Thompson Submachine Gun

The Thompson submachine gun, nicknamed the Tommy gun, was designed by United States Army Brigadier General John T. Thompson between 1917 and 1920 and manufactured chiefly by the Auto-Ordnance Company, with the Model 1921 entering production that year as the first weapon ever marketed under the term submachine gun. Chambered in .45 ACP and fed by 20 or 30-round box magazines or 50 to 100-round drum magazines, the roughly ten to eleven pound weapon had originally been conceived to break the trench warfare stalemate of the First World War, though its prototypes arrived too late for that conflict. It instead became notorious during American Prohibition as the signature weapon of organized crime and the law enforcement officers who fought it, before the United States military formally adopted the Thompson in 1938; more than 1.5 million were produced during the Second World War for American and Allied forces.