How long can we go between news cycles featuring assault rifles? According to the Gun Violence Archive, in 2023 the answer is barely more than 12 hours. This year there have been 565 mass shootings in the US, including the latest horror in Maine – an average of nearly two a day. Those statistics make American Gun, a brilliant new biography of the AR-15, a particularly powerful and important book.
Written by two fine Wall Street Journal reporters, Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson, the book is packed with characters and plot turns, from Eugene Stoner, the publicity-shy inventor who designed the first AR-15 in the 1950s, to the embrace of the gun by Robert McNamara and John F Kennedy, which led to its disastrous adoption as the chief weapon for army infantrymen in Vietnam.
The design was shaped by a simple military adage: “Whoever shoots the most lead wins.” Every detail of how the weapon went from a “counter-insurgency” tool in south-east Asia in the 1960s to the most popular way to kill American schoolchildren in the 21st century is included in this harrowing narrative.
Stoner worked with aluminum in one of the booming aerospace factories in California and became obsessed with how he could use new materials like plastic to make a lighter, more effective rifle. He also achieved the “holy grail that gun designers had pursued for generations: how to use the energy released from the exploding gunpowder … to reload the weapon”. Soon he had a patent for a “gas operated bolt and carrier system” with fewer parts than a conventional rifle, that would make his “smoother to operate and last longer”.
The first third of American Gun is devoted to how Stoner teamed up with an entrepreneur, George Sullivan, who brought his invention to the Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation, which set up a new division, ArmaLite, to produce the weapon. The main challenge they faced in selling the gun to the government was a centuries-old tradition of the army designing its own weapons. In 1957, the army announced it had chosen its own M-14 to replace the M-1, the workhorse of the second world war.
But the inventors used the ancient rivalry between the services to get their foot in the door. They socialized with an air force general, Curtis LeMay, and got him to fire an AR-15 at a July 4 celebration in 1960. (Famously, LeMay was a model for the psychotic character played by George C Scott in Dr Strangelove.) LeMay was so impressed by the impact the gun had on watermelons 50 and 150 yards away, he decided the air force should buy 8,500 of them for its security teams.
The new rifle took off inside the government with the arrival of John Kennedy in the White House and former Ford president Robert McNamara at the defense department, with a legion of whiz kids who wanted to invent new forms of warfare. McNamara was eager to prove he was smarter than the generals he inherited, so he overrode them and convinced Kennedy the army should adopt Stoner’s rifle instead of the M-14.
One thing which especially impressed the earliest AR-15 users, including South Vietnamese troops, was the way its bullets became unstable inside a human body, tearing through “like a tornado, spiraling and tipping … obliterat[ing] organs, blood vessels and bones”. This of course was the same quality that would make the weapon the ultimate scourge of American schoolchildren five decades later.
To mollify the generals, McNamara allowed the Pentagon’s technical coordinating committee to modify the gun before it went into mass production. Among other things, the committee changed the kind of ammunition used – with disastrous consequences. In Vietnam, the gun jammed repeatedly in combat. Vivid descriptions of how that jeopardized the lives of American soldiers are some of the most terrifying sections of American Gun.
Dick Backus, a grunt who saw half of his 10-member squad mowed down, summarized the problem: “Our government sent young men to war with a rifle that didn’t shoot.” A Washington Post editorial reached a similar conclusion: “If the New Left were to set out to compose an insider’s indictment of the ‘military-industrial complex’, it could hardly match the report which a congressional committee has submitted” about the new rifle. Eventually, the army redesigned the weapon, and by 1975 it was working well again.
The second half of American Gun highlights the role of Wall Street hedge fund owners in consolidating the gun industry and making the AR-15 the weapon of choice for insecure American males. Some of the most disgusting details are about an ad campaign proposed for readers of Maxim. The first ad was a picture of a gun pointed at the reader, with the caption “MINE IS SO DEFINITELY BIGGER THAN YOURS”. A website for the Bushmaster rifle read: “The Bushmaster Man Card declares and confirms that you are a Man’s Man, the last of a dying breed, with all the rights and privileges duly afforded.”
Even more disgusting was the strategy of private equity owners who bought up large portions of the gun industry in the early 2000s. They made sure video games included their brand of rifle because it would “help create brand preference among the next generation who experiences these games, allowing [us] to win our fair share of these young customers”.
There is so much more in this book, including the collapse of political will to reform gun laws. The authors also detail how fake the 10-year ban on assault rifles really was, because the bill authored by then California senator Dianne Feinstein contained so many loopholes, gun manufacturers just made tiny tweaks and kept producing weapons.
And because Congress had made the AR-15 forbidden fruit, sales actually exploded. In 1995, Americans owned about 400,000 of them. “By the end of 2021,” McWhirter and Elinson write, “that number jumped to more than 20 million.”
American Gun is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
