A closer look at the MAC-10, the semiautomatic gun that law enforcement say was used in a mass shooting over the weekend that killed 11 people at a Monterey Park dance studio.
As familiar as mass shootings have become, the gunman’s choice of weapon in the attack Saturday night that left 11 people dead and nine injured in Monterey Park stands out.
Instead of the assault-style rifles that have surfaced in recent high-casualty shootings, authorities say, Huu Can Tran carried a 9-millimeter MAC-10 — a relic by today’s standards — when he walked into a dance hall about 10:20 p.m. and began spraying bullets as frightened patrons ducked for cover. Authorities recovered at least 42 spent shell casings from the scene.
At a news conference Monday afternoon, Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said the weapon was wrested from Tran at a dance club in Alhambra and provided law enforcement with the first clues to the gunman’s identity.
The gun, which was used with an extended magazine, is generally illegal in California. Luna said investigators also recovered a Norinco 7.62 x 25 semiautomatic handgun registered to Tran from inside a white van where the 72-year-old was found dead from shooting himself.
As authorities continue to comb Tran’s background for a possible motive, Luna said his agency has been working with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to determine the guns’ origins.
“It’s part of the puzzle that we’re trying to put together,” he said.
The MAC-10 is unmistakable, having shown up in countless action movies and TV shows from the mid-1970s into the 1990s. It resembles a compact version of a machine gun but is considered semiautomatic, firing one bullet with each squeeze of the trigger. Although the weapon was frequently wielded on-screen by John Wayne, Arnold Schwarzenegger and others, in the real world it is considered more of a show piece due to its poor aim and reputation for jamming.
The version that Tran was carrying had been modified, Luna told reporters on Monday, without offering further details.
James Densley, a criminal justice professor at Metropolitan State University in Minnesota, said the gun evokes images of violent crime in the 1990s, but has rarely been used in mass shootings.
Densley and Jillian Peterson, a professor at Minnesota’s Hamline University, started a database of mass shootings, called the Violence Project. The archive dates to a 1966 attack on the campus of the University of Texas in Austin, considered the first modern mass shooting. It uses the academic definition of a mass shooting as an incident in a public space with at least four fatalities.
By that measure, Densley said, the preferred weapon among mass shooters in recent years has been an AR-15-style rifle, which was used in a third of the 66 such attacks in the U.
