Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Categories
Politics & government

AMERICAN GUN

Zusha Elinson Cameron McWhirter

The Story of the AR-15

American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15 presents the epic history of America's most controversial weapon.

In the 1950s, an obsessive firearms designer named Eugene Stoner invented the AR-15 rifle in a California garage. High-minded and patriotic, Stoner sought to devise a lightweight, easy-to-use weapon that could replace the M1s touted by soldiers in World War II. What he did create was a lethal handheld icon of the American century. In American Gun, the veteran Wall Street Journal reporters Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson track the AR-15 from inception to ubiquity. How did the same gun represent the essence of freedom to millions of Americans and the essence of evil to millions more? To answer this question, McWhirter and Elinson follow Stoner - the American Kalashnikov - as he struggled mightily to win support for his invention, which under the name M16 would become standard equipment in Vietnam. Shunned by gun owners at first, the rifle's popularity would take off thanks to a renegade band of small-time gun makers. And in the 2000s, it would become the weapon of choice for mass shooters, prompting widespread calls for proscription even as the gun industry embraced it as a financial savior. Writing with fairness and compassion, McWhirter and Elinson explore America's gun culture, revealing the deep appeal of the AR-15, the awful havoc it wreaks, and the politics of reducing its toll. The result is a moral history of contemporary America's love affair with technology, freedom, and weaponry. Cameron McWhirter is a national reporter for The Wall Street Journal, based in Atlanta. He has covered mass shootings, violent protests and natural disasters across the South. He is also the author of Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America. Previously, he reported for other publications in the U.S., as well as Bosnia, Iraq, and Ethiopia. Zusha Elinson is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, where he covers America's gun culture and industry. He is based in Northern California.

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Book Published 2023-09-26 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Comments

A magisterial work of narrative history and original reportage... You can feel the tension building one cold, catastrophic fact at a time... A virtually unprecedented achievement.

How the AR-15 became America's most popular and deadly weapon - the two journalists recently spoke together with The Times... Read more...

The New Yorker recently published an excellent long-form review of the book Read more...

...superb history... a meticulously researched and impressively informed book... A riveting exploration of the cost of the nation's fascination with an iconic weapon. Read more...

...a particularly powerful and important book. Read more...

Fall must-read books! Read more...

An important book on a sadly topical subject... enlists formidable research and reporting in the service of explaining how an assault rifle developed for military use by a Marine veteran and self-taught engineer in the 1950s was marketed to civilians, eventually becoming the weapon of choice for perpetrators of mass shootings. Read more...

A captivating tale of unintended consequences.

The authors weave Stoner's story alongside a propulsive, often wrenching tale of politicking and ever-escalating rhetoric. Read more...

[McWhirter and Elinson] have done a masterful and damning job tracing the birth and development, and rampant misuse, of the AR-15, and there are heartbreaking stories elegantly told of the destruction this weapon has wrought on families and towns across the nation... Poignant. Read more...

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. McWhirter and Elinson are business reporters, and "American Gun" is, in part, a book about how an industry strategized to sell a particular type of gun to a particular type of person - usually a man - whom it could convince that AR-15s were an integral part of his identity. One of the most unexpected questions raised by their history of the semi-automatic rifle, which has been used by the perpetrators of many of the worst mass shootings in American history, is the following: What if the edgelord identity embraced by many mass shooters is not the result of alienation or mental illness but instead speaks to a successful marketing push of an industry doing business as usual? Read more...