... I took the plunge into some gun porn that preexisted the incident and also looked into the FEG AMD-65, which the police press release seems to finger.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_65
It is indeed a variant of the AKM so for once the press can actually get away with using the shorthand "AK-47" and not have the rest of their reporting called into question for shoddy work.
Most of the discussion around this gun seemed to revolve around several regulatory compliance issues; apparently the guns can only be sold in the US with a certain amount of American-made parts, which seem to be considered sub-standard, and a barrel extension may also be mandatory. Some sort of fiddling with the clips may also have to be done to make them legal. I also got some indication that some of the guns may have shipped either in an illegal configuration or with a few pieces missing, along with an American-made parts catalog that someone could happily toss aside while rebuilding the gun with better, non-American parts.
One poster in a message board observed that only 30-round clips and smaller seemed reliable, and that 40-round clips and larger (there are clips larger than that?!?) tended to fail. The shooter in this video appeared to me to stay semi-auto the whole time, and to have trouble around shot 33; the clip may have begun to fail at that point, though it also appears the shooter was wounded in at least one arm or hand about that time, too.
The only reason I'm offering this is to point out that there are several potential avenues of regulatory failure at work here, even if the shooter acquired and assembled his weapon according to the law.
Not well-regulated is a helluva good position to start from in any American gun debate.
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