Bonnie & Clyde: Their Guns & The Guns that Stopped Them
There Was No Shortage Of Firepower When It Came To The Barrow Gang
The story of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker is a wild one, a story for the ages. It will undoubtedly be retold again and again from various points of view for a long time to come. It’s a mix of crazed romance, grim violence, and outlaw behavior of the highest order during what we think of now as a particularly lawless period in the 20th century.
Great Depression-era criminals weren’t on horseback firing Colt Peacemakers with bandanas over their faces any longer — they were wearing fedoras and riding the running boards of a Ford with Tommy guns in their hands. And some of them were women.
Outlaws like John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, Pretty Boy Floyd, and others sprang up from places across the country, but they all ended up on the front page. And nobody got more ink than Barrow and Parker, who became universally known in the press as “Bonnie and Clyde.”
This murderous couple from Texas caught the zeitgeist of American media and pop culture at just the right time and the nation’s grim obsession with the outlaw couple was like none other. They had actual groupies. Young women started to dress like Parker and wore their hair like she did in the photos of her printed in national and local newspapers. Regular folks who ended up in their path often did little things to help them escape and a large network of friends and family aided them at every turn. This undoubtedly contributed to their almost unbelievable ability to evade capture over and over.
Until they didn’t.
The Road To A Fateful Day
Part of the reason people identified with the couple so much was because Bonnie and Clyde were regular people for most of their lives: Texas natives who were raised in a country filled with failure, poverty, and dust. Parker married young — at the age of 15 — but it was over after a few years and she wound up working as a waitress in Dallas. Barrow had become something of a small-time criminal by the time the two met in early 1930 when he was 20 and she was 19.
They immediately fell into a ring of fire; a young, wild love. But soon after, Clyde went to prison for stealing a car. Bonnie helped him escape, but he didn’t get very far before being recaptured. He got out on parole in 1932, but the bit had changed him — he’d been sexually assaulted while in prison, and in retribution, he beat his assailant to death with a pipe. A prisoner already doing life took the rap, but Clyde was never the same. The experience, people say, made him mean.
The Crime Spree
When Clyde got out of the slammer, he had one singular purpose — to form a gang and get to work. The small assemblage — consisting of Clyde’s brother Buck and his wife Blanche, W.D. Jones, Henry Methvin, Raymond Hamilton, Joe Palmer, and Ralph Fults — became known simply as The Barrow Gang.
They were mostly into bank robberies, but that wasn’t all. As they traveled the Midwest, the gang robbed small stores, gas stations, and anything else that looked ripe while they were on the road between knocking over banks.
They also had a penchant for killing cops, and a few civilians too. All told The Barrow Gang killed nine police officers and four regular civilians, and they robbed 10 banks. But it all came to a bloody end in a literal hail of gunfire on May 23, 1934.
The Barrow Gang’s Guns
During the Great Depression, career criminals rolled hard. Today, we think of gangsters in big cities rolling around with Thompson submachine guns in violin cases and opening fire on city streets — it was called the Chicago Typewriter, after all. The truth is, incidents like the infamous Valentine’s Day Massacre were relatively rare. Most underworld murders were carried out with pistols, or something quieter.
But machine guns and crime got headlines — and most of those headlines were generated not by mob button men, but by wild outlaws who used machine guns on a regular basis. Pretty much every gun or modification they used ended up being included in the National Firearms Act of 1934, which is no coincidence.
These firearms were fairly new, not terribly difficult to obtain, and most importantly, they could easily outgun local police who were typically armed with a revolver or maybe a shotgun or a lever-action rifle.
That wasn’t much going up against criminals armed with BARs and .45s in cars with V8 engines and a body that was essentially bulletproof against anything police were firing.
And it worked. The gang got in five big shootouts with police during their spree, and they came out on top every time. They were always outnumbered but never outgunned.
`The gang was so elusive because they would hit a place, and hit it hard, often firing hundreds of rounds if they met resistance, and then blow out of town. There was a lot of open country, and police weren’t used to dealing with criminals that could cover hundreds of miles in a day and there was little communication (if any) between law enforcement.
Here’s a list of what just Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow had in their car when they were killed by police. Many of the gang’s firearms came from robbing National Guard armories which they then customized to fit their needs.
