSSF president, as saying that the effort placed the “firearms industry” at the “forefront of helping to prevent these deaths.”

But the written agreement between the two groups, which has never been reported on before, has a “conflicts of interest” provision that might have caused some concern had it been viewed by the public. The opening sentence promises that “the parties shall act in the best interests of the other” and “shall disclose any real or potential conflicts that are adverse to the interests of the other as they arise.” Such conflicts included “positions advanced by one party [that] do not align with the positions advanced by the other and the issuance of any public statement by a party that harms or could harm the other.” Given that one of the NSSF’s primary goals is to maximize profit for the firearms industry, such a policy would seemingly present a major limitation for the partnership. Stephanie Rogers, the chief communications officer at AFSP, told me in an email that the language merely calls for transparency, and “does not inhibit the action of either party.”

By 2018, the NSSF had a landing page for its partnership with the AFSP. Most suicide deaths involved a firearm, the program’s materials emphasized, because the presence of a gun almost guarantees that the attempt will be successful. In an introductory video, Sanetti described the deadly urge as often “spur-of-the-moment.” He ended his monologue with a simple statement of fact: “Temporarily preventing a person in crisis from accessing a firearm can help save lives.”

Sanetti was nodding toward a concept known as “means restriction.” If people are jumping off bridges, for instance, then the government builds barriers to prevent those deaths. Such solutions tend to work when they are externally imposed. But the NSSF and AFSP would not jointly recommend anything that could be construed as “gun control.” Instead, an AFSP spokesperson explained in an email, the two groups were “providing practical and accessible suicide prevention education.” The website suggested separately storing ammunition and firearms, which should be kept in safes or lockboxes. If more drastic measures were deemed necessary, the organizations said that “temporary off-site storage” was an option to “consider.” They were advocating for a do-it-yourself approach to a deeply complicated societal problem.

For the NSSF, it was still bold to acknowledge that separating someone from their firearm might be the key to survival. But a 2018 study funded by the group illustrates why it might have been—and likely remains—difficult for the industry to push for more forceful solutions. The NSSF surveyed gun owners who often carried concealed firearms, 81 percent of whom disclosed that they always kept a loaded one close by. “The more frequently a person carries a firearm,” the study found, “the more they spend on handguns, ammunition and carry equipment and accessories.” On average, respondents owned more than 10 guns. Roughly 80 percent of the participants were white men.

Adams Carvalho for The Atlantic

Jenn Jacques began working with Bob Owens in 2015. When she contacted him to ask if there might be a job for her at Bearing Arms, she was running a website for female gun owners. She’d been reading Owens’s writing for years; she admired his boldness and intelligence. Owens was working seven days a week, starting at six in the morning and often ending at 10 at night. Bearing Arms brought Jacques on as a volunteer at first, but after a year made her a full-time, salaried employee.

Owens and Jacques were each required to write seven posts a day if they wanted weekends off. Owens usually sat on a recliner in the living room, facing a window with a view of the woods. “We used to call him Barcalounger Bob,” Jacques told me.

By 2016, Owens had become a central voice in the gun-rights movement, regularly giving interviews on NRATV, which was then one of the gun group’s media platforms. “Bob was under so much pressure,” Christine told me. “The company always wanted more out of him. Always more, more, more.” She took care of the children while Owens was consumed by work. “When I think about it now,” Christine said, “I think Bob liked to look out the window because nature soothed him, calmed his nerves.”

Toward the end of 2016, the parent company of Bearing Arms asked Owens if he would like to write a book—something akin to a gun guide—that the company would publish through Regnery, its publishing house. He wasn’t offered a large sum, but the family needed extra money. Owens also held out hope that the book might lead to an opportunity to write a novel, so he agreed.

In January, Jacques and Owens attended the 2017 SHOT Show, the NSSF’s annual trade event in Las Vegas. Christine Moutier, the AFSP’s chief medical officer, was there to discuss her group’s partnership with the NSSF. She sat for an interview with Jacques, which Owens filmed. It was an intimate, polite chat. Jacques, in a neat striped shirt, sat close to Moutier. “What are a few of the signs of suicide?” Jacques asked. “Even those people who are presenting the strong happy face will show signs without intending to,” Moutier said. They might self-isolate, or become “more short-fused.” In the brief conversation, Moutier did not cover means restriction or the potential danger of keeping guns in the house.

