Ma Barker’s Tommy Gun: Did She Really Fire It?

When FBI agents finally entered the Barker hideout on Lake Weir, Florida, on January 16, 1935, they found Ma Barker dead beside a Thompson submachine gun. The FBI’s own 1935 report put the Tommy gun at her left hand, with its 100-round drum partly fired. Other accounts put it on the floor between her and her son Fred. Either way, that one gun made a 61-year-old mother of four into “Bloody Mama,” the machine-gunning mastermind of the Barker-Karpis gang. The men who actually ran the gang said she never planned a crime in her life.

This is the story of Ma Barker’s Tommy gun, the shootout, the legend J. Edgar Hoover built around it, and what a Tommy gun costs today.

Table of Contents

Ma Barker at a Glance

Real name	Arizona Donnie Clark Barker, known as Kate or Arrie (1873 to 1935)
Her sons	Herman, Lloyd, Arthur “Doc” and Fred Barker, all criminals
The gang	The Barker-Karpis gang, founded by Fred Barker and Alvin Karpis in 1931
The gun	A Thompson submachine gun, found beside her body
Where she died	A rented cottage on Lake Weir, near Ocklawaha, Florida
Rounds fired	About 750 by the FBI’s count; up to 2,000 by press estimates
Mastermind?	Almost certainly not, according to the gang and most historians

Who Was Ma Barker?

She was born Arizona Donnie Clark in Ash Grove, Missouri, on October 8, 1873, and her family called her Arrie. In 1892 she married George Barker, and they had four sons: Herman, Lloyd, Arthur and Fred. The family moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the boys were in trouble almost from the start, running with a local crew called the Central Park gang. By 1928 Herman was dead, killed by his own hand after a police shootout in Wichita, and the other three were all in prison. Ma spent those years in poverty, living in what one account calls a dirt-floor shack.

Things changed when Fred got out in 1931 and teamed up with a prison friend, Alvin Karpis. The Barker-Karpis gang robbed banks, killed a Missouri sheriff, and then moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, where it turned to kidnapping. The gang took brewery heir William Hamm Jr. for a $100,000 ransom and banker Edward Bremer for $200,000. Ma traveled with them. That part of the story is true. What she did while they traveled is where the legend and the record split.

The Gang’s Guns

The Barker-Karpis gang was armed like every serious outfit of the early 1930s: Thompson submachine guns for the robberies, pistols for everyday carry, and bulletproof vests. The vests did not always work. On January 8, 1935, the night agents arrested Doc Barker in Chicago, gang member Russell Gibson tried to shoot his way out of another hideout wearing one. He was fatally wounded. The FBI still has the notebook he was carrying, with a bullet hole through it.

What eventually beat the gang wasn’t a gun at all. According to the FBI, its laboratory lifted invisible fingerprints from the Hamm ransom notes by painting them with silver nitrate, which reacts with the salt in sweat and turns the prints white. That tied the gang to the kidnappings, and the Bureau closed in. A map found on Doc Barker when he was arrested pointed to Ocklawaha, Florida. Agents found the exact house by asking locals about an alligator the gang had mentioned in a letter.

The Shootout at Lake Weir

On the morning of January 16, 1935, agents surrounded a two-story cottage on Lake Weir that the Barkers had rented under the name Blackburn. They expected a houseful of gang members. In fact Karpis and the others had left three days earlier, and only Fred and his mother were there.

When agents called on them to surrender, Fred opened fire. What followed was a long gunfight. Press accounts estimate up to 2,000 rounds were fired into and out of the house. The FBI’s own report, by agent Earl Connelley, counts about 500 fired in by agents and about 250 fired out. Accounts of how long it lasted run from about an hour to several hours. Local people are said to have gathered to watch, some of them picnicking. When the shooting from the house stopped, the agents sent in a local handyman, Willie Woodbury, wearing a bulletproof vest. He came out and reported that nobody inside was alive.

The Tommy Gun in the Bedroom

Both bodies were found in the same upstairs bedroom. Connelley’s report says Fred had about ten bullet wounds and that Kate Barker “had three bullets in the chest, one of which apparently had gone through the heart.” And there was the Thompson. The report found her “lying on her back, with a machine gun at her left hand with a 100 shot drum on same,” and says that drum had “approximately 60 or 40 shots fired.” Other accounts say the gun lay on the floor between mother and son. Agents also recovered an arsenal of Thompsons and other guns from the house, and according to the Spokesman-Review, the crates carrying them were later found mysteriously emptied on the way to Washington.

