Reply #104: A bit of history

[one-eyed fat man]

The Gun That Made the Twenties Roar
There were surprisingly few of them built, and even fewer were sold. Colt built 15,000 Thompson submachineguns and in 1936 almost 13,000 still remained unsold. From its inception, the Auto-Ordnance company marketed their gun to police, express and security agencies. "Sold only to Those on the Side of Law and Order." Many a small town police agency bought a "Tommy gun" as a sign they were progressive.



This book, The American Legend: First Submachine Gun, now out of print, lists the disposition of all the Colt guns by serial number from factory records in one of its appendices. Most of the guns sold went to big companies, many of which folks would consider "Fortune 500." Remember, this was at a time when people were almost universally paid in cash, so having company guards or an armored car for the payroll was not uncommon. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post at one time owned Thompsons. The two that used to belong to the Post never turned up again after the National Firearms Act was passed in 1934. The Chicago mob set up a dummy corporation in Minnesota, the "Gopher Mining Company" to buy three.

True, the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and the use of stolen military weapons by motor bandits, like Bonnie & Clyde were aggressively and sensationally publicized in magazines like Collier's. Homer Cummings, Roosevelt’s Attorney General, the force behind repeated attempts at Federal handgun registration before the WW2 exploited the notoriety and included all pistols and revolvers in his draft of the National Firearms Act.

Attorney General Cummings also said in Congressional testimony, “We certainly don’t expect gangsters to come forward to register their weapons and be fingerprinted, and a $200 tax is frankly prohibitive to private citizens.” On another occasion, he said, "Show me the man who does not want his gun registered, and I will show you a man who should not have a gun."

It was the outbreak of World War 2 that changed that. The Thompson was actually an obsolete design by then, but tooling existed and it was put into production. Despite eliminating the elegant machine work, fine checkering, and craftsmanship of the Colt's, it was still an expensive gun to produce and several changes were made to the design to speed war-time production and reduce costs.

The British and French did order some but at least two shipments of Colt built guns were lost to U-boats. The only other large scale user of the Thompson gun was the Irish Republican Army. Cornelius Ryan who was the money behind Thompson's venture was sympathetic to the Republican cause and diverted guns to the IRA. It is a tribute to the how well the guns were built as when the IRA finally started decommissioning the guns worked as well as they did 85 years ago. Another interesting aside is Ryan was close friends with an Irish Boston bootlegger named Joe Kennedy.