Jophiel wrote:
ITT: Gbaji randomly guesses at what a gun might have looked like then throws a hissy fit that some media outlet didn't make the same random guess.
I especially like the "It's unlikely he bought one like that" when all of my links were to gun dealers (whoops, two dealers, one private seller) selling exactly that. Yeah, real unicorn that pistol group is.
Have you ever even been inside a gun store? I'm honestly curious. Pictures on the internet are not an accurate representation of reality. Just saying. I'm not at all saying that he could not have obtained an SKS with a pistol grip, folding stock, extended magazine, and some kind of fancy scope, but if he just walked into a gun store and purchased a few weapons in a relatively short amount of time (which is what it appears that he did, since every story I've read that mentions it says he purchased it at a local gun store and he was only in the area for a couple months), it's extremely unlikely that he purchased a rifle like that, and that the rifle would have been an SKS and not a number of other weapons which far more commonly possess those features.
Don't get me wrong. It's possible you could just walk into a gun store and they have an SKS modified with such things, that they happened to obtain in a private sale recently, and they don't yet have a buyer lined up, and you got lucky. Kinda like walking onto a car lot and happening to see a classic car with custom cams, glass pack, CAI, blower, and custom exhaust. It's possible. But not likely. Now, if you're looking for that kind of thing, you buy any of a number of more modern weapons that come with them. You don't buy an SKS.
That he purchased an SKS rather than something newer is almost certainly because he wanted a weapon with a larger round with more stopping power than the usual crop of cool looking weapons (with things like pistol grips and folding stocks), but pretty small and weak rounds. Let's not forget that he was buying this weapon intending to go out and shoot some people, right? Again, I suppose he might randomly have run into one with those cosmetic modifications, but it's unlikely.
Unless we see a photo somewhere of the actual weapon he used, there's no way to be sure. Again though, my primary point was about the media rushing to put the one guy who was "absolutely positive" that it was an AK-47 (a weapon it almost certainly was not), on their news broadcast. And, predictably, he was absolutely wrong. Whether it's possible to buy a variant of the weapon that was used that has some of the same features found on other weapons is really not the point. It's the point that anyone who is legitimately knowledgeable enough about firearms to actually be "absolutely positive" about the weapon used, would not, under any circumstances have made that statement about that weapon.
But the journalist in question obviously wasn't going to bother to determine if the person saying that had any actual knowledge of firearms to make such a determination. He just put the person on the broadcast because he was saying something the journalist wanted the public to believe was true. Which is really really terrible journalism.
Oh. And honestly, one of the things that has been bothering me. Your use of the words "some" and "many" from a few posts back is completely backwards. "Most" SKS rifles are going to look like the classic wood stock version. "Some" will have other features more commonly connected with a military style look. Again though, the relative appearance of such things in images on the internet are not an accurate indication of their relative commonality in the real world. I keep going back to car references, but it's a pretty accurate analogy. You don't put the picture of the economy car on your website. You put the sports car on there, right? But which car do you think the dealership sells the most of, and makes most of their money on?
Gun stores work the same way.
Edited, Jun 21st 2017 9:18pm by gbaji 
Sorry your conservative rage-blogs steered you wrong, man. 
