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