Federal law enforcement officials said the gun used by Florida high school shooter Nikolas Cruz to kill 17 and wound 14 others at Parkland High School in Broward County was an AR-15 assault rifle.
And you can buy one in Virginia and Maryland, despite steps to ban them.
The AR-15 is semi-automatic, which means the shooter can pull the trigger over and over and keep firing until the magazine runs out of bullets.
In a 2016 blog post, the NRA called the AR-15 "America's Most Popular" rifle.
You can’t have an AR-15 in Washington, DC because assault weapons are banned. But you can across the Potomac River.
Virginia law allows gun owners to buy an AR-15 as long as they are 18 or older and pass a three-page federal background check. But that background check will not catch the red flags missed with the Florida shooter, including social media rants and school expulsions.
Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring said Thursday, the laws should be changed to ban AR-15's and all assault rifles in the commonwealth.
"These military style assault weapons, these weapons of war are designed to kill as many people as possible on the battlefield," Herring said. "They do not belong on the streets or in our communities, and the laws that we have are not sufficient to protect people."
Those laws, more nuanced In Maryland, where assault-rifles, including the AR-15, were banned in 2013. If you had one before then you could keep it.
But there's a loophole that has allowed continued sale of a certain type of AR-15 in Maryland. It's called the H-Bar AR-15, which stands for "heavy barrel." Because the “heavy barrel” AR-15 is used for target shooting it's exempt from the ban.
But gun dealers tell WUSA9 the only difference between those two AR-15's is a single pound of weight. Still, those gun dealers say the assault weapons ban has drastically reduced the stock of AR-15’s in Maryland gun stores.
