[MUSIC FADES IN]
Shumita Basu, Narrating: This is "In Conversation," from Apple News. I'm Shumita Basu. Today, how the AR-15 became America's gun.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
[URGENT MUSIC]
Basu, Narrating: For over a decade now, Las Vegas has been home to the largest annual gun trade show in America.
[START TFBTV SHOW TIME ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Gun Show Guest: This is not necessarily, shall we say, an improvement over Stoner's design. This is an addendum to it, to help, I think, the gun more shootable for more people.
[END TFBTV SHOW TIME ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Basu, Narrating: In 2020, two "Wall Street Journal" reporters found themselves walking the floor of the SHOT Show. Zusha Elinson and Cameron McWhirter. It was for research, a reporting trip.
After the event, they decided to visit the site of the 2017 Las Vegas shooting where a gunman opened fire on a crowd at a country music concert, killing 60 people and injuring hundreds more. It's still the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. Here's Zusha.
Zusha Elinson: It was very haunting because what we saw when we went there was just this empty field. Just this emptiness. There was, you know, a little, like, makeshift memorial on the side of a fence commemorating all the people who had died, and that's all we saw.
Basu, Narrating: It was jarring, to say the least, for these reporters to be standing on this site where a shooter had once rained bullets down using several AR-15s after coming from this massive gun show where it seemed like the AR-15 had completely taken over and inspired a whole class of assault-style weapons. Here's Cameron.
Cameron McWhirter: We just kept asking, what's going on here? You know, how did we get here? How did this happen where everyone's fighting about this object?
Basu, Narrating: This reporting trip became a years-long investigation. Zusha and Cameron are now out with a book called "American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15." It's a retracing of the rise of the AR-15 from a virtually unknown weapon to the most popular rifle in the U.S. A rifle you can buy for as little as $500, that you see today on bumper stickers and flags and politicians' Christmas cards. One that's become a symbol of personal freedom and individual rights, as well as mass tragedies.
Cameron and Zusha say fully understanding the history of this gun can help us figure out what it's gonna take to move forward past the gridlock and toward a country with less violence.
We started our conversation all the way back at the beginning in the 1950s with the inventor of the AR-15.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
Elinson: The story really begins in the Los Angeles garage of this guy named Eugene Stoner. And he really was an amateur tinkerer. He was a Marine veteran, a very gentle guy. He never spanked his children. He never swore. When he got upset, he would say, "Boy, that frosts me."
[BASU CHUCKLES]
But from an early age, he's just fascinated with explosions and with firearms. And before the age of 10, he's made a pipe bomb, he's made rockets, he's made, um, sort of like a rudimentary cannon. And by the time he becomes an adult, it's all he thinks about. You know, he looks at the gun that he used in World War II, this M1 Garand, this big, heavy gun made of wood and steel, and he wonders, "How could I improve on that gun? How could I make it better?" We read these unpublished interviews with his wife, Jean, she said, you know, "Stoner," which is what everyone called him, "was very quiet and shy. He didn't like to talk that much, but if you talked to him about guns, he could talk all night."
Basu: And I should say, it sounds like he was very curiosity driven. Not violence driven or destruction driven, right?
McWhirter: Well, and also to put it in context, I mean this is the 1950s, this is sort of the age of the tinkerer. The guy in his garage thinking he's gonna invent the next big thing. That's what he was doing, you know, and he was obsessed with guns and that was what he was gonna try to improve.
Basu: So, how did he arrive at the AR-15? What was he trying to solve for?
McWhirter: So, one of the biggest questions in the military after World War II was, how do we get a weapon that is lighter for our soldiers when they go into combat? The Soviets created the AK-47, which is heavier, but a sturdy weapon, and it was starting, they were starting to produce that and give it to its troops and give it to insurgents fighting in the Cold War in various places around the world. And the American military was very worried. We don't have a gun that is light. The gun that Zusha had talked about that was used in World War II, they were a great gun. We obviously won that war [CHUCKLES], so that was good, but really heavy. A heavy gun for soldiers to have to carry. And that reduced the amount of ammunition they could carry. So, there was this whole push for a lighter weapon that could shoot smaller bullets so that soldiers could carry more ammunition. And that was what the broad design concept was. Like, how can we get a gun to our troops and our allies that's lighter? And that is really the goal that what Stoner was trying to tackle. And he succeeded.
