ISIS propaganda chiefs called on lone wolves in the US to use the AR-15 rifle the day before Florida school shooter Nikolas Cruz used the same weapon to carry out his massacre.
The Florida shooter – believed to have links to a far-right group – also used the easily-available weapon to murder 17 people on Wednesday.
An ISIS propaganda poster released on the net on Tuesday urged followers to: ‘Select a high place. Therefore you will have a great angle of vision to direct shots.’
The poster declared the gun the ‘weapon of choice’ for ‘festivals and large gatherings’.
It carried the message ‘kill them all’ in both English and Arabic text.
The AR-15 – sold in Walmart until 2015 – has been used in a string of mass shootings in the US.
The ISIS propaganda poster made the call to use the deadly weapon the day before Cruz went on his deadly rampage
Nikolas Cruz has now been charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder
The Las Vegas gunman used one, modified so that it could shoot like a fully automatic gun, the Pulse nightclub shooter used a rifle in the same style to kill 49 people in Florida and it was used in the San Bernardino, Sandy Hook, and Colorado cinema shootings.
The gun’s most attractive feature is that it can be easily modified, according to the NRA.
It is easy to buy and then change into something even more powerful, without breaking laws that prohibit the manufacturing of fully automatic weapons for the public.
By fixing an entirely legal ‘bump stock’ to the gun, the Las Vegas killer was able to effectively turn it into a fully automatic weapon.
Nikolas Cruz, 19, has now made his first court appearance where he was officially charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland.
According to the family Cruz has been living with, they knew Cruz owned the AR-15 but made him keep it locked up in a cabinet and never saw him go to a shooting range with it. He did have the key, however.
Details are starting to emerge about the shooter, who was recently orphaned, and stopped getting mental health treatment about a year ago and even had ties to a white supremacist group.
An FBI official also said Thursday that they were warned – not once, but twice – about the shooter.
One of the warnings came in September, from a bail bondsman in Mississippi who alerted the agency about an alarming online message Cruz wrote saying he was ‘going to be a professional school shooter’