Last summer, when the release of the video for “Try That in a Small Town,” a single by the country-music star Jason Aldean, generated a small storm of controversy, it was mentioned, often as an aside, that Aldean had been onstage on October 1, 2017, at the Route 91 Harvest Festival, in Las Vegas. That night, as Aldean performed a song called “When She Says Baby,” a man named Stephen Paddock began firing from the thirty-second floor of Mandalay Bay, a nearby resort and casino, into the crowd below. In the span of about ten minutes, Paddock shot more than a thousand bullets, killing fifty-eight people and wounding more than four hundred others before killing himself. In video recorded as the first bursts of gunfire sounded, Aldean stops singing, then flees the stage.
It was a coincidence that put Aldean in Vegas on that particular night, but releasing “Try That in a Small Town,” a song extolling vigilante justice, six years later was a choice. The music video splices together footage from anti-police protests and convenience-store robberies to form an impression of national disarray; its lyrics include the lines “Got a gun that my granddad gave me / They say one day they’re gonna round up.” Aldean left the Las Vegas massacre out of his sizzle reel of American disorder, instead projecting a fantasy of control. Watching the video last summer, I couldn’t help recalling, given Aldean’s association with a mass shooting, that one thing that was tried in a small town in recent American history was the massacre that killed nineteen children in Uvalde, Texas, last year; that law enforcement in that small town waited in the halls for an hour without confronting the shooter; that the small town’s only pediatrician later testified to Congress about identifying the dead by the cartoons on their clothes because their bodies were too damaged. Considered in this light, “Try That in a Small Town” becomes an allegory about posturing over perceived threats to national integrity while ignoring the lived reality of a horror too disturbing to mediate.
Much of the controversy over the video focussed on a shot of Aldean singing with a band in front of a courthouse in Tennessee where a Black man was lynched by a white mob in 1927. Equally remarkable, though less discussed, was the way in which the video enacted the psychological splitting of a certain kind of American gun enthusiast: his unique combination of hubris and cowardice, bravado and nihilism; his peacocking; his racism; his belief in the mythology of law and order over empirical proof of its corruption.
The shooting at the Route 91 concert in Las Vegas was the deadliest mass shooting carried out by one person in American history. As Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson, the authors of “American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15,” a new history of the rifle, observe, more Americans were killed that night than in any single battle in twenty years of war in Afghanistan. In the mass shootings in Las Vegas and Uvalde; in the mass shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, ten days before Uvalde; and in the mass shooting less than two months after, at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois, the perpetrators used the same kind of gun, the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. (In Vegas, to be more precise, Paddock had fourteen AR-15s, which he loaded and lined up in a row in his hotel room, and he modified the guns with bump stocks to make them mimic automatic fire.) There are many makes and models of AR-15s, and in McWhirter and Elinson’s usage the term refers to a style of rifle rather than the original ArmaLite brand from which it gets its name. Extremely deadly and easily obtainable, the AR-15 has become a political symbol, both among people who believe that such weapons should have no part in civilian life and those who consider owning one a constitutional right. Its sale in the United States is minimally restricted. Stephen Paddock bought thirty-one of them in a year.
McWhirter and Elinson are business reporters, and “American Gun” is, in part, a book about how an industry strategized to market a gun to a type of person—usually a man—whom it could convince that AR-15s were an integral part of his identity. To do this, mainstream gunmakers began courting a very particular demographic. The AR-15 looked tough, but it was light and easy to shoot. Marketers played on what one executive called the “wannabe factor” of weekend warriors whom prior generations had mocked as “couch commandos.” A survey of AR-15 owners in 2010 found that ninety-nine per cent of them were male, seventy-three per cent were married, and fifty-six per cent had no military or law-enforcement background. “In many ways,” the authors write, “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.” “American Gun” examines the phenomenon of the mass shooter armed with a semi-automatic rifle, and our continued inability to generate the political will to prevent such shootings from happening, as an ordinary business story: the AR-15 is a consumer product to which advertisers successfully attached an identity—one that has translated to a politics so intractable that in some circles it seems to have more power than the fear of death.
