benEzra
benEzra's JournalDefining "high capacity" as "anything over 10 rounds" is very intentionally misleading.
That is like defining "late term abortion" as an abortion that occurs after detectability of fetal heartbeat. Both bait-and-switches are done for similar reasons, of course---to make pretty extreme measures sound reasonable and mainstream. In the case of >10-round magazines, you are talking about roughly a quarter billion magazines owned by 40+ million people. These are not fringe items.
Over-10-round rifles hit the civilian market in the early 1860's; over-10-round pistols have been pretty common since the 1930s and became dominant in the 1970s-1980s. Standard magazine capacity for a full-sized 9mm pistol is 15 to 20 rounds; the most popular civilian rifles typically hold 30 small-caliber rounds. We'll keep them.
Even gun control advocates have been backing away from the 10-round limit for a while:
“Actually, I like this,” emailed Jim Kessler, a former director of policy and research at Americans for Gun Safety. “There will be a knee-jerk reaction among some who will say, “Why no clip ban?” But I think on both substance and political grounds, a high-capacity clip ban is the wrong way to go. There were roughly 12,000 gun homicides last year, and I’ll wager that less than 10 were caused by bullets 11 through 30 in someone’s magazine. The problem is bullets 1, 2, and 3 –- not 11, 12, and 13."
Of course, USA Today is the same paper that opened the debate on the "assault weapon" fraud in 1989 by declaring the debate over, so they don't exactly have a very thoughtful track record on the issue.
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