The fascinating and topical nonfiction story of how one gun changed American courtrooms streets and homes told for a YA audience by award-winning author Karen Blumenthal
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 Hillary Rodham Clinton: A Woman Living History 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.