Basu: Well, the other thing that set the AR-15 apart at the time, of course, was also the bullet size, which you alluded to, Cameron. But can you talk a little bit about how bullet size makes the AR-15 function differently than guns that came before it?
McWhirter: There was this general sense, and I guess it's intuitive, that when you see a bigger bullet and a smaller bullet next to each other, if we put one on the table here, you'd think, "Oh, well, I don't want that bigger bullet. That's gonna hurt me more." In fact, when a larger bullet hits somebody, hits a person, because it's so large, it tends to punch through the person pretty quickly. Which is bad, you have a serious wound. But with the smaller bullet, when it hits the body, it tumbles. It tends to quickly lose its energy and spread around into the body, and it can splinter and it can do all kinds of horrible things. So, it's almost like a tornado inside the body. So smaller bullets fired at high velocity can do a lotta damage. And again, if you can carry more of it, that's better for combat. I mean, we're talking about a military purpose here.
Basu: Sure. How did the military come to adopt the weapon?
Elinson: That is a long saga. A very, very dramatic saga, too. I mean, if you think about the characters involved, you have Stoner. He's a very guileless, brainy guy, not very political, not very avaricious, and he joins this small startup called ArmaLite in Hollywood, of all places, and they're the ones that, where all his revolutionary ideas come together. They come up with the design for the AR-15. Now, Stoner had some backers, a powerful general named Willard Wyman, who really saw the need for this lightweight weapon. But there was an entrenched military bureaucracy, and they were centered in Springfield, Massachusetts. Now, this is the historic place where military arms have been developed and manufactured for centuries. Since George Washington's time. And at that time in the late '50s, they were developing what they thought was the gun of the future. But the problem was, it looked very much like the rifle of the past. And so, Stoner and Wyman, they go up against this giant military bureaucracy, and it's a really David verse Goliath story, because Stoner has this idea that his gun's the best, so it's definitely gonna win. But the military bureaucracy has so many tricks up its sleeve to shade tests, to rig tests, in fact, to make it look like his gun's actually doing poorly. And there's a series of these events where they just try to crush these outsiders from Hollywood with very underhanded tactics. So, it's a long journey for Stoner to get his gun adopted.
[SOFT DRAMATIC MUSIC]
Basu, Narrating: The military eventually adopts the AR-15 and renames it the M16. This happens as the United States is entering the Vietnam War. And gunmakers receive a waiver to mass produce the rifle without all of the normal safety checks.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
McWhirter: And this proves to be disastrous because a committee within the Pentagon had made some technical changes to the gun and had altered the ammunition propellant slightly and then hadn't properly tested. So, Marines ended up in combat and their guns would jam. I mean, we have some horrible stories in the book where soldiers wake up in the middle of the night, they're being attacked, and their guns don't work, which is very terrifying. I mean, I was interviewing Marines who were describing finding soldiers who are dead. Marines who are dead with the cleaning equipment next to them. I mean, and everyone had a horror story. Everyone was stupefied and terrified because they, if there's one thing you need when you're in combat it's a gun that works.
Basu: Yeah, of course.
Elinson: Yeah, and just to piggyback on what Cam is saying there, we were able to look at declassified memos from inside the military where they state very openly that this is a problem. So, they know that this ammunition switch, the changes they've made to the gun, is going to cause jamming problems, and they do nothing about it.
McWhirter: And Stoner had warned them. We have found documentation that Stoner was contacting military officials saying, "You can't switch the propellant of this ammu-- 'Cause it interrupts his whole system.
Basu: So, it sounds like, you know, we're in this place where the public is starting to find out about all these problems, and at this point in your book, it's sort of easy to imagine an alternative history ending where this is the end of the AR-15. But we know that's not what happened. We know that actually at some point, civilian interest in this particular weapon really picked up. How exactly did that happen?
