Prohibition Gangster Guns: The Tommy Gun and the Chicago Typewriter

For about a decade, one gun defined American crime. It chattered through the headlines of the Prohibition era, turned bootleggers into legends, and frightened the public so badly that it helped write the first federal gun law in history.

These are the Prohibition gangster guns, the weapons of Capone and Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde, with the real history sorted out from the movie myths. And there are more myths here than you might expect.

The Tommy Gun: built for war, adopted by crime

The Thompson submachine gun was designed by U.S. Army general John T. Thompson and his engineers, who finished an early prototype they called the “Annihilator” in 1918. The catch is that World War I ended that November, before a single one shipped to Europe.

So Auto-Ordnance had a fearsome .45-caliber weapon and no war to sell it to. The Model of 1921 was marketed to police and the military as a “trench broom,” and Thompson’s own advertising is credited with coining the term “submachine gun.” In the 1920s you could buy one by mail order. Then the gangsters found it. A 50-round drum magazine and the gun’s compact size made it murderously effective from a moving car, which is exactly how the bootleggers used it.

The “Chicago typewriter” was mostly a movie myth

Everyone knows the Tommy Gun was called the “Chicago typewriter” for the rat-a-tat sound it made, like a typist hammering keys. Here is the twist: that nickname, along with “Chicago piano,” was mostly the work of newspapers and Hollywood, not the gangsters themselves.

On the street it was simply the “Tommy Gun,” a name Auto-Ordnance actually trademarked. The colorful slang we associate with it came from the same sensational press coverage that turned the criminals into folk antiheroes. The myth-making started early.

The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre

On February 14, 1929, in a garage on Chicago’s North Clark Street, seven men of Bugs Moran’s gang were lined up against a wall and gunned down. Two of the killers wore police uniforms, so the victims thought they were facing a routine raid.

The forensics told the story: two Thompson submachine guns and a shotgun, roughly 70 rounds fired. The hit is widely believed to have been ordered by Al Capone, though his direct involvement was never proven and he was conveniently in Florida that day. Bugs Moran, the real target, saw the fake police car and walked away for a cup of coffee.

It was never solved. But it did give birth to modern forensic ballistics, when investigator Calvin Goddard matched the bullets to specific Thompsons, an early triumph of crime science. The killing horrified the public precisely because it was so organized, so cold, and so brazen in broad daylight.

Bonnie and Clyde’s stolen firepower

Clyde Barrow had a favorite gun, and it wasn’t a Tommy Gun. It was the Browning Automatic Rifle, a military weapon that fired the powerful .30-06 cartridge and could punch straight through the body of a car, including the police cars chasing him.

He got them by raiding National Guard armories. Then he sawed down the barrels and stocks into a concealable weapon he called his “scattergun,” because people scattered when he opened up. Three of these cut-down BARs were found in the death car after the 1934 ambush that killed the pair.

The pistols: Colt 1911s and “baby machine guns”

The workhorse pistol of the era was the Colt 1911. John Dillinger favored one chambered in the snappy .38 Super, a round fast enough to defeat the early bulletproof vests some lawmen wore.

A San Antonio gun dealer named Hyman Lebman went further, illegally converting 1911-pattern pistols into full-automatic “baby machine guns,” some fitted with forward grips and compensators, built to order for Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson. The line between pistol and machine gun got very blurry in those years.

The men behind the guns

The weapons are only half the story. The other half is the men who carried them and the newspapers that made them famous. John Dillinger robbed banks with a Thompson and his .38 Super pistol and was crowned “Public Enemy No. 1” before the FBI gunned him down outside a Chicago theater in 1934.

Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd ran his own Tommy Gun on bank jobs across the Midwest before he too was killed that same year. Baby Face Nelson carried Lebman’s converted machine pistols to his death. It was a strange, short-lived era: three of the most wanted men in America died within four months of each other in 1934, all of them folk antiheroes built up by the very press that cheered their downfall. The Prohibition gangster guns were inseparable from the legends of the men who fired them.

The gun that wrote a law

The Tommy Gun’s reign in the headlines did something no firearm had done before. Public fear, fueled by the massacre and a wave of gangland violence, drove Congress to pass the National Firearms Act of 1934, the first major federal gun-control law in American history.

Rather than ban the guns outright, which was considered constitutionally shaky at the time, Congress taxed them. The law slapped a $200 transfer tax, a fortune during the Depression, on machine guns, sawed-off shotguns, and suppressors, plus mandatory federal registration. The era of buying a Tommy Gun by mail order was over. Nearly a century later, that law is still the backbone of how the federal government regulates machine guns.

Why the Prohibition gangster guns still fascinate

What makes these guns endure is the gap between the myth and the truth. The real story is grimmer and stranger than the movies: short, violent lives, stolen military hardware, and a public that turned killers into celebrities while demanding laws to stop them.

The same press that sold the legend helped end it. For more, see the most famous guns in history and the guns of the Wild West outlaws who came before them.

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