The man who invented the AR-15 was afraid of getting too close to the beach. A native of Southern California’s Coachella Valley, Eugene Stoner would later start a family in the Westchester neighborhood of Los Angeles. His wife wanted to live by the ocean, but Stoner worried that the sand and salt air would tamper with what he was doing in his garage workshop. An inspired engineer despite the lack of a formal degree, Stoner spent the 1950s perfecting what would become one of the most notorious and lethal weapons available to Americans.
“It was kind of a hobby that got out of hand,” he said.
American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15, by Wall Street Journal reporters Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson, offers a history of Stoner’s invention and its often hellish impact. In fact, because the AR-15 plays a role in so many aspects of American life, this is, rather, a host of histories. It’s a tale of good old-fashioned, California-bred, garage-centered innovation in the tradition of Hewlett-Packard and Apple. (Stoner perfected the rifle while working for ArmaLite, a firearms firm headquartered in Hollywood, near the Paramount lot.) It’s a military story: in the 1960s, the AR-15 became the M16, the U.S. Army’s standard rifle, much to the chagrin of soldiers in Vietnam who found it unreliable. It’s a chronicle of public policy: the AR-15 has been at the center of multiple congressional debates, beginning with the M16’s malfunctions in Vietnam and continuing through to the 1994 assault-weapons ban and the half measures and stonewalling since then. And, of course, it’s a business story: small manufacturers and hedge funds have profited off people who’ve feared the faintest whiff of gun legislation, with total sales of the AR-15 reaching 20 million in 2023.
Not least, it’s a story of mass-shooting tragedy after mass-shooting tragedy. Many of the chapters are summaries of incidents we’ve now shorthanded by location: Parkland, Aurora, Sandy Hook, Uvalde, San Bernardino, Las Vegas. The repetition can be as numbing in these pages as in our lives. A troubled and usually white male with a clean police record accesses an AR-15–style rifle and high-capacity magazines, then kills and wounds as many as he can. Businesses and politicians make public gestures about legislation but ultimately stand pat for fear of riling a committed bloc of one-issue voters. There’s too much money and fear at stake for meaningful change. (Cerberus, the private equity firm that owned Remington Arms, the manufacturer of the rifle used by Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza, announced it would sell the company in the aftermath; it did not.)
Yet if decades of inaction have framed the rifle as “a cultural chew toy for angry partisans,” American Gun sheds light on the forces that prompted the weapon’s rise—and might spell its decline. The AR-15 story isn’t just about gun regulations; it’s tied up in shifting national neuroses around race, the role of the military, patriotism, and masculinity. The AR-15 and its cousins, the authors note, were for a long time disdained by most gun owners. In the 1960s and 1970s, few saw the point of a civilian weapon designed for lightness and destructive power, not accuracy. As the rifles came into the hands of Los Angeles gangs in the 1980s, they were further demonized; the most voluble early calls for bans came not from the left but from law enforcement, most prominently LAPD chief Daryl Gates.
A 1989 mass shooting at an elementary school in Stockton, where 5 children were killed and 31 others wounded, finally compelled political action; a trio of U.S. senators, among them Dianne Feinstein, pushed through the 1994 assault-weapons ban. The wording, however, narrowed the restrictions of the bill and made them easy to get around. Sales actually increased during the 10-year span of the ban because banning guns by name only prompted manufacturers to change their labeling.
“When these idiots wrote [the legislation], they wrote it cosmetically,” one gun designer sneered.
By the time the ban expired, in 2004, the AR-15 had become an avatar for macho anxiety and xenophobia. Bushmaster launched a campaign suggesting that the rifle was the best way to avoid becoming a beta cuck. Manufacturers in the post-9/11 world amped up the military connotations, appealing to a base that imagined foreign-terrorist threats around every corner—without acknowledging that they were becoming the threat themselves. Surveys found that AR-15 owners were among the most committed and change-resistant voters. Company owners were cold-blooded about it. “I would challenge you to find a consumer product that grows at eight percent consistently for seven years,” Cerberus executive George Kollitides II said. “As an investor, this would excite me.”
McWhirter and Elinson are expert, experienced journalists, and American Gun is solid, well-made journalism; it is the definitive book about the weapon. Still, there is something about the poker-faced, tell-both-sides, old-school approach that makes the book feel too emotionally detached. It chronicles the cultural turmoil that has resulted in “the hell they’re creating,” as one of Stoner’s coworkers puts it, but avoids exploring root causes and solutions.
If the prospect of cooly detailed reportage on dead bodies and bad policy doesn’t appeal, try this: Head straight to the final chapter. There, McWhirter and Elinson tell the story of Valerie Kallis-Weber, one of the innocent bystanders wounded in the San Bernardino shooting in 2015. By 2019, she’d had 56 surgical procedures to address injuries caused by just two bullets from an AR-15. “If the body could be characterized with emotions, this would have been hysteria,” one doctor says. Death counts can often lead us to ignore the injury numbers, which reveal how extensive the carnage is. If we want to have a hope of ending the carnage, we’ll have, at bare minimum, to ban high-capacity magazines for a weapon that turned a classroom, to quote a Sandy Hook parent, into a “fucking blender.” But even more than that, we will also have to reimagine the ways Americans—and especially American men—perceive themselves.
We have thick knots of cultural paranoia to untie.•
Farrar, Straus and Giroux AMERICAN GUN: THE TRUE STORY OF THE AR-15, BY CAMERON MCWHIRTER AND ZUSHA ELINSON
Mark Athitakis is the author of The New Midwest (Belt Publishing), a critical study of contemporary fiction set in the region. He lives in Arizona.
