This is Later with Lee Matthews the Lee Matthews Podcast More what You Hear Weekday
Afternoon's on the Drive. Zusha Ellenson is a national reporter writing about guns and
violence for The Wall Street Journal based in California's also written for the Center for
Investigative Reporting and the New York Times Bay Area Section. He along with his
co writer Cameron mcwherder, have written a book called American Gun The History of
the AR fifteen. And I welcome you, Zusha Ellenson. Thank you so
much for having me Lee. What we all know that the AR fifteen originated
by a group of Satanic hooded monks bowing before a candlelit pentagram, don't we
the first time we've gotten that intro? Well, if you would listened to
some of the some of the so called experts, that seems to be what
the AR fifteen was designed to do. Yeah, for certain, And this
is why we wrote the book. Right this gun stands at the center of
our very bitter firearms debate. And as you said, two millions, it
represents, you know, what's gone wrong with American gun culture. They hate
it. And to millions more, as you well know, it represents freedom.
It represents a gun that is beloved in our country. It is the
most popular rifle in America. There's more than twenty million in civilian hands.
It's also a gun that's been used in some mass shootings. And so,
you know, looking at this gun at the heart of our firearms debate,
we want to know how did we get here? What is the true story
of the AR fifteen, And that is what we set out to try to
find, and they do an American gun, the history of the AR fifteen.
Everybody knows that AR stands for assault rifle. Let's start there, Lee,
that's a great myth we could bust, right. Yeah, So often
control activists will say AR stands for assault rifle. Is not true. But
I'll say this too. Sometimes gun guys they'll say, well, we think
it stands for ArmaLite Rifle, you know the name of the little company that
came up with this gun. But that's also not quite right. It stands
for ArmaLite Research. And fifteen is the fifteenth creation of this tiny little startup.
And I can tell you a little more about them next. Well,
let's start with the inventor, Eugene Stoner. Was he a vet? Did
he have a bad experience with one of the previous military designs and say to
himself, I'm going to fix this. So Stoner is a fascinating character.
He's a marine vet. He's a very gentle guy. He never swears.
When he gets upset, he says, boy, that frosts me. And
he was just fascinated with the way that guns worked. As a child,
he made a little pipe bomb that he exploded in the Coachella Valley. He
made a little cannon that he pointed at his neighbor's house and his dad had
to intervene before he opened fire. So he's just fascinated with guns. And
he he came up in his garage with the ideas that would become the AR
fifteen. So was it inspired by what he had been through with his military
training for because I get the idea that there's always been this competition between the
AR and the Russian made AK forty seven. That's right at the time that
Stoner was coming up with these ideas in his garage. You know, he
had no formal training in firearms design. He was not indoctrinated in the dogmas
of the day, so he was free to think outside the box and at
the time, the military was very afraid of the AK forty seven. There's
lightweight mid range rifle used by Soviet gorillas around the world, and they needed
something to counteract that, and he came up with that, a lightweight gun
that could fire a lot of lead. Now, he had used the M
one grams very heavy wooden steel rifle in World War Two, so he knew
what needed to be improved. And the first thing he did was get rid
of that wood it's too heavy. He used aluminum, and he you know,
created an ingenious gas system that also lightened it. I mean, his
first prototypes of the air fifteen weight a little more than five pounds. If
you can imagine that, that's almost half the weight of the M one Garand
there was also the small car being that was carried in World War Two by
many officers, I know, the M one car being, but it only
had a thirty caliber bullet with not a lot of punch, right right,
So yeah, so it's interesting about the bullet. Right. So, in
order to create a gun that was lightweight and troops could have a lot of
ammo, they came up with this tiny little bullet, the two two three
or the five five six, and Stoner really utilized that. Right. It
goes really fast, but it's really small and the results can be devastating.
