Double-Tapping Eugene Stoner's Rifle

Two 'journalists' target the AR-15

For 148 pages, American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 473 pages; $32.00) capably recounts how Eugene Stoner invented a revolutionary firearm — and how the Pentagon’s bungling of the weapon got an unknown number of servicemen killed in Southeast Asia.

Unfortunately, the book’s body text is 382 pages.

Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson devote nearly two-thirds of American Gun to how the AR-15 became “the lightning rod for the nation’s gun debate.” Since its authors are reporters for The Wall Street Journal, it’s not difficult to guess how American Gun’s purpose shifts once it leaves the 1960s.

Stoner, like Mikhail Kalashnikov, lacked a college degree. But the force behind “the fifteenth weapon developed by ArmaLite, a subsidiary of Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation” was a patriot, and a natural engineer. He struggled, for years, to get the military to take his creation — a rifle with “no trace of craftsmanship and … no polished wood,” comprised of “aluminum, fiberglass, and plastic” — seriously.

Stoner’s chief foe was the Springfield Armory, which proudly traced its heritage back to George Washington. ArmaLite secured the approval of some key insiders, though. The independent-minded general in charge of Continental Army Command believed that soldiers fighting on “our atomic battlefield” needed “a truly light-weight ultra-high-velocity small-caliber rifle weighing in the order of 6 pounds.” He challenged the Pentagon, which preferred Springfield’s unimpressive M14. Curtis LeMay, a close pal of Fairchild’s president, was another ally.

Tragically, Stoner’s triumph turned to incomprehensible catastrophe when the “Whiz Kids” shipped the military version of the AR-15 — the M16 — to Indochina. American Gun’s firsthand chronicles of the bloody mayhem that resulted from procurement of the wrong type of ammunition and a lack of chrome plating in the rifle’s “chamber and bore” are beyond harrowing.

It’s when the M16 is fixed, and McWhirter and Elinson transition from history to public policy, that their book swerves into poorly disguised activism. Armchair sociology, bias by omission, and political shibboleths worthy of the dopes of No Labels flack for the “new, intriguing solutions” offered by “a wide-ranging group of younger political leaders, pragmatic gun-industry executives, free-thinking scholars, and desperate law enforcement leaders.”

Yes, rifles in the AR-15’s lineage are often employed in America’s mass shootings. But as Crime Prevention Research Center data show, between January 1st, 1998 and March 15th, 2023, 56.4 percent of multiple-victim attackers “used solely handguns.” Furthermore, mass shootings account for a miniscule portion of all firearm casualties in the U.S. (The butcher’s bill for this past weekend in Chicago alone: two killed, 39 wounded.) Finally, the majority of gun deaths in our nation result not from deranged attention-seekers, gang warfare, or accidents. Suicides claim well over half of all firearm deaths. And unsurprisingly, most of the people who self-delete with a bullet choose handguns.

McWhirter and Elinson’s core assumption — that the AR-15 has a unique role to play in illuminating the reality of firearm violence in the United States — is hollow. But untroubled by the stats, American Gun slogs ahead, with page after page of lurid details about high-profile mass shootings.

The story of how David and Francine Wheeler lost their six-year-old in the Sandy Hook massacre is enough to make the coldhearted weep. But the couple’s misguided gun-control lobbying — fueled, quite understandably, by emotion rather than logic — adds little to the search for “solutions.” Similarly, the struggles of Valerie Kallis-Weber, gruesomely wounded by the two monsters who shot up a San Bernardino County Department of Public Health event in 2015, is exploitative, not enlightening:

How do I feel? I got a pee bag. I got a colostomy bag. I got medicine that we can’t even put in one box. I have a room that’s full of supplies. I can’t get out of bed. My hair’s falling out. I can’t get in the shower. I can’t get in the bathtub. I can’t walk from one place to another. I can’t sit.

If McWhirter and Elinson sought to make an original contribution to “the nation’s gun debate,” their book would have explored America’s cultural collapse. The highest share of single-parent homes in the developed world? The possible link between psychiatric drugs and mass shootings? The roles of social media and videogames? How the war on masculinity helps foster a cohort of very angry boys and young men?

Nah. That kind of stuff isn’t likely to yield a puff profile in The New Yorker. So American Gun does what comes naturally to made members of the MSM. If it bleeds, it’s good for a publishing contract.