Wisconsin shooter Wade Michael Page used a Springfield 9mm semiautomatic handgun to carry out the attack at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, officials said. As in several other recent mass shootings, the gun had been purchased legally, at a Milwaukee-area gun store called the Shooter Shop.
James Holmes, the man accused of killing 12 people in a shooting spree last month at a theater in Aurora, Colorado, used one .40-caliber Glock handgun and had another one in his car. Jared Loughner, who is accused of killing six people and critically wounding Representative Gabrielle Giffords in a January 2011 attack in Tucson, Arizona, used a Glock 9 mm semiautomatic pistol with a magazine that held more than 30 bullets.
Seung-hui Cho, the Virginia Tech University student who killed 32 people and then committed suicide in 2007, also used a Glock semiautomatic handgun. The common thread binding the mass attacks together is that they all used semiautomatic handguns with high-capacity magazines.
Semiautomatic handguns are the weapon of choice for mass murderers because they are light and easy to conceal, and adaptable to using high-capacity magazines, experts say. This allows the shooter to fire the maximum number of bullets in a short period of time.
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