The Gun

The murder at Rakoczi Square, largely forgotten, was a signature moment in the evolution of automatic arms.

In the first decades of production of rapid-fire arms, several obstacles restricted who could own and use them. Armies, navies, state militias, territorial prisons, and the like could acquire them, but not the common man. More than the behavior of salesmen kept machine-gun circulation within the authorities’ hands. There were factors rooted in the weapons’ characteristics. Machine guns were expensive. They were technically complex. They were cumbersome. Many men had to be trained and pressed into service to operate and maintain them. Over time the guns would shrink. But machine guns, their associated equipment, and their ammunition were still heavy, and their operation was not intuitive. They remained almost exclusively instruments of the state.

The Soviet Union was changing all this. It had created the circumstances for the crossover arm, the weapon that would let automatic-rifle fire jump from institutional control. The AK-47 was small. No mule was required here. While not a precision rifle, it was accurate enough for most shots a man might be expected to take. Its ammunition was lightweight. Almost anyone of teenage years or beyond could carry a few hundred rounds. Its variant with a wooden stock could be hidden beneath a blanket. The variant with a folding stock could be slung inside a coat. It provided flexibility, allowing whoever carried it to fire a single shot with each trigger squeeze or to hold the trigger back and blast out bursts. The evolution of automatic arms had reached its most successful form. Gatling’s dream —firepower “for men of ordinary intelligence”—was now available for a man of ordinary intelligence, for the individual, whether he was in uniform or not, trained or not, legal or not, supervised or not. It could be handled by a child. And this highly functional distillation of firearms technology had become the output of planned economies, which could manufacture them in numbers beyond what anyone, outside the minds that organized socialist police states, would need or want. Industrial and political currents in the Soviet Union had lined up in ways that were converting the AK-47 into the world’s gun, the automatic rifle for everyman, a tool designed for military use that would elevate the danger to people not directly engaged in war.

There had been, in an instructive way, a precedent: the Thompson submachine gun, whose arrival to markets also predicted what was to come. Something about submachine guns caused alarm. They emerged in World War I and provided an excellent solution for many types of close combat, though they had all the expected limits related to short-range pistol ammunition. Worries over their use had been great enough that in 1919 the Treaty of Versailles banned the MP-18, Germany’s first submachine gun, from its postwar army.⁵⁷ History would have it that it was not armies with MP-18s that would give submachine guns their reputation. That role fell to civilians once they wrapped their hands around the Thompson gun.

The Thompson gun was less than thirty-four inches long, weighed ten and a half pounds, and fired fat .45- caliber pistol rounds. It was the brainchild of retired brigadier general John T. Thompson, a former Army ordnance officer and longtime advocate of automatic arms. In the 1890s, as a captain, Thompson had helped Second Lieutenant John H. Parker obtain Gatling guns for the Spanish-American War; his place in machine-gun history was secure before he founded a gun firm. Thompson was more like Richard Gatling than Mikhail Kalashnikov. Upon retiring from the army, he pursued his weapon’s development as a business, with a private design team, wealthy backing, and an eye on profits. No state committee was involved, though one root of his design tapped his prior government work. Thompson chambered the Tommy Gun, as it was nicknamed, for the pistol round that he had championed, based on his military-funded studies, as ideal for killing men.

How Thompson came to this decision was a bizarre journey through the world of small-arms development and military science. In October 1903, the secretary of war asked Thompson and an army surgeon to test the available pistol cartridges and determine which possessed “the stopping power and shock effect at short ranges necessary for a pistol for the military service.”⁵⁸ This was subjective work, and the officers were allowed to choose the methodology they thought best. Thompson’s partner on the project, Major Louis A. La Garde, had served as a surgeon in the Spanish-American War and been fascinated with questions of ballistics throughout his long career. Experiments suited him. La Garde had tested cartridges tipped with biological agents and established that the flash of high temperatures and pressure involved in blasting a bullet out of a barrel did not kill bacteria, as some men assumed. “We fired bullets from different kinds of hand weapons which were previously contaminated with anthrax germs into susceptible animals at varying distances up to 500 yards and the animals died of anthrax in the majority of cases,” he wrote in one of his many studies.⁵⁹

