Columbiana Center Mall

“A Columbia police officer reported March 13 that he found part of an AR-15 assault rifle and six 40-bullet banana-style ammo clips in Roof’s car during a routine encounter in a downtown Columbia park,” thestate.com reports. “Roof told the officer he wanted to buy an AR-15.” That revelation brought out the “assault rifle” hand-wringers in droves . . .

“That’s scary. We ought to be thankful he never got his hands an AR-15,” said former U.S. Attorney and State Law Enforcement Division director Reggie Lloyd, now an attorney in private practice.

An AR-15 is the semi-automatic civilian version of the U.S. military’s M16 fully automatic assault rifle.

Such a weapon, loaded with a 40-bullet ammo clip, could allow someone to shoot several dozen people without reloading and from a greater distance than the .45 Glock handgun Roof is accused of using in the June 17 church killings.

Assault rifles are designed to inflict maximum damage on a maximum number of people in a brief time. The AR-15 is known for its high-velocity rounds that spin upon entering a human body, wreaking havoc in muscle and tissue.

“Roof wanted even more ability to kill than he had,” said Rep. Joe Neal, D-Richland, a longtime member of the S.C. House. “This suggests to me that if he had had access to a more powerful weapon, he would have killed a lot more people.”

State NAACP president Lonnie Randolph agreed. “This is frightening,” he said of the report. Clearly, Roof was thinking of killing more people, he said.

Roof, then 20, was not charged with a crime because it’s not illegal to possess a forearm grip of an AR-15.

Yet. Regardless of the anti-AR rhetoric, we know that Roof “cased” the Columbiana Center Mall before heading to the Emanuel AME Church to commit his heinous crime. He probably chose the church to specifically target blacks. Or it might have had something to do with the fact that the Columbiana Mall had increased armed security earlier this year after a series of armed robberies.

In any event, Roof’s attack reminds us to remain vigilant at all times, everywhere. Preferably while carrying a gun.

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87 COMMENTS

  1. “Roof wanted even more ability to kill than he had,” said Rep. Joe Neal, D-Richland, a longtime member of the S.C. House. “This suggests to me that if he had had access to a more powerful weapon, he would have killed a lot more people.”

    Good thing there’s an AWB in South Carolina, and that he didn’t have access to an AR-15.

    ..oh, wait.

  2. “Charleston Killer Too Stupid To Do Math: Entry Level AR’s Cost Same Or Less Than Glock Pistol He Used”

    Fixed the headline for ya.

    • Semi-auto Glock pistol with multiple magazines and the damage potential for killing unarmed civilians would be the same as with an AR-15 style rifle. So this article makes NO sense at all. Pure speculation from people that have little or no knowledge of guns or how they are used.

      • I agree completely. Unfortunately the ignorant media and ignorant masses they preach to are the ones trying to restrict our rights.

  3. So, I’ve got “parts” for an M-16.

    A leftover stock from an AR-15, and compatible magazines.

    Is this what passes for responsible journalism these days? Guess so.

  4. Oh EXPLETIVE DELETED, here it comes…

    Owning a generic forward grip (hint, they fit other things besides ARs) and magazines is now intent to do evil.

    AWB is right around the corner.

    • I’d take a more optimistic view and say this shows how desperate the antis are getting, as they lose traction on the issue. This incident is already fading from the news cycle (today’s gay marriage and terrorism stories should kick it off the radar completely until the shithead goes to trial), and they’re scrambling to try to salvage some kind of gun control “win” out of it.

  5. I need me some 40-bullet banana-style ammo clips… They’ll go very well with my rifle with the shoulder thing that goes up. Giggity Giggity…

    • There’s no need to have a 40-bullet holder clip thingy and automatic gun for hunting and to embrace American heritage. Just owning one tells me you want to mow down as many people possible without reloading. You just hold down the trigger without even having to aim!

      • Mark, not sure if you are being serious or sarcastic ? If you are serious then nice try but the 2nd Amendment is not about hunting at all. That is a red herring and totally irrelevant to any discussion here.

        • @ Gatha58
          You REALLY asked that?
          I suggest that besides a reboot, you further check your CPU fan! It may have overheated.

        • I would say that I know the dude is being sarcastic, but we ALL saw saw Kevin DeLeon go full retard. And these reporters. And most of the state of Connecticut.

  6. He was inside the church. How much “greater distance” did he need? This is just a way to shoehorn “assault weapons” back into the conversation, since Roof crossed-up the gun-grabbers by using an ordinary pistol.

    • the long-slide version of the .45 caliber Glocks issued to both Charleston and North Charleston PD, while we’re at it.

  7. “The AR-15 is known for its high-velocity rounds that spin upon entering a human body, wreaking havoc in muscle and tissue.”

    It is??