Back home, as Owens worked on his manuscript, Christine noticed that he seemed newly moody. He started smoking, a habit he had dropped years earlier. He would get worked up about tiny things in a way he never had, snapping at Christine if she forgot something at the store. When he was frustrated, he’d say, “I have to go for a walk.” “He was always walking because everything was just irritating him,” Christine said.

Christine tried to reassure her husband that life would get easier when his book was finished. “I just kept saying, ‘You’re almost done. When this is done, you can relax.’” He was experiencing symptoms of depression. Christine asked him to see a therapist, and he did. He tried medication for about a week, but stopped taking it because he thought it made him feel worse.

To his readers, though, Owens was the same man he’d always been. That spring, he ran stories with headlines such as “Another Good Guy With a Gun: Detroit Man Shoots Sister’s Violent Stalker,” and “Armed Good Samaritan Runs Off Terrified Robber.” The NRA’s annual meeting—the one both Jacques and Owens attended in Atlanta—was in late April. Owens tweeted a photo of a revolver and ammo. “This is the Ruger LCR I’m carrying at #NRAAM2017,” he wrote.

On Friday, May 5, after Owens had returned from the event, Christine and Kate left for a Girl Scouts camping trip. Owens was “acting funny,” Christine said. “He was constantly texting to see how we were doing, and would get worried if I didn’t respond right away. I kept telling him, ‘We’re fine, we’re fine, but we’re out doing things.’” She noted that Owens was effusive, almost manic. “He was saying that I was the best wife, the best woman, and that when we got home, he would be the husband I deserve and things would change. He promised to cook us a steak dinner.”

On Sunday, Owens tweeted a meme featuring a heavily tattooed man and a little boy. Each had a speech bubble coming from his mouth. “Dad,” the boy says, “when I become a man, I want to be a Liberal.” The father responds, “Well, you have to choose one son. You can’t be both.” Owens added: “I admit it. I laughed.” That evening, after Christine and Kate returned, Owens grilled steak for the family. Everybody ate, and then he and Christine stayed up late into the night, discussing a possible winter trip to Las Vegas. His book was due in three days.

The following morning, Owens placed his cigarettes, Altoids, pepper spray, knife, phone, and wallet in his pockets. The holster clipped to his belt held the same revolver he’d carried a week earlier at the NRA’s annual meeting. He walked Kate to the school-bus stop and watched her board.

Owens had a few hours before he had to drive to Wake Tech Community College to pick up his older daughter, Maya, who was taking a final. So he kept walking. As he made his way down Sequoia Ridge Drive, he caught the attention of a neighbor, a woman who didn’t know him but was struck by the way he was hanging his head. That man, she thought, seems remarkably sad.

Eventually, Owens arrived at the intersection of Sequoia and South Judd Parkway, not far from his house. Cars whipped by rows of well-kept shrubs. Owens pulled out his phone to post a message on Facebook. “In the end, it turns out that I’m not strong,” he wrote. “I’m a coward, and a selfish son of a bitch. I’m sorry.”

When her father didn’t show up to get her, Maya tried calling. She couldn’t reach him, so she contacted her mom and explained that she was stranded. It was unlike Owens not to show.   

A 39-year-old Iraq War veteran drove by the corner of Sequoia and Judd. He noticed Owens lying in the grass, bleeding from a gunshot wound in the head. The vet parked and ran over. He felt for a pulse that was not there, then dialed 911.

Police told Christine what had happened. She was too distraught to drive home, so two detectives, along with Christine’s father, went to meet her. News of Owens’s death began to trickle out that evening. Jacques wrote on Facebook, “Life as I knew it ended this morning. It was a privilege and an honor to call Bob Owens my friend, co-editor and work hubby, so please know that I will do everything in my power to protect him in death as I did in life.” The next day, Jacques published a short post about Owens on Bearing Arms, but she did not disclose how he died. She wrote, “In the end, all that matters is [he] will be sorely missed, and the truth is that we will never know what truly happened.”

