Handgun used at YouTube afforded less chance for massive death toll

Police said Nasim Aghdam shot with a 9mm semiauto matic handgun. Police said Nasim Aghdam shot with a 9mm semiauto matic handgun. Image 1 of / 63 Caption Close Handgun used at YouTube afforded less chance for massive death toll 1 / 63 Back to Gallery

It was an all-too-common occurrence Tuesday when an armed assailant — this time at YouTube headquarters in the Bay Area — walked into a crowded area and opened fire.

But while the attack at the San Bruno complex that left three people wounded and the shooter dead mirrored so many recent bloodbaths around the country, the type of weapon and number of rounds the shooter was limited to may have prevented another national tragedy, mass shooting experts said Wednesday.

“Power of weaponry, the number of bullets and the ability to shoot more rapidly are the things that make mass shootings more deadly,” said John Donohue, a professor at Stanford Law School who studies gun violence. “The fact that she only had a handgun and it was apparently restrained to the legal limit in California is all to the good.”

Nasim Aghdam, 39, used a legally-purchased 9mm Smith & Wesson semiautomatic handgun in the rampage, police said, and had fired it that morning at an unnamed gun range near the YouTube campus.

California law prohibits new purchases of high-capacity magazines, which suggests Aghdam was limited because of that restriction to 10 rounds before she would have to reload.

High-capacity magazines, which hold well over 10 bullets and have been seriously restricted in California in recent years, are critical features in many of the country’s mass shootings with high body counts, Donohue said.

Police have not said when and where Aghdam purchased the firearm or how much ammunition she had, but San Bruno Police Chief Ed Barberini said she fired “quite a few” shots before turning the gun on herself.

In the end, Aghdam lay dead while paramedics rushed three victims with gunshot wounds to San Francisco General Hospital. Two women, ages 32 and 27, were released Tuesday night and a third victim, a 36-year-old man, remained hospitalized in serious condition.

Aside from the size of magazine, Aghdam’s use of a handgun over a high-powered rifle — like an AR-15-style weapon — increased the survivability of the attack, experts said.

“There’s no question if you get shot by a handgun anywhere other than the most vital regions, you’re better off than getting shot with an AR-15,” Donohue said. “In Sandy Hook, there were almost no survivors. The smaller the caliber, the more your ability to survive if you don’t get shot in the head or heart from someone shooting wildly.”

AR-15-style rifles have been used in many of the deadliest recent attacks, including at Sandy Hook Elementary School, a 2012 massacre in Newtown, Conn., that left 20 kids and six school staff and faculty dead.

In the October shooting in Las Vegas, Stephen Paddock fired on a crowded country music festival, killing 58 with several similar rifles. Omar Mateen the year before killed 49 people with such a weapon inside the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, and in February, a former student killed 17 people with an AR-15-style rifle at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.

AR-15-style rifles were developed for combat but manufactured and produced for consumers. The wounds from such guns can be so devastating that a shot to the leg or arm can cause massive blood loss, experts said.

But even though AR-15-style rifles have been used in many of the deadliest mass shootings, handguns are used more often, said James Alan Fox, a criminologist and researcher at Northeastern University, and co-author of “Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder.”

“Most mass killings don’t involve assault weapons,” he said. “They’re hard to conceal and handguns are lighter and easier.”

The shooter in the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, for example, used two handguns to kill 32 fellow students and faculty in the third-deadliest shooting in recent U.S. history. Elliot Rodger used knives and handguns to kill six people and wound 14 more in a rampage in Isla Vista, Calif., in 2014.

Handguns are also the preferred weapons of female assailants, who only make up about 5 percent of mass shooters, Fox said.

But since there’s no death toll other than the shooter, Tuesday’s attack doesn’t fit the widely accepted definition of a mass shooting, in which four or more people are killed.

The attack, though, had some of the hallmarks of so many mass shootings because the shooter indiscriminately targeted her victims, police said.

Still, the attack was not completely random, and it’s not clear if the shooter was even seeking a high body count. Police said Aghdam’s motive for the attack had to do with the policies and practices of YouTube and she was angry at the company for skimping on revenue driven by her page.