NEWTOWN, Conn. — Adam Lanza forced his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School carrying a Glock, a SIG Sauer and a Bushmaster rifle, all legally registered to his mother, law enforcement officials said, and all capable of massive killing power.
He chose the rifle over the two handguns to mow down most of his 26 victims in a matter of minutes, inflicting “devastating” multiple wounds, said Connecticut’s chief medical examiner.
Police said that they found “dozens and dozens” of shell casings from .223 high-velocity rounds inside the school, the type of spent casings that come from bullets used in the Bushmaster rifle.
The lightweight .223 bullets travel at a velocity of about 3,000 feet per second, and after they enter their target, they explode throughout the tissue. As the medical examiner H. Wayne Carver II put it at a news conference Saturday, the bullets’ “energy stays in the body.”
A similar high-powered, semiautomatic Bushmaster rifle was the weapon used by the Washington snipers John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, who terrorized the metropolitan area in 2002, killing 10 people and critically wounding three.
In 2004, Bushmaster Firearms agreed to contribute $500,000 to a $2.5 million settlement along with co-defendant Bull’s Eye Shooter Supply, paid to some victims and families of victims of the 2002 Beltway snipers. The company cited mounting legal fees as the reason for settling.
The Bushmaster is one brand of the best-selling type of rifle in America, according to the National Rifle Association, which has been which has been fighting any attempt to reimpose a ban on the AR-15, a civilian modification of assault rifle used by police and military forces. One can be purchased for about $1,000.
The semiautomatic Glock 9mm handgun, made by an Austrian-based company, is extremely popular with law enforcement officers across the country. A lightweight firearm, the Glock is made of synthetic polymers to ease the recoil and can be quickly and easily reloaded.
It is carried by agents with the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration. Two-thirds of U.S. police departments carry the Glock, including officers with the D.C. Police and the New York Police Department.
It is also increasingly the weapon of choice in mass shootings.
The Glock was used in the 2011 shooting at a shopping center in the Tucson, Ariz., area that killed six people and wounded 13, including then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz. In 2007, Seung Hui Cho used a Glock (along with a .22-caliber semiautomatic pistol) to kill 32 people and wound 17 before killing himself at Virginia Tech. A .40-caliber Glock was carried by a gunman into a Colorado movie theater in July, where 12 people were killed and dozens more were wounded.
“The Glock shows up at mass shootings because, as deranged as these killers are, they clearly prepare thoughtfully to accomplish what they seek to accomplish, killing a lot of people in a short period of time,” said Paul Barrett, author of “Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun.”
Barrett said that the Glock is popular because of its large ammunition capacity, its soft trigger pull that allows shooters to fire quickly and its “dark glamor.”
“Within a couple of years after the Glock first appeared in this country in the late 1980s, movie stars were waving it around in Hollywood movies and the most famous hip-hop stars were rapping about the Glock by name, including Tupac Shakur who was later killed by a Glock,” Barrett said.
No details were available Saturday about whether Lanza used large-capacity magazines when he was shooting. But the Glock, which costs $500 to $600, fires up to five bullets a second at a velocity of 1,200 feet per second.
The 9mm SIG Sauer pistol is also popular with law enforcement and the military because it is lightweight, easy to carry and conceal and can be easily reloaded. According to SIG Sauer, one-third of U.S. police forces use SIG firearms.
Available for about $300, the handgun fires up to five bullets a second at a velocity of 1,200 feet per second. The SIG Sauer was used in a 1989 shooting in Louisville, Ky. that left eight people dead and 12 wounded. And it was the gun, legally purchased and owned, that Floyd Lee Corkins is charged with pulling from his backpack and firing at a security guard at the Family Research Council in the District of Columbia in August.
ayuh, and a bomb would have killed many, many more in the blink of an eye…
does Bushmaster also make bombs?
No, but one can hope, right?
No they don’t but with a internet search and some readily available materials any novice can construct one.
these kids were not killed by a bomb .It was a BUSH master Do you work for the manufacturer?
Why was the first information from the police officers saying that only hand guns were found on the shooter and the rifle was found in his car? Now that the issue of gun control has surfaced, NOW they say he used a rifle? What IS the true story?
the ‘truth’ is what the anti-gun, pro-big pharma corporatist cheerleading democrats want you to believe…vote accordingly, just don’t hope too much for change
Are you serious???? I watched the news conference yesterday by the chief medical examiner……..the one that actually had his hands inside the dead bodies of 7 children pulling out 3 to 11 bullets from each. Time for people like you to face reality instead of living in your own little world!
The title of the story is false. It was NOT the MURDERERS rifle he STOLE it. He also STOLE the car he used to get the the school. The school is a liberal feel good “GUN FREE ZONE” so what law woudl have effected this CRIMINAL who broke so many laws in just this single day. Also there where in CT one of the most strict states in regards to legally obtaining firearms.
As long as these people get the attention and people keep blaming the tool used then we are going to have more people like this.
FYI The SAME day in China where firearms are all but non existent for civilians a nut took a knife to 22 kids and one adult. Last year about 20 kids where killed and 50 wounded in knife attacks like this.
