Blame John Wayne For the AR-15

During World War II he saw precisely as much action as Mother Teresa, but he gave his blessing to a rifle favored by mass killers and Trump's would-be assassin.

John Wayne, patron saint of the AR-15, in The Green Berets (1968, Warner Brothers).

I was and remain a great admirer of President Barack Obama, but he popularized an expression I can’t stand: “That’s not who we are.” We heard a lot of “that’s not who we are” after Thomas Matthew Crooks’s assassination attempt on Donald Trump that killed Corey Comperatore, a 50 year-old volunteer firefighter, and seriously injured two others. “The idea that there’s political violence or violence in America like this is just unheard of,” President Biden said immediately after the shooting. Well, no, it isn’t unheard of, unfortunately; just ask Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, or John F. Kennedy. Violence is an ugly part of America’s national character, and it’s abetted by the most lax gun regulation in the developed world. Which may explain why the best-selling rifle in America right now is not a hunting weapon (almost nobody hunts anymore) but the AR-15 (or “AR-15-style rifle,” as it’s usually called because of its many variations). The AR-15 was designed deliberately to kill indiscriminately, making it useless to hunters but a valuable weapon in war that should never have been marketed to civilians, and ought now to be banned, as it was for 10 years, albeit ineffectually, under President Bill Clinton in the 1994 crime bill.

The AR-15’s inventor was an autodidact engineering genius named Eugene Stoner, who was kind of a piece of work himself. In their excellent book American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15, Zusha Elision and Cameron McWhirter, who mostly lionize Stoner as a classic garage tinkerer, let drop that Stoner, like William S. Burroughs a few years later, fancied himself a latter-day William Tell and once used a bow and arrow to split an apple atop his wife’s head. Unlike Burroughs’s wife Joan (whose re-enactment involved a gun in place of the bow and arrow and a glass in place of the apple), Stoner’s wife Jean survived the event and, though she eventually divorced Stoner, never faulted him for that. Topic for future exploration: Exactly how many couples in the 1940s and 1950s practiced this questionable hobby, and how many wives survived it?

But let’s move on to John Wayne, the AR-15’s patron saint.

John Wayne was, of course, a movie star and a national symbol of masculinity and physical heroism. This is a bit rich considering that the Duke spent World War II in Hollywood (he got one deferment for being a family provider and then, when that expired, another on the grounds that his war movies were in “the support of national interest”). Those fabled sands of Iwo Jima? Wayne never laid eyes on them. Duke Wayne was what a subsequent generation of militaristic Republican dodgers of the Vietnam draft would be termed a chickenhawk, and in that capacity he loved wars, just so long as somebody else fought them, and he loved guns, even during his off hours.

One day in 1957 the Duke was in Costa Mesa getting his boat repaired when the shipyard owners told him that next door Stoner was building a new kind of military rifle that would correct for the observed poor marksmanship of most soldiers in battle by firing rapidly with little kickback and deploying small-caliber bullets whose instability tore up the enemy’s insides, turning even seemingly minor wounds fatal. Wayne wandered over, introduced himself (though of course he didn’t need to), and was invited to become the first person not employed by the AR-15’s manufacturer, ArmaLite, to fire one. He “shouldered the rifle,” Elision and McWhirter report, and “squeezed off a flurry of shots, spraying sand into the air.” Wayne dined out on that for years, and in 1968, after the Army had developed the AR-15 into a balky, botched rifle called the M-16, the Duke starred and co-directed a movie called The Green Berets that was as much a chip-on-the-shoulder defense of the M-16 as it was a chip-on-the-shoulder defense of the deeply unpopular Vietnam War. “Out here due process is a bullet!” Wayne says at one point in the film. Thomas Matthew Crooks would agree.

The AR-15 is a poor sniper’s weapon, which may help explain why (thank goodness) Trump was spared serious injury, and almost certainly explains why, with only a reported three rounds, Crooks managed to kill or seriously injure three people he hadn’t even aimed at. AR-15-style rifles have been used in four out of the five deadliest mass shootings. They should be banned again, this time more effectively than in 1994, when Clinton’s assault-weapons ban had too many loopholes. That’s the subject of my latest New Republic piece. Please read my piece here.

Sorry, Duke. You’ll still have that silly airport.