“Before a LEO encounters a BG, a civilian does. And the civilian doesn’t have body armor or back-up. Why shouldn’t the civilian have the same mag capacity of the LEO?” – hick63 at defensivecarry.com
“Before a LEO encounters a BG, a civilian does. And the civilian doesn’t have body armor or back-up. Why shouldn’t the civilian have the same mag capacity of the LEO?” – hick63 at defensivecarry.com
There entire magazine capacity issue as used by the second amendment deniers is a strawman. If you accept the premise than jurisdictions with unlimited would be safer with limit of 30 rounds, and those with 3o limit would be safer with 15, then 10, then 7, and heck why not — magazine capacity of one round. Then calibers are next, introduction of low power ammunition is next etc.
Like civilians can only carry non lethal ammo.
Great idea, better put it in a letter to the ATF.
Simple question: have magazine limits, where they have been implemented, resulted in any demonstrable reduction in crime? Let’s start there, because if not, the entire issue of magazine capacity limits is a non-starter.
Crime is not the issue, it has never been the issue. While violent crime has been the excuse that is championed by white women who live in suburbs with little to no crime, it has never been about crime but it is about white women being scared and wanting everyone else to be scared to and stroke their emotions.
The magazine capacity disarmament lie is that lower capacity magazines will stop a more tragic school shooting incident because some super teacher will disarm the spree shooter in mid reload or that he will shoot fewer people before the police take 9min to arrive on scene.
Neither crime nor school shooting will be stopped with magazine capacity limits — it is simply an emotional response that makes zero sense. It is an excuse.
No politician, no courts are willing to confront a crying mother and tell her the truth because they would be tried in front of the court of twitter and Facebook and face a public trial worse than the Salem witch trials in the court of public opinion.
Those on this forum and anyone with any logical non-emotional sense knows magazine capacity means absolutely nothing. Dogma, ideology and Leftist sense of control is the only thing driving the mag capacity debate.
of all the stupid gun laws and backwards twisted logic, the magazine capacity laws are the dumbest of them all.
Of course. You and I know this, but the person repeating it may not.
So showing that mag cap limits don’t help reduce crime, reduces the “wiggle room” for the average grabber to squirm his or her arguments around in.
Keep doing this and you eventually get to something like “I just feel that…” Or “they shouldn’t…” without any real justifications.
That’s when you can really start the conversation.
Very logical…I like his presentation.
agreed, the LEO and the BG both have more then 10/7 rounds, why can’t we?
I thought the most interesting quote came from the source article itself:
“The bills, between them, have 125 sponsors and co-sponsors. Clearly, the American people must have access to 125-round magazines.”
Before a LEO encounters a BG, a civilian does. And the civilian doesn’t have body armor or back-up. Why shouldn’t the civilian have the same mag capacity of the LEO?
Because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I said so, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that’s why and if you don’t see my logic here, you’re just a tool of the evil NRA gun lobby that just wants children to be slaughtered so they can make a profit.
(er… just in case: /sarc).
Longest most useless post I have seen so far this year. I like it, its funny because it is true!
You have to read it very closely to see the true subtlety and nuance of the argument being made. But, alas, too many of those knuckledragging gun rednecks will just say “tl;dr”
(again, /sarc).
Steve, I think you’re one “blah” short.
Damn, Ralph, you’re right. I’ve lost the whole argument right there, due to forgetting a key point.
Steve, you lost me at “blah, blah, blah, I said so,”…
Law enforcement (think about the true meaning of those words) doesn’t hold sway….
You either believe in freedom or you do not.
Civilians don’t need nearly as many rounds as cops to get the job done because they’re historically much better shots, and they don’t waste all their bullets on innocent bystanders. So, I’d say law enforcement SHOULD get more bullets. Or training. You know, level playing field and all that.
You lost me when you referred to civilians as if cops are in a separate category.
That’s precisely the part that the muggles and the sheeple don’t “get”–well, that and the part that ultimately, the cop is carrying a gun for the same reason I do–for self-defense, primarily. They are operating on the idea that the cops are there to prevent them from coming in contact with a BG to start with. When Officer O’Malley was walking his beat every day and running in the bums and running off the troublemakers on the slimmest of pretexts, that might have been more true. But it sure ain’t the case now. The Hysterical “Moms” and such are just too stupid and/or scared to see or admit it.
What always makes me laughs are the gross inconsistencies in the antis’ arguments.
We may not allow armed school staff or college students, because they’re all so unmanageably emotional that they would murder someone over a test score, if only a firearm were readily available. Or we may not allow them to be armed because they’re just lowly, clumsy, hoi polloi, not SEAL Team Six members possessing world class talent, training, tooling, and schooling in the science of violence.
