Recently retired Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agent Thomas Ahern says it doesn’t take any special skills to fire a fully automatic weapon like the one used in the Las Vegas shooting that killed at least 58 people and injured more than 500. Automatic weapons are designed for war, he says. ‘There are ways that a semi-automatic rifle can be converted to a fully automatic rifle and fired like a machine gun. And those conversion kits are out there in society, but a person would have to have the skills, the knowhow to convert a semi-automatic rifle into a fully automatic rifle’, Ahern said.