“American Gun” is an exhaustive account of how the AR-15 became a symbol of national division.
,” by journalists Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson, is a deeply reported, engrossing account of the rifle, tracing its evolution from battlefield combat to today’s domestic carnage and culture war. The book begins with the gun’s inventor, Eugene Stoner, a World War II Marine veteran and engineering whiz who dreamed up prototypes in his Los Angeles garage in the 1950s.
By 1963, John F. Kennedy inspected an AR-15 in the Oval Office as Pentagon leaders sought an answer to the Soviet-made AK-47, the signature rifle of communist guerrilla insurgencies. Soon the military would produce the gun as the M16 and make it capable of firing on a fully automatic setting for U.S. troops in Vietnam. A rushed modification by the Army caused the gun to jam easily. Subsequent deaths of troops left vulnerable were made all the more obscene by an attempted military coverup.
When such carnage later featured in mass shootings, gun industry lobbyists would try to soften the AR-15’s image by promoting it as a “modern sporting rifle.” But as McWhirter and Elinson’s reported history makes evident, the AR-15 is a weapon of war. In fact, initial efforts by the gunmaker Colt to sell it in the 1960s as a civilian product called the “Sporter” flopped. The rifle was irrelevant to a gun culture that championed responsible hunting and marksmanship.
In the 1980s and ’90s, the rifles began to turn up in gang battles and other instances of violent crime, bringing havoc to Los Angeles and other cities and setting off an arms race with outgunned police. From here, “American Gun” immerses in shifting politics and their exploitation by the firearms industry, whose lobbying and marketing tactics spurred the sale ofAR-15s to consumers.
The interwoven reporting gives a broad view, though not without some contextual stumbles. Too much focus on battles over banning assault weapons plays into a false dichotomy of all-or-nothing policy; research has long made clear that other measures — gun permits, limits on ammunition devices, red-flag laws,
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