Nashville school shooter was armed with two assault-style weapons

Photos of the three weapons recovered from Hale can be seen in a March 27 tweet by MNPD.

(Reuters) - Experts and officials say that the suspect in a Nashville, Tennessee school shooting on March 27, Audrey Elizabeth Hale, was armed with two assault-type guns and a handgun, contrary to claims online that Hale did not use assault-style weapons.

One Facebook user said, “Any excuse to try and ban our rights to defend ourselves” while sharing a post with text reading, in part, “She didn’t use the big bad assault guns they want banned.” (here) More examples can be seen (here) and (here).

However, the arms used by Hale in the school shooting were publicly identified by police, and two of the three guns meet most legal definitions for assault-style weapons, experts told Reuters.

WEAPONS IDENTIFIED

Hale was armed with three weapons and fatally shot six people at a private Christian school (here). Reuters reported in the days following the shooting that Hale had two assault-style weapons, which were among seven firearms Hale had legally purchased in recent years from Nashville-area stores (here), (here).

Tennessee allows all individuals 21 or older to carry a firearm without a permit, whether openly or concealed (here).

The Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD) said Hale was armed with two assault-type weapons and a 9mm handgun in a media release and a tweet (here), (here). 

Photos of the three weapons recovered from Hale can be seen in a March 27 tweet by MNPD (here).

Experts told Reuters that the photo on the left shows a Kel-Tec Sub2000 pistol caliber carbine with 9mm rounds, whose manufacturer describes it as “a semi-automatic folding carbine” (here); the weapon on the top-right is a Lead Star Arms Grunt AR-15 pistol that uses 5.56 mm ammunition (here); and the last weapon is a Smith & Wesson M&P9 Shield EZ 9mm pistol (here).

Hale fired a total of 152 rounds, including over a hundred 5.56 rifle rounds and more than two dozen 9mm rounds, according to an April 3 MNPD update (here).

ASSAULT-STYLE WEAPONS

Lawmakers define “what is or isn’t an assault weapon,” Daniel Webster, Bloomberg Professor of American Health in Violence Prevention at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, told Reuters.

“Typically, the laws say semi-automatic firearms that accept high-capacity magazines, and have at least 1 (or in some laws, at least 2) other features considered to be more relevant to criminal use than to sporting or self-defense,” he said by email.

These features include “folding stocks, barrel shrouds, pistol grips, threaded barrel to accept suppressors (aka, “silencers”),” Webster added, which can facilitate concealment and/or firing a large number of rounds very rapidly.”

The “AR” in AR-15s stands for Armalite, but the weapon’s name has been used as an umbrella term for that style of gun (here), (here).

WEAPONS USED IN NASHVILLE ARE ASSAULT-STYLE

Both the AR-15 pistol and the Kel-Tec Sub2000 carbine pistol would be considered assault-style weapons “based on definitions of assault weapons used by many states that ban them,” Webster said.

On July 2022, the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation banning assault-style weapons (here), (here). It says “all AR types,” specifically the AR-15, and the Kel-Tec Sub-2000, are among the firearms considered semiautomatic assault-style weapons.

Hale was armed with weapons that have “object design features that are included in the legislation, including detachable magazines, pistol grips, threaded barrels, and barrel shrouds,” Mike Stankiewicz, national press secretary at the nonprofit organization Brady: United Against Gun Violence, told Reuters by email.

Ryan Busse, a gun owner and senior advisor at Giffords, a nonprofit dedicated to preventing gun violence, told Reuters that the AR-15 Hale owned would be defined as a pistol, not a rifle, by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), but “it is in essence a shortened AR-15 rifle.”

“The only difference between this gun and an ‘AR-15 rifle’ are that this gun has a shorter barrel and the stock is modified to fit the definition of an arm brace,” Busse said, but the two use the same 5.56 ammunition, which is what Hale used for the “majority of shooting.”

As for the Kel-Tec carbine, it is “a hodgepodge of pistol and assault rifle,” he said, and “most would also label it as (an) assault gun.”

VERDICT

False. The suspect in the Nashville school shooting was armed with three firearms, two of which are considered assault-style weapons.