American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15

By Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023. 496 pages. $32/hardcover; $22/paperback; $15.99/eBook.

The AR-15, a rifle often known by its military designation M16, is a ubiquitous and deadly presence in U.S. society. Designed in the 1950s, the gun would become the main weapon of the U.S. military during the Vietnam conflict. Starting in the 1980s, it surged in popularity among civilian gun owners. In American Gun, journalists Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson (both veteran Wall Street Journal reporters with experience covering mass shootings, protests, and gun culture and industry) tell the story of the firearm’s history and how it became the most commonly used weapon in mass shootings in the United States.

The opening 12 chapters comprise the first of the book’s two parts. These focus on Eugene Stoner and his invention of the AR-15. Stoner was a largely self-taught tinkerer and inventor with a passion for guns. He designed a revolutionary gas-operated system that allowed his rifles to fire faster and use lighter components than competing designs. Working at the gun engineering company ArmaLite, he created the AR-15 (the initials referring to ArmaLite or ArmaLite Research depending on who you ask). The gun would also use a smaller bullet than most military rifles that was fired at a high velocity. This meant that when the bullet hit its target, it was prone to tumble inside the bodies of people or animals, causing extreme wounds and damage. The weapon became the United States’ counter to the Soviet-made AK-47.

This section of the book reads as a triumphant narrative of technical achievement, though McWhirter and Elinson constantly highlight the hubris and lack of foresight in developing such a lethal technology. The debates about the military selecting and adopting the rifle are a central part of these chapters, particularly focusing on the resistance of the military establishment to adopt the rifle due to their preference for more traditional weapons made by the government-run Springfield Armory. When the rifle was used in combat in the Vietnam War, it performed disastrously, primarily due to changes the military had made to Stoner’s innovative design. The book at times seems to paint Stoner as a weapons designer akin to J. Robert Oppenheimer, a genius who expressed ambivalence about his legacy. Yet while Stoner does display a remarkable talent for firearm design, he does not seem to have been particularly introspective or reflective about the impact of his creation.

The second part of the book is about mass shootings: how these were connected to largely ineffective efforts to pass any form of gun control in the United States, and about the AR-15 itself becoming a politically charged, partisan symbol. These 20 chapters take on a far more journalistic tone, recounting in graphic detail mass shootings done with AR-15s at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut; the Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas, Nev.; Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.; and numerous other incidents. The accounts of these events are heartfelt and appropriately disturbing, serving as a reminder of how common such tragedies have become.

Though McWhirter and Elinson never explicitly state their politics, their book is a clear plea for gun control. (McWhirter is a Quaker living in Atlanta, Ga., though this affiliation is not mentioned in his bio for the book.) The narrative the authors provide is one of repeated grisly mass shootings, brief bursts of hope for reforms, followed by small changes and considerable disappointment as such measures fail to pass. They do point toward several comparatively moderate measures—a limit on the size of gun magazines, the temporary removal of guns for those who are deemed a likely threat to others, and tighter licensing laws—which have the potential to reduce mass shootings, but there is no panacea offered here.

This is a skillfully written and thoroughly researched book. It would be useful to those trying to understand modern debates about gun control. Yet some readers may be less interested in devoting close attention to the technical nuances of the development of the AR-15 and the details of its testing and eventual adoption as the main rifle of the U.S. military. At times it can feel like two books: one a history about the AR-15 as a weapon, and the other about the cultural and political impact on U.S. society of what are often called assault weapons. Both sections are worth reading, but there may be separate audiences for each.

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Isaac Barnes May is a resident fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School in New Haven, Conn. He is the author of two recent books on modern Quaker history, and a member of Charlottesville (Va.) Meeting.