From military weapon to cultural symbol: how the AR-15 has defined the US gun debate

Earlier this year, several Republican lawmakers were seen sporting a new accessory: lapel pins shaped like an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.

Related: ‘It’s a weapon to hunt people!’ Why so many Americans hate – and love – the AR-15

Andrew Clyde, a Republican congressman from Georgia who also owns a gun store, later said he had handed out the pins to his congressional colleagues “to remind people of the second amendment of the constitution and how important it is in preserving our liberties”.

The choice of an AR-15 – instead of another firearm like a handgun or revolver – shows how much the rifle has become a symbol of the gun debate in the United States. It’s now one of the most popular, and one of the most recognizable, firearms in the country.

This notoriety has come from its use in high-profile mass shootings and ongoing efforts by Democratic lawmakers to ban them. (Most recently in Maine, where 18 people were shot and killed at a bowling alley and a bar; authorities found an AR-10, a predecessor to the AR-15, in the suspected gunman’s car.) Because of these killings, the AR-15 has also become something of a rallying cry for the gun control movement.

The potent symbolism of the AR-15 is what the Wall Street Journal reporters Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson say led them to write their new book, American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15. In it, they chart the more-than-six-decade history of the rifle, from its inception in a Los Angeles garage to its use in school shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and Parkland, Florida, as well as at the movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado.

“The AR-15 is this cultural object that everyone’s fighting about,” McWhirter said. “But nobody really understands how it developed, how it got here.”

The Guardian spoke to McWhirter and Elinson about the origins of the AR-15, how it went from military to civilian weapon and what it has come to mean in US politics. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The AR-15 has been a central part of the US gun debate for over a decade. What led you to write this book right now?

McWhirter: Zusha and I were reporting and covering mass shootings over and over again, and increasingly, they involved AR-15s. We were paired on a business story on the AR-15 and after we wrote the story, we had so much more on this history, going back to the cold war.

The AR-15 is this cultural object that everyone’s fighting about. Everyone knows the silhouette of that image, we’ve seen it a million times all over the place. If you’re for it, you put it on your bumper sticker on your car; if you put a symbol of it with a line through it on a sign, then you know what you’re saying right away without even having to use words.

Everyone’s fighting about this object, but nobody really understands how it developed, how it got here and how it became this cultural symbol that has gone far beyond the fact that it’s a gun. We wanted to understand how that happened.

So who created the AR-15, and why?

Elinson: The history of the AR-15 begins in a detached garage in Los Angeles that belonged to a former marine named Eugene Stoner, a very mild-mannered and shy fellow. He was fascinated with explosions, firearms and projectiles. He had no formal training or college education but he was trying to invent the next greatest gun, and he focused on making a lightweight rifle.

At the time, the US military was in search of a better rifle for all of its troops. We had won the second world war using this big, heavy rifle made of wood and steel. But military leaders were really afraid of all these communist threats coming up around the world. And all the guerrillas were armed with the AK-47, a gun that could fire a lot of bullets very quickly at close range.

The government felt that we needed a gun to counteract that. And into that breach steps Eugene Stoner. He uses aluminium instead of steel and an efficient, lightweight internal system, using the energy from each shot to expel spent casings and load the next round. The final result was a gun that could fire lots of bullets really rapidly, was extremely easy to shoot and keep on target. And it was just what some people in the military wanted.

How did the AR-15 go from being mainly used on battlefields to one of the most popular firearms among civilians in the US?

Elinson: ArmaLite – the company Stoner worked for – sold the rights to the AR-15 to Colt, a venerable old gunmaker. Colt decided to sell a civilian version, which they called the Sporter. It was semi-automatic, unlike the military version, but didn’t catch on in the 70s and 80s because hunters liked larger-caliber hunting rifles and were used to wood-stock rifles’ gleaming steel – they didn’t like this chintzy plastic aluminium thing.

Related: After years of mass shootings, the US is still trying to understand gun violence. Why?

It was an accident of politics that made this gun popular. In the early late 80s and 90s, crime was high in cities. There were a lot of shootings where people were using AK-47s and Mac-10s. Politicians and police were worried and so there’s a movement against these military-style semi-automatic guns with large magazines. The AR-15 was dragged into it.

In 1994 President Clinton signed the Federal Assault Weapons Ban with the support of Democrats, Republicans and police. At that moment, the AR-15 became a political symbol. It became a line in the sand, a symbol of second amendment rights and it drew a lot of people to the gun.

McWhirter: Because of that concern, the AR-15 became a business story, because a lot of the gunmakers who had been promoting this rifle saw a spike in sales as people were worried about the ban, then the ban went into effect. Gunmakers also learned very early on that they just had to make some modifications to the gun for it to fit the letter of the law.

Then in 2004, the Republican-led Congress let the assault weapons ban sunset. As soon as it went away, a lot of the larger gunmakers who resisted them all jumped in, because the profit was too tempting. AR-15s are easy to make and you can ramp up and reduce production really quickly. All these things are very attractive.

Simultaneously, both of these things come together with this military macho aspect of our “war on terror” to send sales of the AR-15 through the roof.

What role has the AR-15 played in the gun control movement?

McWhirter: This gun has become a symbol that people are focusing on. You still see leaders in the Democratic party talking about, “we need another assault weapons ban,” when, as we show in our book, the first one really didn’t work. And secondly, there’s more than 20m in civilian hands right now – what’s a ban going to do at this point?

Support for those movements has been very episodic, whereas gun rights groups are laser-focused on one thing. So people have to start to talk beyond this binary of guns are bad or guns are good. We need to start thinking about surgical ways to make us all safer, because that’s the bottom line.