Planned Frisco mall shooting raises questions over guns and age restrictions

The Plano West Senior High student who police say planned a mass shooting at Stonebriar Centre in Frisco was initially planning to legally buy a gun when he turned 18.

The Parkland school massacre brought the question of age restrictions on gun purchases into the national spotlight. Trump, who is scheduled to speak Friday at the NRA convention, initially indicated he would support raising the minimum age to 21 on some purchases -- then backed off from the idea.

But few cases point to the age restriction issue quite as directly as the arrest of Matin Azizi-Yarand. Statements he allegedly made in the arrest warrant are chilling.

"How hard can it be to spray down a big crowd of people," investigators say he told an undercover FBI source in an online chat. When the source asked when he planned to carry out his mass shooting, he wrote back, "When I get a proper gun."

In December and in January he told the source, "Me and the 2 other guys are serious about this we are willing to do something here...but they've been waiting for me to turn 18 to be able to buy the guns."

The document says he later sent the source money to purchase weapons for him.

As an estimated 80,000 NRA members are coming to Dallas for their convention. One of the NRA's most visible faces, a host for NRA-TV, said the affidavit doesn’t provide an argument for raising minimum age requirements.

“Bottom line is you can keep raising the age of when to buy a firearm. What do you do, if it is 22 do you say, raise to 23, if it's 25 do you say raise it to 26,” Grant Stinchfield said. “Evil exists in the world, you will never regulate it away.”

The NRA has pointed out there are already federal age restrictions for handguns. The group's position is that creating new restrictions for rifles and shotguns would deprive law abiding young adults ages of their constitutional right to self-protection.

Stinchfield summed it up with a familiar NRA argument.

"The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” Stinchfield said.