Yet, at the same time, we must limit magazine capacities, because any ol’ random bystander in the maelstrom of a spree shooting will have not only the ice water reserve to assess the event and pinpoint the moment of imminent mag change, but also the cat like athleticism to bound toward the assailant; disarming and detaining him during that pause in the slaughter.
Logic and the Left are not exactly on speaking terms. Gun control is no exception.
Irony- U.S. Democratic leaders are arming and training Syrian’s with weapons they think are too dangerous for American people not wearing a uniform, with “large” capacity 30 round magizines.
Did anyone else watch the YouTube videos of the Sheriff debunking magizine limits. There was less than 2 seconds difference in 2 15 round magizines than 3 10 round magizines, and then he showed a shooter doing a new York reload with a backpack full of revolvers firing 36+ rounds?
Yes, the Sheriff is in Indiana. For the uninitiated, here is a link to his video demonstration on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YmF2ULnlhA
The gun grabbers’ background argument is actually much more gruesome: they assume an unopposed and unhampered spree killer shoots dozens of victims one after another after another wracking up dozens of casualties until police arrive. And their argument is that each magazine swap displaces one casualty because the spree killer is not shooting anyone while swapping magazines.
Thus, if a spree killer has a cadence of shooting 1 victim every three seconds (20 victims per minute) and police arrive in three minutes, the spree killer would be able to shoot 60 victims with a 60 round magazine. But if the spree killer were limited to 10 round magazines and each magazine swap took three seconds, over the course of that same three minutes the spree killer would only shoot 55 victims. (Swapping magazines would take up the same amount of time as shooting 5 defenseless victims who are “sitting ducks”.)
Gun grabbers’ primary rationale for limiting magazine capacities is to slightly reduce the body count of an unopposed spree killer. The fact that almost immediate armed resistance to the spree killer would greatly reduce the casualty count is off the table because, GUNS!
Now if you really want to point out their inconsistency, use their “if it saves one life” argument against them. They have no qualms violating our rights to allegedly save 5 lives in the hypothetical scenario I described above. Then they should definitely have no qualms with responsible armed adults violating their own delicate sensibilities to save dozens of lives in my hypothetical scenario. Of course they would never go for that because, GUNS!
Good point. Meanwhile, they ignore the $200 12 ga. pump action shotgun option, which can slam 5+1 shells of (9) 00 buck into an unsuspecting crowd in half the time of dumping a 30rd P-Mag. Nearly twice as many projectiles in half the time, each one larger and with more energy than a .223, from a basic shotgun, and these dolts are focused on the scary black rifles.
Goes to show gun control is all about controlling people and always has been, and never about controlling crime and never will be.
Don’t forget you can keep dropping shells into the open chamber off of a side saddle, bandoleer or bag and continue to shoot. Magazine capacity is a moot point. Bad people will figure out ways around the law. They have all of the time and the advantage of knowing the rules. The better plan would be to have any mass shooters know theY will be met by armed individuals and they don’t k ow who they are.
Of course one key difference is those nine bits of .00 all have to go in the same direction at the same time, so you can only target one person per shell (unless two are crowding close together). In terms of number of people you (or a bad guy) can engage, shell count is what matters, not aggregate number of projectiles.
At Newtown all the kiddies and teachers were packed into one pile of flesh quivering and sheltering in place in a comer. I dunno, under the right circumstances, a semi-auto shotgun might have been even more lethal than the AR-15. Anyway you cut it, the whole quivering in a pile of human flesh makes for the crazies or the terrorists to rack up an impressive body count in 15 to 25 minutes with about any type of firearm.
SteveInCO has a good point in that all nine #00 buckshot pellets will probably all land on the same victim. Thus 5+1 shotgun shells with #00 buckshot will probably only kill 6 people.
Of course there is a simple work around. Just use a lever-action rifle in .357 Magnum and shoot 180 grain hardcast lead bullets. Each bullet will go through at least two adults and probably four children. If the rifle’s capacity is 10+1 rounds, that means a spree killer could kill 44 children huddled into a corner, without any reloading. And if the spree killer had enough foresight to carry two such loaded rifles, then the spree killer could kill 88 children without reloading. Similar results are possible if an imaginative spree killer carried four .357 Magnum revolvers with 8 round cylinders.
Now if a spree killer is really ambitious, they can up the ante and use a lever action rifle in .44 Magnum or even worse .45-70 Government. A single .45 caliber, 400+ grain hardcast bullet coming out of a rifle will have no trouble going through 6 or more children. That is a horrific six kills per squeeze of the trigger with 140 year old firearm technology.
