http://csgv.org/blog/2013/adam-lanza-to ... lementary/When Adam killed his sleeping, defenseless mother as she lay in bed, his choice of weapon was the Savage Mark II .22-caliber rifle, a bolt-action firearm that can accept a 10-round magazine. When it came time to travel to Sandy Hook to commit mass murder—and potentially expose himself to harm from responding law enforcement—Lanza discarded the Savage rifle and turned to the Bushmaster XM15-E2S, a semiautomatic rifle that he equipped with 30-round magazines so as to cut down on the number of times he would have to reload.
All of the firearms Adam took to Sandy Hook were semiautomatic weapons with detachable ammunition magazines. As with his Bushmaster, Adam equipped his handguns with high-capacity 30-round magazines. Adam elected to leave his Saiga tactical shotgun on the passenger seat of his car, entering the school with just his Bushmaster rifle and handguns.
Left at home were the Lanza families bolt-action rifles, which lacked both the rate of fire and capacity necessary for mass murder. Lanza also left numerous bladed weapons at home, including eight knives with a blade five inches in length or longer, a “six-foot-10-inch wooden-handled two-sided pole with a blade on one side and a spear on the opposite side,” and three samurai swords.
After the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado on July 20, 2012, National Rifle Association board member Ted Nugent claimed, “You could do more damage with a single shot or a bolt action because he had 20 minutes … His AR-15 Smith & Wesson rifle is now the most popular sporting rifle in America. It is the number one competition, number one in self-defense. It’s the number one sporting rifle for big game and small game. And if they keep calling it an ‘assault weapon,’ I may have that aneurysm.” Nugent was wrong on several points. For starters, the Aurora shooting lasted less than two minutes, and police arrived on the scene just 90 seconds after the first call.
But more importantly, despite the gun lobby’s best attempts at marketing, the AR-15 is not a “sporting rifle.” It is a weapons platform that was designed for battlefield use and marketed to militaries around the world for that purpose. The only functional difference between the civilian and military versions of the AR-15 is that the civilian version only fires in the semiautomatic position (and not on full-auto), but that is still a rapid rate of fire—as fast as you can repeatedly pull the trigger.
Mass shooters, of course, are aware of the rifle’s lethality. Adam Lanza, for his part, had complied a “doctoral thesis” of past mass shootings, complete with details on the firearms and magazines used in each incident. Mother Jones conducted an analysis of mass shootings that occurred between 1982 and 2012 and found that more than half of all mass shooters possessed high-capacity ammunition magazines, assault weapons or both.
As Americans, we can have a reasonable debate about the type of military-style hardware that belongs in civilian hands, and why. But that debate should involve an honest accounting of weapons used by mass murderers, which are becoming increasingly familiar.
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
