It’s Those &^%$# “High Capacity Magazines”…

…that make shootings like Parkland so…

…um…

oh.

The 19-year-old school shooter who killed 17 in Florida on Valentine’s Day had 150 rounds of ammunition in 10-round magazines.

And when you have four uninterrupted minutes and the cops aren’t inclined to intervene, they may as well have been five round magazines.   Loading is loading.

But then, gun control is not about saving lives.

7 thoughts on “It’s Those &^%$# “High Capacity Magazines”…

  1. I seem to remember that one of the complaints with high capacity magazines is that they jam more. One might wonder whether fewer people would have been killed if he’d been using bigger magazines for that very reason. Obviously I’m not recommending an experiment to test that, but…..

  2. It’s stuff like this that really gets my goat.

    Look, I’ve been shooting 40 years. I’ve spent a fair amount of time around people with guns and I will admit that I’ve met some knuckleheads clowning around or showing off who needed to be slapped upside the head. But I’ve never met a single solitary soul who WANTED to be unsafe with guns.

    No shooter WANTS society to suffer school shootings, drive-bys, accidental discharges, or suicides. But we also don’t want to give up one of our Constitutional rights merely to signal our virtue to the In Crowd. To prevent tragedy, it’s not enough to “do something;” you must do right thing, the effective thing, the sensible thing, even if it might be the hard thing.

    My cousin unfriended me because she supported a high-capacity magazine ban and I asked her: “So you don’t mind the killing, it’s the RATE of killing you object to? If he killed them more slowly because of all those mag changes, then everything would be alright?” She was angry but she’s wrong to be angry at me, she ought to be angry at herself for such shallow thinking.

    The problem isn’t the mags. The problem is the killing. Focus on the problem. And that’s what’s wrong with all the popular gun control schemes – they focus on the wrong things, the easy things, the quick fixes that won’t actually prevent the killing, as we see in the Florida school shooting.

    The Florida shooter didn’t need high-capacity mags because he had a dozen smaller ones. He didn’t obtain his gun when the owner left it unsecured, he bought the gun himself. He wasn’t deterred by a waiting period, he purchased months in advance. He wasn’t stopped by a universal background check because he wasn’t in the system despite scores of warnings. Raising the buying age to 21 would have saved these specific school children’s lives but not prevented him from shooting different school children two years from now because . . . we haven’t focused on the problem, only on the fringes.

    Dave Pinto’s legislation had a glimmer of the right idea: we need to make it easier for society to force people with mental illness to take their meds so they quit being a danger to society. That’s how we stop the killing. Now . . . how are we going to do it in a way that everybody can support?

  3. JD, I hear Shvonder-eTASS is working on a plan.

    Ok, Ok, slap me upside the head. I deserve it. But then when you get a softball served up on a platter like that, you just gotta hit it outta the park.

    And again, you are absolutely correct. Nobody is addressing the root of the problem. NOBODY! Let’s ban bump stocks! is the clear example of that. Problem is, solution can only be developed by rational people, and 99% of the politicians are irrational and illogical, looking only to the next election cycle to make sure they retain their spot at the trough. I hate to sound repetitious, but I still believe term limits could fix a lot of problems in Washington by putting an end to the professional politician class who care naught for governance or the people but only about enriching themselves.

  4. BTW, so now we have two orc canards we can counter:

    Ban assault guns to stop school shootings! – Virginia Tech was perpetrated with a P22.

    Ban high cap mags because they cause more carnage! – Parkland shooting involved 10round capacity mags.

    Just keeping track, that’s all.

  5. In related news: 2 killed at Central Michigan University, gunman
    ´armed and dangerous´ still at large

    Sounds like a domestic dispute. But why do you think gunman went to do his deed at CMU? Could it be because CMU is a gun free zone and he KNEW he would not get accosted and had a higher rate of success and escape then just about anywhere else? Hmmm….

  6. Pingback: In The Mailbox: 03.02.18 : The Other McCain

  7. JPA, he stole his dad’s gun and killed his parents–I’d presume because he was flunking out or something and there was Hell to pay for it. So we would infer this one may have occurred in part because either it wasn’t a gun free zone (MSU, an hour south, is not), or Dad didn’t respect it.

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