[How the gun became a cultural icon—and unmade America. A Review
of American Gun, True Story of the AR-15 by Cameron McWhirter and
Zusha Elinson]
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THE CURSE OF THE AR-15  
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Colin Dickey
October 23, 2023
The New Republic
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_ How the gun became a cultural icon—and unmade America. A Review
of American Gun, True Story of the AR-15 by Cameron McWhirter and
Zusha Elinson _

, Illustration by Brian Stauffer

 

The last time I went to Las Vegas, the LED billboards on the strip had
stopped advertising Cirque du Soleil and showgirls, and instead were
displaying the phone numbers for trauma and suicide helplines. It was
Thursday, October 5, 2017, four days after a man with an arsenal had
opened fire
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from his hotel room window in the Mandalay Bay resort and casino onto
the Route 91 Harvest Festival down below, while Jason Aldean was
performing. From my room in the adjacent Delano, I could still see the
crime scene: the area cordoned off with police tape and cop cars. The
local radio station was doing nearly nonstop open phone lines for
people to process their grief.

Most of the weapons that were found in the assailant’s room that day
were variations of the AR-15—a gun that has become ubiquitous in
American culture in the past 30 years, and the subject of Cameron
McWhirter and Zusha Elinson’s new book, _American Gun: The True
Story of the AR-15
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There are as many as 44 million AR-15–style rifles in circulation in
the United States today, nearly a tenth of the total 393 million guns
in private hands in this country. The AR-15 is a semiautomatic rifle
(its military counterpart, the M16, is fully automatic), capable of
firing off bullets as fast as you can pull the trigger, but it is far
from unique in this capacity. It’s been used in a great number of
mass shootings
[[link removed]], of
course, but not in all: The horrific 2007 mass shooting at Virginia
Tech, the deadliest mass shooting in modern history in the United
States until the Orlando nightclub shooting in 2016 and the Vegas
shooting the following year, was perpetrated using two handguns.

And yet, the AR-15 remains what we talk about when we talk about guns
in this country. When first introduced, its space-age design was
strange and new, but in the decades since its outline has become the
familiar symbol of American firearms—its silhouette found on truck
windows and superimposed on U.S. flags, as well as in ads calling for
commonsense gun laws. Its distinguishing features are its easy ability
to be customized, and its single-minded purpose: the fast,
indiscriminate firing of small-caliber bullets. Its introduction into
the postwar United States heralded the shift away from wood and steel
rifles designed for marksmen to mass consumer objects that would come
to represent a specific kind of aggressive machismo.

_American Gun_ attempts to unravel the strange history of this weapon,
from an unlikely engineering success, to a marketing and branding
coup, to an object singularly associated with the current catastrophic
state of American culture. The rise of the AR-15 represents the end
result of Eisenhower’s feared “military-industrial complex”
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private corporations making weapons of war to sell both to the
military and ordinary citizens. But the story of _American Gun_ is
also the story of the changing face of America’s fascination with
guns, from the image of the skilled hunter to the macho dude whose
ferocious weapon is also stunningly simple to use. The gun that unmade
America was built to address a secret, long-suppressed problem: The
American fighting man just wasn’t that good at fighting. And if the
AR-15 is so feared these days, it’s because it’s brought that
sub-competence to the civilian world, where now literally any idiot
can use it to unleash mayhem and death.

The birth of the AR-15, which takes up the first half of _American
Gun_, reads as a classic American origin story: A plucky inventor
recognizes a gap in the market, toils away in his free time with grit
and ingenuity, and alters history. Eugene Stoner was born in 1922 in
the tiny town of Gosport, Indiana. He spent World War II working in
aviation ordnance for the Marines, repairing large-caliber guns on
planes and devoting his spare time to new weapons. By the 1950s, he
was in Southern California, designing airplane parts, when word began
to trickle out that the military was dissatisfied with the
standard-issue rifle, the M1. GIs had come to view it as undependable,
and it was under-matched against the Soviets’ new automatic AK-47,
designed by Mikhail Kalashnikov. Stoner set out to make a better
mousetrap.

What he would later describe as a “kind of a hobby that got out of
hand” led him to a series of innovations. Rifles were traditionally
made of heavy wood and steel; Stoner introduced the use of cheap,
stamped aluminum parts. It was by no means the first automatic rifle,
but he patented a far more efficient system for using the energy
expended in a rifle shot to recock the chamber for the next round,
increasing the efficiency of automatic fire. Stoner also realized that
smaller caliber bullets would not only fire faster and more
accurately, but they would do far more damage to a target than larger
caliber bullets. Whereas larger bullets tend to punch straight through
human bodies, smaller bullets, Stoner would later explain, “will go
unstable faster, and therefore create a larger wound cavity than you
would normally expect.” The result was a highly portable, highly
destructive weapon.

