Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [62]
Prohibition greatly heightened America’s official distaste for guns. Gangsters rubbed each other out on street corners, in front of restaurants, from armored limousines. By the fall of 1925, as mobs in Chicago fought each other for control, the homicide rate in Cook County, Illinois, rose to more than one murder per day, a decidedly modern rate of mutual disposal. For as long as the killing remained in the family, the public was enthralled. Chicago’s gangsters were glamorous celebrities thumbing their noses at a censorious government intent on denying the public its pleasures.
The history of gun violence, however, teaches two important maxims, whose predictive power was demonstrated yet again during the Prohibition wars.
First, violence will always spread beyond boundaries initially found by the public at large to be “acceptable.” That is, gang warfare—or, as today, inner-city feuds between drug dealers—will inevitably expand beyond those boundaries to include bystanders.
Second, guns will always migrate from the hands of their originally intended users to those who value their use in crime. Just as the Ingram, designed for military use, became instead the drug-gang weapon of choice and a ghetto icon, so too the Thompson submachine gun, designed to be a “trench broom” for use in World War I, became instead the favored tool of gangsters throughout the country and an icon of the 1920s. In 1969, long before S.W. Daniel began peddling its Cobray as “the gun that made the eighties roar,” William J. Helmer titled his biography of the Thompson gun The Gun That Made the Twenties Roar. The gangsters’ use of the gun was largely responsible for the passage of the nation’s first-ever federal gun controls in 1934, and thus for expanding the Treasury Department’s law-enforcement responsibilities to include firearms.
The Thompson submachine gun, invented by Gen. John T. Thompson, was built in New York by Auto-Ordnance Corp., founded by Thompson in 1916 with the express purpose of putting the design into production. Like the Ingram, the Thompson submachine gun was initially a failure. The Army did not yet appreciate its value. The gun was too big to be a sidearm, too small for a field rifle, or so went the conventional wisdom of the time. General Thompson, like Gordon Ingram, sought to expand the market for the gun by offering it to consumers, an effort that resulted in some unusual advertising. In a 1922 magazine ad, Auto-Ordnance merged frontier myth with modern firepower, depicting a cowboy in furry chaps and kerchief earnestly firing his tommy gun from the front porch of his ranch house at a group of seven bandits. The text below called the gun “the ideal weapon for the protection of large estates, ranches, plantations, etc.” An article in Army & Navy Journal reported the gun “can be kept in the home as a protection against burglars.”
Critics, however, described the gun in terms strikingly similar to those used by Col. Leonard Supenski in his critique of S.W. Daniel’s Cobray pistol. In 1923, a British firearms expert described the tommy gun as “an arm that is useless for sport, cumbrous for self-defense, and could not serve any honest purpose, but which in the hands of political fanatics might provoke disaster.”
The gun did not initially win many military contracts, but it captured the imagination of the Chicago gangs. The first recorded use of a tommy gun in crime occurred in Chicago on September 25, 1925, when Frank McErlane, a Chicago bootlegger, set out to assassinate a competitor named