Elinson: So, it starts with Colt, which is the venerable old gun manufacturer in Hartford, Connecticut, everyone knows about. And they had a long history of building guns for the military and also selling them to consumers. So going back to the revolver, which now seems quaint, but at the time it was invented by Samuel Colt, was very advanced. You know, during his time, you didn't have guns that could shoot multiple rounds that quickly. So, he sold that to the military and then marketed it to civilians as well, using that imprint, that cachet. And so, Colt tried to do the same thing with the AR-15. So, the military version, called the M16, is a select fire rifle, and back then that meant you could switch it from semiautomatic where you could shoot one shot per trigger pull, or fully automatic where you pull the trigger down and just a stream of bullets flies out until you empty the magazine. So, Colt decided to sell the civilian version, which is semiautomatic, and they called it the Sporter. And they marketed it to hunters. They called it "a superb hunting partner." They sold it with five-round magazines, but hunters really weren't interested. At that time, most hunters, they use what you think of a traditional hunting rifle. You know, you have your wood stock, gleaming steel, large caliber. And hunters, you know, they prided themselves on felling large game with a single shot. They didn't see the need for rapid follow up shots. And the gun was--
Basu: If anything, that seemed a little bit like cheating, I'm assuming, to a lot of hunters, right?
McWhirter: Oh, to a lot of people, yeah.
Elinson: Yeah, and also just the look and feel of the gun. It seemed plastic and chintzy to them. It just didn't seem like something they wanted to use to go hunting. So, for many years they sold a couple thousand a year. Very small. Very small. And then in 1977, Stoner's patent expires and a few more companies start to get in the mix. And these guys are kind of like, uh, I don't know, we call them like the "bad boys of the gun industry." They're kind of like the outlaw motorcycle gangs. They're trying to make this gun cool, right? They appeal to like what they call an "edgy crowd" is how they describe it. So, you have like three or four or five companies that start to make Stoner's rifle, but they are absolutely shunned by the gun industry itself. They go to the biggest, you know, convention of the year, which is called SHOT Show. This is where every gun company displays their wares. And they are just like pushed off to the side. SHOT Show does not want them besmirching their image, which at the time was sort of like the sportsman. You know, the guy who goes hunting, you know, with his shotgun, goes duck hunting, who goes deer hunting. They didn't like this military style rifle. And one of these early AR-15 makers described to us how he would be at the NRA convention, put his wares on his little table there, and people would flip him off, because they didn't want to see that type of gun there.
McWhirter: And some of them were veterans because they were still angry about Vietnam.
Basu: They had all these memories of Vietnam, yeah.
[SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC]
Elinson: And we interviewed powerful gun industry executives from that time. And they just said, these guys were not part of our club.
Basu, Narrating: By the late-1980s, assault-style weapons, including the AR-15, were getting more and more negative attention. The rifles were connected to extremist groups. There were reports of increased crime in America's cities, of gangs using assault-style rifles against police officers. And then, on January 17, 1989, a gunman showed up outside an elementary school playground in Stockton, California. He killed five children and injured 31 others.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
Elinson: This is sort of the worst elementary school shooting at the time. It was carried out by a drifter who had resentments against Southeast Asian immigrants. Just a really hateful guy. And he went back to a place where he had lived, Stockton, California, with an AK-47-style rifle, and he stood at the edge of the playground, and he shot children. And this horrified the nation at the time. People at that time when they saw the gun that he used were surprised because not a lot of people at that time owned AK-47-style rifles or AR-15s. And so, there was this immediate aversion, and that started the real conversation of restricting these semiautomatic military-style guns. And, throughout the next five years was sort of the high point for the gun control movement in the United States, in probably in all the history of the United States. One of the key political forces was that police officers were calling for a ban of these guns. And we read internal memos from politicians talking about how, you know, "If we have the police," these are Democrats, talking about, "If we have the police on our side, we can counteract the very strong National Rifle Association." "Cause NRA was very strong back then, too. But having the police on their side tipped the balance in favor of gun control.