In this story of can-do spirit, Stoner gets his big break through a
chance meeting. In the spring of 1954, he was testing his homemade
guns at a range in Topanga Canyon, when he was approached by George C.
Sullivan, a salesman who founded the ArmaLite weapons division of the
Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corp. In McWhirter and Elinson’s
telling, ArmaLite had a broad, vague mandate to “design off-the-wall
stuff that Fairchild could sell to the U.S. or other governments,”
with very little oversight or interference. Eventually the company
produced a strange, futuristic-looking gun—it had no wood at all,
and very little steel even. This was ArmaLite’s tenth design, hence
its name: the AR-10. Stoner continued to refine the gun while Sullivan
pitched it to military brass; finally, the company’s fifteenth
design, even smaller and lighter than its predecessors, was ready.

It’s a classic American tale not just because of Stoner’s
determination, but also because of the tides of graft and grifting
that helped the gun’s rise to fame. The AR-15’s adoption by the
U.S. military was hampered by corruption: The Army’s bureaucracy
didn’t want a gun that hadn’t been developed in-house by military
personnel; they repeatedly pushed the less-effective M14, skewing
performance tests and attempting to tarnish the AR-15’s reputation.
Without government contracts, the gun’s sales languished, and in
1959 ArmaLite moved to off-load the product, selling manufacturing
rights to Colt. When the military finally began purchasing the AR-15
(rechristened the “M16”) for GIs fighting in Vietnam, they altered
the design (against Stoner’s recommendations) to save money,
sacrificing its effectiveness and earning it a reputation for jamming
at crucial moments.

If it seems at times that _American Gun_ gives Eugene Stoner the
Inspired Genius treatment that, say, Walter Isaacson has reserved for
Steve Jobs or Elon Musk
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the book never fully lets you forget that Stoner designed a killing
machine, and that he knew it. As a _Dallas Morning News_ reporter who
observed rifle instructors in 1966 put it, “Killing people is what
it is built for, and what it does with great efficiency.”

The second half of the book chronicles the introduction of the AR-15
into American civilian life, and the deadly consequences that ensued.
Colt’s decision to release a semiautomatic version into the sporting
market in the 1960s did not attract much interest at the time. The
gun’s nontraditional appearance did not appeal to the hunting
community, nor did its ability to fire rapidly. To hunt game, a
competent hunter doesn’t need a thing that sprays bullets at short
range; they need a steady rifle with a high caliber, something that
can bring down a deer in a single, well-aimed shot. As a machine
designed to kill humans, Stoner’s gun had little to offer the
hunting community, and at first it barely sold.

But as America’s hunting culture waned, new customers emerged:
people interested in killing other humans. Its first use in a homicide
committed by a civilian appears to have been in the 1975 Pine Ridge
murders, for which the Native American activist Leonard Peltier was
later convicted
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first use in a mass shooting came two years later, when six people
were killed in Klamath Falls, Oregon. Another mass killing in
Pennsylvania in 1982 prompted the county prosecutor who handled the
case, Robert Gillespie, to later remark: “I felt the weapon should
be banned for civilians…. The devastation that was done by that gun
was shocking to me.”

After Colt’s patent expired
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in 1977, the gun spread even further, as other manufacturers began
making their own versions of Stoner’s rifle (though Colt retains
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the trademark on the term “AR-15” itself). By the late 1970s, it
was gaining popularity among white nationalists and far-right
survivalists. The cover of the infamous white nationalist novel _The
Turner Diaries
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published in 1978, depicts an AR-15. In 1985, J. David McFarland,
author of _AR-15, M16 Assault Rifle Handbook
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wrote that many of the “people purchasing the AR-15 today are
survivalists who feel that if and when the ultimate chaos hits
(whether from nuclear war, natural disaster, economic collapse or
whatever), the old .30-30 that they carry into the woods every fall
just won’t cut the mustard in a prolonged firefight.” Among the
fans of the AR-15 was cult leader David Koresh, who amassed
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hundreds of parts to build the gun in the Branch Davidian compound in
Waco, Texas, in preparation for Armageddon.