Crazy criminals do not care about the law thus the laws we have nor new ones will have and effect on them. If laws stopped crime we would not have any crime would we?
and NONE of the children in CHINA weer KILLED. See the difference in lethality ??
Everything is a conspiracy according to these wingnuts.
Which leads to bad analogies and wild, unfounded stereotyping.
The” truth “is what the gun manufacturer and the NRA wants you to believe. PS Murdock has come out AGAINST assault rifles and says they must be banned.!!
What difference does how the rifle looks have to do with anything? The liberal definition of a “assault rifle” covers anything black or military looking. The founders where very clear that the people should have access to the SAME weapons the military does.
Under the “clinton ban” crime did not drop at all in fact many places it went dramatically UP. Criminals by definition do not obey the law so what good would a new law do?
Evidently the latter is the true story. Preliminaries were obviously inerror.
Faux news?? it would be interesting to go back and do a fact check time line to see what media initially reported that AND that the murder’s mother was a teacher there.
Where did BOTH pieces of erroneous info come from? The person in charge of the investigation is saying there is all kinds of HARMFUL misinformation being reported on these homemade black blackbackgrounded websites. and that HE is the ONLY source of truthful and accurate info .
It wasn’t “the police ” who told them??….but over eager news people, who got it wrong??
Gun nuts need to be disarmed and concentrated somewhere for their safety and ours! Give them a chance to be re-educated and rejoin society but for all of the world’s sake, stand up to them.
Ok….and let’s call it a military! You know like the one that defends your right to post stupid stuff?
A Sig Sauer can fire 5 rounds a second? I’d like to see that!!! It is popular with law enforcement officials because of it’s reliability. It is no easier to reload than most handguns. Let’s stop with the exaggerating to scare people. Guns are guns. And as for a .223 bullet creating “devastating wounds.” Be glad he wasn’t using an AK-47 which also can also use a 30 round magazine and makes a much larger hole in a human body. I know of what I speak. A tour of Vietnam let me see many bodies with holes from both AK-47s and M-16s.
Why is that that people are so good a knee jerk reactions???? This country is getting scarier by the year. People who have never touched a firearm in their lives are suddenly experts???
My heart goes out the the families that lost loved ones in this terrible tragedy. I know how they felt. I lost more people who reported to me in Vietnam, but no one gave a sh*& at the time. I have also carried out dozens of dead children and babies from villages that the NVA and/or Viet Cong annihilated. It makes it hard to put this into perspective. We don’t seem to give a sh*& about entire populations being all but destroyed in other parts of the world, but OMG when it happens at home!! We should be ashamed to be so narrow minded.
We are lucky that we live in what is probably the safest country in the world. But we appear to have lost a realistic perspective of the dangers that exist in the world today. Connecticut all but outlawed guns, but the fact that this tragedy occurred anyways just goes to show that guns don’t kill people. It’s the idiots that hold the gun that do the job.
Realistic, intelligently applied gun laws, without the histrionics of the NRA or the antis and their interference are what we need. But as long as we have the NRA on one side and the ignorant antis on the other there appears to be very little chance of a commonsensical gun law structure being enacted. Sort of like national politics on any other issue of any importance.
A Vietnam vet and Hunter Safety Instructor.
Agreed. I have just as much to fear from a .22 if it is aimed well. If the shooter is adept at changing magazines, the magazine capacity won’t matter much. The description we have so far indicates he fired a lot of rounds. Whether he had to change mags 2 times or 10 times doesn’t seem to be significant. I don’t think it’s a critical factor unless somebody is returning fire. But I’m already reading about plans to reinstate the bans that expired in 2004. My definition of an assault gun is any gun when it is being used to assault somebody. Yes, a gun is a gun.
I love your whole post…with the exception of the “probably the safest country in the world”. That’s just not realistic.
Note that he did most of the killing with the Bushmaster. You may argue about the ballistics and wounding, but still obviously deadly. The question still remains, of what use are weapons of these types in this society? Hunting? Hardly. Rapid killing? Evidently.
They are excellent for hunting coyotes.
You were in a war serving your country; these kids were not. They were in a classroom The only comparison is apparently— the injuries. A classroom isn’t supposed to be a “war zone”.. Thanks for serving and welcoome home. It was a very devastating and difficult war.
We do not live in the safest country in the world.
This article is plagued with errors. Please stop trying to exploit a tragedy for political purposes. Many innocent children are dead and many parents and children are grieving from this horror. We live in a sick world where sick people will take any tool or weapon to hurt the most precious people in our life. America cannot collectively encourage sociopathic behavior in our movies, music, and video games and then act shocked that some mentally unstable person commits mass murder – our pop culture glorifies it. As a nation, we cannot have it both ways. Maybe it’s time we turn back to God and stop chasing our own flawed “wisdom”.
Exploiting for political purposes? Gun defenders politicized the tragedy from the start. Granted, increased religiosity could help, but I don’t see either the shooters or extremists on both sides of the issue as necessarily religious.
