This morning I was up early doing some final editing to my promised full review of the new book on the AR-15, American Gun by Wall Street Journal reporters Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson. (My brief video review of the book is available on my Light Over Heat YouTube channel.)

I was trying to figure out when the first mass shooting with an AR-15 occurred. After some failed Google searches, I decided to go to Google’s Bard generative artificial intelligence (AI) experimental tool.

The answers I received from Bard were factually incorrect, but in a very telling way.

I first asked, “What was the first mass shooting in American [sic.] in which the perpetrator used an AR-15 rifle.” Answer: The University of Texas tower shooter in 1966. Incorrect.

I tried to help Bard out by asking a more specific question about the Texas tower shooting, and Bard correctly answered that the shooter did not use an AR-15, but then suggested he could not have used an AR-15 because it wasn’t invented until 7 years after the shooting. Incorrect, obviously, but maybe also suggestive of where Bard’s “mind” is — he probably have used an AR-15 if it had been invented?

Google’s Bard frequently generates more than one response to prompts. In this case, the second response to my initial prompt was worse than the first. It identified the Cleveland Elementary School (Stockton, California) shooter not only as using an AR-15 but as using a Bushmaster AR-15 specifically. Incorrect on both counts, though the second paragraph of Bard’s response again hints at where its “mind” is. Bard draws on some common gun control talking points like the AR-15 being the “weapon of choice” for mass shooters.

I tried to help Bard out by asking more specific questions about the Stockton school shooting and the AR-15. Bard was quite confident in its incorrect response.

Wanting badly to lead Bard to the correct answer, I asked if the shooter used an AK-47. No. “He used a Bushmaster AR-15 rifle.”

Maybe he used a Norinco Type 56S? No. Bard correctly identified the Norinco as a Chinese-made AK-47, but still insisted that the shooter “used a Bushmaster AR-15 rifle.”

Sorry, Bushmaster, your AR-15 rifle has become so identified with mass shootings that generative artificial intelligence chatbots like Google Bard are being fed bad information.

But the AR-15 has also become so identified in mass shootings that actual human beings also shade the truth, including the authors of The True Story of the AR-15.*

(*Perhaps. I have not had the opportunity to fully fact-check this story, but what I have read leads me to believe they shaded the truth in the case discussed below.)

With both Google and Google’s Bard AI failing me on the question of the first mass shooter to use an AR-15, I turned to McWhirter and Elinson’s American Gun. There I learned that the first mass shooting of U.S. civilians with an AR-15 was outside a nightclub in Klamath Falls, Oregon ion 1977 (p. 161). This was just what I was looking for.

But I read on and also learned that the second mass shooting was in June 1980 at First Baptist Church in Daingerfield, Texas. The shooter “carried an AR-15 and several other weapons. [He] opened fire, then shouted to the 350 people in attendance, ‘This is war,’ and started firing again.” In the end, he had killed five people (p. 162).

Reading more about this case for my long-delayed project on congregational security, I came across an interesting story published in March 1983 in Texas Monthly. The story’s author recounted some details of the event that McWhirter and Elinson left out.

The Dainigerfield church shooter, according to Texas Monthly, had with him a .38-caliber revolver, a .22-caliber pistol, an AR-15, and an M-1 carbine (designed in 1941).

Wielding the carbine, with the AR-15 slung over his shoulder, the left-handed gunman had either kicked the doors open or used the rifle to slam them inward. He charged through the vestibule, took one step inside the sanctuary, and bellowed, “This is war!” Then, swinging the carbine’s muzzle to his right, he methodically opened fire. 

Jan Ried, “Blood of the Lamb,” March 1983

He killed three victims with the M-1 carbine.

The shooter was then confronted by congregants, losing hold of his rifles, and tacked by Red McDaniel.

Still, he had enough strength to shove the .38 revolver hard into Red McDaniel’s middle and jerk the trigger till he was dead. As the man tried to rise, Kenneth Truitt made a dive for him, hit his shoulder, and rolled off. The gunman extended the .38 and fatally wounded Truitt.

He killed the other two victims with a .38 revolver.

But he was carrying an AR-15.