But the real turning point in the AR-15’s journey from a curiosity
to an awful icon was the 1994 assault weapons ban
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The legislation was prompted by a 1989 shooting in Stockton,
California, where five children were killed, but took years to build
enough steam to get through Congress. The finished bill intended to
eliminate the public sale of military-style weapons that could cause
mass carnage, but it also tried to preserve hunters’ rights;
accordingly, it focused on various “military” features to
determine whether a weapon was a “semiautomatic assault rifle,”
including bayonet fixtures, pistol grips, and other aesthetic features
that would appeal (it was thought) to killers rather than hunters. But
fundamentally, the law didn’t restrict the central feature of a
semiautomatic rifle: its ability to fire however fast you can pull the
trigger.

In McWhirter and Elinson’s discussion of the 1994 ban, it becomes
clear that one of the singular failures of the bill was that it did
not attempt to give gun manufacturers an incentive to abandon assault
rifles. Had these companies been given commensurate government
contracts or financial incentives to shift their business models,
perhaps they might not have set out to circumvent the spirit of the
law with such zeal. As it was, companies like Colt faced bankruptcy
over the loss of their AR-15 civilian segment if they could not find a
work-around. Accordingly, they got started on finding the
legislation’s many loopholes, and marketed new versions of the gun
that evaded the ban, making simple changes like removing the bayonet
lug and the flash suppressor—features that were listed in the bill
but had no impact on the gun’s basic functionality. As one of the
arms designers at Bushmaster crowed, “When these idiots wrote [the
legislation], they wrote it cosmetically.”

By the time the ban ended in 2004, the AR-15 was everywhere. In the
three decades before the ban, 400,000 had been produced; while the ban
was in effect, nearly 900,000 were made. In the 20 years since the
ban’s end, the number of AR-15s sold has increased
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exponentially. For one, the bill inadvertently revealed one of the
main selling points of the gun: It lends itself to easy customization.
(“I would compare it to custom cars and trucks,” one gunmaker
tells the authors, explaining that, just as women’s fashion contains
endless possibilities for personalization, the AR-15 is the “easiest
thing to accessorize in the male world other than cars and
motorcycles.”) Additionally, the ban played to another core element
of the American psyche: As another gunmaker put it, “If you want to
sell something to an American, you tell him he can’t have it.”

Reading the second half of _American Gun_ is like watching a
Shakespearean tragedy: You witness a whole culture gradually slipping
away to unstoppable forces of capitalism, greed, and destruction, with
an ever-rising body count in their wake. To their credit, the authors
gradually shift focus from the triumphs of the manufacturers to the
stories of victims and survivors of their products. The book is
heartbreaking, and at times claustrophobic, as it revisits a litany of
America’s worst moments: Columbine, Sandy Hook, Marjory Stoneman
Douglas High School—terms that once denoted places, communities,
schools, lives, and which now to the majority of Americans signify
only devastation and bloodshed.

 

 
But why _this_ gun? When Eugene Stoner first set out to design the
AR-15, military thinking was at a turning point. By 1952, the Pentagon
had determined that success in battle was not due to marksmanship,
with American service members using long-range rifles at great
distances to take out targets. Rather, war was close-fought, and
troops under fire shot without precision; the key to success, the
military now believed, lay in guns that sprayed as many bullets as
possible. They were slow to adapt their weaponry to this
understanding, but it represented a sea change not only in tactics and
technology, but also in the way warriors imagined themselves. As John
Ellis wrote in his 1975 book, _The Social History of the Machine Gun
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rifles like the AR-15 “negated all the old human virtues—pluck,
fortitude, patriotism, honor—and made them as nothing in the face of
a deadly stream of bullets, a quite unassailable mechanical
barrier.”

The machine gun, in essence, undercuts all the pageantry and symbolism
surrounding the American fighting man: His job is not to display skill
or heroism, so much as it is to dispense as much firepower as
possible. Thus, _American Gun_ suggests, the AR-15’s awful
popularity. Among its biggest consumers were the type of men the
industry itself derisively referred to as “couch commandos” and
“tactards” (short for “tactical retards”): “wannabes” who
were trying to look cool but lacked any skill or discipline. “The
gun looked martial and intimidating,” McWhirter and Elinson write,
“but Eugene Stoner had designed it to be easy to aim and shoot for
just about anyone…. In many ways, the AR-15 was the ideal firearm
for the modern American man: it looked macho, but he didn’t have to
put much effort into shooting it.” Even the stupidest of high
schoolers could use it to murder dozens of classmates in seconds.

