“A San Francisco UPS driver who killed three colleagues in a shooting rampage at a company warehouse was armed with two stolen guns and appeared to target his victims,” abcnews.go.com reports. “Lam was armed with two stolen weapons. One was an assault pistol that is illegal in California and was stolen in Utah.” And that would be . .
Lam shot his victims with a MAC 10 made by MasterPiece Arms, an automatic pistol that is illegal in California. The pistol was also equipped with a special magazine that held 30 bullets instead of 10, gun gear that is also illegal in California.
First, what’s an “assault pistol”?
A true assault rifle is a select fire weapon (capable of fully-automatic fire). Gun control advocates feel free to redefine that definition to “any rifle that’s black and scary looking (with a shoulder thingie that goes up).”
I reckon an “assault pistol” is any pistol that doesn’t look like a revolver or a GLOCK. Or anything with a threaded barrel (as per California law). Which is kinda funny ’cause GLOCK makes a fully automatic pistol, and most gunmakers make pistols with threaded barrels
Second, it wasn’t a MAC-10.
MasterPiece Arms doesn’t make a MAC-10. Never has. The company started after the ATF declared “open bolt” firearms to be verboten. (Click here to read Nick’s post on the company.) MPA redesigned a MAC-10 clone and rechristened it.
MPA makes a range of such guns, under a variety of model designations. We don’t know which model the killer used, but it wasn’t a MAC-10.
As for the source of the killer’s gun, well, good luck with that. While the ATF suddenly becomes really interested in tracing a stolen gun that’s used in a high-profile crime, the horse has left the barn.
The odds of shutting down a stolen gun “smuggling ring” are pretty small. (There are a lot of “casual sales” of stolen guns.) As the ATF’s predecessors learned during Prohibition, destroying one source of a highly-prized illegal item only enables another.