INDIANAPOLIS -- A lot of discussion after the Las Vegas tragedy focused on the weapons the suspect used, but the history of the automatic weapon has roots in Indianapolis.
The Gatling gun, the first modern, reliable machine gun, was invented in Indianapolis in 1862. It was invented by Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling. Gatling was in Indianapolis in the 1860s completing a railroad contract, he told the Terre Haute Daily News in 1892.
Working at for a railroad company, he would often see soldiers leave or return from the Civil War. He started talking with the survivors, only to find out they died not in combat, but of disease.
"It then occurred to me that the methods of war were antiquated and that wars lasted too long," he said.
The gun as Gatling invented was able to fire 1,200 shots per minute accurately as the user cranked the handle.
Gatling invented the gun not because he wanted more deaths in war, he claims, but because he wanted fewer. He believed the gun would speed up war, saving the lives of the soldiers sick in camps and hospitals.
"I said to myself we are doing nearly all kinds of work by machinery now, why should not be be killed by machinery, too?" he said. "This, I thought, would shorten wars and save many lives. So I went to work on this idea at once, and after a while I had designed a gun which in principle is the same as that of the perfected gun of today, that will fire accurately 1,200 shots in a minute.”
Gatling's invention was different than modern machine guns (and even guns that came a couple decades later) because it required a hand crank to fire.
He first tried to sell six guns to the Civil War's Union War Department in Cincinnati, but his shop was set on fire, rendering the guns useless. He said the fire may have been caused by a Confederate sympathizer (something Gatling himself has been rumored to be), or perhaps somebody who believed the guns were too dangerous to be produced.
He eventually sold 13 guns for $1,000 each, he said.
Gatling's invention ended up being used in the Civil War sparingly, but it was used more after the war, and paved the way for more modern automatic weapons, such as the M61 Vulcan minigun, which was attached to helicopters during the Vietnam War. The M61 Vulcan fires about five times faster than Gatling's invention did.
Gatling died in 1903 in New York. He is buried in Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis.
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