John Taliaferro Thompson had a mission: to develop a lightweight, fast-firing weapon that would help Americans win on the battlefield. His Thompson submachine gun could deliver a hundred bullets in a matter of seconds but didn't find a market in the U.S. military. Instead, the Tommy gun became the weapon of choice for a generation of bootleggers and bank-robbing outlaws, and became a deadly American icon. Following a bloody decade and eighty years before the mass shootings of our own time Congress moved to take this weapon off the streets, igniting a national debate about gun control.
Critically-acclaimed author Karen Blumenthal, author of Bootleg: Murder, Moonshine, and the Lawless Years of Prohibition and Six Days in October: The Stock Market Crash of 1929, reveals the fascinating story of this famous and deadly weapon of the lives it changed, the debate it sparked, and the unprecedented response it inspired in Tommy: The Gun That Changed America.
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