<P><b>The fascinating and topical nonfiction story of how one gun changed American courtrooms streets and homes told for a YA audience by award-winning author Karen Blumenthal</b></p><p>John Taliaferro Thompson had a mission: to develop a lightweight fast-firing weapon that would help Americans win on the battlefield. His Thompson submachine gun could deliver a hundred bullets in a matter of seconds?but didn't find a market in the U.S. military. Instead the Tommy gun became the weapon of choice for a generation of bootleggers and bank-robbing outlaws and became a deadly American icon. Following a bloody decade?and eighty years before the mass shootings of our own time?Congress moved to take this weapon off the streets igniting a national debate about gun control.</p><p>Critically-acclaimed author Karen Blumenthal author of <i>Bootleg: Murder Moonshine and the Lawless Years of Prohibition Hillary Rodham Clinton: A Woman Living History</i> and <i>Six Days in October: The Stock Market Crash of 1929</i> reveals the fascinating story of this famous and deadly weapon?of the lives it changed the debate it sparked and the unprecedented response it inspired in <i>Tommy: The Gun That Changed America</i>.</P>