Opinion

America’s rifle

James Holmes used a modern version of the AR-15 (similar to the one above) to kill 12 people in Aurora, Colo. (RJ Sangosti/Pool/Sipa USA)

By now the details are already starting to fade into the patchwork of mass-shooting tragedies that have come before it: An armor-wearing, orange-haired gunman walked into the midnight premiere of the new Batman movie in Aurora, Colo., where he opened fire on a packed movie theater, killing 12 and wounding 58.

He carried three guns, all legally purchased, doing most of his damage with a .223 caliber Smith & Wesson M&P15, a rifle that is long and black and lethal. It is a variant of a gun known as the AR-15, the semiautomatic, civilian version of the military’s automatic M-16.

And it was invented in, of all places, Hollywood, California, in a small machine shop along Santa Monica Boulevard — about five miles from Batman’s cinematic home at Warner Bros. Studios.

From those beginnings, the AR-15 has become an iconic weapon that has played a role in every armed US conflict since Vietnam and, for better or worse, ingrained itself in a half-century’s worth of our popular culture. It is one of the most commercially successful guns of all time, and while there are no precise counts, it is estimated more than 10 million have been produced for military and civilian use.

If the six-shooter is America’s pistol, seen on the hip of every Western sheriff and Dirty Harry, the AR-15 is America’s rifle.

‘TECHNOLOGICALLY SEXY’

The original patent for the gun, No. 2,951,424, was filed Aug. 14, 1956. The company was ArmaLite, a division of the Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation that endeavored to sell guns to the military. The person was Eugene Stoner, ArmaLite’s chief designer, who was tasked with creating a replacement for the M-1 and M-14, which together had been the Army’s rifle of choice since before World War II.

A former Marine Corps armorer, Stoner had no college degree but possessed a special genius for small-arms design. And by borrowing pieces and ideas from firearms all across the world, he created a rifle like no one had ever seen.

Stoner’s AR-15 (named after ArmaLite, not “assault rifle” as is sometimes believed) replaced the .30 caliber bullet used in the M-1 and M-14 with a lighter, .223 round, then housed it in a miniaturized cartridge. It had a magazine that could be released with just one finger. It put everything from the muzzle to the breech in precise alignment, resulting in far less recoil than other rifles. It had a muzzle brake, which counteracted the natural upward climb of a rifle on automatic fire.

It was made of plastic — as was everything else new and cool in the ’50s — along with flashy alloys, like titanium and aluminum.

And, borrowing from earlier Swedish and French guns, it used an innovation known as direct gas impingement, which allowed for the elimination of the piston, cylinder and rod — part of most guns’ firing mechanisms — shaving off several pounds and some complicated moving parts.

The result was a simple, lightweight yet highly accurate weapon that could be fired from just about any position, thanks to its low recoil and its pistol grip, and that allowed the firer to stay trained on the target even as multiple rounds exited the muzzle.

“None of these ideas were really new. But Stoner was the first to put it together in one high-tech package,” said Sam Pikula, a retired Army major who wrote a book about the AR-10, the immediate predecessor to the AR-15. “At the time, it was really futuristic. The gun was just technologically sexy.”

THE VIETNAM EFFECT

Here in this nation, where 31,000 people are killed by guns every year — but where we have a Constitution interpreted as guaranteeing the individual right to possess them — the AR-15 is once again at the center of a well-worn debate.

The anti-gun left calls the AR-15 “a weapon of war with no place in a civilian population,” to use the words of Jackie Hilly, executive director of New Yorkers Against Violence. “When we’re talking about US soldiers in Kandahar Province in Afghanistan facing an armed enemy, we want them to have these kinds of weapons,” Hilly said. “But who’s the enemy in a movie theater? I don’t know how many more examples of these kinds of mass shootings we need to allow before we stop this lunacy.”

The pro-gun right, meanwhile, counters that the AR-15 is popular as a hunting rifle — even if its .223 round is too small for large game — and as a target rifle at places like Camp Perry, Ohio, which has been home to the Civilian Marksmanship Program since the days of Teddy Roosevelt.

“I can assure you, there are very prestigious national championships where top-level competitors are shooting AR-15s,” said Jim Scoutten, the executive producer and host of Shooting USA, a weekly show that runs on Outside Channel and chronicles a variety of target-shooting events. “Service-rifle shooting is a real passion for some people.”

In some ways, both the right and left are correct: The AR-15 is a useful gun prized by its owners, the vast majority of whom are law-abiding; and it was exquisitely designed for soldiers looking to wound lots of people very quickly.

Its ascension started not with the Army, but with the Air Force. The president of Fairchild Engine and Airplane, Richard Boutelle, invited Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay to a party on July 4, 1960. LeMay (he of “bomb them back into the Stone Age” fame) test-fired a Colt-manufactured ArmaLite AR-15 on some watermelons, set at 50 and 150 yards. They quickly became among the AR-15s first casualties.

“If Curtis LeMay hadn’t been a nut for guns, you probably never would have heard of it,” Pikula said. “But he saw this thing and he just had to have it. He thought it was totally cool.”