Indiana Tom,
“Anyway you cut it, the whole quivering in a pile of human flesh makes for the crazies or the terrorists to rack up an impressive body count in 15 to 25 minutes with about any type of firearm.”
Try more like 15 to 25 seconds using a large caliber rifle with hardcast lead bullets as I described above.
SteveinCO is correct, but it still depends on distance from the target. VERY roughly speaking, you’re looking at a shot pattern spread of about 1″ for each yard between muzzle and target. People in a crowd are only about 1.5 feet apart. (Distance between the arm rests on a commercial flight in coach is about 17″, for example.) From about 30 yards away, perhaps from an elevated position like a window overlooking a street festival or a balcony overlooking a theater, that’s a pretty good spread capable of hitting more than just one or two people.
The most important metric here, though, isn’t simply the number of shots fired or even victims struck. It’s the straight up body count. Consider Aurora, CO: police recovered 76 casings from the rampage that killed 12 and wounded 58. The round-to-body ratio would be much higher in a shotgun-only rampage. One might even argue that in the Aurora incident, it was only as high as it was because there was a shotgun involved. After all, the AR jammed.
So I get SteveinCO’s point, and it certainly valid, but there are more variables at play, some random and some controllable by the killer, which recommend the shotgun as the more potent close quarters mass murder weapon. And yet, the antis ignore the shotgun’s effectiveness in favor of focusing on the AR’s scariness, all for political expedience.
@uncommon and Jonathan,
I wrote what I did, remembering someone a while ago who kept asserting that “mag limits” were pointless (even by “their” so-called “logic”) when you could readily carry 45 projectiles in your five-shell shotgun, which is 3-7+ times the limits imposed by various mag restriction laws (depending on which particular arbitrary distinction was imposed in a particular state). The guy didn’t seem to realize that you could only take 5 targeted shots. To be sure someone hit with 12 ga 00 buck is far more likely to have his thuggish intent curbed than one shot with a single 9mm, but you can still only take care of 5 BGs with that shotgun, and that’s assuming you don’t miss or have to use a shot to make him keep his head down instead of shooting at you. I sensed a similar line of “reasoning” brewing here–45 projectiles gives you (or the spree shooter) a way around mag bans. No, it doesn’t, because tactically speaking, what matters is the number of discrete trigger pulls-with-a-subsequent-BANG! you can make. Now someone pointed out that it’s very easy to top off a shotgun, and they are right on that score, but that’s completely different from somehow considering a shotgun shell equivalent to nine rounds of pistol in a firefight.
Well, Steve, now you’re moving the goalpost, with reference to a firefight, since this discussion has been about spree shootings against an unarmed crowd. You’re also propping up a strawman argument for easy knock down, since nobody but you and your Spidy Sense “sensed” anybody’s “reasoning” as you disrespectfully placed in quotes. (There goes another passive aggressive TTAG know-it-all, snidely dismissing other people’s posts. No shortage of that boorish behavior.)
Nobody, but you, said anything about independently targeting multiple victims with a single shot shell. The fact remains that a spree killer’s goal is to murder as many people in a crowded place as possible in the shortest amount of time. A shotgun is going to accomplish that to great effect, perhaps greater effect than an AR, regardless of mag limitations on the rifle, but the antis ignore that because they don’t really care about crime or deaths.
May I suggest following along with the conversation and attributing to people only what they actually write, not what you merely sense? If you have something interesting to contribute to the casual conversation, I welcome it. If you want to transform these things into a debate, well, bring that on, too. However, if you just want to disagree to be disagreeable or just to have something to say, save it. We’re over stocked on blowhards as it is.
Jonathan – Houston,
I think that was dyseptic_gunsmith who compared a 12 gauge shotgun full of #00 buckshot to an AR-15 with a 30 round magazine about one or two years ago. His comparison wasn’t entirely apples to apples for the reasons that we just discussed here. Namely, it all depends on how far away the victims are. The pattern from a 12 gauge shotgun with an 18 inch cylinder “choke” barrel will all fit within one person at the ranges you can expect in a school classroom. Thus one shot will probably only wound/kill one person. Of course the pattern will cover at least two people at 30 yards and one shot will probably wound/kill at least two people … although I have never seen a classroom that is 30 yards (90 feet) long.
At any rate I believe the point of dyseptic_gunsmith’s post was to show gun grabbers that magazine restrictions are not the panacea that they claim. I don’t think anyone is claiming that shooting 6 shotgun shells, which in aggregate contain 45 pellets, is going to wound/kill 45 people. We also acknowledge that a shotgun with 6 shells is more than capable of wounding/killing more than 6 people at ranges beyond something like 20 yards.