[MOMENTOUS MUSIC]
Basu, Narrating: This era culminated in the passage of the 1994 federal assault weapons ban. The legislation prohibited the making and selling of 19 semiautomatic weapons in the United States, including the Colt AR-15. It also banned magazines that could hold more than ten rounds. But the law ended up having some unintended consequences.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
Elinson: It turned the AR-15 into a political symbol for the first time. And that plays a huge role going forward. The AR-15 was included with a number of other guns in this ban. It was kind of an afterthought. You know, there weren't that many owners of AR-15s at the time. I talked to this guy, Dave McCann. He's one of about 400,000 people in America at that time who own AR-15s. And he bought one because, you know, he'd been in the military, he liked the gun. He would take it target shooting. He's kind of a collector. He didn't think anything of it. But as soon as Bill Clinton starts getting up there in Washington telling him, you know, "This is an evil weapon, you can't have it." He was like, "Oh man. This is something that cannot happen. This is a line in the sand. This gun right here, this little black gun is an affirmation of my Second Amendment rights." And that is really the first time that it becomes a political symbol. And this generates interest from people. Now people wanna have this gun, right? Because A, you know, it's gonna be banned, and B, it's a symbol of your politics. And so, what happens after the ban goes into effect is that there are actually more AR-15s made in the next 10 years when it's supposedly banned than there have been made for the 30 prior years.
McWhirter: So, it becomes a political symbol of something you can't have, but at the same time, the gunmakers quickly modified their AR-15s to get them back onto the market. And so, it became a way to make a political statement, and it was easy to get.
Basu: All at the same time, and on top of that, I mean, you two are very scrutinizing of this in the book, on top of that, the ban itself, you say, was really not written in an effective way at all.
McWhirter: No. No.
Basu: Talk a little bit more about that, because I feel like there is a lot of conversation today about the need for a return to some kind of federal assault weapons ban. But there's lessons to be learned from how the 1994 law was drafted.
Elinson: When these gun control groups and Democratic senators went to write this ban, they didn't seem to understand what they were doing almost. And so, they wrote a definition of a gun that really only got at the way it looked. They outlawed the form and not the function. So, the AR-15s made under the ban look a little different, but they're still semiautomatic, you can still shoot the same bullet as fast as you could shoot it before. The only difference was they could only sell 10-round magazines instead of larger magazines. But there were tons of magazines floating around out there. There's no way to track them, so they're easy to get, these larger magazines. You can contrast that with the way that other countries have done it. So, Australia, for instance, in the '90s, also outlawed AR-15s and other guns like them. And they basically outlawed all semiautomatic rifles with few exceptions. So, they banned the function, not the form. Of course, Australia is nothing like the U.S. They have no Second Amendment, right? They don't have as strong a gun culture as the U.S. does. So, there's different considerations, but you can see the two different approaches and how they played out.
McWhirter: And another important point is the sunset. You know, they created a ten-year ban and that, we write this in the book, but it was really just a random, like three people sitting here talking and just kinda picking a number. It really wasn't very well thought out. And by 2004, Congress was controlled by the Republicans. We'd had 9/11, in which, the bad taste that Vietnam left in people's mouths over that gun was vanished because suddenly we saw soldiers standing at our airports with AR-15-style rifles, going into combat with, you know, M16s in Afghanistan, and the gun was, you know, a "hero's gun." That's how a lot of people saw it. So, all that leads to 2004 where the assault weapons ban just sorta disappears. It dies with a whimper in Congress. And simultaneously, the gun industry has really seen the profits that could be made from an AR-15. Very high margins. And they're off to the races. So, when the gun ban is lifted, then you see the first huge boom in sales. The gun had been selling well throughout the ban, and then it takes off.
Basu: Yeah, say a little bit more about that if you can. Just where we were in the early 2000s to mid-2000s in terms of our gun culture and interest.
Elinson: Right. So, gun culture is really changing around this time because of a couple of factors. One is that hunting is really on the decline. You know, more people are living in urban areas, suburban areas, less in rural areas. And so, a new kind of gun culture centered around self-defense and target shooting is really taking hold, less around hunting. And the thing that these "bad boys," as we were describing, these little renegade AR-15 makers discovered in the '90s, was that this gun is very cheap and simple to make. It does not require a lot of skilled labor or expensive machinery the way that wooden rifles do. And once the big gunmakers realized this, the huge margins that could be made, they all wanted to get in. So, they had a growing market, huge margins, and all of a sudden you have big companies like Smith & Wesson, Ruger, Sig Sauer, all these companies that had shunned this gun are suddenly wanting to sell their own version of it.
