Some important new details have come out since my post yesterday about the narrowly avoided school shooting in Missouri. I pointed out that (A) the weapon, though scarily referred to as an AK-47, was most likely a semi-automatic gun that would have worked quite well for hunting and (B) someone was probably negligent in letting this unbalanced 13-year-old get a hold of it. The first point holds with the new information, but the second doesn’t.

New information:

–The gun was technically a Mac-90, a knockoff of the AK-47. My points about semi-automatic fire and deer hunting caliber are unaffected. “Assault weapon” is and always has been a meaningless term, mainly referring to the fact that these otherwise normal guns look mean.

–The student did not, of his own free will, stop the attack (he’s now been charged). The gun jammed, which I would guess is more likely to happen with a knockoff “assault weapon” than with a more standard-looking deer hunting rifle. I’ve never had (or seen) a rifle jam in my 10+ years of hunting and shooting, though I tend to use bolt-action (non-semiautomatic, more reliable) guns. I’ve found jamming most common with semi-auto pistols, and it’s usually due to problems unique to pistols like limp-wristing.

–The gun belonged to the student’s parents. The boy got the weapon from a locked safe; the parents say the boy “apparently” had the combination, implying they didn’t give it to him. If this is the case I would say it exonerates the parents, at least as far as gun availability goes. This is one of those rare situations where having a properly stored gun in the house ended up doing more harm than good. Still, by and large, the evidence suggests that lawful gun ownership deters more crime than it enables.

And the media is still pretty intent on pointing out that, according to police, it’s “not uncommon” for folks in Joplin to own “assault weapons” — without explaining what an assault weapon is. If people knew “AK-47s” were no more powerful than hunting rifles, well, that wouldn’t make rural America look quite so backward, now would it?

Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com.