    • So is he implying that they don’t start spinning before they enter the body?! Or did he really mean they tumble? And how does he know how they were designed, him being all stupid and that? Oh, he must have read it on HuffPo or Salon.

      • Maybe he heard it from Mike “The Gun [for me but not for thee] Guy” Wise-ass.

    • The M-16 started with a 1 in 14 twist. This plus the light bullet meant it would twist and tumble in a body. However, the M-16A2 has a 1 in 7 twist, with a heavier bullet. This gives better accuracy and penetration,. There was also was reportedly a concern the the M-16 caused excessive wounds and might be a violation of the law of land warfare.

    • Banana things are dangerous. I have seen the damage they can do. If I could have gotten the votes………..

    • I used to have a banana seat on my bicycle as a kid. Damn I was lucky I didn’t get killed by that bike!

      • I still have my bike with a banana seat. It’s an original 1968 Blue Stingray with the 2 speed kick back.
        Got it in 1968 in Salinas, CA

  9. And if he had a bomb that still wouldn’t have compared to the death toll from the sooper, automatic, bullet spraying murder machine AR…..parts

  11. Dread the armor-piercing spinning boolits! They explode with LASER force.
    I’m thinking that someone more serious about a body count in an enclosed area, than concealability would be better with a 12ga. For less than the price of the GLOCK, you can get a scattergun with an 8-round tube.

    • I have a spare grip and a spare handguard. I guess to this author, I must “almost have” another AR15. Or want one. Or be on the verge of killing everyone, ever.

      Or maybe I had a Cabela’s gift card and Magpul furniture is more comfortable to shoot with than generic mil-spec stuff.

      • By the logic in this nitwit’s article, the Cabela’s gift card itself is “almost” an AR-15.

        • Oh crap! I just got a bonus that’s big enough to *buy* an AR-15! How many degrees does it take?

      • Usually a spare pistol grip or handguard will become another AR-15, at least at my house it does.

  14. “40-bullet ammo clip”

    Is that something like a 30 Caliber Magazine Clip, only better?

  15. This is part of the CNN article about the same thing

    “Roof also had a forearm for an AR-15 in his trunk. It allows a shooter to more easily keep a grip on the rifle, as the barrel grows fiery hot from the shots pouring out of it.”

    Every rifle I know of has a forearm or area forward of the trigger to grip that is near the barrel. I like the quote about shots pouring out of it.

    OMG!!

    • OOOOOOOOOOOO “fiery hot from the shots pouring out of it.”

      Fear of something that wasn’t there. Kind of like subconscious racism or, my fave, micro aggression.

    • The original Henry had no forearm, and they eventually added one. Other than that, no I don’t think any production rifle ever went without a forearm.

      • The only rifles I’ve seen without handguards are the M-16’s used in the movie ‘Escape From New York.’

  16. There’s a piece of scrap metal in my garage.

    Guess that means I have the parts for an M1 Abrams.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if every bit of this was planted and made up just to shoehorn evil AR 15s back into the story since the shooter mucked up every claim from anti nuts by using a plain old handgun.

    • That’s what I was thinking too.

      The imagination of the antis and their supporters seems limitless.

      I wonder if any of the simpleton reporters involved attended that training seminar Bloomberg was putting on to teach media hacks about ‘gunz’ and how to ‘properly’ frame their stories to the best advantage of the gun grabber crowd.

      A fore grip??? Gimme a break. “Parts is parts.” No more, no less.

  17. Where does one find a 40 bullet ammo clip? All I have are 10 round ones. I could load a standard magazine and have 10 rounds left instead of having to use three of the little 10 round ones.
    I also want some of those high-velocity rounds that spin upon entering a human body, wreaking havoc in muscle and tissue. They sound so much better than the low velocity non havoc in tissue 5.56 rounds my rifle usually shoots.

    • You find “40 bullet banana clips” by welding 4 ten round stripper clips together then curving them. Then the really impressive part would be trying to load all of that into your single mag while in combat. Maybe he wanted one of those AR’s that cant eject the mag until its the rear takedown pin has been pushed out, or hes planning on breaking it down shotgun style and charging the mag from stripper clips. So many ways to interpret what the liberal media says about guns if we take it all as factual.

  18. As long as there wasnt a shoulder thingy that goes up we are all safe. Unless he puts a confederate flag on it then were all doomed again

  19. Of course the implication is ‘what IF he had an “assault weapon”? What if an asteroid hits the earth? What if California breaks off and floats into the South Pacific? What id we didn’t have stupid politicians and dishonest media?
    I also read somewhere else that he also had an M-16 hand guard which is used to stabilize the evil weapon as it spews out 32 bullets per second and heats up the barrel to an orange glow.
    Al most as bad as that evil flip-up shoulder thingy. The horror!

  20. What you all fail to recognize is that the magazines and hand guards were just merely the visible pieces of his ghost gun. Obviously a 3D printed, unserialized, polymer, and invisible mass killing machine capable of shooting thousands of high powered spinning, soul tearing billets per second.

