The other scary thing about these events is the number of "experts" who show up on TV and are completely ignorant. Initially some people thought this guy had a AK-47 solely because of his butcher's bill. We need to renew the Assault Weapons Ban! Turns out the gunman had a 9mm semi-automatic and lots of magazines. Oops.
It would also be wise to take "eye witness accounts" with a grain of salt for a while. The ones most likely to be correct are generally out of the action. The people involved in the action are unlikely to be reliable. Things happen too fast. Few people keep their head. Even fewer are trained to know what to look for in a firefight. Remember survivors firing on the rescue helicopters in New Orleans after Katrina? Didn't happen or at least no aircraft came home with bullets in them. Some pilot heard gunfire and panicked because they didn't know how to judge where the bullets were going.
A commenter over Wizbang is making statements like this:
And finally, MSNBC had a commentator who said that semi-automatic weapons were illegal in Virginia, and yet possessing all the components necessary to convert a firearm to semi-automatic *are* legal. This country needs gun laws that make sense...Semi-automatic firearms aren't illegal anywhere in the US. Automatic weapons are regulated. Semi-automatic firearms cycle one bullet through the gun with each pull of the trigger. Automatic firearms cycle as many bullets as they can while the trigger is held down. Also possessing a conversion kit and the weapon to be converted is generally regarded as possession of a converted weapon by the ATF. Which is a felony. Sadly it is the people proposing new gun laws which generally don't understand the ones we already have on the books.
Unfortunately the desire to fill the news vacuum on this story is going to make for a lot of poor reporting for a while. The shooting is bad news, but the coverage is bad news of a completely different sort.
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