On May 16, the gun company Daniel Defense tweeted an ad featuring a toddler holding an AR-style rifle—the same kind of gun that would be used to kill 21 people in Uvalde, Texas, days later. According to Todd C. Frankel, an enterprise reporter at the Washington Post, ads like these are as routine as the “thoughts and prayers” Daniel Defense and other gun companies offer up after every mass shooting. There is “a Groundhog Day quality to all this,” he says. “They just follow the same playbook and no variation.” On Thursday’s episode of What Next, I talked to Frankel about why gun manufacturers aren’t worried about bad publicity and how guns became identity politics. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Source: Daniel Defense Uvalde shooting: Gun manufacturers aren’t fazed by mass shootings.