Triggering Memories At the NRA Museum, Tommy Gun Devotees Can Zero In on a Classic

At 2:23 p.m. on Nov. 1, 1950, news suddenly arrived at the Secret Service office in the East Wing of the White House that across the street, men were trying to shoot their way into Blair House, where Harry Truman was taking a nap.

James Rowley, agent in charge of the White House detail, responded with four words, spoken, one imagines, rather forcefully: "WHERE'S MY TOMMY GUN?"

Fortunately, Rowley didn't have to pull the trigger that day, and the agents at Blair handled their emergency with dispatch and heroism. But Rowley's cry reflects almost a half-century's worth of loyalty by American police and military men toward Brig. Gen. John Taliaferro Thompson's baby when things got shaky and high quantities of firepower were necessary.

Thompson himself didn't invent the gun (though he did invent the term "submachine gun"). He found a moneyed investor (Thomas Fortune Ryan) and thereby raised the capital to assemble a first-rate design team. But the two primary engineers -- Oscar Payne, of the unschooled genius type that also figures prominently in firearms design, and Theodore Eickhoff, a gifted mechanical engineer -- surpassed even their sponsor's grandest hopes. They invented a classic.

I met the sons of Payne and Eickoff at the NRA convention in Kansas City several years ago. They were displaying together for the first time in public the pair of presentation Thompsons the DOD had made and engraved with their fathers' names to honor their work.

I'll have to find the pamphlet they had that they both autographed for me, as well as a pic I took of the two of them with the firearms.

Several years ago, I fired a Thompson at the Gun Store in Las Vegas. It handled exactly as I expected it would.

I gotta move out of Kansas to a state where I can own one of those babys.

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