The AR-15, that weapon highly useful on the battlefield and mechanized death when crazed shooters get their hands on one, has a long and twisted history, almost snuffed out at many times before the years when it become explosively popular and started selling by the millions.
The first of them were made in southern California, by an experimental division - new product development - of a military contractor. The actor John Wayne was the first person outside the company who actually shot one. A gun collector, he was interested in the weapon and happy to try it out. But he had no thought of buying one. As developed in the late 50s, they were intended strictly for military use, and years would pass before anyone conceived of a commercial market for them.
One of the original surviving developers, one of the few who made it to the recent time when AR-15 had become a household word, pondered what the original inventor (Eugene Stoner) and the people like him who had contributed to the effort, thought about what had come of it since. He said, "every gun designer has a responsibility to" - he paused, and said, "to think about what the hell they're creating."
That is the last quote in the new book American Gun: The True Story of the AR 15," by the journalists Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson, and it sums up what came before. Stoner, a classic absent-minded inventor (of many things, not just guns), had in mind developing a much more powerful, reliable and easily-used military grade weapon, and by all accounts (apart from some people who were personally committed to earlier models) it did that job quite well. It ran into problems when it moved into the civilian market, where large number of military and law enforcement leaders have argued with unimpeachable logic over many years that it doesn't belong. The marketplace says otherwise.
The AR-15 has become the subject of literal worship, a hunk of metal many people have made a part of their personal identity. The story of how the gun was made, how it survived numerous challenges and leached into the private sector makes American Gun a strong read. The accounts of what has happened to the many victims of mass shootings - there's a long, painful chapter about the aftermath of one of those shootings who survived, barely, but never really recovered - is wrenching.
But some of the most important sections lie elsewhere: In what about this weapon makes them so overwhelmingly, powerfully, attractive to so many people. They're not very good for hunting or target shooting (their main feature is rapid spraying of bullets), for personal defense (they'd be no more useful than a handgun inside a house) or most other conventional civilian uses of guns. They are designed to kill - and in an unusually gory and destructive way - large numbers of people, period. So why are so many Americans attached to them?
McWhirter and Elinson touch on a number of prospective answers to that question. They don't come up with a conclusive reason, and probably there isn't just one.
But it's a question that should be addressed a lot more seriously.
- Randy Stapilus