By Fred Moody (thanks to Ed M.)
On July 13, a 20-year-old kid named Thomas Crooks—a kid who was such a poor shot that he had failed to make his small high school’s junior varsity shooting team—came within a hair’s breadth of shooting Donald Trump to death from 450 feet away. The weapon that made up for his shortcomings as a marksman was an AR-15 assault rifle. That weapon, the first prototype of which was built in 1953, has an exceptionally deadly and scandalous (and thoroughly American) history.
That gruesome history (and prehistory) is told in enlightening and infuriating detail in American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15, by Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Sept. 2023). Their narrative encompasses everything from the invention and marketing of the first bolt-action rifle; the marketing by Sam Colt to white southerners fearful of slave revolts with the first breech-loading revolver; the long history of the Springfield Rifle Company, founded by George Washington; to detailed reporting of the AR-15’s development, use and deadly effects in the present day. There can be no more American story than the story of how this gun, powered by politicians and marketers, became the high-performance weapon of choice by evildoers around the world.
Were it not for the technology in question, the story of this rifle’s ascent would be a charming, garden-variety, classic American tale of an eccentric tinkerer’s invention making its way to unimaginable high performance, ubiquity, and profitability. The inventor, Eugene Stoner—a shy, withdrawn employee of an aerospace company—came up with the first version of the gun in his spare time, working in his Southern California garage in 1953. Its innovations included light weight, automatic firing, and small-caliber bullets—which, counterintuitively, do more damage than large-caliber bullets. (continued)