Well this is a first: an email from the Washington Post’s PR department linking to a firearms related story. Much obliged. But here’s the thing: Data indicate drop in high-capacity magazines during federal gun ban clearly indicates that the WaPo reckons “high capacity” ammunition magazines are a public safety hazard. Where’s the data on that? Not to mention the data on defensive gun uses where lives were saved because of armed civilians with “high capacity” magazines? See what I mean about an unspoken bias for civilian disarmament amongst the media elite? Anyway, make the jump for the officially sanctioned excerpt . . .

According to a Washington Post investigation, during the 10-year federal ban on assault weapons, the percentage of firearms equipped with high-capacity magazines seized by police agencies in Virginia dropped, only to rise sharply once the restrictions were lifted in 2004. In Virginia, the Post found that the rate at which police recovered firearms with high-capacity magazines — mostly handguns and to a smaller extent rifles — began to drop around 1998, four years into the ban. It hit a low of 9 percent of the total number of guns recovered the year the ban expired, 2004.

The next year, the rate began to climb and continued to rise in subsequent years, reaching 20 percent in 2010, according to the analysis of a little-known Virginia database of guns recovered by police. In the period The Post studied, police in Virginia recovered more than 100,000 firearms, more than 14,000 of which had high-capacity magazines.

To some researchers, the snapshot in Virginia suggests that the federal ban may have started to curb the widespread availability of the larger magazines. “I was skeptical that the ban would be effective, and I was wrong,” said Garen Wintemute, head of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California at Davis School of Medicine.

For the full investigative story by David S. Fallis, go to: http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/data-point-to-drop-in-high-capacity-magazines-during-federal-gun-ban/2013/01/10/d56d3bb6-4b91-11e2-a6a6-aabac85e8036_story.html

Jennifer Lee
Manager, Communications
The Washington Post
@WashPostPR

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30 COMMENTS

  1. Interesting that they sent it in of their own volition. At least there’s some attempt at dialogue from the left going on, however misguided said dialogue is.

  4. Wow. There’s some hard hitting journalism right there.

    When standard capacity magazines are banned, people can’t buy them, so they get low capacity magazines. Then when they can buy them again, they buy standard capacity magazines.

    There’s no magical formula, and notice, police still arrested people with guns.

    It’s like a report saying “Drunk drivers are driving drunk.”

  5. That was a whole lot of words to say absolutely nothing of meaning.

    The amount of higher-than-10-capacity mags out there in the world went up after the ban ended? No shit! And that is reflected in the guns the cops seize? Oh my God, that’s fascinating!

    Alert the goddamn media!

    Oh, right.

  7. What they love to report is how many guns were seized, how many hi cap mags were seized, how many Evil Black Rifles were seized. That’s because most of them were not used to commit a crime, but seized from the home of the suspect after the crime was committed. And the alleged crime may not even have been a violent crime where a firearm had been used at all! Note also that in many cases the “seized” statistic is padded with guns taken from innocent people, who now have to fight to get their legal property back. Allegations (not convictions) of domestic abuse? Seize the Guns!

    Show me the stats on how many of these hi cap mags were used to commit crimes where the perp fired more than 10 rounds!

    • Not many, because most crimes are committed using cheap throw-away handguns by drug gangs in urban ghettos. The national gun numbers are strongly in favor of the pro-2A side, and when you adjust for geography the scale tilts completely vertical weighing in favor of the pro-gun side. Poverty and the drug black market are what drives the vast majority of drug violence and other violent crime in this country. Even in the absence of guns, there would still be crime committed because of poverty and drugs.

      • Crimes aren’t committed because of poverty and drugs, any more than people are fat because of McDonalds. They are fat because of the choices they made when they encountered McDonalds.

        • Yes, but poor uneducated people do not have the same options as middle class folks who finished High School or got at least an Assiciate’s degree…. So they do have different a different set of choices before them.
          YES, staying on the straight and narrow and getting an education and moving up is one of them, but for whatever reasons, this is not a frequently chosen option in that demographic….

  8. It’s strange, because the Left blamed the Right-leaning media bias and propaganda machine in the aftermath of the Invasion of Iraq and failure to find WMD.

    And now the same media is using the same tactics to push the Left’s agenda.

    Don’t people realize that the Left vs Right thing is another load of bull? Sure, there are specific issue differences, but for the most part what the media is biased against is the people.

    • It sells newspapers. OK, maybe not enough, but some. And clicks. Hopefully they’ll get on the “Give a Scared Parent a Gun” charity bandwagon and the idiocy will go away. “You’ve got to understand” Obama smugly intonend at the private 2014 fundraiser in San Francisco, “up in Connecticut they just cling to their guns and their copy of Vanity Fair for security.”

    • They are, at least as far as cable news goes, all corporate whores who are biased towards dollars.

      BUT this 24 hour news cycle all drama all the time bullshit started with Fox, and there’s no arguing that.

  10. Funny how all there research is done by antigun kaliforina research organizations. While none partisan FBI crime reports show the exact opposite!

  11. “Suggests to researchers”? Like, “Hey, Susie…Waddya make of this?”

    Fluff. WaPo is a dying animal.

  12. During the Soviet Union’s regime, the major newspaper was”Pravda”(truth) under the state news agency,”TASS”(news).
    Ordinary Russians had a saying,”There is no truth in’Pravda’, and no news in’TASS’.”
    Substitute “Pravda” for the”Washington Post” and “TASS” for the
    ” New York Times”, and you’ve got it.

  14. And lots of criminals continue to use 6 shot revolvers because they are handy. Similarly, many criminals used semi-auto handguns with less-than-10-round magazines because they were handy. But the $50,000 question is if magazine capacity restrictions saved any lives: there is no evidence that happened. What we do know is that murder rates (where the murder weapon was a firearm) have been on a steady and significant decline starting in 1993 and continuing to this day. Thus arbitrary magazine capacity limits do not change murder rates when firearms are the murder weapon.

    • It’s not that revolvers are handy, it’s because they’re cheap, and they don’t leave brass behind for the police to get prints from. Most criminals are repeat offenders*, meaning their prints are on file with the po-po.

      *partly because once you’re a convicted felon, it’s pretty difficult to have a ‘normal’ life again, and that makes it really easy to return to your old bad habits, but that’s a whole ‘nother discussion.

  18. Wow – What insightful investigative reporting in Economics 101 ! The government restricts the supply, and lo and behold, less of the restricted items are found by them. Also, since there are less, the value of those available skyrockets and people hang on to them and again Wow! , less are available to be “found” by the government.

    Even more shocking, the restriction is lifted and lo and behold, more of the restricted items are subsequently found to be around.

    I think a smell a Nobel Prize in both Economics and Journalism (if they award one for that, if not make it a Pulitzer) for the Washington Post!

  19. They might as well have written an article on how noone seems to be eating the McRib during the time when McD’s is not selling it. That’s some hard hitting Geraldo Rivera level journalism right there.

  20. The high cap magazine ban was effective? Effective at what? Reducing the number of these magazines? How does that improve anything?

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