Did he have anything to do with the design of the bullet that kind of
yaws at a certain point when it leaves the barrel. Yeah, exactly,
that's the bullet we're talking about, the two two three. He helped design
it. What he did is he took a tiny little bullet and he put
a lot of powder behind it, so really fast, so when it goes
straight nose first through the air, and then when it hits the human body
or something else, it goes unstable very quickly. And Stoner understood this because
the military had done trials on pigs and goats, and he put that to
use very effectively in his AR fifteen. The other thing about the AR fifteen
is, so you mentioned the speed that's coming out of that barrel, but
there is the opposite reaction where the gas expansion is also working the action to
reload, and that must have been something he also had to take into consideration,
because you want a reliable weapon as well. Yeah. Absolutely, so
Stoner came up with his ingenious gasestem. I'll tell you something about him He
loved efficiency, and I think a story that best exemplifies that is he only
wore clip on bow ties, right. And why is this because he thought
a regular tie would get caught in the machinery. He was a machinist,
and he thought it took too long to put a normal bow tie on.
So he wanted efficiency and everything he did, including his bow ties, And
so that was the same way he approached guns. Right. He wanted the
energy used from each shot to be used as efficiently as possible to expel the
spent casing and load the next round. And that that's what his gas system
did, and that's what he got the patent for Zusha Ellenson is with US
American gun The history of the AAR fifteen when it came out, how initially
was it received right, so the military. It took a long winding path
for the military to adopt it because there's an entrenched bureaucracy that didn't like this
little outsider from Hollywood, California trying to eat their cake and all that sort
of stuff. But eventually the military adopts it and cult Venerable Gun Company starts
making this gun for the military, and at the same time they start trying
to sell it on the civilian market as the cult sport in the early sixties,
but it doesn't really catch on, and in fact, for the first
thirty years of existence on the civilian market, that's the semi automatic version you're
listeners. No, it sold only a couple thousand a year, and the
reason was that hunters were not really attracted to it at first. They didn't
like it was made out of you know, fiberglass, plastic, aluminium.
It didn't look like the woodstock hunting rifles that they knew and were familiar with,
and they really didn't They didn't like the round that it fired. They
thought it was too small for large game, and eventually it would catch on.
Obviously, you know, we went from having about four hundred thousand of
these AR type rifles in the country in nineteen ninety four to today where there's
over twenty million, and a big part of our book is tracing how this
gun went from being kind of an outcast in the gun world to the most
popular rifle. I will tell you when I got my first model, when
the lovely wife was out at the range with me, the first thing she
fell in love with was Wow. It makes a lot of noise, but
there's not a lot of kick. Oh, you hit right upon. One
of the most important parts about this gun. Anyone who's fired in the air
fifteen knows how easy it is to shoot and keep on target. And that's
something Stoner designed it for. So at the time, military leaders were worried
that guys in the heat of battle were not hitting their targets, and Stoner
just designed this gun that was extremely easy to keep on target. And the
civilian version two is extremely easy to shoot, and that's one of the big
appeals. Of course, some of the other appeals are that you can tinker
with it. You can change out all the parts. You know, they
call them legos for adults or barbies for men. And it's also become a
symbol of the Second Amendment, as you know, you know, after every
mass shooting, Democrats they come out and they call for banning the AAR fifteen,
and so people buy them to show that they support the Second Amendment.
Well, a lot of my listeners too are fans of not only tinkering with
the design of their own, but also building their own because it makes it
it's very easy to accessorize. Yeah, absolutely, there is literally no gun
that could be accessorized and rebuilt and parts such as this, and that also
goes back to the way that Stoner built it. He wanted it to be
easy to manufacture. So as the gun becomes more populars in the nineties and
the two thousands, gun makers start selling all these little parts that you can
you know, you can swap out anything, basically the pistol, grip,
the barrel. You know, if you if you shot an R platform rifle,
you can switch out the type of caliber, anything you wanted. It's
very versatile American gun. The History of the AR fifteen and one of the
authors is Zusha Ellenson along with Cameron McWhirter. I'm we have to go,
We have to go right now, but I could talk to you all day
about this, and I thank you for bringing the book to us. Oh
Lee, You're so knowledgeable about the subject. It's a real pleasure to be
on your show. Thanks for listening to Later with Lee Matthews, the Lee
Matthews Podcast, and remember to listen to The Drive Live weekday afternoons from five
to seven and iHeartMedia Presentation