The Gun (38 page)

It was not enough to plumb how bullets tore through the dead or made hanging corpses sway. To gauge shock effect, the captain and major decided that they also needed to observe the varied ways and rates at which living creatures might die after suffering different types of pistol fire. So, after satisfying themselves that they had learned what could be learned from the cadaver shoots, the officers proceeded to the Union Stock Yards in Chicago, where they obtained livestock for the next stage. The first stockyard test posed a simple question: How does a pistol bullet affect a steer or cow when fired at close range? Animals were tied by turns to posts. The officers lifted their pistols, stepped near, took aim from roughly thirty-six inches away, and fired into each animal’s rib cage. Then
they backed up to watch. Observations recorded of the first animal, a bull weighing about thirteen hundred pounds, were typical.

Two shots through both lungs from left to right; second shot four inches in front of the first. Animal dropped at the end of four minutes. Was apparently not much disturbed by the first shot, only throwing head slightly, but he was shocked by the second shot. Blood flowing from nostrils immediately after the first shot, showing that the lung was probably perforated. He was in a death struggle at the end of four and a half minutes; dead at the end of five.

The experiment on the fourth animal, a bull of the same size, might have suggested that cattle were not the best surrogates for studying the effects of bullets on men.

First shot: Bullet entered from left to right; animal was shocked by the report. The bullet was intended to traverse the intestinal area as much as possible. At the end of the forty-five seconds the animal was breathing somewhat rapidly.

Second shot: Two minutes from first shot. Bullet struck to the right and below where the first entered. Animal was again shocked by the report of the revolver and, of course, by the force of the blow.

Third shot: Three minutes and ten seconds from first shot. Animal very much shocked by the loudness of the report; his breathing became faster, but he soon quieted down.

As it became evident that the animal would not die immediately from the wounds already inflicted, he was shot in the head at the end of six minutes and thirty seconds from the time of the first shot, with no apparent effect.

Sixth shot: At the end of seven minutes and fifteen seconds, the animal, still standing, was shot in the ear, with no apparent effect.21

Seventh shot: At the end of eight minutes and fifteen seconds, the animal still standing, was shot behind the ear. The animal continued to stand, the shots having failed to reach a vital spot, it was determined to kill him in accordance with the method practiced at
the slaughter house. At the fourth blow on the head with a hammer he fell to the ground and expired.

Captain Thompson and Major La Garde shot eight cows and steers before shifting to what they called “quick-firing” tests, the object being “to fire a sufficient number of shots in rapid succession to cause the animal to fall to the floor.” The first cow withstood six bullets and sagged to the ground. The second cow absorbed ten, though “owing to a hitch in the working of the pistol, there was an interval of one minute between the third and fourth shots.” The third animal was still standing after twelve bullets. The officers decided to dispatch it with a hammer. And so on.
⁶²

The work was of dubious value. The data sample was small, the method of observation crude. By today’s standards it would be considered unethical and inhumane. It was influential nonetheless.
⁶³
The officers concluded that the caliber of a pistol bullet was the most important factor in lethality. Bullets with larger diameters, they deduced, caused wounds with larger diameters, which brought about incapacitation and death more quickly than narrower, faster rounds. A wealth of other studies in wound ballistics would later show wounding to be more complicated than this. But based in part on these conclusions, the United States adopted the .45 as its standard pistol round. Thompson’s affinity for the .45 round outlasted his military service. The lessons he thought he learned from watching swinging corpses and death throes in the stockyard led him to design the Thompson gun as a .45-caliber weapon. The thinking was linear. When fired rapidly through a pistol, the .45 round had brought a standing cow to the floor more quickly than any other pistol round: Six shots and a 950-pound brute was on her side. If it could do that job, imagine what it might do if fired at a rate of more than six hundred rounds a minute into a 160-pound man? This, on paper at least, was what the Thompson gun offered to all buyers.