Owens’s employers at Townhall Media, which owns Bearing Arms and did not respond to a request for comment, sent Christine a condolence email and flowers. They also set up a GoFundMe page announcing that they’d “lost a friend,” soliciting donations from the public to help support Owens’s family. “We’d like to show our love and appreciation for Bob,” the page said. “Groceries, bills and college dreams will be a struggle—but we can help.” The campaign raised more than $36,000 from 608 donors. No Townhall executives attended her husband’s funeral. (On behalf of Owens’s mother and siblings, his father declined to comment for this article, citing his support for the Second Amendment.)

Jacques does not think the gun industry holds any responsibility for Bob’s death, or for gun suicide in general. “It really is a shame people may not be as comfortable reaching out for help because we’re attacked by the gun-control movement,” Jacques told me. Gutowski, the journalist who was friends with Owens, said that many gun owners are afraid to tell doctors about their mental-health struggles, because they worry someone will take their weapons away.

It’s been seven years since the AFSP and the NSSF announced their partnership, and more Americans are dying of gun suicide than ever before. The coronavirus pandemic and the summer 2020 protests after the murder of George Floyd spurred people to buy firearms in record-breaking numbers. In 2022, according to CDC data, there were 27,000 gun suicides, the highest number ever recorded in the United States. According to an analysis by Cassandra Crifasi, an associate professor of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins University, white men still make up nearly 80 percent of these deaths. “The risk typically starts to peak when they reach their mid-40s,” she said. Owens was 46 when he died.

In 2021, the NSSF, which declined to provide a comment for this story, hosted a webinar on suicide prevention for gun-range operators and firearms dealers. Two gregarious consultants—John “JB” Bocker and John “JC” Clark—ran the presentation. They ticked through the signs of depression, and gave some guidance on how to predict when a customer might be suicidal.

“How does your most common customer come into the store?” Clark asked. “They’re excited, right? They’re going to buy their first firearm, or they’re going to buy a new firearm, or something new to the market. Or they want to receive training. They’re excited about it. They have a certain amount of energy. So when you compare the atypical customer to these different scenarios, then you may have a situation where somebody is in crisis, where somebody needs help.” He continued, “Moving, speaking slowly, restlessness—all of these things could be signs you need to be aware of.”

“And, JC, we can’t forget understanding basic body language,” Bocker chimed in. “It may not always be verbal. It may not always be their direct approach about buying or not buying a gun. It just might be their quietness; it might be the way they’re looking or not looking.” He added, “Everything about their body language can be a telltale hint to them wanting to do something they shouldn’t do with a firearm.”

Bocker and Clark declined to be interviewed for this story. At my request, Amanda Spray, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at NYU’s Grossman School of Medicine, reviewed a recording of their presentation. “Untrained individuals would find it very difficult to predict who is experiencing suicidal ideation,” she told me. She called the approach, with its inherent conflicts between sales and public health, “extremely unrealistic.”

Not long ago, I visited Christine in North Carolina and spent a day in the Owenses’ old neighborhood in Fuquay-Varina. The homes and lawns were meticulously maintained. Driveways had basketball hoops, and rocking chairs sat on porches. There were decorative signs with welcoming messages. One said Home on the Range. Another said Sit Relax Gossip.

Other than his Facebook post, Bob had not left a note. At the time of his death, Christine felt as though she were in a kind of limbo. She was desperate for clues and answers. She could not get into his phone, and Bob’s therapist could not divulge any details about her husband’s treatment. “Why didn’t he come to me?” Christine wondered. “We always worked it out, always worked through things. We worked on them together, always.”

One day, soon after Bob died, Christine opened his work bag and found a notebook. In it was a list: “Things That Are Stressing Me Out.” It stretched on for seven or eight pages, mentioning death threats, which were news to Christine, as were Bob’s concerns about his aging parents. A lot of it was familiar, just laid out at length. “So much about his job,” Christine described to me, “the book, things that were going on with the kids, being the provider.” She realized she hadn’t known the extent of his stress. “Bob really felt like he was stuck and didn’t know where to go,” she said.