Regardless, the common point to all of our posts is that firearm restrictions will not stop spree killers from killing several dozen people if they have 3+ minutes to attack without opposition.
Gun grabbers’ primary rationale for limiting magazine capacities is to slightly reduce the body count of an unopposed spree killer. Agree. The less effective they can legally make the gun, the slightly reduced will be the body count in a spree shooting according to their logic. Of course, someone will rush the mass killer when magazine changes are initiated according to their logic as well.
Then you have that the citizen will be at a disadvantage when compared to the new militarized high speed low drag operator police force mentality.
We’re citizens, not civilians.
Why? Because gun grabbers could care less about whether or not a violent criminal harms someone … they want control!
There ya go making sense again.
Legally arm citizens should be able to have as much ammo in the firearm as they feel comfortable with as they have no back up and nobody armor and who knows how many bad guys they will be confronted with. I do NOT feel comfortable with 10 round magazines even carrying and extra or two extra only have 11 rounds to start with. If one for Schmidt was limited to 10 rounds per magazine definitely carry more than the extra three that they normally carry. Do you think they would feel comfortable only having 31 rounds available I doubt it even though they have back up.
The thing about mag capacity limits is that from a totally superficial point of view, it makes sense as a knee-jerk reaction. Hear me out.
Emotional libtard hears about the latest school shooting or violent crime, and thinks “wow, that’s a lot of suffering and death. Why?” He answers himself “Back in the day, we didn’t have all these evil ‘assault rifles’ and automatic weapons technology, guns were noble things, tools used by brave hunters… Davy Crockett or Daniel Boone and his flintlock musket stalking a deer for food. And then we had WWI, and every schoolchild knows WWI was incredibly bloody ‘because of all the new machine gun technology’ so obviously if we want a better, safer land, the solution is to try to turn back the clock and ban all these automatic death machines -these repeating firearms. After all, to shoot one deer, or defend yourself against one bad man who is breaking into your home, do you really need more than one shot? And people made do with that one shot for generations, and with six shots even in the dangerous Old West… So having a mag limit of 7 or 10 rounds is very generous, really.”
A lot of this is left unvoiced, but it is, in effect, their thought process. It’s obviously absurd, because the cat is out of the bag, and whether we like it or not, repeating firearms are a thing, and have been for about 150 years now. Nevertheless, this gun-ban logic won’t be satisfied until all cartridge firearms are forbidden (as if that will do anything to stop criminals) and since this is unrealistic, they’ll settle for just banning guns entirely.
I don’t believe in overkill. To quote the “70 Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries”, Maxim 37 says “There is no ‘overkill.’ There is only ‘open fire’ and ‘I need to reload’.”
Since I hurt my neck in a car accident, I can’t take the recoil of my thumpier weapons, so I resort to a much smaller caliber that I CAN shoot accurately and reliably. I CAN shoot the bigger rounds, but the pain from the recoil quickly mounts so high I become incapacitated. A smaller round makes it more likely that I’ll still be functional ten minutes AFTER a confrontation, so I carry a Kel-Tec PMR-30. The shoulder rig I have for it has a double mag pouch under the opposite arm. So, including the mag in the weapon, I have 90 rounds ready to go. Add the double mag pouch for my BELT, and you’ve got 150 rounds.
If an anti counted up how many rounds I could (and sometimes do) walk around with, their widdle heads would explode. To them, 90 or 150 rounds is like the Terminator — they can’t wrap their minds around the concept. But the whole thing, gun, magazines, rounds, and holsters, weighs less than my Kimber with a spare mag, and is more comfortable to wear.
Of course, I expect the horrified “you can’t use .22 WMR as a defensive round!” complaints. Yes, yes I can. I just have to be extremely accurate with them, and be willing to use as many as I need to stop the threat. Would I *like* to carry my Kimber instead? Sure! I love my Kimber, it’s a fantastic weapon! But it also weighs a freaking TON, and firing it feels like taking a pitched baseball to the back of my neck every time I fire it. It’s a trade-off made necessary by having broken my neck in 2006, an injury that I survived, but with complications that leave me in severe, debilitating pain most of the time. So I compromise and still maintain my safety as much as I’m able.
You should ditch the Kimber, then, and get a .500 S&W. Follow my reasoning here. You’d be so furious at the bad guy for necessitating what you are about to go through in pain that your telepathically projected anger would instantly vaporize him. You wouldn’t have to actually pull the trigger.