Thompson’s intentions were patriotic as well as commercial. He conceived of his submachine gun during World War I—a “trench broom,” he called it, for cleaning German soldiers from fighting holes. But he did not get his prototype developed before the war’s end. When he had it ready for sale, the timing was terrible. The American military budget was in a postwar contraction. Procurements were hard to find. Thompson hawked his gun with zeal from his Auto-Ordnance Corporation
offices on Broadway in Manhattan. Calling it a trench broom hardly served his interests. Germany had surrendered. The prospects for another trench war were uncertain. Government markets were picky and fickle; armies did not know what to prepare for next. The American military acknowledged the mechanical soundness of Thompson’s gun, but still favored traditional rifles. Thompson presented the weapon to police departments. Police officials had misgivings, too. A submachine gun had a place in certain types of battle. But proposing automatic arms for use against criminals seemed to many police chiefs to be a risky inclination toward overkill, considering the danger to bystanders. Yet all was not lost. Unlike Gatling’s massive weapon, Thompson’s gun had characteristics that commended it to customers outside government. And its legal path was clear. Until this point, automatic arms had been military arms. No one had conceived of a law to regulate their sale to private parties, because private citizens had not seemed to be a potential market for the weapons that had appeared before. The Auto-Ordnance Corporation turned its sales attention to civilians. The United States had a love affair with firearms. Why not offer a firearm with extra pop? The corporation appealed to both the nation’s folklore and its cinematic sense of self. One Thompson gun advertisement showed a cowboy firing from his right hip at armed horsemen charging his porch. In the ad copy, four of the marauders’ horses have been relieved of riders by the bullets of the Tommy Gun. One rider is falling backward from his saddle, rifle high, having just been shot. Two more horsemen, one of whom is galloping away, appear to have had second thoughts. This was Madison Avenue merged with righteous carnage, step right up and buy your own. “The Thompson Submachine Gun. The Most Effective Portable Fire Arms in Existence,” the advertisement read. “The ideal weapon for the protection of large estates, ranches, plantations, etc.” Thompson’s most thorough historian summed up the Auto-Ordnance pitch, and the predicament that accompanied it.

A company that could fancy a cowboy mowing down bandits, or envision a householder pouring machine gun fire into his darkened dining room in defense of the family silver, might well have misjudged its markets. But the submachine gun was legally available to anyone, and lack of police and military interest made it, by default, a
civilian weapon. And so it came to pass that the Thompson—manufactured in peacetime, sold on the commercial market—was, in a sense, a machine gun for the home.
⁶⁴

A natural problem flowed from this sales ambition. The portion of the civilian population interested in purchasing submachine guns could have been expected to include more than the trespassed-upon homeowners suggested by the pitch. Unfortunately for the brigadier, this was the case. The Tommy Gun became a weapon of choice for mobsters, bank robbers, rum runners, and other members of the villainous classes of the 1920s and 1930s, all of whom gave submachine guns a bad name fast. The military’s objection to the Thompson—that submachine guns were not effective across the distances at which the infantry often fights—was irrelevant in the underworld. Criminals did not worry about fighting off the massed rifles of well-drilled line platoons. They worried about each other, and they worried about the police. When their disputes turned violent, they settled them by pistol and shotgun fire, across distances at which people could hear each other curse. For these purposes and at these ranges, the Tommy Gun, with bullets that earned their respectability by knocking over cows, was a most useful tool.

Once civilians started filling orders, scandal was not far behind. In 1921, a shipment of Thompsons bound for the Irish Republican Army was discovered on a vessel soon to depart Hoboken for Dublin, which nearly caused a major diplomatic row between Washington and London.
⁶⁵
The company’s officers dodged indictment, though suspicions lingered that some of them knew more about the Irish deal than they let on. In 1923 the
Saturday Evening Post
questioned the merits of the gun’s existence, and worried aloud over the uses to which it might be put.

