Introduction: Common Violence

"The road gets dimmer and dimmer,

Sometimes you can hardly see,

Still it's fight, man to man,

And do all you can,

For they know they can never be free.

If they try to act like citizens,

And rent them a nice little flat,

About the third night

They are invited to fight

By a 'sub-gun' rat-tat-tat.

--Bonnie Parker, "The Story of Bonnie and Clyde"

The Tommy Gun, when considered as “just a thing”, is ruthless in its simplicity. Target. Trigger. Violence. Death. Even the very concept that John T. Thompson thought up for a “trench broom” seemed to be designed to simplify something as complex and horrifying as mass violence: It was an automatic gun model which allowed for new bullets to be loaded as soon as the previous one was shot. It had firing power and magazine size comparable to the already extremely deadly machine gun—a “submachine gun.” And, perhaps most dangerously of all, it was portable: small enough to fit under a trench coat or in a violin case. All the power of a machine gun in a lone man’s hands. On top of that, he could move and shoot at the same time. And it was well designed and thus extremely reliable, even after much usage. All of these factors simplified the gun to the point where in was, in essence, raw violence: The Tommy Gun was stripped of possible mechanical limitations and, as a result, capable of continuous ad massive amounts of violence.

And in reality, the Tommy Gun was not only capable of this violence. It produced the violence endlessly, which complexified the gun beyond its mere mechanical structure. For one, the Tommy Gun was ridiculously deadly: It killed millions of people over its twenty-three year history. It was widespread in use: Soldiers, gangsters, citizens, political rebels, smugglers, the police—all of them used the gun in some capacity, and similarly all died from it in some amount. And it was used for an extended period of time: the same model that was produced in 1921 was still used until well into World War II in 1944, including some of the guns actually produced in 1921. For all its theoretical simplicity, the Tommy Gun’s reality seems much more complex.

Thinking about this contrast between the simplicities and complexities of the Tommy Gun leads to more than a few questions. For one, and perhaps most strikingly, how could such a violent and deadly murderer of a thing be simplified so much? Not merely in its utility, but in its history and how society reacted and still reacts to it: Somehow we are able to casually refer to the gun in common conversation, despite all the death and violence that it has caused. We can see it murder dozens of people in a film and think nothing is out of the ordinary. And perhaps the most scary thing is that, as soon as the gun failed commercially in sales to the police and the military, the gun was sold to private citizens, cheaply bought and easily obtainable, from where it found its way into the hands of criminal gangsters more than it did any other group in the twenties and thirties. The Tommy Gun’s capacity for terrible violence was increased because of its history.

Another curiosity comes to mind as well—namely, how could the same Tommy Gun produced to be used in World War I be used by a police man, a citizen, a gangster, a criminal, and then (finally!) a soldier in World War II, and still be the same gun model and make? How could the gun possibly not change in over twenty years of history? Looking at these two problems, it becomes clear that perhaps we’re missing something. Something that we can explore and begin to understand when we consider the gun not as “just a thing” that grows in efficiency and age, but also evolves as part of a human-thing relationship and in ways more complex than its basic function. To understand the Tommy Gun we must complexify it in order to understand how something so deadly can be seen as so simple. And in order to explore this way, we must look past its consistencies over time and see how the Tommy Gun truly changed, what factors caused these changes, and how it finally changed us in the process.

These are the issues I want to get to during the course of this project. Before we get into the discussion, however, here's how I'll be tackling the project: First, we'll quickly define some key factors of the Tommy Gun and its violence that we’ll be discussing throughout the project.

Then, I'll briefly outline the history of the gun so we can have a context to fit those factors in. Sadly this account will be minimal by design--there's a lot of really interesting history to the gun and to the people who took part in its history-- but for the sake of fitting everything in and because it isn't all fully pertinent to what we'll be later discussing, I'm going to have to cut it down a bit, and it won’t be in full text format. (When you see the timeline you’ll wonder how in the world it could get any longer. There’s a lot of history.) I also heartily recommend William Helmer's The Gun That Made The Twenties Roar, a book which is immensely interesting and was incredibly helpful in putting together this project. If you found this project interesting and want to read a full history of the Tommy Gun then that book is, in my opinion, easily the best means available.

Finally, I'll split off into a few discussions involving different parts of both the Tommy Gun's history and its inherent and defining factors. There’s three major discussions, and then a few smaller mini-discussions These will focus on a few topics, ranging from how and why different groups adopted the Tommy Gun to various extents, to how the Tommy Gun in the media and in the popular image affects our perception of violence. First, though, let's get a bit philosophical and figure out the defining characteristics of the Tommy Gun.

Posted at Dec 22/2008 08:27AM:
chris witmore: Hi Will. References should be provided for substantive information such as "the Tommy Gun killed millions." How does one come by these statistics?