McWhirter: In many ways, the gun becomes so profitable that it really sort of saves the gun industry. The gun industry is really boom and bust, and this really gives them something they can count on. Politics enters in again to that. You know, we get to 2008, you know, the presidential election. Despite the fact that Barack Obama was very careful in his wording regarding the Second Amendment and what he planned to do about guns, the NRA is screaming, "This guy's coming for your guns." And this leads to a period called the "Barack Boom," where people ran out to buy guns, particularly AR-15s and AR-15 sales skyrocket.
[WEIGHTY MUSIC]
Basu, Narrating: Coming up, how the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting has and hasn't changed the gun debate, and how we can break the political gridlock around gun safety laws. That's just ahead.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
[UPBEAT MUSIC]
Basu, Narrating: If you're anything like me, you have millions of tabs open and a stack of magazines piling up. There are so many interesting articles that you wanna read every week, but you don't always have the time. Well, I'm gonna tell you how I make sure I'm extremely well-read. I listen. See, Apple News has some of the best voice actors in the business read articles from your favorite magazines and newspapers. So, you can listen to them on the go. It's called Apple News+ Narrated. And now, it's available in the Podcast app for Apple News+ subscribers.
Hear stories from "The Atlantic," "TIME," "People," "The Wall Street Journal," and more.
…A warp drive breakthrough that could make interstellar travel possible…
…The psychedelic scientists who sends brains back to childhood…
…Inside Charles's first year as king…
Plus, you'll hear some of the stars and journalists themselves read you the articles they wrote.
Allen Iverson: What's up? I'm Allen Iverson.
Molly Ringwald: I'm Molly Ringwald.
Joanna Gaines: Joanna Gaines.
Rebecca Traister: Rebecca Traister.
Iverson: This is my story.
Gaines: For the "Magnolia Journal."
Traister: For "New York Magazine."
Iverson: For "The Players Tribune."
Basu, Narrating: Follow "News+ Narrated" in Apple Podcasts today. Because great journalism deserves to be heard.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
[OMINOUS MUSIC]
Basu, Narrating: In 2012, at Sandy Hook Elementary School, when a gunman used an AR-15 to kill 20 children and six adults, many people thought this would be a watershed moment in the U.S. gun debate.
Cameron and Zusha spoke with David and Francine Wheeler, whose 6-year-old son Ben was killed at Sandy Hook. They talked about what it was like advocating for changes to gun laws after that mass shooting.
Elinson: They'd never been involved in politics, and we trace how they get involved in trying to do something. And so they go to the State House. David gives this emotional speech before these state legislators.
[START ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP]
David Wheeler: The liberty of any person to own a military-style assault weapon and a high-capacity magazine and keep them in their home is second to the right of my son. To his life. His life.
[END ARCHIVAL NEWS CLIP]
Elinson: And they just, they all start clapping. It's just eruption of applause. So, the Connecticut State legislature does something. They pass a number of gun laws to restrict sales of this weapon. It's one of the most comprehensive bills ever passed. And the Sandy Hook parents get extremely hopeful, so they decide to go to Washington. And we follow the story of the Wheelers as they walk through the Senate building there, going into senators' offices, sharing the story of their son, holding pictures of their son, and they describe these heartbreaking scenes where some very well-known senators are standing before them, crying, listening to them, looking down at the floor, and at the end of the conversation, the Wheelers and the others are asking, "Can you do anything? Can you do anything to prevent this from happening again?" And they just say, "No."
Basu: What is behind that answer? That, no.
Elinson: So, the gun rights movement had been led by the old timers, but all of a sudden, the AR-15 owners are the strongest advocates for gun rights. And they are the reason that nothing passed, honestly. People who own guns and are passionate about gun rights are much more committed than gun control activists at this point in history.
Basu: When you say committed, what does that mean?