Some of La Garde’s work spoke of an eccentric’s whim; other projects had practical value. By firing into cadavers in the 1890s, he traced the ways that wounds from bullets changed as bullet technology changed. In that study, the ambition had been to examine the effects of rifle fire on what the army called “the human frame.” La Garde conducted his tests in 1893 at the Frankford Arsenal in Philadelphia. His methods were clinical to the point of being mechanical. He used tackle to position cadavers so bullets could strike the targeted areas of the body squarely. He set up barrels of sawdust to catch the bullets after they passed through, allowing their recovery and examination. The arsenal did not have the ranges required for shooting at long distance, and long-range shots would naturally introduce imprecision. So to reproduce the impact of bullets fired from far away, La Garde shot cadavers with cartridges with less powder from a distance of twenty-eight feet. Lighter charges propelled bullets at reduced speed, thereby simulating bullet strikes from farther out. La Garde was driven by curiosity. He wanted to divine the effects of bullets on various body parts. Shot by shot, he methodically shattered the cadavers in his care. He fired into one upper arm, then the other, one femur, then the other. He shot ankles, hips, and knees, and then shoulders and elbows. He shot skulls, sending bullets through heads at various angles and orientations. He shot feet. He shot a pelvis. He collected the bullets after each shot. Upon examining them and assessing their degree and type of deformation, La Garde tried to determine how they had caused the damage they had caused. Gunshot injuries were common, in peace and in war. Much about them was misunderstood. He was trying to peer forensically into the split-second mechanisms of wounding deep inside the human body. Throughout it all he kept notes and compared them with observations of the torn tissue and broken bones. Based on this work, La Garde concluded that the newer, faster-moving and smaller-caliber bullets caused less tissue destruction, and were therefore more humane, than the heavier lead bullets used in most war to that time. He predicted that wounds from the newer rounds would be such that surgeons would be required to amputate limbs less often than in wars past.⁶⁰ La Garde worked in the presecrecy era, before much of the military’s work and deliberations were routinely classified and withheld from public review. He was a different breed. He published accounts of his work openly, and when it attracted controversy he defended his methods with vigor. After a few years, when the gunshot injuries of the Spanish-American War had been treated and examined, conclusions from this study were proven right.

The pistol tests were another matter. It was one thing to document how different bullets smash different bones. It was altogether another to measure concepts as ill-defined as “stopping power” and “shock effect.” But this was the order, and Thompson and La Garde tried. The officers agreed to an imaginative set of trials. The field of firearms ballistics, like many applied sciences, is populated by scrupulous practitioners and passionate quacks. At times it can be difficult to tell the types apart. This was to be the case here. La Garde’s rigor departed him entirely.

First the pair decided they needed cadavers and made the necessary arrangements at the Philadelphia Polyclinic Hospital and New York University’s medical school. On the grounds of these institutions, they suspended cadavers by their heads so that their feet hung clear of the floor. Barrels of sawdust provided a backstop. Thompson and La Garde produced their tools: a collection of common pistols of the time[17] and assorted cartridges, some with full-metal jackets, others with lead points, and one with a cupped front end that its salesmen dubbed “the Man-stopper.” The shooting began. Eventually the officers would examine each wound, recording effects on flesh, organs, and bones. First they did something novel. In the instant each bullet smacked each cadaver, they estimated the degree of oscillation—in a word, the swing—of the struck limbs. “The force of impact was noticed to throw the limb back in the direction of the flight of the bullet, and in regaining its normally suspended position, the member was apt to sway back forth several times,”⁶¹ the officers wrote to the War Department. Their observations led to a numerical rating that no serious scientist would regard as valid—a number between 1 and 100, assigned by assessing the movement with the naked eye. (The .45 round was rated an 80 or an 85, depending on the type of bullet fired.)

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