AR-15 inventor never intended it for civilian use, his family says
The family of the man who invented the AR-15 assault rifle says he never intended for the weapon to be used by civilians.
“Our father, Eugene Stoner, designed the AR-15 and subsequent M-16 as a military weapon to give our soldiers an advantage over the AK-47,” the Stoner family told NBC News in a statement late Wednesday.
Stoner, who designed the AR-15 and the M-16 in the 1950s, died of cancer in April 1997. He was 74.
“He died long before any mass shootings occurred,” the family said. “But we do think he would have been horrified and sickened as anyone, if not more by these events.”
According to his New York Times obituary, Stoner, a Marine veteran, had the idea “to develop a rifle that would fire repeatedly with a single pull of the trigger” because because military studies showed that soldiers “under the pressure of combat … were not pulling the trigger on the weapons.”
He designed the original AR-15 — and a .223 caliber bullet capable of piercing a metal helmet at a distance of 500 yards — in his garage.
Stoner, an avid hunter, was then contracted by the U.S. Army for his work developing the automatic rifle, which was renamed the M-16 for the battlefield. But family members said he never fathomed they’d be used by citizens to kill.
“After many conversations with him, we feel his intent was that he designed it as a military rifle,” Stoner’s family said. “[He] focused on making the most efficient and superior rifle possible for the military.”
After his death, copycat versions of Stoner’s creation surfaced, and a semi-automatic version of the AR-15 — dubbed by the National Rifle Association as “America’s gun” — became a civilian bestseller.
AR-15-style guns and ammunition have been used in at least 10 recent mass shootings, according to NBC News, including the massacres in Aurora, Colo., Newtown, Conn., and San Bernardino, Calif.
On Sunday, the gunman that opened fire inside the Pulse Orlando nightclub used an AR-15 spinoff, the Sig Sauer MCX, to kill 49 people and wound 53 others in the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, reigniting calls for gun law reforms.
But the family stopped short of wading into the gun control debate.
“What has happened, good or bad, since his patents have expired is a result of our free market system,” Stoner’s family said. “Currently, a more interesting question is ‘Who now is benefiting from the manufacturing and sales of AR-15s, and for what uses?‘”
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