#1863 Why did so many gangsters use Tommy guns?

Why did so many gangsters use Tommy guns? Hollywood makes it look like many more gangsters used Tommy guns than actually did. They were expensive, so only wealthy gangsters could use them.

The Tommy gun was so called because it was named after its inventor, Brigadier General John T. Thompson. Thompson joined the US Army in 1882. When the Spanish-American War started, he was put to work with ordnance supply, and he showed himself to be a capable organizer. He also had his first experience with a machine gun here. He made a unit to use the new Gatling gun, which was one of the first machine guns. It had multiple barrels and was hand cranked. As each barrel rotates, it fires and is then reloaded. Gatling actually invented this gun because he thought it would reduce the number of casualties. He reasoned that if one gun could fire as much as 150 soldiers, then that would be 150 fewer soldiers on the battlefield. His reasoning didn’t stretch to how many more people such a gun could kill. After the war finished, Thompson was put in charge of small arms, and he began to take more of an interest in them.

When World War 1 started, he set himself the task of designing a machine gun that could be used in the trench warfare that the war had quickly stagnated into. Thompson pushed for the USA to help free Europe, but the USA didn’t enter the war until 1917. Thompson and his team worked out how to make his new gun in 1916 and set up a company called the Auto-Ordnance Company. The design was finished, and the first prototypes were shipped on November 11^th, 1918, the day World War 1 ended. The Thompson gun was a submachine gun rather than a machine gun, which meant it fired pistol caliber ammunition instead of larger cartridges designed for machine guns. This made the gun easier to control than an automatic weapon firing more powerful rifle cartridges. He nicknamed his gun the “Trench Broom” because he envisaged it being used to sweep up the enemy. In the end, it would never see service in any war during Thompson’s life, but huge numbers of them were used in World War 2.

Thompson’s company tried to sell the gun to the US Army, but they didn’t want it. The first problem was its price. It was $200 per gun, which is over $3,500 in today’s money. At the time, that was expensive, but today, the US Army spends roughly $4,000 per M7 rifle for its troops. The second reason the army didn’t want the gun was that it was heavy, with an odd center of gravity, which made it difficult to hold and aim. It also wasn’t very accurate or effective at long distances. It could be sold as a close-quarters gun, but the army needed more accuracy than that. In the end, they would buy more than 1.5 million of them for World War 2 because they desperately needed close-range weapons at the start of the war.

Because there wasn’t a market for the gun in the military, the company began to look elsewhere, and there were a number of takers. Several were sold to the Irish Republican Army to be used in the Irish War of Independence. A number were sold to the communists to use in a coup in Estonia. The FBI bought some. The US Postal Inspection Service also bought some. However, they were most famously known as guns used by gangsters.

The Tommy gun wasn’t used by a lot of gangsters, but Hollywood took up the idea and made it look like every gangster had a Tommy gun. This wasn’t true because of their cost. $200 for a gun was a lot of money, and only the most successful gangsters could get their hands on one. These were gangsters like John Dillinger and Al Capone. They liked the gun more for its status than for its abilities. The gun was hard to aim, but it did fire a lot of bullets very quickly and made a lot of noise. It was known as the “Chicago Typewriter” because of its sound. And because it was expensive, it was a status symbol. Only the most powerful gangs could afford one. Most gangs wouldn’t have used them.

They slowly gained in popularity. Several countries began to buy them. Chinese warlords used them, and Nationalist China ordered them to fight the Japanese. Then, World War 2 broke out, and the US Army and its allies realized they didn’t have any powerful guns for close combat fighting, so they bought 1.5 million Tommy guns. During World War II, the US Army began replacing the Tommy gun with the cheaper M3 submachine gun, nicknamed the Grease Gun. Although Thompson guns continued to be used around the world for decades, their heyday was over and they were finally superseded by the AK47 in the 1970s. And this is what I learned today.

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thompson_submachine_gun

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-Ordnance_Corporation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_T._Thompson

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatling_gun