Swimming pools still kill far more children. While swimming may be rooted in history as a way of obtaining food or getting around, it is simply no longer necessary. People who own pools do so at the risk of children’s lives for the selfish purpose of their own recreation. (do those arguments sound familiar)
These kids didn’t die in a swimming pool. Someone came into their classroom and actively killed them with a semi automatic
and your political rhetoric amounts to this “don’t take my guns away ” It’s everyone and eveything else’s fault BUT irresponsible gun laws.!!
There are so many inaccuracies in this article it should be pulled and rewritten. Sensationalism at it’s worst.
Spare us your rewrite.
Don’t worry, I wouldn’t want to bore you with facts.
You can outlaw guns but it what can you do about insane or evil ?
Evil, yes. Insanity, not demonstrated.
put them in an anti bullying class..
No shock..this is a Washington Post article. The Washington Post can’t be properly described without the word flaming…
Present company excepted?
NRA supporters would love for everyone to believe that more restrictive gun control policies would not save any more lives. Incidentally, statistics from the developed countries around the world make it pretty clear that’s a load of BS.
See for yourself:
Firearm Availability and Homicide Rates across 26 High-Income Countries
David Hemenway, PhD, and Matthew Miller, MD, MPH, ScD
The Journal of Trauma, Injury, Infection, and Critical Care
2000;49:985–988.
Background:
Among developed nations, the United States has the highest rate of civilian gun
ownership, and the highest homicide rate. We examine whether the United States
is merely an exception, or if a relationship between gun availability and
homicide exists across all developed nations.
Methods:
Homicide rates for the early 1990s come from 26 of 27 of the highly
industrialized or high-income countries with greater than 1 million population
as classified by the World Bank. Two common proxies for gun availability are
used, the percentage of suicides with a firearm, and the“Cook index,” the
average of the percentage of suicides with a firearm and the percentage of
homicides with a firearm.
Results: In simple regressions (no control variables) across 26 high-income nations, there is a strong and statistically significant association between gun availability and homicide rates.
Conclusion:
Across developed countries, where guns are more available, there are more
homicides.
Read that last part again, just so it sinks in…
“Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International and some Domestic Evidence” in Volume 30, Number 2 of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy (pp. 649-694) found the exact opposite.
I appreciate the use of research to make the point rather than just hauling up the same old rhetoric. At this point what needs to happen is for everyone to put aside ideology and have a sensible debate about realistic policy options that will address all elements of this problem – from mental health, poverty, and culture, to yes, the easy accessibility of firearms. The foundation for that discussion is relying on facts and research rather than emotion. Unfortunately, because the issue has become so polarizing, finding legitimate research that’s not out to move some agenda is increasingly difficult.
For example, the Mauser/Kates study you cited has been debunked for manipulating data. They use Luxembourg as one of their primary examples of gun bans not having an effect on the murder rate, because Luxembourg has a complete, across the board ban on guns. It cites the murder rate in 2002 as 9.01 per 100,000, which would rank it right behind Russia for one of the highest murder rates. The problem is that they put the decimal point in the wrong place… the murder rate was in fact .9 per 100,000, which would have placed it at the bottom of their table. [Mauser himself cites the .9 2002 murder rate figure here: international-evidence-on-gun-bans-and-murder-rates.pdf].
Was this intentional manipulation, or simply incompetent review? Either way it doesn’t say much for the quality of the work, and in fact reflects that this was not a peer-reviewed study at all but a contribution to Harvard’s student run Conservative/Libertarian legal journal. You can find the description right here: http://www.harvard-jlpp.com/about/, and evaluate for yourself whether it is a credible alternative to the far more numerous peer-reviewed works of sociology that find a strong correlation between the availability of firearms and homicides.
Aren’t Bushmasters made in Maine ?
Not any more. The business was sold and moved. I beleive a new company formed at the Windha location and has begun production and sales as Windham Weaponry.
The facts simply don’t add up. You cannot trust the corporate media at all.
Apparently this kid with aspergers was an excellent shot? But the bushmaster was in the car, no, it was wasn’t, yes it was….what?
How is it possible there was no taken to the er? Did you see the number if ambulances at the scene? Like two…
Second shooter walks out of the woods dressed in camo looks parents in the eyes as he walks by and says he didn’t do it…what the heck happened to this guy?
Inlets address the real questions! Why? Motivation is important. Not the gun.
So initial reports on this tregety had him using only hand guns…..now that the liberals smell the rising tide of a possible gun control measure it was a semi auto rifle that was used…..hmmmm?
What’s next? It was the fault of a anti Muslim u-tube video?
For every one person who died on 9/11, fifty people have been murdered by guns in the USA over the last 10 years. We have all sorts of fake security measures we have to go through on our phony War on Terror. But real violence against our citizenry is allowed to go unchecked.
Rightwing guns nuts here, from my cold dead hand types here, 2nd amendment militia crazies here, NRA fanatics here, big brother paranoia types here, the muslim in chief will take my guns away here, I need guns to protect myself from the OTHER nuts here, You guys are more worried about losing the comfort of how much that gun in your hands make you feel more like a man, than this gun problem the U.S. has… but lets face it the gun is out of Pandora’s box and will never be able to be put back in.
But just a few words to the gun nuts today.
Just shut the hell up for a few days.
Probably best well stated post ever heard on this site.