Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Wikipedia
The Tommy gun mostly refers to the Thompson submachine gun. This may also refer to:
- "Tommy Gun" (song), a song by The Clash
- "Tommy Gun", the main title of a book written by Bill Yenne
"Tommy Gun" is a song by the British punk rock band The Clash, released as the first single from their second album Give 'Em Enough Rope (1978).
Joe Strummer said that he got the idea for the song when he was thinking about terrorists, and how they probably enjoy reading about their killings as much as movie stars like seeing their films reviewed. While Topper Headon mimics the sound of gangster movie shootings with quick snare hits and the guitars are full of distortion and feedback, Strummer's sarcastic lyrics (I'm cutting out your picture from page one/I'm gonna get a jacket just like yours/And give my false support to your cause/Whatever you want, you're gonna get it!) condemn rather than condone violence: at the end of the song he sings, If death comes so cheap/Then the same goes for life!
In the liner notes of the Singles Box, Carl Barat (former frontman of Dirty Pretty Things and The Libertines), says that "Tommy Gun" was important for music at the time because it let people know what was going on in the world—it talked about real issues. He says, "It's ["Tommy Gun"] a product of the volatile climate of the late seventies - all those references to terrorist organizations like Baader-Meinhof and The Red Brigades. It's like a punk rock adaptation of The Beatles' " Revolution"."
"Tommy Gun: How General Thompson's Submachine Gun Wrote History", is the title of a book that was written by Bill Yenne.
The book is descriptive and refers to the Thompson submachine gun; submachine gun named after General John Taliaferro Thompson.
The hardcover book has 340 pages which include the introduction, epilogue, appendix 1, 2, & 3, bibliography and index. It is organized in five parts encompassing thirty-nine chapters in all. The book contains black and white photographs and illustrations; a cross-section drawing and a parts list is also shown.
Usage examples of "tommy gun".
At the same time there was a louder crash as the front door was kicked in and Jingles smashed his way into the shop, his tommy gun cradled in his arms.
He wasn't about to tell her that he'd been on the wrong end of a Capone-era tommy gun, or that he'd been pronounced dead in a hospital, only to wake up in its morgue forever changed.
Armed men-they were bound to be armed, almost certainly with the ubiquitous tommy gun which seemed the standard weapon among the generalissimo's henchmen.
Headquarters tour no longer offers American children the opportunity to fire a tommy gun.
It was fast, incredibly fast, and Turk felt the snap of the bullet as it whizzed by his ear, and then he swung up the tommy gun.
He borrows a small, straight twenty-round tommy gun magazine from one of his comrades and they set out for Intramuros.
My Kalmuck went last, but he took no honey, for he had to change the magazine of his tommy gun.