Elinson: So, support for gun control really sort of swells and fades. It's very episodic. So, after a mass shooting, everyone says, "We want these new laws, we want these new laws." But you know, a few months down the road and, Democrats particularly, are thinking about other issues: abortion, healthcare, climate, whatever it could be. So, for Democrats, generally, gun control, you know, it's changing a little now, and we'll get to that, but back then, gun control was very kinda low on the list of priorities. Now, you talk about conservatives, it's a much different story. There was polls done that show that conservative voters, much more likely to vote yes or no on the candidate based on their position on guns. For Democrats, not so. And so, it's a very strong single issue voter bloc. And the way this translates into nothing being done after Sandy Hook is that those senators that were saying no to these crying parents are worried about being voted out of office. And that's really what it comes down to.
McWhirter: And it becomes this strident line in the sand where, you know, the phrase, "Come and Take It," which we've seen on, eventually see at Jan. 6. But, I mean, these flags that have the AR-15 in silhouette, "Come and Take It." That really becomes the battle cry of the gun rights movement, and this gun particularly becomes that emblem.
Basu: Yeah. Yeah. I will say, one way that the Sandy Hook families have been unusual and successful is the settlement that they received in 2022. I just wanna talk about that briefly. They won a $73 million settlement, the largest ever paid by a gunmaker in a mass shooting case. And the way that they went about it was rather unusual because, and maybe I can ask you two to explain this, how gun manufacturers are largely legally "off the hook" for deaths related to the products that they make. Can you talk a little bit about the strategy that played out here and whether it has any kinda future?
Elinson: Right. To set up the context here, right now in the courts, gun rights organizations are winning everything, right? The Supreme Court has expanded Second Amendment rights a couple times, and even at the district court level, a lot of gun control laws are going down. But when you talk about civil litigation, and that's what we're talking about here, there has been some progress made by gun control groups. And this really interesting case, so the Sandy Hook parents, they were really frustrated by their experience with Congress not doing anything. They wanted to hold someone accountable for what had happened, and so they searched around for a lawyer to sue the gunmaker.
It's a giant gun conglomerate that owned a company called Bushmaster that made the gun used by Adam Lanza. And the reason that no lawyers wanted to take up these Sandy Hook parents was, they said, "We're never gonna win." Why would they never be able to win? That's because Congress passed a law in 2005 really limiting liability for gunmakers. Basically, if a gun's used in the commission of crime, the gunmaker's not liable under this law. And the way they approached it was by looking at the way that the guns were marketed. There was an exception in the law that if, you know, a gunmaker violates state law or negligently markets their products, then they can be held liable. And so, they started looking at Bushmaster's marketing, and that's actually a big part of our book, is how this private equity-backed gun conglomerate changed the game for marketing AR-15s.
For a long time, gun marketing is really kind of like, I don't know, it's almost like looking at an IKEA catalog, right? You have like a picture of a gun, and it lists all the parts, you know. This kind of part does this, and it's made out of this kind of metal. It's really, it was really geared at like gun nerds, in some way. People who owned a lot of guns, knew a lot about guns. But when private equity gets involved in the game, they bring modern marketing to the table. They hire ad agencies. They wanna sell it like any other product in America. With sex.
They go and they put this ad in "Maxim" magazine. You know, this is a magazine that was very popular back in the day, featuring scantily clad models and articles about sex and drinking and partying. All this sort of stuff really aimed at young men. And they launched this ad campaign for the Bushmaster XM-15 in there called, "Consider your man card reissued." So, this is really a different approach to marketing. On top of that, they start marketing their guns through videogames. And thanks to this lawsuit, we were able to look at a bunch of discovery, and we were able to look at internal company emails where they talk about placing their products in videogames so that younger customers will eventually, when they grow old enough, buy their guns. And this was a really startling thing for us to see.
Basu: Let's talk a bit about solutions and accountability from a policy perspective. You write about laws that have gone into effect, especially at the state level, that have been effective at bringing down the number of fatalities in mass shootings. Can you say a bit more about what we've seen that has been effective, that's worked?
McWhirter: Yeah, toward the end of the book, we explore some of the things people are trying to do. The assault weapons ban, as we discussed, is still talked about as a political option, but with upwards of 20 million plus civilian AR-15s in this country right now, we don't really know the exact number, but it's at least that, the idea of rounding them up would be pretty implausible.
Basu: And the idea that we don't really know the numbers is a little scary, actually.