Did Ma Barker fire that Tommy gun? The Bureau’s report says it apparently did, since the drum beside her was partly empty and its summary has both Kate and Fred firing at agents. But nobody saw her shoot, and some historians doubt she took part in the gunfight at all. But a Tommy gun next to the body of a woman in her sixties was a picture the Bureau needed, and it used it.

“Bloody Mama”: How Hoover Built the Legend

After Lake Weir, J. Edgar Hoover called Ma Barker “the most vicious, dangerous, and resourceful criminal brain of the last decade.” That line became the story. Movies like Ma Barker’s Killer Brood (1960) and Bloody Mama (1970) turned her into a gun-toting crime boss who ran her sons like an army. Bloody Mama, directed by Roger Corman, starred Shelley Winters as Ma, with a young Robert De Niro as her son Lloyd. None of those films was interested in the version Ma’s own gang told.

The people who actually knew her told it differently. Alvin Karpis, who co-founded the gang, wrote in his memoir Public Enemy Number One, published in the US as The Alvin Karpis Story: “The most ridiculous story in the annals of crime is that Ma Barker was the mastermind behind the Karpis-Barker gang.” He said her role was simple: “when we traveled together, we moved as a mother and her sons.” One associate put it more bluntly, saying she “couldn’t plan breakfast.” Karpis and others believed Hoover inflated her role to explain why his agents had killed a 61-year-old mother, and most historians now agree she knew about her sons’ crimes and helped them hide, but did not lead anything.

The rest of the family story ended the way you’d expect. Doc Barker went to Alcatraz and was shot dead trying to escape in 1939. Karpis was caught in New Orleans in May 1936, with Hoover flying down to be there for the arrest, and served 26 years on Alcatraz, longer than any other prisoner in its history.

The Barker House Today

The Ma Barker house survived. In October 2016 it was floated across Lake Weir on a barge to Carney Island, a Marion County park, and it’s now open as a museum, the Bradford-Ma Barker House, with tours booked in advance. On the 90th anniversary of the shootout in January 2025, the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI unveiled a marker there. Ma and Fred were buried in Welch, Oklahoma, next to Herman.

Can You Buy a Tommy Gun Today?

The full-auto Thompsons the gang carried are now registered machine guns under the National Firearms Act, and only those registered before 1986 can be sold to civilians. Buying one means a collector’s price, a $200 federal tax stamp and a wait of months for ATF approval of the transfer. The legal, affordable version is Auto-Ordnance’s semi-automatic 1927A-1, a close copy of the Prohibition-era gun. Our guide to buying a Tommy gun covers your options, and our Prohibition gangster guns guide explains how the Thompson became the gang gun of the era:

Auto-Ordnance also builds the plainer World War II-style Thompson M1, often for a little less:

What a 61-Year-Old Really Needs for Self-Defense

There’s a practical irony in the legend. A Thompson with a loaded drum weighs well over ten pounds and kicks hard, which is about the last gun anyone would pick for a woman in her sixties. If you’re choosing a defensive gun for yourself or an older family member today, the right answer is something light, simple and easy to shoot. Our best concealed carry guns for seniors and home defense for seniors guides focus on exactly that, and for women specifically, see the best handguns for women, best revolvers for women and best home defense shotguns for women. For women with real shooting records, not invented ones, read about the legendary women of the gun.

The Rest of the Public Enemies

Ma Barker died a few weeks after the last of the big names. Read the rest of the series: John Dillinger’s guns, Baby Face Nelson’s guns, Pretty Boy Floyd’s guns, Machine Gun Kelly’s gun and the guns of Bonnie and Clyde. The Barkers’ trail ran from Missouri and Oklahoma to Minnesota and Florida, and our Missouri, Oklahoma, Minnesota and Florida guides explain what the gun laws there look like now. Our gun deals page tracks the best current prices across more than 200 retailers.

Frequently Asked Questions

Featured image: the Barker cottage on Lake Weir, Florida, photo by TheGoodspeeds, Wikimedia Commons, public domain, with added text.