Of course a gun didn't kill people at an Omaha mall, pro-gun groups will tell us.  A crazy person with a gun did it.

And that's true, to a degree.  Jim Rowen, who once covered the firearms issue for the Milwaukee Journal, doubts that a steak knife would have had the same impact.

The weapon in question, Rowen says, was

The SKS is a military weapon that is often called an assault rifle, though because it's not manufactured to fire selectively in single or automatic bursts, it's just a plain old vicious, terribly deadly, non-assault rifle.

A carbine. To the general public, it's an assault rifle because it's military and devastating, and to the dead Nebraskans, it's of no consequence.

Anyway...

There are many SKS variants, having metastasized from the Soviet Union to China and throughout other former Eastern bloc countries, as a cheap, durable deadly, mass-produced and exportable military weapon - - a staple of the world arms trade.

Not with the ugly cachet of the true assault rifle, like an AK-47, but available from Africa to Asia...to southeastern Wisconsin, aina!