    • But you’ve gotta watch out for those darn “banana-style ammo clip”. They’re all crooked… 🙂

    • OMG that thing is so awesome. I think I may need to acquire something like that at some point.

  23. I believe the original news article said he left at least one person alive to report what he did. So, it sounds like he killed everyone he wanted to kill. What difference does the tool make ? Or the “theoretical tool” that he could have used to kill more people. This is a propaganda piece and nothing more. Dramatic, sensationalism at it’s worst.

    • Exactly. He killed everyone in the building except the sole survivor he allowed to live as a witness. The death toll would not have been higher regardless of what implement he chose to use.

  24. “I asked him why he was asking the employees of the businesses those questions.
    Mr. Dylann then began speaking very nervously,” the responding officer reported.
    “I…observed that Mr. Dylann was becoming more nervous acting and taking more time to think of answers to my questions.”

    After a consensual search, the cop found an unlabeled pill bottle containing orange “square strips.”

    Roof claimed they were suboxone, a drug often used to treat heroin addiction.”

    So, after this interrogation the mall security officers still did not regard him suspicious enough to report Roof to the police. If you see something; say nothing. Part of the Progressive campaign to guarantee liberty to individuals who evidence cause to suspect they ought to be evaluated and possibly committed.

    There appear to be two ways to take this:
    1. – If the Progressives insist that the dangerously mentally ill must be at liberty among us then we the People must be at liberty to defend ourselves against them; or,
    2. – The Progressives might argue that there is nothing authorities could possibly do to detect dangerously mentally ill individuals; therefore, the state must disarm all the People (except it’s own agents) because any one of them is a plausible danger to others.

  25. He sat there in the church with these people for an hour before murdering them. Aside from the fact that is pretty damn cold blooded, I don’t think the AR was in his plans as somebody would have probably noticed him sitting there with it.

  26. “Assault rifles are designed to inflict maximum damage on a maximum number of people in a brief time.”

    Assume for a moment this is accurate, what everyday scenarios would justify every other basic flat foot in a cruiser routinely rolling around town on traffic duty with such a wholesale slaughter job limbered up?

    So much for the old “police are outgunned” myth.

    • Perfect thing to bring up to the antis. “So you’re in favor of police spewing bullets from a high powered assault machine gun?”

    • I learned a different definition of “maximum” while I was at school, and paying attention in math and science classes. The author’s description is more apt for a nuclear bomb than a small-caliber semi-automatic rifle.

      • I guess you didn’t get to calculus in your studies then; a local maximum can exist well below the true maximum; indeed in a place where there are no other weapons, a muzzle loader inflicts the (local) maximum damage. Perhaps not on the maximum number of people, though, since you can hit a lot of people with your fists.

  27. Color me surprised. I really did not know 40-clip banana bullets were designed to spin.

  28. After committing mass murder with the foregrip of an AR-15, I hear he was going to make his getaway with the steering wheel off a Shelby GT-500.

  30. Yikes-the derp is strong with this one. So those poor unarmed folks would be “deader”?

  31. I fully expect read one day a story about the tv series The Rifleman, how Lucas McCain used a “lever machine gun” to mow down people. Journalist are stupid. They could become informed but choose not to.

  32. I know, ban anyone from owning guns who can reload a pistol in less then a half second… Sorry Jerry Miculek.

  33. Good grief. I’ve got more AR parts in a box on a shelf that this clown had. Guess I’d better lock them up before they go crazy and hurt someone.

  36. So if he had an AR, he would have been able to shoot 9 people instead of…um, 9 people. Common, the victims were unarmed and in a close space. A large magazine capacity and bayonet lug would not have made a difference. Heck, he may have hit less people, because if I understand correctly, he waited in a pew for over an hour for the best time to spring is attack. I am sorry, but an AR is not the type of gun you simply hide in your waist band to wait for the best time to strike.

  37. “Roof wanted even more ability to kill than he had,” said Rep. Joe Neal, D-Richland, a longtime member of the S.C. House. “This suggests to me that if he had had access to a more powerful weapon, he would have killed a lot more people.”
    Just think how many people he would have killed with a Mosin Nagant.

  38. I’ve got magazines and ammo and parts and random shit for guns I don’t even own. These people would probably crap their pants if they peaked into my bedroom.

  39. If only he knew that he could stick a banana in a 1911 and all the democrats’ heads would explode… Way easier than shooting people in a church.

  40. Was the original draft of this article written with crayons? Who can take this bullshit seriously? At best, it’s hilarious.

  41. …40 bullet banana style ammo clip… Not sure if they are trolling hard or really that ignorant.

    • I remember one time years back when I was reading an article about a downed military helicopter and the article mentioned about the helicopter’s propeller on top.

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