The AR-15 wasn’t supposed to be a best-seller. It's the result of a dramatic shift in American gun culture fueled by the firearms industry and its allies.
Colt acquired the AR-15 patent and trademark from Armalite in 1959. The patent expired, leaving many companies to produce their own weapons, commonly called AR-style rifles. While Colt still holds the trademark, “AR-15” has become a ubiquitous term for a popular style of gas-operated, magazine-fed semiautomatic rifles. For this reason, we refer to the rifle broadly as the AR-15 in this series.The rugged, powerful weapon was originally designed as a soldiers’ rifle in the late 1950s.
Today, the AR-15 is the best-selling rifle in the United States, industry figures indicate. About 1 in 20 U.S. adults — or roughly 16 million people — own at least one AR-15, according to polling data from The Washington Post and Ipsos. It also has become a stark symbol of the nation’s gun violence epidemic. Ten of the 17 deadliest U.S. mass shootings since 2012 have involved AR-15s.Sources: The Associated Press, USA Today, Northeastern University Mass Killing Database
The shift began after the 2004 expiration of a federal assault weapons ban that had blocked the sales of many semiautomatic rifles. More than 13.7 million of those have been manufactured by U.S. gunmakers just since the Newtown massacre in late 2012, with those sales generating roughly $11 billion in revenue, according to a Post analysis of industry estimates through 2020, the most recently available data. In other words, at least two-thirds of these guns have been made in just the past decade.
“The firearms industry, in the aggregate, is very small,” Falber told The Post. “And look at the havoc it wreaks.”Early versions of the AR-15 were sent to Vietnam, which proved to be a testing ground for the new rifles. The weapon later became standard issue and designated the M16. That began to change in 2005.
The U.S. military started using the rifle during the Vietnam War, with Colt — which had acquired the gun’s patent rights from Armalite — winning the contract to produce the M16. The new gun was met by complaints that it was prone to jamming, even mid-firefight, until Colt revamped the design. Despite its mixed success, the new gun won over military leaders.
Smith & Wesson’s first AR-15 was unveiled to the public in February 2006 at the industry’s marquee annual convention,While the name indicated the gun was for professionals — “M” for military and “P” for police — the company always had its eyes on the consumer market, according to corporate filings and statements from executives.
New Hampshire-based Sig Arms, later renamed Sig Sauer, said in late 2006 that it planned to make an AR-15 — soon after the firm had been “about two seconds away from imploding,” chief executive Ron Cohen later “Nobody thought AR-15s were a good idea just a couple years ago,” Busse said. “And then you couldn’t criticize them without getting fired.”Barack Obama at an election night gathering in Chicago in 2008. Sales of AR-15s soared in the run-up to his election.
Jeff Buchanan, then-chief financial officer at Smith & Wesson, recalled several years later at a business conference that Obama spurred sales “because he was a pronounced liberal” and “people buy because they are afraid of future legislation.” Michael Fifer, the gunmaker’s CEO at the time, described to financial analysts in 2009 how Ruger brought in roughly $200 from each handgun — but each AR-15-style rifle brought in $1,000.Ruger declined to comment through its general counsel.“There is no better illustration for this change than the Evil Black Rifle itself which has just joined the Ruger product offering,” Steve Johnson wrote on his popular Firearm Blog, using a sarcastic name popular with gun owners for AR-15s.
Video games introduced a new generation to the AR-15 through popular first-person shooter games such as “Call of Duty.” Players got to simulate using military weapons with down-to-the-bolt realism.In 2010, representatives of two gun manufacturers and a video game maker converged at an outdoor shooting range north of Las Vegas.
First-person shooter games such as "Call of Duty" introduced a new generation to the AR-15. In the Philadelphia suburbs, Bill Shanley saw his first AR-15 up close when one of his adult sons came home with one in 2010. Shanley was in his mid-50s and had been raised around guns. He’d taught his own children how to shoot, too. But he’d never given much thought to the AR-15.Father and son took the AR-15 to a gun range.
One showed Falber’s vision for selling guns. It featured a silver revolver and a black pistol, side by side against the light backdrop of a range target, under the block type “FINE-TUNED MACHINES.” The deadliest mass killing at a K-12 school in U.S. history focused attention like never before on the destructive power of the AR-15.
“We all kind of want to leave that era behind us,” he said. “Every time there was a mass shooting we got blamed.” “People who never planned to buy one went out and got one,” said Grover Norquist, an anti-tax activist who was on the NRA board. “It was an f-you to the left.” “We’re not going to go into business with people saying you can’t have this gun or that gun,” Tommy Millner, CEO of the outdoor retailing giant Cabela’s at the time, recalled saying when he pulled the company’s sponsorship.
When a new assault weapons ban finally came to a vote in the Democratic-led Senate soon after Newtown, it didn’t come close to passing — earning just 40 votes. “It wasn’t that I was carrying a rifle,” recalled Grisham, a former member of the Proud Boys, a far-right group with a history of violence. “It was the fact I was carryingGrisham went on to create Open Carry Texas, a group advocating for carrying weapons in public. Open-carry demonstrations had been cropping up in conservative states since the 2008 election, typically with holstered pistols, but Grisham’s group pushed a new tactic.
The AR-15 seemed to be everywhere. Its cultural profile was rising, not unlike the way the Soviet-made Kalashnikov became a symbol of insurgency and freedom for many around the world. By 2018, he and his wife, Patricia, had settled near Parkland, Fla., an affluent suburb outside Fort Lauderdale. Gun violence rarely intruded, except when mass shootings made the news. Oliver recalled talking with his teenage son, Joaquin, about the 2016 shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, where a gunman with a Sig Sauer MCX semiautomatic rifle killed 49 people.
“The gun folks will go nuts against you, and it’s going to be incredibly bad for business, and it’s going to get you a lot of bad press,” Powell recalled NRA officials telling Bass Pro Shops founder Johnny Morris. In other cases, Powell warned there would be NRA member boycotts.A representative for Bass Pro Shops said Morris had no “recollection” of the conversation.
As one former official put it in describing the real estate developer turned politician, “His reflexes were a New York liberal on guns. He doesn’t have knee-jerk conservative reflexes.” Murphy, the Democratic senator from Connecticut and a participant in a White House meeting on a potential ban, described Trump’s lack of action as a missed opportunity for an unusually powerful Republican leader. “I said this to Trump in that meeting: I think the Republican Party would have followed him wherever he went, and he ultimately decided to stand with the NRA,” Murphy said.
In 2020, a year of pandemic lockdowns, racial justice protests and a bitterly fought presidential campaign, U.S. gunmakers produced about 2.5 million AR-15s, according to the NSSF. That added up to roughly 1 in 4 of all guns that ATF said were manufactured in the United States. The AR-15 was also especially alluring to the gunman who killed 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo in May 2022.
Later that month, executives from five gunmakers were called to Capitol Hill to answer questions about AR-15s. The hearing played out in expected fashion. Democrats decried the gunmakers, the Republicans defended them, and the gun executives deflected. This year, Smith & Wesson’s sprawling exhibit was surrounded by other gunmakers offering their own AR-15s, such as Mossberg, Black Rain Ordnance and Savage Arms. Smith & Wesson promoted its latest addition to its AR-15 lineup: the M&P Volunteer.
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