An American Tragedy: Rise of the AR-15 Rifle

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 The inventor, Eugene Stoner—a shy, withdrawn employee of an aerospace company—came up with the first version of the gun in his spare time, working in his Southern California garage in 1953.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. 

That prototype’s evolution into the present-day killing machine it has become is a story nearly identical to the evolution, via California hobbyists’ garages, of the primitive mainframe computer into today’s high-performance smartphone.

Stoner was not motivated by a desire for wealth. Rather, he was caught up in the nation’s crisis mentality brought on by the Korean War, in which the standard-issue M-1 rifle, a 9.5-pound, steel-and-wood weapon with eight-round clips, proved inadequate in close-quarters fighting against the combined forces of North Korea and China. While the M-1 was effective against relatively stationary forces being fired upon at long distances, it was useless against hordes of enemy soldiers rushing at you at close range. It was particularly useless in urban combat, where you want to spray bullets rapidly rather than take careful aim and fire them one at a time. 

Meanwhile, Russia had a significant lead in the arms race with the U.S. when it came to rifles. Having captured some new German Sturmgewehr rifles (literally, “Storm Rifle,” translated by Americans as “assault rifle”) near the end of World War II, the Russians were quick to build on its innovations: light weight, stamped parts, large magazines, and capability of close-range rapid fire. The Soviets reverse-engineered it, with inventor Mikhail Kalashnikov eventually designing the AK-47, soon to become widely deployed among Communist-friendly forces around the world. 

First available in 1949, by 1959 there were some 2.5 million in use. “Stoner knew his gun could help U.S. troops counter the durable AK-47’s used by insurgents around the globe,” the authors write. “In Stoner’s and Jim Sullivan’s [founder of Armalite, the company formed to develop and market Stoner’s invention] minds, their work was engaging but also noble. For them, the task of making the best rifle for the U.S. military wasn’t burdened with a moral quandary.” 

The story of how Stoner and Sullivan finally persuaded the military bureaucracy to abandon rifles of the M-1 variety and shift to a completely new paradigm is fascinating, with detailed reporting on such pivotal figures as General Curtis LeMay, John Wayne, JFK, and Robert McNamara. Ultimately, the U.S. armed forces were persuaded by battlefield tests, which proved the superior “killing power” of the AR-15’s small-caliber bullets over the larger caliber bullets fired by the M-1. 

“A bullet fired from an AR-15 flew nose first through the air. But when it hit the human body it became unstable. Once unstable, the bullet tore through the body like a tornado, spiraling and tipping as it obliterated organs, blood vessels, and bones.” Larger bullets, by contrast, simply passed through the body, leaving a single, straight hole.

Once U.S. soldiers had tried the AR-15 in combat, they were stunned. According to one report filed from Vietnam, “A Ranger platoon ambushed a Viet Cong company on June 9, killing five, all with AR-15 fire. After the shootout, the Rangers inspected the corpses and reported the bullets exploded one man’s chest and another’s stomach. They shredded another guerrilla’s buttocks. Yet another man died when he was struck in the heel and the wound split open to his hip….” 

The story of the military’s use of this weapon is gruesome enough. Far worse is the story of how the AR-15 became the all-time best-selling weapon in the civilian market—something the gun’s inventor never intended. The authors’ reporting on this dismal history is so detailed, and so damning, that you can’t help but imagine that if everyone in the country could be made to read this book, this weapon would be legislated out of existence, and the politicians writing the legislation would be lionized rather than run out of office.

I’ve never read a book that so thoroughly and ably described the profound weaknesses in the American character and system of government. There was no end to the moments in this book when I felt like I was grinding my teeth in rage all the way down to their roots.

The authors devote substantial portions of their work to the notorious Las Vegas massacre of October 2017, by Stephen Paddock. The gunman brought fourteen AR-15s and eight AR-10s for his mission.  “In about ten minutes, Paddock fired 1,057 bullets. He killed 58 people that night and wounded 413 others…. An aging, overweight gambler who found sex exhausting killed more people in a mass shooting than any other individual in U.S. history. The AR-15 rifles had made the ghoulish feat easy.” 

One thing that has always vexed me about the reporting on mass shootings is how bowdlerized it is. There is a squeamishness on the part of reporters and readers alike that makes them avert their gaze from the reality of what these weapons do. The closest they come to alerting us to the deadly killing power of these guns is when they mention that parents of slaughtered children are asked to provide DNA samples so that law enforcement can identify victims—who, by implication, are disintegrated beyond recognition. I’ve always felt (perhaps naively) that graphic reporting on these shootings would actually lead to meaningful gun reform. 

To that end, one chapter in this book—“Valerie’s Road Home”—does us all a great (if horrifying) service, in that it spares us no detail on the story of one victim’s struggle to recover from her astonishing wounds. The story of her first emergency surgeries is the story of a series of medical miracles. “Valerie lived. But her body was damaged forever. The life she once imagined in retirement was replaced with a daily battle to overcome physical and psychological wounds from the attack. Two easy pulls of an AR-15’s trigger changed everything.” 

The authors take us through “four years, fifty-seven surgeries, more than 3,500 therapy appointments,” after which Valerie struggles to walk, is still hobbling from one physical therapy appointment to another, and requires 24-hour nursing care at home. “Valerie accepted that she would never recover her lost life.” 

The chapter on Valerie is a powerful, compassionate, devastating final chapter in a masterfully written, reported, and necessary book.