My wife, and I am sure she is not alone, is asking this morning why automatic weapons are allowed ‘with all of these attacks’. Explained to her that I think this is the first US terrorist attack with an automatic weapon. Ban machine guns she suggests. And how do we carve that out and keep the 2nd amendment alive? Argument on both sides is that automatic weapons likely make up what, maybe 1% of all privately owned guns?
My question is, how did he get all of that into the hotel? Do places like this allow people to bring in guns, have no detection/security system etc. ? (I don’t travel much or stay in places like that, so I don’t know about them.)
Now, illegal (smuggled or home-built) machine guns are another story. Many police departments have collections of illegal (and subsequently deactivated) fully-automatic weapons that were seized from arrestees or found at crime scenes. With our porous southern border, it would be easy enough to send crates of AKs up into the southwestern US. IIRC, there was a shipping container full of real, military AKs that BATF caught at a California wharf, back during the Clinton years. A "packaging error" in China. I wonder how many such containers made it through?
Approximately 1.7 million registered NFA items (includes machine guns) out of an estimated 400 - 700 MILLION guns.