SACRAMENTO, Calif. _ Authorities said the gunman in Sunday's Gilroy festival shooting used an SKS, an "AK-47-style rifle" he legally purchased in Nevada to kill three people, including two children, and wound a dozen others.
SKS weapons have been used in several mass shootings over the years, including the 2017 shooting of House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and two Capitol Police officers at a Washington, D.C., baseball practice.
The Violence Policy Center describes the SKS as "a menace to public safety."
But based on the limited information authorities have provided, it's not clear whether the firearm would be classified as an illegal "assault weapon" in California.
Unmodified SKS rifles, while they appear similar to semiautomatic AK-47 style weapons, are generally legal to purchase and own in California, despite the state's strict regulations on owning and buying assault rifles.
An original, unmodified SKS looks similar to an AK-47 and shoots the same 7.62 x 39mm round.
But there are two key differences that make an SKS legal to possess or buy in California, which generally prohibits the sale of "assault weapons" _ defined under state law as a semiautomatic rifle with a detachable magazine and certain features such as a pistol grip stock.
An unmodified SKS has a 10-round magazine that is attached to the gun. Ammunition has to be fed, one-round at a time, into the top of the gun. Likewise, the rear of an unmodified SKS has a stock that looks like a traditional hunting rifle with no pistol grips or thumb holes.
By comparison, an AK-47-style rifle is considered an "assault rifle" under California law because it comes standard with a detachable magazine and a pistol grip-style stock.
However, like many other kinds of legal semiautomatic rifles, SKS weapons are easy to modify to have them be classified as an "assault rifle" under California's gun law.
Gun-parts retailers sell a plethora of custom stocks with pistol grips, and the guns can be easily modified to accept detachable magazines.
Authorities did not say Monday whether Gilroy gunman Santino William Legan's rifle was modified.
During the early 1990s, hundreds of thousands of SKSs were imported from countries such as China and sold in the United States for as little as $100 a piece.
"There are hundreds of thousands of them in private possession in California," said Sam Paredes, executive director of Gun Owners of California, a gun rights group. "You used to be able to go to gun dealers and find crates of them on the floor."
