this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
90 points (92.5% liked)

News

22838 readers
3982 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] theyoyomaster@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

He had bump stocks, the official investigation never determined whether or not he used them or if any of the rifles were illegally modified to be actual machine guns.

[–] Followupquestion@lemm.ee 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The official investigation also never really turned up a motive, and if he was suicidal and wanted to take the maximum number of people with him, he had his own plane, so…

[–] theyoyomaster@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's a lot of unanswered questions, even after the investigation was completed. A FOIA request showed that the ATF was prohibited from inspecting any of the guns to check for full auto modifications. It was a deliberate choice by investigators to not determine anything pertaining to the function of any given weapon.

[–] JustZ@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Why would the ATF inspect the guns? That's the FBI's job, isn't it?

[–] theyoyomaster@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The ATF handles the firearms portion of high visibility investigations. It was the ATF that investigated the firearms aspect of the massacre and were the source of that portion of the final report. No agency actually inspected the internal components of the guns at any point and the final report did not determine whether or not bump stocks were actually used, just that it was a possibility. This was revealed via a FOIA request after the investigation completed. The powers that be made the specific choice to not figure out if they were or were not machine guns or conduct any sort of testing on the weapons regarding their function or rate of fire and commented on this fact on internal documents during the investigation.

[–] JustZ@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Interesting, I've never heard of this function of the ATF.

I guess it didn't matter since the suspect was dead and there wasn't going to be a prosecution for an unlawful possession of machine gun charge?

[–] theyoyomaster@lemmy.world -1 points 1 year ago

Maybe? They didn't give their justification but more likely than not it is because both the FBI and ATF considered their primary job not to be investigating and getting answers as much as creating justification for summarily ignoring laws by executive fiat.

[–] FARTYSHARTBLAST@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That seems really insane, how did they not determine that? What the fuck did they even investigate then?

[–] theyoyomaster@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

The simplest and most likely answer is that they didn't want to know. If they can say "he had bumpstocks" they had reason to ignore the fact that bumpstocks are 100% legal and ban them anyway without legislation. If they had found out that he genuinely modified them to be real machine guns, which are already banned by legislation, then they wouldn't have their justification for going outside the law. There might be another answer but this is the one that feels the least like a conspiracy theory. It took a FOIA request for them to even admit that they were prohibited from inspecting any of the weapons used.

[–] SeaJ@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's pretty obvious he did but the extremely high rate of fire. You'd have to be nuts to think he brought them but decided his finger had had enough of a work out to be able to for rapidly for an extended period of time. It's not like he needed precision since he was firing into a giant crowd

[–] theyoyomaster@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Not necessarily. The rate of fire is far more consistent than you normally get with a bump stock. Converting any given gun to full auto illegally isn't that hard, it can even be done with a shoelace. During the course of the investigation the ATF was prohibited from testing or inspecting any of the weapons and they admitted that they do not know if they were illegal machine guns or not. All it would have taken is a pair of tin snips and a sheet of mild steel from home depot; the asshole more than proved that he had time and ability to do so.