The gun manufacturers know this, and they play to it. Among the most
notorious ad campaigns for the AR-15 was one launched by Bushmaster
and featured in _Maxim _magazine in 2009. A series of proposed ads
leaned entirely into toxic masculinity with lines like, “Helping Men
Grow a Pair Since 1978” and “It Is Never Too Late to Be a Man,”
with the final published ad reading “Consider Your Man Card
Reissued.” The campaign’s success was emblematic of how
manufacturers have consistently marketed the gun through appeals to
insecurity and vulnerability. To this mix, it always helped to add
paranoia. In the book, Bushmaster’s former chief executive John
DeSantis recalls the sales boost that followed the Y2K panic:
“People were just concerned there was going to be mass rioting in
the streets. A lot of the crazies bought semiautomatic rifles and
yeah, we exploited that situation.”

This surge in gun ownership is one of the many ways the United States
remains singular, if not unique. Other countries, such as Australia
(after the Port Arthur Massacre
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1996), banned assault rifles and instituted buybacks, effectively
ending
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mass shootings in those countries. But a central resistance to such
measures in the United States is the idea that guns are necessary for
patriots to resist a coming totalitarian state where they’ll need to
take the law into their own hands. This has unequivocally failed to
happen in any other country that has banned assault rifles, but it has
not stopped the belief among many that semiautomatic rifles are
necessary for purposes that go beyond hunting or home defense.
Ultimately, _American Gun_ is an indictment on a paranoid, apocalyptic
country, riven with people who cannot help but see their neighbors, as
well as their own government, as perpetual threats that must be met
with deadly force.

Industry executives like DeSantis are surprisingly candid in their
willingness to exploit that human weakness to get as many lethal
weapons out the door as possible. One of the most telling moments
comes in an interview with former DPMS Panther Arms CEO Randy Luth,
who refused to participate in marketing for video games like _Call of
Duty: Modern Warfare 2_: While other manufacturers collaborated with
game designers to get free advertising by having their weapons
accurately re-created in the game, Luth refused, because he wanted to
avoid “using our brand name to teach kids how to kill humans.” Yet
he pioneered an agreement with SoftAir USA to make BB guns that looked
like AR-15s with his company’s logo, to ensure that kids too young
to buy their own weapons would become aware of the AR-15 brand from an
early age. “I felt that just like Camel cigarettes,” he tells the
authors, “if you introduce kids to the brand at a young age,
they’re gonna remember that brand.”

Luth, it seems, wanted to have it both ways: to get young people
hooked to encourage repeat sales and brand loyalty, while
simultaneously attempting to deny what everyone has always known about
the AR-15—that it exists to extinguish human lives. And yet, he is
at least a hypocrite; most of the other manufacturers quoted here
don’t even pretend to care.

 

 
A lucid, straightforward, and well-researched and -reported work,
_American Gun_ promises, via its back cover, “fairness and
compassion.” By the book’s end, I found myself wondering why
fairness is a worthy goal here. I don’t know what fairness we owe
these manufacturers or the individuals who buy their products. There
is no argument here—compassionate or otherwise—that can explain
why an everyday person needs a weapon designed solely to kill as many
people as possible in seconds. And that’s because no defensible
argument exists.

And it’s not just mass shootings. Guns are implicated regularly in
suicide
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domestic abuse
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and accidents
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All of it needless. There are those who loudly maintain that their
rights as responsible gun owners are infringed by any kind of
regulation, and such individuals will always be the most culpable
enablers of this violence. Behind them only slightly are the
manufacturers themselves, who rely on paranoia and insecurity to drive
sales and reap profits.

Meanwhile, on the message board website ar15.com, posters are debating
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Jason Aldean’s new belligerent single, “Try That in a Small
Town.” The song and its music video threaten vigilante violence
through jingoistic lyrics and dog whistle politics. “Not a big fan
of the song but like the message. Leftists aren’t people anymore,”
one writes approvingly. But for others, Aldean will never be truly on
their side because of his comments after the Las Vegas massacre:
“Isn’t this the same douche canoe who said guns ‘were too easy
to get’ a few years back? fuck him.” In the world of the AR-15,
not only are political enemies actively dehumanized and worthy of
slaughter, but even surviving a mass shooting yourself is no grounds
for sympathy or understanding. All that matters is guns—getting
them, keeping them, and inevitably wielding them.

Colin Dickey [[link removed]]
@colindickey [[link removed]]

Colin Dickey is the author of _The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters,
Alien Encounters and Our Obsession With the Unexplained_ and
_Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places_.

* Guns in America; AR-15 Semi-Automatic Rifles; Mass Shootings;
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