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The AR-15 assault rifle was engineered to create what one of its designers called “maximum wound effect.” Its tiny bullets – needle-nosed and weighing less than four grams – travel nearly three times the speed of sound. As the bullet strikes the body, the payload of kinetic energy rips open a cavity inside the flesh – essentially inert space – which collapses back on itself, destroying inelastic tissue, including nerves, blood vessels and vital organs. “It’s a perfect killing machine,” says Dr. Peter Rhee, a leading trauma surgeon and retired captain with 24 years of active-duty service in the Navy.

Rhee is most famous at home for saving the life of Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords after she was shot point-blank in the head with a handgun fired by a mass shooter in 2011. “A handgun [wound] is simply a stabbing with a bullet,” says Rhee. “It goes in like a nail.” With the high-velocity rounds of the AR-15, he adds, “its as if you shot somebody with a Coke can.”

Versions of the AR-15 have been the U.S. military’s standard-issue assault rifle in every war since Vietnam. But only in the past dozen years have semi-automatic models become a fixture of American life. Gun-makers – emboldened by Congress and cloaked in the Second Amendment – have elevated the AR-15 into an avatar of civilian manhood, independence and patriotism. In the process, this off-patent combat rifle has become an infinitely customizable weapon platform that now accounts for nearly one in five guns sold in America. The federal government has deemed them “semi-automatic assault rifles” with magazine capacities that serve “no sporting purpose.” But the National Rifle Association now simply calls the AR-15 “America’s Rifle.”

The mass-market boom of the AR has been horrific for the rest of us. Adam Lanza stormed Sandy Hook Elementary with a Bushmaster AR-15, laying down more than 150 rounds in less than five minutes and slaughtering 20 first-graders. James Holmes wielded a Smith & Wesson “Military & Police” (M&P) AR-15 fitted with a 100-round drum magazine in his siege of a movie theater that killed 12 and wounded 58. The San Bernardino, California, shooters carried a pair of AR-15s in their ISIS-inspired rampage that left 14 dead. Orlando shooter Omar Mateen deployed Sig Sauer’s concealable “next-generation AR” to murder 49 and injure dozens more at the Pulse nightclub – the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history.


“Time and time again we see it used to do what it was designed to do, which is to kill a lot of people in a short amount of time,” says Mark Barden, managing director of the Sandy Hook Promise, a group dedicated to protecting children from gun violence. Barden’s son Daniel – precocious, kindhearted, an ace at foosball – was one of the students murdered in Newtown, Connecticut. “It’s designed for combat,” he says. “It doesn’t have any practical application in civilized society.”


Gun-makers call the civilian AR-15 a “modern sporting rifle,” and insist that the restriction on automatic fire somehow neuters the weapon. The industry’s trade group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), maintains that “AR-15-style rifles are NOT ‘assault weapons,'” adding that the guns “look like military rifles?.?.?.?but function like other semi-automatic civilian sporting firearms.” This line of argument is hard to square with the Army’s own Field Manual, which instructs soldiers that semi-automatic fire is the “most important firing technique during fast-moving, modern combat,” adding, “It is surprising how devastatingly accurate rapid semi-automatic fire can be.”

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The assault rifle was born in World War II. The Nazi “Sturm-gewehr,” or “storm rifle,” introduced in 1944, was designed to marry the light weight and rapid fire of a submachine gun to the power and accuracy of a rifle. It came equipped with a 30-round detachable magazine, and proved a deadly asset to Nazis mowing down waves of Russian conscripts on the Eastern Front. The Soviets debuted their own combat rifle in 1947: the rugged, nearly indestructible Avtomat Kalashnikova, or AK-47 – faced by American GIs in virtually every military conflict since.

The “assault rifle” (a de-Hitlerized translation) evolved as warfare leaped out of the trenches into more open, guerrilla-style clashes. The United States was late to enter the light-arms race, but would eventually answer with the AR-15. The “AR” doesn’t stand for “assault rifle”; it stands for Armalite Rifle – named for the small California company that designed the weapon. A subsidiary of an airplane manufacturer, Armalite fashioned lightweight guns from aircraft-grade aluminum and modern plastics, aiming to bring the bulky wood-and-steel rifles lugged by soldiers in World War II and Korea into the jet age.

In 1957, the Army approached Armalite’s star gun designer, Eugene Stoner, with a tall order: Produce a six-pound, high-velocity rifle, firing in semi- and full-automatic modes, with firepower capable “of penetrating a steel helmet or standard body armor at 500 yards.” Stoner was a brilliant Marine Corps vet with no more than a high school degree from Long Beach Poly. He wore owlish glasses and had a taste for bow ties, giving him an unassuming look, the Orville Redenbacher of machine-gun design. His answer to the Army’s request was the AR-15, an exceptionally balanced gun with little recoil – meaning soldiers could more easily keep the rifle level, and on target, in a firefight.

By the Army’s own metrics, Stoner had built a superior war-fighting machine. A 1959 Pentagon report found that Stoner’s gun was “much more effective” both in “volume of fire and number of targets hit” than its competition, the M14 rifle, concluding that a “5- to 7-man squad armed with the AR-15 would be as effective as a 10-man squad armed with the M14.” The chief of the Air Force, Curtis LeMay, famous for directing the firebombing of Tokyo and inspiring the cigar-chomping General Ripper character in Dr. Strangelove, had fallen hard for the gun while shooting watermelons with an AR-15 at a Fourth of July celebration. After atomizing two of the party’s three melons, legend has it, LeMay placed the third in his sights before reconsidering: “Let’s eat the son of a bitch.”

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But it was the killing power of the AR-15 that turned the heads of Pentagon bureaucrats and congressional appropriators alike. The battlefield testimonials included in the ARPA report are horrific: One describes an Army Ranger killing a Viet Cong soldier at about 15 meters with a three-round burst. “One round in the head – took it completely off,” it reads. “Another in the right arm, took it completely off, too. One round hit him in the right side, causing a hole about five inches in diameter.” Each shot was a killer: “Any one of the three would have caused death.”

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