The history of the AR-15 begins not with the couch commando but with another masculine archetype: the postwar garage tinkerer who believed in the promise of Popular Mechanics magazine, that hobbyist inventors “could move the country forward with the power of their ingenuity—and strike it rich in the process,” as the authors write. Eugene Stoner, the inventor of the AR-15, would later be recalled for his utter disinterest in the moral implications of his invention. He preferred to discuss the technical aspects of the gun rather than its intended purpose of killing people. “It was kind of a hobby that got out of hand,” Stoner would later say about his career inventing firearms.
Stoner was born in 1922 in a small town in Indiana, but grew up in the Coachella Valley of Southern California. A fascination with “launching projectiles of all kinds” manifested early in childhood. He set off his first pipe bomb at the age of six, built his own cannon at seven, and at ten fired a rocket into his parents’ house. In 1944, he enlisted in the Marines, where he worked in aviation ordnance, but Stoner’s interests were not in aircraft but in guns. He loved them, and was interested in improving the M1 Garand, the rifle he had been issued as a marine. (He never saw combat.) As the Korean War began, the M1, which was made of wood and steel and weighed almost ten pounds, was proving to be an insufficient weapon for modern warfare, heavy and cumbersome and with a shoulder-knocking recoil.
In the arms race for a lighter military rifle, the United States had fallen behind. The term “assault rifle” is a translation of the Nazi Sturmgewehr, the “storm rifle” developed by the gunmaker Hugo Schmeisser at the end of the Second World War—a lighter, rapid-firing rifle that was better used at close range than from long distances. A Russian gun designer, Mikhail Kalashnikov, studied the Nazi gun as he developed what would become the AK-47. By the mid-nineteen-fifties, the Soviet Union and its Communist allies had made millions of AK-47s, which were reliable, durable, and easy to carry. As the decade progressed, the need for an American counterpart to the AK-47 was becoming more evident.
After the war ended, Stoner left the Marines and eventually became a partner in an engineering firm that designed parts for aircraft. “He found success in spite of his lack of formal education, teaching himself the principles of engineering, physics, and materials science,” the authors write. In his free time, Stoner researched new aluminum alloys and compulsively scribbled designs on tablecloths with a pen when he went out to dinner. His wife and children would remember him always carrying a drawing board or a pad of paper in case inspiration struck. He used the machines at his job to make the gun parts that he would assemble and test in his garage at night. His experimentation led to an innovation (which he patented) that better channelled the energy released when a gun was fired by using it to reload the weapon. He compensated for the effects of his system on aim and recoil by raising the sight above the rifle, adding the Sturmgewehr’s pistol grip, and eliminating the angle of the M1’s rifle stock. The prototype he perfected in 1954, which today sits in a museum in Florida, would later be considered a work of genius. “Historians of gun design liken Stoner’s innovations to a symphony by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,” the authors write. “Stoner was both a synthesizer and a creator.”
Stoner’s invention coincided with the opening up of arms procurement to private contractors, the birth of the so-called military-industrial complex under the Eisenhower Administration. Stoner was soon hired by ArmaLite, a firearms subsidiary of the Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation, which was seeking to get into the game. The intention to build lighter firearms using new materials was evident in ArmaLite’s name. McWhirter and Elinson compare the lab’s mandate to the moon-shot research companies of Silicon Valley today. Its offices were in Hollywood.
The AR-15 was the fifteenth weapon developed by ArmaLite. (Contrary to some misconception, the AR of the AR-15’s model refers either to the first two letters of the company’s name or to ArmaLite Research—not to “assault rifle.”) Stoner’s new rifles were made of aluminum, fibreglass, and plastic. They weighed less than seven pounds and required no particular expertise to shoot or physical strength to carry. They were also deadlier than the rifles that had come before them, which used relatively large bullets that made a straight passage through the body on impact. Stoner’s invention used small-calibre bullets fired at fast speeds. “A bullet fired from the AR-15 flew nose first through the air,” the authors write. “But when it hit the 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.”