In Bonnie & Clyde’s Car:
- 7 M1911 pistols (.45 ACP)
- 1 Colt M1909 revolver (.45 Colt)
- 1 Colt Automatic Pistol (.25 ACP)
- 1 Colt Detective Special revolver (.38 Special)
- 1 M1903 Colt Automatic Pistol (.32 ACP)
- 1 Winchester Model 1901 lever-action shotgun (10 gauge, sawed-off)
- 1 Remington Model 11 semi-auto shotgun (20 gauge, sawed-off)
- 3 M1918 Browning Automatic Rifles – BARs (.30-06, modified)
For ammo they had 100 20-round mags for the BARs loaded up, and another 3,000 rounds of assorted cartridges for everything else.
If you look at the mods they made, you can tell the guns were meant to be used and nothing was for show. The Winchester 1901 is a 10 gauge, which delivers a stout felt recoil. The barrel of the shotgun was cut down as much as possible to make the gun easier to hide under a coat and to make it more maneuverable in and out of a vehicle, but they didn’t cut off the buttstock, because you really need a stock on a 10 gauge.
Clyde’s favorite gun was a cut-down M1918 BAR, which he first started using in 1932. He sometimes referred to his “scattergun,” and this is what he was talking about. The powerful .30-06, full auto fire, plus fast reloads was a force to be reckoned with. It outmatched anything police had at the time and the .30-06 would shred pretty much anything someone might use for cover short of a brick wall.
When the gang robbed National Guard armories in Oklahoma and Illinois, they stocked up on BARs, 1911s, Model 11 shotguns, and M1917 revolvers, along with ammo and magazines. Clyde had the barrel and gas tube of his BAR shortened and he had custom magazines made by welding two BAR mags together for a 40-round capacity.
He essentially created a Colt Monitor, a variant of the BAR produced after World War I in limited quantities, most of which were sold to law enforcement entities.
Bonnie’s favorite gun was a cut-down Remington Model 11 20-gauge shotgun, a variant of the Browning Auto 5 made under license. Why did National Guard armories have a semi-auto 20 gauge in large numbers? Because the Army bought a whole bunch in a riot gun configuration with a 20-inch barrel, to potentially use for riot gun stuff. Plus, at the time, shotguns had become a big part of trench warfare during WWI for the U.S. And so, the Model 11 became a favorite of The Barrow Gang.
Bonnie’s personal shotgun had the barrel cut off just in front of the mag tube cap and the stock was cut down, leaving just a few inches behind the grip. This gun was in the front seat near Clyde when the couple was shot down, along with another shotgun and the 1911 Bonnie was holding.
During robberies, Clyde often used the shortened shotgun in conjunction with a special pair of pants with a zipper running down one leg that allowed him to conceal it while holding the grip through the pocket and to fire it quickly from the hip if he had to.
Law Enforcement Firearms
Bonnie and Clyde’s spree of robbery and murder ended in a pile of shell casings and blood on Highway 154 between Gibsland and Sailes in Louisiana. The two were traveling alone in a 1934 Ford Model 40 B sedan when they were ambushed by six well-armed lawmen led by legendary Texas Ranger Frank Hamer.
Hamer was carrying a Remington Model 8, an under-appreciated semi-auto rifle designed by John M. Browning. The rifle was marketed mostly as a hunting rifle with a fixed 5-round magazine, but some Model 8s were modified for use by police with detachable mags with higher capacities of 10 or 15 rounds.
Hamer’s gun was a custom Model 8 chambered in .35 Remington with special-order 15-round single-stack mags.
At least one other man was armed with a Model 8, possibly more, and Dallas County Deputy Sheriff Ted Hinton had one of the rare aforementioned Colt Monitors in hand. There was at least one full-size BAR in the mix as well. These cops were armed for bear.
One of the officers may also have been carrying a Colt Lightning slide-action rifle. The official account says that every man had a rifle, a shotgun, and a pistol of some kind and that they unloaded each of those into Bonnie and Clyde’s car in that order.
The first shot was allegedly fired by Louisiana police officer Prentiss Oakley, who was likely carrying a Model 8 rifle. It hit Barrow in the head. Parker screamed, and then all that could be heard was gunfire.
The car, and the two infamous outlaws inside, were completely riddled with bullets.