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Tangential, but have we gotten any reliable information on the weapon used? From the one picture reposted everywhere, I figured 30-06. Now tabloids are saying 8mm Mauser. Weird either way. After the tacticool Butler gun and Routh’s trap house special, are we going to get a third style? Is the next assassin going to use a spetsnaz knife?
Back in the 80s and 90s, a lot of mass shootings involved SKSes and mini-14s, since they squeaked through the feature tests of Clinton's AWB.
I'd expect modern shooters to converge on whatever passes through the combined sieve of the various state bans. I'd also expect more and more successful shooters to start thinking about things like distance from the target and the possibility of the shooter wearing armor.
In that context, the optimal gun is nearly identical to Grandpa's full power hunting rifle, which nobody has the political power and will to ban.
I think that this depends on the killer's goal. For a targeted assassination of an unsuspecting victim from distance, hunting rifles seem obvious. But not every sick fuck is a sick fuck bent just on murdering one specific person, some want to kill as many as possible. These seem to be the ones who mostly go for semi- or full-auto weapons, if they can get their hands on them.
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Not really an answer to your question, but .30-06 Springfield (7.62 x 63) and 8 mm Mauser (7.92 x 57) are extremely similar rounds, developed at about the same time for the same kind of weapons (full power rifles). Traditional European loadings of 8 mm Mauser deliver basically equivalent performance to .30-06 Springfield (although American-manufactured 8 mm Mauser rounds are often downloaded for safety/compatibility reasons).
But both are rounds in the same (8 mm) rifle round class, used as military service rifles for the first half of the twentieth century and for hunting. You'd probably have to be an aficionado to be able to distinguish a rifle firing one cartridge from the other at a glance.
While I would consider myself an aficionado, I have yet to see any pictures of the gun itself. Just a 5-round stripper clip of FMJ rifle bullets. I figured it was most likely a something like a 1903. But there are certainly Mausers floating around the Midwest.
Hoping we get more details. It’d be incredibly stupid if the media tries to paint this guy as a Wehraboo.
In the gory picture of the (self)shooter that is probably still floating around twitter, he's gripping what looks like a full-wood military Mauser of some kind -- K98k is my strong impression, so 8mm is a good guess, although there are other possibilities. (Notably .308, in case it's an, ahem, Israeli mauser)
Interesting possibilities in the ill-informed CW space, in that there's a strong chance that the rifle is stamped with either or both of swastikas and stars of David!
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Ah, I see. Agreed.
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