>In particular, the Auto-Ordnance
>advertisement reproduced on page 151 is telling. "The ideal weapon
>for the protection of large estates," indeed.

Hey, I found that ad online. Check it out, it's simultaneously hilarious and disturbing.

The chapter on the Thompson gun is probably the best part of The Social History of the Machine Gun, in fairness, and I should probably have mentioned it more than just in passing, but I was working to a length limit. It's also the part of the book that comes closest to being an actual social history, since - much more than the long section on WWI, which deals almost exclusively with military matters - it actually discusses how the Thompson gun affected society. In particular, there's the section I alluded to in my review where Ellis goes off to do a short Film Studies paper that might be called "The Tommy Gun in Gangster Cinema".

On the page with the Thompson ad, Ellis quotes William J. Helmer in The Gun that Made the Twenties Roar (a book I shall have to track down, I think):

"A company that could fancy a cowboy mowing down bandits, or envision a householder pouring machine gun fire into his darkened dining-room in defence of the family silver, might well have misjudged its markets."

(This is by far the wittiest remark in the book, which is kind of a shame since it's a quotation from another one.)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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