The shooting at the Route 91 concert in Las Vegas was the deadliest mass shooting carried out by one person in American history. As Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson, the authors of “American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15,” a new history of the rifle, observe, more Americans were killed that night than in any single battle in twenty years of war in Afghanistan. In the mass shootings in Las Vegas and Uvalde; in the mass shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, ten days before Uvalde; and in the mass shooting less than two months after, at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois, the perpetrators used the same kind of gun, the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. (In Vegas, to be more precise, Paddock had fourteen AR-15s, which he loaded and lined up in a row in his hotel room, and he modified the guns with bump stocks to make them mimic automatic fire.) There are many makes and models of AR-15s, and in McWhirter and Elinson’s usage the term refers to a style of rifle rather than the original ArmaLite brand from which it gets its name. 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. Its sale in the United States is minimally restricted. Stephen Paddock bought thirty-one of them in a year.
McWhirter and Elinson are business reporters, and “American Gun” is, in part, a book about how an industry strategized to market a gun to a type of person—usually a man—whom it could convince that AR-15s were an integral part of his identity. To do this, mainstream gunmakers began courting a very particular demographic. The AR-15 looked tough, but it was light and easy to shoot. Marketers played on what one executive called the “wannabe factor” of weekend warriors whom prior generations had mocked as “couch commandos.” A survey of AR-15 owners in 2010 found that ninety-nine per cent of them were male, seventy-three per cent were married, and fifty-six per cent had no military or law-enforcement background. “In many ways,” the authors write, “the AR-15 was the ideal firearm for the modern American man: it looked macho, but he didn’t have to put much effort into shooting it.” “American Gun” examines the phenomenon of the mass shooter armed with a semi-automatic rifle, and our continued inability to generate the political will to prevent such shootings from happening, as an ordinary business story: the AR-15 is a consumer product to which advertisers successfully attached an identity—one that has translated to a politics so intractable that in some circles it seems to have more power than the fear of death.