MAPPED: How deadly semi-automatics guns have been used in shootings from Texas to Vegas

Gun controlGETTY / EXPRESS

Semi-automatic weapons have been used in attacks across the USA

These weapons can simulate automatic fire using a “bump stock”, which allows rapid fire without having to reload. 

And these weapons have been used to horrifying effect during 2017, resulting in two of America’s worst shootings in history taking place since October. 

In Las Vegas last month, sick killer Stephen Paddock shot more than 500 people, 58 of whom died, from his casino hotel window. 

A bump stock allowed him to fire thousands of bullets onto the helpless crowd below him. 

And yesterday Devin Kelley burst into the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs Texas and opened fire with a AR-556 rifle. 

Gun controlEXPRESS

Shootings using semi-automatic weapons have take place across the USA

Witnesses reported hearing “semi-automatic fire” as he sprayed bullets at the congregation, killing 26 people. 

Semi-automatic mass shootings, however, are not a recent trend and their bloody history stretches back decades. 

As the above map shows, they have been used from California on the West Coast during the 1980s to New Hampshire in the north-east, with gunmen finding it all too easy to use the weapons to slaughter helpless victims. 

One particularly heartbreaking example was the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting, which saw 20 children aged 6 or 7 shot dead. 

Killer Adam Lanza, who also killed six adult staff members, used a semi-automatic XM15-E2S gun during his depraved attack. 

This attack accelerated the gun control campaign in America, with then US President Barack Obama weeping as he said it was time “not to debate the last mass shooting but to do something to prevent the next one”. 

He said more needed to be done to make it harder for dangerous people to get their hands on guns and carry out deranged attacks. 

Mr Obama said: “Five years ago this week, a sitting member of Congress and 18 others were shot at at a supermarket in Tucson, Arizona. It wasn’t the first time I had to talk to the nation in response to a mass shooting, nor would it be the last.

“Fort Hood, Binghamton, Aurora, Oak Creek, Newtown, the Navy Yard, Santa Barbara, Charleston, San Bernardino… Too many.”

But gun rights activists reject claims gun control would make America safer and instead say more weapons should be carried on the streets. 

US President Donald Trump said the church at the centre of the Sutherland Springs shooting yesterday “isn’t a guns situation”. 

He has already blocked plans put in place by Mr Obama which would have stopped 75,000 people with mental health disorder buying guns. 

Gun controlGETTY

26 people were killed in yesterday’s shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas

And Texas’ attorney general, speaking in the aftermath of yesterday’s attack, said mass shootings could be avoided if more people, not less, had guns. He advised “arming some parishioners” to avoid further church shootings. 

He said: “All I can say is that in Texas at least we have the opportunity to have concealed carry. 

“And so if it’s a place where somebody has the ability to carry, there’s always the opportunity that the gunman will be taken out before he has the opportunity to kill very many people.

“We need in churches … at least arming some of the parishioners or the congregation so that they can respond if something like this, when something like this happens again.”