LeMay bought an order of AR-15s for Air Force special forces, who then introduced them to Army special forces. By 1962, US troops in South Vietnam were using AR-15s in skirmishes against the North Vietnamese. David Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist-turned-author, filed a story for the Oct. 16, 1962 New York Times that included several paragraphs about the ArmaLite AR-15.

“We found in interrogation that there were three things the Communist fear,” one officer told Halberstam. “The helicopter, the M-113 amphibious troop carriers and the ArmaLite.”

By 1966, the gun had become the standard rifle given to combat units and was rechristened the M-16 (in typically straightforward Army parlance the “M” stands for “model”). Its use was not without controversy. A side effect of direct gas impingement was that it dumped unburned gunpowder directly into the action, giving it a tendency to jam if not cleaned properly. (This flaw may have been a blessing for some people in Aurora, Colo.: Law enforcement sources say the shooter’s rifle jammed before he could empty its entire 100-round magazine).

Stories of soldiers dying next to broken M-16s began spreading. But an Army-commissioned study found that of more than 13 million rounds fired, there were only 1,243 malfunctions — roughly one per every 10,000 rounds. For the Army, that was satisfactory.

And it still is: More than 50 years after it first went into production, the AR-15/M-16 remains the principal service rifle of the US armed forces.

‘THE GOOD-GUY GUN’

The first non-military uses of the AR-15 were by police departments, which in response to civil disorders in places like Watts, Detroit and Newark began arming themselves with the gun. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, better known as the Kerner Commission, specifically condemned this practice, saying AR-15s had “no place in densely populated urban communities.”

From military to police, the AR-15 made a slow drift into the civilian population, though it remained relatively uncommon throughout the early and mid-’70s. That began to change in the late ’70s and early ’80s when two things happened. One, Stoner’s patent on the AR-15, which had been sold to Colt, expired in 1977, allowing other gun manufacturers to make their own versions. (There are today at least 30 domestic companies known to manufacture AR-15 variants.)

Second, handgun sales started slumping, from 2.7 million in 1982 to 1.7 million in 1984, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Gun manufacturers needed a new product, and they seized on the AR-15, which was getting great exposure on television shows like “Miami Vice” and movies like “First Blood.”

“Hollywood is what really made it popular,” said Duncan Long, an author who has written several books on the AR-15. “I always say the AR-15 is the good-guy gun and the AK-47 is the bad-guy gun.”

Still, bad guys managed to get their hands on AR-15s — and guns like it — leading to an increased public outcry against them. After mass shootings in San Ysidro and Stockton California became the first state to ban assault rifles like the AR-15 in 1989.

A federal ban, proposed but not passed that year, took longer to coalesce. It wasn’t until 1994, with considerable arm-twisting from President Bill Clinton, that the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act — known colloquially as the assault rifle ban — became law.

It was, by most measures, a failure. It defined an assault rifle as a weapon that accepted detachable magazines and had two or more of the following characteristics: a pistol grip, a flash suppressor, a folding stock, a bayonet mount or a grenade launcher. Savvy gun manufacturers quickly adjusted, designing guns that still looked and felt like AR-15s, but that skirted the law by, say, changing the pistol grip to a thumbhole stock and getting rid of the bayonet mount and grenade launcher. Additionally, the law did nothing to ban existing assault rifles, meaning there were still millions of them in circulation.

“It was a law that was kind of designed to fail,” said Gary Kleck, a professor of criminology at Florida State who studies gun control. “Everybody understood it was one of those laws that was more symbolic than anything.”

The law had a 10-year sunset provision, and Congress allowed it to expire in 2004. A study commissioned by the Justice Department concluded the reduction in gun violence attributable to the ban was “too small for reliable measurement.”

While New York and New Jersey are among states that still ban assault rifles, a new federal ban has never gained momentum.

ONLY GETS MORE POPULAR

For now, the AR-15 is perfectly legal — and growing in popularity.

“There’s a lot of chatter within the gun industry that if you’re not in the AR market, you’re missing out on a lot of sales, because that’s what’s trendy,” said Kristen Rand, legislative director at the Violence Policy Center.

Smith & Wesson, the maker of the Colorado gun, is a relative newcomer to the AR-15 market, having rolled out its M&P15 — the M and P stand for “military and police” — in 2006. The company has declined to comment since the shooting, but according to its filings with the ATF, production of the M&P15 has gone from 4,650 to 100,051 during its first four years.

“The entire M&P product line has been a tremendous success,” Smith & Wesson CEO Mike Golden told shareholders during a conference call in 2008. “These products were designed to cross multiple markets including military, law enforcement and consumer, and they’re hitting — they’re hitting their mark in a big way.”

In a perverse way, atrocities like the one in Colorado only serve to bolster sales. Gun stores across the country have reported that fears of a renewed ban, however politically unlikely that may be, have sent consumers flocking in to buy them while they still can — just one more example of the AR-15 owing its success to Hollywood.

Brad Parks is a Shamus- and Nero-Award-winning mystery novelist whose latest book, “The Girl Next Door,” is currently available from St. Martin’s Press.