Defining the Tommy Gun

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Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology & the Ancient World
Brown University
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Violence is the key component in defining the Tommy Gun. As a thing the gun's violence is its essence and utility; to attempt to change that utility would be to change the thing itself, at least in the era that I describe it in (ie., not when it is later a gun collector’s antique.) What we must first consider, then, is why a human would desire that utility, and how they would interact with the thing. In the time period I'm looking at the central component to why and how the Tommy Gun was used is its capability for unqualified (in other words, without qualification or without limits) and continuous violence—this is an extremely important concept that I will return to often, but it is not what changes about the gun itself.

Things do start changing, however, when we try to define the specifics of the violence itself, and how it affects the Tommy Gun's surroundings. We can go about defining the gun in terms of violence in many ways in order to make the situations in which there are Tommy Guns more distinct. All of these factors involve violence or some product of violence that the Tommy Gun brings to history:

The nature of the violence: We know what violence the Tommy Gun is capable of. How much is actually produced? Why?
The direction of the violence: Who is shooting, and who is being shot?
The social perception of the violence: With regards to the direction and nature of the violence, how is the Tommy Gun perceived by society?
The social portrayal of the violence: How is the Tommy Gun shown and understood?

So, if we want to explore how the Tommy Gun changed, and if violence is the key component of the Tommy Gun, then we can keep with this motif and come up with a means of exp loration for each:

How nature changes: How and why the amount of violence actually produced changed as the Tommy Gun is put in different situations?
How direction changes: How and why does the gun change hands and targets?
How social perception changes: How the gun was perceived by different people in different points during its lifetime? Is the gun socially acceptable when one person uses it just as much as when another does?
How social portrayal changes: How the gun is shown and understood in a movie when compared to reality, and how does this affect us?

By considering all of these factors we'll see how the Tommy Gun changes: from the Trench Broom in Thompson's mind to the Tommy Gun in a gangster's hand to a submachine gun in World War II.

There is one thing I think is important to note about these factors before moving on--we should very clearly remember how important the human-thing relationship is in understanding any of these factors and how they changed. This consideration is important in the study of any thing, but perhaps especially when considering a thing like a Tommy Gun for a couple of reasons. For one, the factors would be mostly negligible without a human element--a direction of violence requires at least one human shooting the gun, and often another human or group of humans as the victim(s). Social perception and portrayal are obviously innately human, as well. Further, the gun would not exist the way it did without human interaction in specific ways: a person to invent the gun, to sell the gun, to use the gun, to reject the gun. This may seem like an obvious distinction, especially in light of our studies in this course, but like violence this relationship is going to be integral to how we come to understand the Tommy Gun in various historical contexts.