All kidding aside, I am sorry to hear about your neck. You sound like one tough survivor! (To say nothing of wealthy to be able to afford that much 22 LR.)
The larger point to take away from your example is that one’s choice of firearm depends on many, many, many things. There’s no gun that is right for absolutely everyone, there is no caliber that is right for absolutely everyone. A lot of the caliber/brand war pissing contests that go on amount to “this works for me”, “no it doesn’t, because this works for me” and that’s just absurd. The only truly wrong thing one can do is pick an unreliable gun, when a reliable gun is available to, and usable by, them.
FWIW, I got no problem with .22 mag as a defensive round–and neither does Mas Ayoob, if that’s what it comes to. Heck, I’ve even carried a .22 LR as a back-up. Wish I had a .22 mag myself, tho I would prefer a 7 or 8 round wheel gun to a semi-auto, as long as I’m wishing.
The FN five-seven has nearly zero recoil, I believe the Secret Service folks use it…
However they also use the correct ammo for what the gun was designed for and are not limited to the neutered “sporting” ammo us peons have been forced to use thus limiting its true capability for us.
That’s purty clip ‘ya got there…
The issue of magazine capacity is easily solved when you look at LEO exemptions, private security like Congress critters use, etc. If they were named as not exempt in any of initial bills and as a condition of passage- the bills would never see the light of day as the LEO out-cry would be too great.
BTW, this type of scenario made a lot of bills DOA back in the 80s-90s.
Antis always bring up this point about why only “trained” people being allowed to carry guns (i.e. cops and military personnel). In the past five years alone, the NYPD and LAPD have put countless innocent bystanders in the hospital by emptying their magazines in a totally undisciplined fashion. How many concealed carriers have done the same in that time period? They often counter with “But nobody’s perfect and that level of stress can cause anyone to slip up.” Wait a second. Didn’t you just say the only people who qualify to carry guns in your world are “trained?” Wouldn’t that also mean such individuals would be “trained” to have a significantly lower chance of putting bystanders in the hospital? Go watch a few videos on youtube, cops are firing like madmen in these cases. I can understand the occasional stray bullet, but the 7+ we saw wounded in the Empire State Building shooting a while back or the Dorner Manhunt truck incident are hardly “slip ups”.
I then bring up statistics on the number of qualification sessions and rounds fired therein by well known police departments (I believe it’s under 200 a year for most) on an annual basis, along with the abysmally lax scores required for an officer to pass. Every concealed carrier I’ve met trains at the range once every two to three weeks minimum (not including snap cap practice at home), and no fewer than a hundred rounds are fired per session. There are always exceptions, as some concealed carriers rarely train while some cops do on a weekly basis, but it’s largely accepted that the average concealed carrier gets more trigger time than the average cop annually.
“But police and soldiers have training!” they cry. The drills and motions both cops and soldiers go through are not black magic and witchcraft. These training techniques can be perfected by anyone given the proper time and effort, regardless of whether they wear a uniform or not. Besides, basic marksmanship isn’t rocket science.
“But what if a concealed carrier shoots an innocent bystander!? What if he shoots me because of the hero complex!?” I can say in complete confidence that, armed or unarmed, if gunfire rang out in the vicinity of 99.9% of concealed carriers, even the ones who talk tough, they’d be booking it in the opposite direction. I know I would. Cops and soldiers are expected to charge into the fray and get shot at in the course of their work so I don’t have to. I’m not going to draw a weapon unless I or a loved one next to me faces a clear and immediate threat. Besides, if a concealed carrier did accidentally shoot you, you could easily sue him/her in today’s legal climate. Do you honestly think it would be easier to sue a policeman with a department, city, and state government backing him up in the same case? Not a chance.
Only the real loons will admit it, but most antis think only cops and military personnel should be allowed to carry because they worship uniformed agents of the state. Mag capacity limits don’t matter; that’s just a stepping stone on the road to total disarmament of anyone not wearing a uniform. They want to be protected/controlled by the state because they’re too afraid to protect and help themselves; too afraid to be self-reliant and independent like real adults because they are emotionally stunted children in adults’ bodies. In order to rationalize their disorder they want everyone else to be at the mercy of the state too. It really is that simple.
most antis think only cops and military personnel should be allowed to carry because they worship uniformed agents of the state.
Which is why we have 2A — to protect us against uniformed agents of the state and the sycophants who worship them.
I can’t believe there are this many comments without the correct answer: Because The Children ™.
Won’t somebody think of the children?
Already thought of my children, all of whom know their way around a high powered rifle, shotgun and pistol.
Comments are closed.