Christine doesn’t view Bob’s suicide as a cautionary tale about gun ownership, and she does not think anyone else should view it that way, either. She herself carries a firearm when she goes out of town, in case her car breaks down. One day, while we were eating lunch at a Japanese restaurant, I asked if she was aware that gun suicide, according to the data, seemed to pose a unique threat to men like her husband. She set down her fork and folded her arms. “I know,” Christine said, but she believes the real problem is that so many boys are raised to equate vulnerability with weakness. “I don’t think it’s about guns. I think it’s about men and their feelings—they’re still bad at dealing with them.”

Bob, she said, wanted to take care of the people around him. Like many men, she went on, “he had to be tough.” She thinks her husband would have found a way to kill himself no matter what. “Besides,” she said, “how would I have kept Bob away from guns?”

This article is a collaboration between The Atlantic and The Trace. When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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From time to time, I visit a friend who has been enormously successful in business. He has an office in New York City that is decorated top to bottom with memorabilia of his many achievements. On the wall are framed magazine covers with his smiling face—CEO of the Year! On the bookshelves are dozens of knickknacks engraved with the dates of when he bought or sold a company.

His office is like a shrine to past glories, and an obvious source of pride. Recently, however, he surprised me by saying he plans to get rid of all of these trophies. I asked why, and he told me that his business has struggled of late, and the trophies are only making his troubles seem worse. “I feel as if they’re mocking me.”

This phenomenon has been called the “Ozymandias problem,” an allusion to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1818 poem about the once-great ancient-Egyptian pharaoh (also known as Ramesses II), who is memorialized by a long-eroded statue—of which nothing recognizable remains after many millennia except the inscription on its base: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

The Ozymandias problem refers to the futility of our efforts to immortalize our accomplishments. The one who would despair, of course, would be the pharaoh himself, were he alive to see his ruined statue.

[Arthur C. Brooks: The red pill of humility]

Like my friend, almost all of us enjoy commemorating our achievements, but we must also face the inevitable fact that our worldly triumphs will decay with the passage of time. This realization can be a source of bitterness and keep us stuck in the past. Then, as my friend found, our trophies might end up mocking us. But only if we let them. If, instead, we choose to celebrate and remember what truly matters in life, we can enjoy the past and the present, despite what time brings our way.

Your trophies might be a silver cup from winning a pickleball tournament, a Phi Beta Kappa pin, stuffed-and-mounted animals, or pictures of yourself with celebrities. Such awards and mementos might seem like a simple matter, but they’re not. Trophies attempt simultaneously to stop time and to substitute a concrete object for an abstract experience.

Say you win a spelling bee as a kid. The moment of victory is sweet—it stimulates your brain’s ventral striatum, part of the cognitive-reward circuit. But that sweetness is both ephemeral and intangible—a moment marked by your identifying a series of letters more accurately than your competitors. To freeze that feeling of pleasure in time and make it more concrete, you receive a certificate with the inscription Seventh-Grade Spelling Champion, which you have framed and put up on your wall, where it stays for years.

Because we value our victories so highly, we value the associated trophies—even trivial ones—in ways that might seem irrational. Social scientists have demonstrated this trait using clever experiments. For example, in 2014, two German economists administered a simple competitive math test to one group among 76 adults. The winners—those with the highest scores—received a “trophy,” an ordinary pen worth 2.10 euros, and the losers got nothing. They were then asked to name the price for which they would be willing to part with their pens; the average amount was 4.40 euros. Evidently, this plain object was now endowed with some emotional value above and beyond its utility. When the losers were asked how much they would pay for the identical pen, they quoted an average price of 57 cents, suggesting an aversion to someone else’s trophy, which would presumably remind them of their defeat.