Except as an arm for trench warfare or semimilitary police forces having to deal with armed risings, it is difficult to see what honest need they can meet; yet we are faced with the fact that they exist and are on the open market for anyone who wants to buy them. Here, one would say, is an arm that is useless for sport, cumbrous for self-defense and could not serve any honest purpose, but which in the hands of political fanatics might provoke disaster.
⁶⁶

The Thompson was not particularly cumbersome for self-defense, and arguments still rage about the best definitions for legal sport and honest purposes in nations fortunate enough to have the stability and the forums to quarrel over such things. But the
Post
summarized well enough some of the risks that followed when small automatic arms designed for the most intimately violent of military tasks were made available to anyone. A few years later, the prediction proved at least partly right. In the mid-1920s, the weapon began to turn up in the hands of Chicago gangsters as they descended into a bootlegging turf war. Thompson’s solution for overcoming the tactical horrors of the Western Front reached firearms notoriety by 1929, when hit men in police uniforms ordered seven men against a garage wall in Chicago’s North Side and killed them all with Tommy Guns. Thompson was distressed. His public-relations troubles did not improve in the Depression. Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine Gun Kelly, Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker, and John Dillinger led a list of headline-generating outlaws who came to be associated with the Thompson and the menace of illicit firepower—good for bandits convincing bank tellers to open vaults and for shooting out of encirclement when trapped by the police. Not so good for everyone else.

The Thompson had a spectacular run, but its long-term effects as a public danger were less than what might appear. The Auto-Ordnance Corporation was one small company. Its production was not especially large. The gun entered outlaw lore aided by a rambunctious press. It managed to point to the future perils of assault-rifle proliferation. Yet it was an isolated case. This was because its breakout period occurred in a stable Western nation with functioning police, courts, and legislatures and a durable public compact. There was also the important matter of scale. Perhaps a few hundred Thompsons reached criminal hands in the United States. They caused minor havoc and national uproar, but the United States took steps for the public’s safety before popular ownership of submachine guns became widespread. It began to make law. In 1934, Congress passed the National Firearms Act, part of a series of state and federal laws that restrict the sale, ownership, or use of automatic arms in the United States. Ultimately, after a brief and noisy heyday, Thompson’s trench broom served to illustrate how stable nations with responsive governments can adjust to shifts in weapons technology. These were not the sort of nations where the AK-47 would leave its longest-lasting marks.

The AK-47 existed on a different order of magnitude, and was controlled by a different political culture. It was being assembled in enormous quantities by governments that, while they lasted, would show small concern for where the weapons went, or to whom. And after these governments fell, many of their automatic arms cascaded out of their possession. The arms flow began with a trickle. It began with József Tibor Fejes.

Fejes had carried his captured AK-47 with straight-backed rebel confidence. His cause seemed to have prevailed.

Soon after the cease-fire, the Kremlin adopted a conciliatory tone. It published in
Pravda
a declaration of respect, equality, and noninterference in the domestic affairs of its European satellites. By all appearances, the insurgents had won. They had forced Khrushchev to accept a new point of view about Soviet relations in the buffer zone. The revolution shifted from violent to political, at least on the surface. On November 1, 1955, Prime Minister Nagy delivered a radio address declaring Hungary’s departure from the Warsaw Pact, and proclaiming its new unaligned status. Hungary was leaving the Soviet orbit. For Hungarians the proclamation was a moment of national self-determination. For the Kremlin, the radio address challenged Soviet authority over the nations in its grip and threatened to unravel a carefully choreographed alliance. For Nagy, the address was a reactive step; he had received reports of new Soviet military activities. The conciliatory declaration in
Pravda
had been a trick. On October 31, Khrushchev had decided to invade Hungary again, and with a much larger force. For a few days, as it massed troops, the Kremlin maintained the ruse. The Soviet leadership negotiated with Nagy’s government over details for withdrawing Soviet forces. Almost everyone took the bait. On November 1 in Washington, Allen Dulles, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, addressed the National Security Council after digesting the news. He marveled at the insurgents’ success: