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This is Later with Lee Matthews the
Lee Matthews Podcast More what You Hear Weekday

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Afternoon's on the Drive. Zusha Ellenson
is a national reporter writing about guns and

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violence for The Wall Street Journal based
in California's also written for the Center for

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Investigative Reporting and the New York Times
Bay Area Section. He along with his

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co writer Cameron mcwherder, have written
a book called American Gun The History of

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the AR fifteen. And I welcome
you, Zusha Ellenson. Thank you so

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much for having me Lee. What
we all know that the AR fifteen originated

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by a group of Satanic hooded monks
bowing before a candlelit pentagram, don't we

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the first time we've gotten that intro? Well, if you would listened to

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some of the some of the so
called experts, that seems to be what

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the AR fifteen was designed to do. Yeah, for certain, And this

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is why we wrote the book.
Right this gun stands at the center of

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our very bitter firearms debate. And
as you said, two millions, it

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represents, you know, what's gone
wrong with American gun culture. They hate

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it. And to millions more,
as you well know, it represents freedom.

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It represents a gun that is beloved
in our country. It is the

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most popular rifle in America. There's
more than twenty million in civilian hands.

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It's also a gun that's been used
in some mass shootings. And so,

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you know, looking at this gun
at the heart of our firearms debate,

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we want to know how did we
get here? What is the true story

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of the AR fifteen, And that
is what we set out to try to

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find, and they do an American
gun, the history of the AR fifteen.

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Everybody knows that AR stands for assault
rifle. Let's start there, Lee,

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that's a great myth we could bust, right. Yeah, So often

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control activists will say AR stands for
assault rifle. Is not true. But

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I'll say this too. Sometimes gun
guys they'll say, well, we think

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it stands for ArmaLite Rifle, you
know the name of the little company that

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came up with this gun. But
that's also not quite right. It stands

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for ArmaLite Research. And fifteen is
the fifteenth creation of this tiny little startup.

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And I can tell you a little
more about them next. Well,

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let's start with the inventor, Eugene
Stoner. Was he a vet? Did

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he have a bad experience with one
of the previous military designs and say to

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himself, I'm going to fix this. So Stoner is a fascinating character.

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He's a marine vet. He's a
very gentle guy. He never swears.

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When he gets upset, he says, boy, that frosts me. And

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he was just fascinated with the way
that guns worked. As a child,

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he made a little pipe bomb that
he exploded in the Coachella Valley. He

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made a little cannon that he pointed
at his neighbor's house and his dad had

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to intervene before he opened fire.
So he's just fascinated with guns. And

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he he came up in his garage
with the ideas that would become the AR

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fifteen. So was it inspired by
what he had been through with his military

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training for because I get the idea
that there's always been this competition between the

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AR and the Russian made AK forty
seven. That's right at the time that

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Stoner was coming up with these ideas
in his garage. You know, he

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had no formal training in firearms design. He was not indoctrinated in the dogmas

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of the day, so he was
free to think outside the box and at

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the time, the military was very
afraid of the AK forty seven. There's

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lightweight mid range rifle used by Soviet
gorillas around the world, and they needed

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something to counteract that, and he
came up with that, a lightweight gun

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that could fire a lot of lead. Now, he had used the M

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one grams very heavy wooden steel rifle
in World War Two, so he knew

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what needed to be improved. And
the first thing he did was get rid

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of that wood it's too heavy.
He used aluminum, and he you know,

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created an ingenious gas system that also
lightened it. I mean, his

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first prototypes of the air fifteen weight
a little more than five pounds. If

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you can imagine that, that's almost
half the weight of the M one Garand

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there was also the small car being
that was carried in World War Two by

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many officers, I know, the
M one car being, but it only

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had a thirty caliber bullet with not
a lot of punch, right right,

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So yeah, so it's interesting about
the bullet. Right. So, in

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order to create a gun that was
lightweight and troops could have a lot of

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ammo, they came up with this
tiny little bullet, the two two three

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or the five five six, and
Stoner really utilized that. Right. It

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goes really fast, but it's really
small and the results can be devastating.

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Did he have anything to do with
the design of the bullet that kind of

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yaws at a certain point when it
leaves the barrel. Yeah, exactly,

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that's the bullet we're talking about,
the two two three. He helped design

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it. What he did is he
took a tiny little bullet and he put

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a lot of powder behind it,
so really fast, so when it goes

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straight nose first through the air,
and then when it hits the human body

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or something else, it goes unstable
very quickly. And Stoner understood this because

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the military had done trials on pigs
and goats, and he put that to

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use very effectively in his AR fifteen. The other thing about the AR fifteen

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is, so you mentioned the speed
that's coming out of that barrel, but

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there is the opposite reaction where the
gas expansion is also working the action to

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reload, and that must have been
something he also had to take into consideration,

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because you want a reliable weapon as
well. Yeah. Absolutely, so

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Stoner came up with his ingenious gasestem. I'll tell you something about him He

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loved efficiency, and I think a
story that best exemplifies that is he only

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wore clip on bow ties, right. And why is this because he thought

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a regular tie would get caught in
the machinery. He was a machinist,

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and he thought it took too long
to put a normal bow tie on.

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So he wanted efficiency and everything he
did, including his bow ties, And

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so that was the same way he
approached guns. Right. He wanted the

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energy used from each shot to be
used as efficiently as possible to expel the

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spent casing and load the next round. And that that's what his gas system

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did, and that's what he got
the patent for Zusha Ellenson is with US

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American gun The history of the AAR
fifteen when it came out, how initially

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was it received right, so the
military. It took a long winding path

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for the military to adopt it because
there's an entrenched bureaucracy that didn't like this

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little outsider from Hollywood, California trying
to eat their cake and all that sort

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of stuff. But eventually the military
adopts it and cult Venerable Gun Company starts

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making this gun for the military,
and at the same time they start trying

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to sell it on the civilian market
as the cult sport in the early sixties,

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but it doesn't really catch on,
and in fact, for the first

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thirty years of existence on the civilian
market, that's the semi automatic version you're

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listeners. No, it sold only
a couple thousand a year, and the

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reason was that hunters were not really
attracted to it at first. They didn't

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like it was made out of you
know, fiberglass, plastic, aluminium.

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It didn't look like the woodstock hunting
rifles that they knew and were familiar with,

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and they really didn't They didn't like
the round that it fired. They

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thought it was too small for large
game, and eventually it would catch on.

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Obviously, you know, we went
from having about four hundred thousand of

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these AR type rifles in the country
in nineteen ninety four to today where there's

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over twenty million, and a big
part of our book is tracing how this

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gun went from being kind of an
outcast in the gun world to the most

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popular rifle. I will tell you
when I got my first model, when

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the lovely wife was out at the
range with me, the first thing she

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fell in love with was Wow.
It makes a lot of noise, but

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there's not a lot of kick.
Oh, you hit right upon. One

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of the most important parts about this
gun. Anyone who's fired in the air

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fifteen knows how easy it is to
shoot and keep on target. And that's

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something Stoner designed it for. So
at the time, military leaders were worried

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that guys in the heat of battle
were not hitting their targets, and Stoner

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just designed this gun that was extremely
easy to keep on target. And the

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civilian version two is extremely easy to
shoot, and that's one of the big

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appeals. Of course, some of
the other appeals are that you can tinker

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with it. You can change out
all the parts. You know, they

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call them legos for adults or barbies
for men. And it's also become a

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symbol of the Second Amendment, as
you know, you know, after every

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mass shooting, Democrats they come out
and they call for banning the AAR fifteen,

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and so people buy them to show
that they support the Second Amendment.

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Well, a lot of my listeners
too are fans of not only tinkering with

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the design of their own, but
also building their own because it makes it

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it's very easy to accessorize. Yeah, absolutely, there is literally no gun

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that could be accessorized and rebuilt and
parts such as this, and that also

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goes back to the way that Stoner
built it. He wanted it to be

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easy to manufacture. So as the
gun becomes more populars in the nineties and

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the two thousands, gun makers start
selling all these little parts that you can

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you know, you can swap out
anything, basically the pistol, grip,

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the barrel. You know, if
you if you shot an R platform rifle,

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you can switch out the type of
caliber, anything you wanted. It's

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very versatile American gun. The History
of the AR fifteen and one of the

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authors is Zusha Ellenson along with Cameron
McWhirter. I'm we have to go,

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We have to go right now,
but I could talk to you all day

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about this, and I thank you
for bringing the book to us. Oh

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Lee, You're so knowledgeable about the
subject. It's a real pleasure to be

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on your show. Thanks for listening
to Later with Lee Matthews, the Lee

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Matthews Podcast, and remember to listen
to The Drive Live weekday afternoons from five

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to seven and iHeartMedia Presentation