Trophies of all types are intended to make us happier by evoking a positive memory. And plenty of research has shown that recalling past happy experiences can improve well-being by lowering stress and reducing feelings of sadness. Not coincidentally, people who are suffering from persistent and intense sadness may struggle to recall positive autobiographical experiences. A good happiness habit is to keep a journal of happy memories, such as fun days with loved ones and moments of peace and tranquility, and then turn to this journal in moments of strife and stress.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Why the most successful marriages are start-ups, not mergers]

But memorializing extraordinary victories is different from recalling sweet moments in ordinary life. Although the latter are happy times you can reasonably hope to replicate—a reminder that life can be good—the former can set you up for an unhappy comparison with your former self.

Suppose you get fired from your job. This can hurt a lot, and may temporarily make you feel worthless. Thinking of happy times with friends and family can help you at such a moment, reminding you that there are still plenty of people who love and value you. But looking at your framed Employee of the Month award from better times is probably a bad idea.

Trophy-keeping can be an example of what I call “invidious intertemporal autocomparison” (don’t judge me; coming up with fancy technical terms is one way academics get tenure). In one study showing how this syndrome can hurt you, Eastern European researchers asked people to evaluate what their life was like before the fall of Communism compared with their current circumstances. The researchers found that the better people’s past existence seemed to them in retrospect, the lower their well-being would be in the present.

Imagine living with someone who went out of their way to remind you every day that you used to be younger and more attractive, or that you used to have better ideas and more energy. That would be an abusive relationship. But this is in effect what you are doing to yourself if you adorn your home or workplace with trophies of your past accomplishments.

None of this is to suggest that you should enter your very own witness-protection program and erase your whole past. Personal mementos are fine. The problem with conventional trophies is that where your happiness is concerned, they get the time frame wrong and commemorate the wrong things. Here are three ideas for how to make sure you keep only the trophies that bring you joy—and that never mock you.

1. Get the time frame right.
Golfers always complain that they aren’t playing well, because they compare today’s score with their best score ever. Better instead to remember that the only game that matters—if it is supposed to be an enjoyable hobby—is the one you’re playing today. So it is with life. Each day is an adventure with the potential for highs and lows, one full of experiences appropriate to your age and circumstances.

Instead of hanging a medal on the wall that marked some achievement that would be beyond you now, honor the thing that you did today—and that you’ll also be able to do tomorrow. Take a minute each evening to jot down the day’s best moment—maybe it was a conversation or a meal or finishing a project at work. Celebrate it in any way you like (as I’ve confessed before, I like a piece of candy). Put the reminder note about your happy time on the fridge or leave it on your desk. Tomorrow, throw it away and make a new one.

[Juliet Lapidos: There is a culture industry that gives its top prizes to women]

2. Commemorate what matters.
If you want to keep trophies of your life’s peak achievements, then at least pick the right ones to hold on to: They should be the moments of greatest intrinsic satisfaction, not of extrinsic adulation. I have met award-winning actors and athletes, but I don’t know a single one who would trade celebrating her child’s birthday for winning an Oscar or Olympic gold. As long as the reminder of your greatest loves is connected to a relationship that is still strong and full, celebrating the highlights won’t mock you. Memorialize the relationship with favorite moments: your wedding photo, for example. These trophies remind you that your victory is not a closed and finished episode in your past but something that you’re still winning.

3. If the trophies mock you, toss them.
My friend was finding it hard to clear out the trophy shelf in his office. He is quite attached to all the doodads and pictures of himself, and he fears that he will lose touch with his sense of self-worth without them. But they are interfering with his quality of life, and when he finally gets rid of them, he will feel a lot freer and better—as though he is finally living in the present. You can do the same thing. If a physical object causes you the least bit of chagrin, ditch it.

Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is intended as a cautionary tale that juxtaposes ephemeral human magnificence with the remorseless passage of time. The poem ends with these forlorn lines:

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

I have been to the Egyptian deserts once ruled by Ramesses II, but I had an entirely different reaction to the sands stretching into the distance: I found them indescribably beautiful, not sad. No doubt, this was the same beauty that Shelley’s traveler, contemplating the great king’s fate, could have marveled at. But reflecting on the illusory glory symbolized by the monarch’s derelict statue, he failed to enjoy the natural glory before his very eyes. Don’t make the Ozymandias mistake and miss the beauty of your present by fetishizing the monuments of your past.