McWhirter: Yeah. But they're out there and so the policy question becomes, how do we keep these guns out of the hands of people who would wanna hurt somebody? And that is a complicated question, but that is where, what we write about, that's where people are starting to look. That, you know, a much more surgical approach than just sort of a blanket ban. And I think that's where, you know, red flag laws that people are talking about, where someone who has expressed an interest in hurting other people on social media or to other friends or family. People can go to the courts and have their guns taken away for a period of time. There's talk of raising the age limits in some states for the purchasing of guns like the AR-15. Nobody wants this to be happening, and most gun owners in this country aren't committing mass shootings. So, some people are doing this, and how do we keep those people from not getting access to this gun?
Elinson: One of the things we tried to highlight in our book are sort of surprising suggestions. So, we really wanted to bring out some voices that people might listen to. We interviewed, for instance, the former chief executive of Colt, and he eye-openly suggested that there should be a higher scrutiny for people buying AR-15s. Currently, if you want to buy a machine gun in this country or a short barreled rifle, you have to go through a much more onerous process: background check, and it gets registered with the federal government. This is under a 1934 law, actually. And he thought that AR-15s should be brought under that type of law. Now there's a lot of complications with that and so forth and getting it passed and how would you do it, but I think what he's pointing to is, how do we prevent people who shouldn't have these guns from getting it at that point of sale?
One of the interesting things we uncovered by talking to people who research mass shootings is that most mass shooters go into a store and legally buy an AR-15 or other gun that they use. And that's really different from any other type of crime. If you're talking about gang warfare, you're talking about, you know, drug turf wars, those guys are getting their guns from the underground market, from traffickers, from guns that are ripped off from automobiles or gun stores, not through legal channels. But most mass shooters do not have a criminal history.
Basu: By way of a concluding thought, I wanted to ask you both, you know, now that you've done this work, now that you've compiled this history, you've looked at how public sentiment has changed, you've looked at how law enforcement sentiment has changed, how politics have changed, I think most people look at the current moment that we're in and just feel this overwhelming feeling of, "We're stuck. We're so stuck. We're not moving anywhere." What are your takeaways from having studied the history on how we can get unstuck? How we can move somewhere on this issue?
Elinson: I think one of the biggest things that's gonna cause society to change is the next generation. So, me and Cam, we didn't grow up with mass shooter drills, but Cam's kids did. Right?
McWhirter: Right.
Elinson: Kids now grow up with the fear that someone's gonna come into their school and shoot them. And that just creates a very different mindset. And so, there's been polling of young folks, and they just have a very different attitude towards this issue. On the other hand, what's interesting is that gun ownership is just expanding massively. During the first two years of the pandemic, there were 40 million guns sold in America. So, you have this younger generation coming up very aware of the school shooting, mass shooting problem, and at the same time, way more guns in the country. And what the polls find is that young people are more in favor of solutions that target individuals with violent tendencies or mental health problems from owning guns, a much more precise approach to this problem. I guess that would be my final takeaway, is that things may change as this younger generation grows up.
McWhirter: This gun was designed to shoot really quickly and be really easy to shoot. That was what Stoner wanted for the military. But those same design principles are now being used to commit horrible acts against a country that he loved. I keep thinking about Stoner and the engineer's mind, which I don't, I don't have that. I wasn't born with that brain. But I came to really respect it. That you see a problem, "How do I make it better? How do I fix this? Let's try this. Let's try that. Let's try this." You know, and it's agnostic, they're not thinking about, "Is this a liberal decision? Would this make us safer because it's from a Democratic senator that I like? Or is this a good decision because it's from a Republican that I like?" You have to put all that aside. What is working and what doesn't work? What do we do to make our world safer? With the understanding, with the acceptance that this technology is here.
[MUSIC FADES IN]
Basu: Zusha, Cameron, thank you both so much for your time. This was really interesting.
McWhirter: Thank you very much.
Elinson: Thank you.
Basu, Narrating: Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson's book "American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15" is out now. We'll link to it in our show notes page.
If you're enjoying this podcast, please follow "Apple News In Conversation" on Apple Podcasts and leave us a review. Thanks for listening.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]