I was listening to the radio and the person being interviewed said that the police/ FBI are not allowed to say that a gun used in a shooting is a certain model. Is this true? I’m having trouble figuring out how to google it.
I can find no such restriction for the police/FBI. Of course, I may have missed it.
I cannot imagine why the police/FBI would feel the need to withhold such information.
That isn’t true. I can remember the model being mentioned on several of the many occasions we’ve had to deal with this nightmare. The AR-15 has played a prominent role in most of them.
I’d heard it inferred that the gun lobby had pushed through the law.
I suspect I wouldn’t have to look too far to find counter-examples:
Hmm. I will double-check the story and get back to you. It was heard secondhand, so might have been garbled. Sounded plausible enough at first.
It could be they simply don’t want to say. Oddly enough, officials asked difficult questions will often say things like “I can’t tell you that” or “it’s part of an ongoing investigation”. Journalists are not inclinded to spend a long time digging into fact checking these days.
There was an episode in Nova Scotia duing a mass shooting there - a man dressed as a Mountie with a fake police car shot a number of people. Details are unclear, but apparently the head of the RCMP called the investigators to ask what the model of gun(s) used were, claiming the Justice minister wanted to know. The government at the time was in the process of pushing through a bill to ban certain “assualt weapons” and speculation was they wanted the propaganda value of saying “see, that sort of gun should have been banned already”. The local investigators claimed this was political interference (an actual no-no in Canada). Not sure why, it seems pretty simple. Basically, the RCMP response to the shooting was disrganized at best and they wanted to keep as many details as possible hidden. They used to “on-going investigation” excuse, even though there was no reason to hide that detail.
Open to correction to but referring to a rifle as an AR-15 is describing a style of rifle rather than a model. Colt do make an AR-15 model rifle but most rifles referred to as AR-15s are not the Colt AR-15 model.
Ah, okay. It’s like saying Honda (Colt) as opposed to HR-V (AR-15).
Or saying SUV instaead of Ford Explorer.
But it is generally an AR-15 “type” or “clone”, not often the Colt version.
Correct.
The relevant patents to an AR-style platform expired in 1977, and the design is straightforward and fairly effective, so it’s going to be cloned a lot.
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It doesn’t seem that plausible to me as it would be a clear violation of the First Amendment, would it not? How could anyone legally tell the media that they can’t report a basic element of the story?
Now, there are time that authorities might decline telling the press certain information, and there’re other situations where authorities know the media has certain information but ask them to voluntarily not report those data because releasing it could jeopardize their investigation or even put folks in danger (e.g. reporting the size and location of a SWAT team while a bad dude is still holed up with a hostage).
If a reporter reports stuff that they were asked not to I don’t think they’d be in any legal trouble but they might be in a whole lot of career trouble and likely will greatly harm their station’s/paper’s/website’s relationship with local authorities.
Also and I admit this is drifting into commentary, there can also be
(a) how both authorities and media outlets are often criticized for getting granular details of firearms description and nomenclature wrong, so they’d rather not risk it, and
(b) concern that specifying, say, “this was a AmeriFreedom Firearms SeconAm AF15C 5.56mm semiautomatic” is either giving the brand publicity or conversely casting aspersions on it.
But yes, as a rule with reporting I’ve always seen description by type rather than by specific model – “the perp used a .38 revolver” or “a 9mm pistol”, “short barrelled shotgun”, “AR-15 type rifle” or even just “automatic pistol” or “assault type rifle” rather than specify a specific model, until we get to where we are discussing specific evidence for a case.
I’m fairly certain it’s probably for libel and slander laws if they don’t know the exact name and model, as once the make and model is released usually that company gets hounded by the press/public.
Though once they confirm the weapon you do usually see it immediately reported, as seen here due to recent events we now know the Maine shooter used a Ruger SFAR rifle.
The AR-15 isn’t a model, it’s a type.
At it’s core, it’s going to have an upper and lower receiver (the receiver is just the part that “receives” the other parts, i.e. everything bolts onto the receiver). It’s going to have a barrel. It’s going to have a fire control group (the trigger and the bits around it). These parts are going to be of a roughly similar design.
Since the patents have long since expired, anyone can make their own parts, and over the years the AR-15 platform has become by far the number one choice for customization. This is why the AR-15 is so prominently featured in mass shootings. It’s just popular, by both regular shooters and by whack-jobs who go on killing sprees. If you want a custom rifle, you want an AR-15.
This is an AR-15:
This is an AR-15:
This is an AR-15:
Not only are they different styles, but they are completely different weapons with completely different capabilities.
The top one is chambered in .22LR. This is one of the smallest and weakest cartridges that you can buy. A lot of target pistols use .22LR because it is so weak that it has almost no recoil, which helps make it accurate. It’s a popular cartridge for “pocket pistols”. Rifles that shoot .22LR are often referred to as “varmint rifles” since they are good for hunting squirrels or for eliminating groundhogs from your farm, but they are far too small and weak to use for much else. They are also sometimes referred to as “plinkers”, because it’s the type of gun you’d use to shoot at tin cans or other bits of trash (aka “plinking”).
The middle one is chambered in 5.56. This is the most common cartridge for the AR-15 platform since it’s what the military uses. Want cheap ammo? Use the same stuff that the military uses. It’s made in HUGE quantities. Despite how it is portrayed in the press, the 5.56 AR-15 is not some super-deadly high-powered military round. It’s what is called an “intermediate cartridge”, about halfway between a pistol round and a rifle round.
The third one is chambered in .30-06. This is a proper rifle round. It is a popular deer hunting round because it is easily powerful enough to take down a deer in one shot.
So there you have it. Not only are they all different styles, but they range from tiny plinking rifles to high-powered hunting rifles. And they are all AR-15s.
These all look different, but they are all AR-15 upper receivers.
So are these.
And so are these.
This is an AR-15.
These are AR-15s.
This is an AR-15.
This is an AR-15.
And finally, an actual military style AR-15.
The AR-15 isn’t a model. It’s a type. And that type has a LOT of variety. No other platform has anywhere close to the same level of customized parts available on the market.
I went looking for actual statistics, and found this. These are the totals for mass shootings for the period of 1982 to August of 2023.
Number of handguns used: 165
Number of rifles used: 69
Number of shotguns used: 31
Rifles are not broken down by type. Most are probably semi-automatic rifles, and most of those are most likely AR-15 types, but I don’t have actual statistics.
Regardless, rifles in total were only about 1/4th of all weapons used.
Another site had data back to 1966. Of those, 80 percent used handguns, 28 percent used semi-auto rifles (that adds up to more than 100 percent because some used both).
More recent data says that between 2010 and 2020, the use of semi-auto rifles in mass shootings increased from about 1 out of 4 to about 1 out of 3.
So, increasing, but still nowhere near “most”.
I’d be curious too as to number of dead per type, but I suspect you may be right - there’s a lot of shootings, but the ones that make the most noise in the press have the added notoriety of “Assault rifle”.
OTOH, I recall a discussion about types of guns with an American consultant when he was working for us in Canada in the 1990’s. He said “how many Americans really need a gun named the ‘Street Sweeper’? Maybe the deer are running wild in downtown Denver.”
…and that’s w/o mentioning the “AR15”-type “pistols” (exclude a stock and put on a very very short barrel)