Tag Archive for 'omaha_police'

Despite the emphasis in nearly every major media outlet’s coverage of yesterdays shooting in a Nebraska mall, the shooter did not use an “assault” weapon by any stretch of the imagination. But this doesn’t stop the media from using the term:

A 19-year-old man killed eight people and then himself with an assault rifle at a busy mall in Omaha on Wednesday, sending terrified workers and Christmas shoppers scrambling for cover.

But the weapon used was not an assault rifle, it was about the cheapest, impractical* rifle money can buy – a Russian SKS. It would take five minutes of google-work to determine that the SKS is semi-automatic, with 10-round magazines and is well known to be used by rednecks for shooting beer cans long before it would ever be used by a mass murderer.

In a 2001 letter to the editor, Ed Hoyer Jr. wrote an excellent and short analysis of the term being applied to the gun in the Chicago Tribune:

The SKS is a semiautomatic rifle. It is not an assault rifle.

Real assault rifles have a selector switch that controls how many bullets will be fired with one pull of the trigger. The usual pattern is up to four selections: safe or no bullets, one bullet at a time, a burst of three bullets or fully automatic fire like a machine gun. That selector switch is what makes a real assault rifle different from a semiautomatic rifle.

The SKS has never had this selector switch. It has always been a semiautomatic rifle–one bullet for each pull of the trigger. That’s the way the Russians designed it and the way it has been built all over the world. It is a simple, easy-to-operate, semiautomatic rifle. It’s popular in the U.S. because it is simple to operate, inexpensive, easy to maintain and can be used for both target shooting and hunting some game.

But the media isn’t entirely to blame for messing this one up. The originator of this inaccuracy, not the last, I’m sure, in a long line of mainstream myths, ignorance and political exaduration of gun threats, is actually the local police department.

It was local Omaha police chief Thomas Warren who first declared to the media that we are talking about an “assault rifle.” One would think that a police officer (police chief, no less), supposedly well trained in firearm use and identification, would be able to tell the difference between something like a full-auto AK-47 with a 30 round banana magazine, and a glorified bottle shooter like an SKS.

The distinction is important – if not only for accuracy in government and media. But accuracy is even more important, because guns, weapons and public use of these things are paramount issues in the United States. In order to make accurate determinations of what kind of weapons are dangerous, we need to know the facts in the first place. If we don’t, we can soon expect “outrageous exposes” on how regular people, without b***ground checks or special approval, can just walk in a gun shop and buy an “assault rifle.”

*author changed “worthless” to “impractical” to emphasize that, while the SKS is a useful weapon, it is not the most pragmatic choice for close-quarter killing