'Experts' Want To Focus On Magazine Capacity. They're Wrong

In the wake of numerous mass shootings in recent months, a lot of attention has been focused on them. People are looking to try and find a solution and, frankly, a lot of those who are doing so don’t give a flying flip about your rights. They’ll do anything they can, including banning things.

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Over at the Washington Post, they found some “experts” to claim that what we need to focus on is magazine capacity.

It took a shooter all of 32 seconds to spray 41 rounds outside a popular bar in Dayton, Ohio, this month, an attack that killed nine people and injured 27. A lightning-fast response from nearby officers prevented a far higher toll: When police shot him dead, the killer still had dozens of bullets to go in his double-drum, 100-round magazine.

The use of such high-capacity magazines was banned in Ohio up until 2015, when a little-noticed change in state law legalized the devices, part of an overall rollback in gun-control measures that has been mirrored in states nationwide.

With the pace of mass shootings accelerating — and their tolls dramatically increasing — criminologists and reform advocates are more intently focused on limiting access to such accessories as one of the most potent ways to curb the epidemic.

Restrictions on the capacity of bullet magazines will not stop mass shootings, but they could make the attacks less deadly, giving potential targets precious seconds to escape or fight back while the shooter reloads, experts say.

“The high-capacity magazine is what takes it to a whole other level of carnage,” said David Chipman, who served 25 years as a special agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. “It’s the primary driver for why we’re seeing more mass shootings more regularly.”

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Except that’s crap.

The Parkland killer used 10-round magazines. As the Miami Herald reported, “Cruz went in with only 10-round magazines because larger clips would not fit in his duffel bag, Book said.”

Now, no one is going to pretend that Parkland isn’t a major mass shooting. It claimed 17 lives and left another 17 wounded. It was a major mass shooting, but it was carried out with 10-round magazines, apparently.

When you take a look at the Virginia Tech shooting, the killer there used a mix of 10-round and 15-round magazines. There’s no indication that he was less deadly with the 10-rounders in his weapons.

Right now, they’re trying to use various mass shootings and the isolated facts surrounding them to try and craft laws that will create a meaningful impact. They won’t.

While the Dayton killer may have taken fewer lives with lower-capacity magazines, the El Paso killer probably wouldn’t have. The Parkland killer did plenty of damage with 10-round magazines, after all. The Las Vegas killer had plenty of time to change magazines if he’d needed to. Higher-capacity magazines were forbidden in California, but the Thousand Oaks killer clearly got his hands on some anyway.

Dayton had an armed response available fairly quickly, which is why they want to chalk the death toll up to the magazine. Dayton is a relatively weird scenario anyway. Usually, mass shooters don’t pick places with a police presence nice and handy like he did.

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The truth of the matter is that when you look at mass shootings, what you do see is that these are people driven to kill as many people as humanly possible. They’ll use whatever advantage they can find to kill more people.

What’s more, I think Mr. Chipman up there knows that. However, while the Post gives his credentials first, they don’t mention until later that he now works with Giffords. In other words, his job is to advance gun control. He’s not going to tell you that magazine bans don’t work or that they won’t have an impact on mass shootings. If he did, he’d have to propose something even worse from a pro-gun perspective or he’d be out of work.

Now, I’m not saying he doesn’t believe what he’s saying. He well may. What I’m saying is that he’s a biased source, so hardly an unbiased expert simply following the data. No, he’s a gun-grabber through and through, which makes anything he says suspect.

And since I was able to refute his claim this easily, you’d think the Washington Post would have the resources to at least verify whether that was true or not. They didn’t.

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