Poll alert! Vote!

John Hardin said:

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2011/02/11/Should-congress-ban-high-capacity-ammo-clips

John Hardin of WA @ Feb 12, 2011 13:51:35 PM

No. Such a ban is an unreasonable overreaction to a horrifying, yet ultimately uncommon, tragedy.

Any time the government considers enacting a restriction on the freedom of the people, if such a restriction is permitted by the Constitution, a rational analysis of the societal costs of that restriction versus the possible societal benefits from that restriction must be made. If the societal costs outweigh the societal benefits, then the restriction is not justified and should not be enacted, no matter how appealing it may be in the heat of the moment.

Those who are advocating for a ban of so-called "large capacity" magazines are ignoring the societal costs of such a ban, either through intentional dishonesty or through ignorance. Ignorance can be remedied...

As a practical matter, "large capacity" magazines (using the "greater than ten rounds" definition) are not at all unusual. In fact, they are standard equipment provided by the manufacturer with almost all modern semiautomatic pistols. The correct size for a pistol magazine is "as many rounds as will fit and allow reliable operation without the magazine sticking out very far past the bottom of the grip". For a physically small caliber like 9mm this can be 18 rounds.

Many tens of millions of these magazines are presently in the hands of millions of peaceable, law abiding firearm owners and are being carried and used every day for legitimate self defense. Setting a limit of ten rounds on the legal size of a magazine would turn all of these people into felons overnight, and would impose on them the considerable burden of replacing all of their standard-size magazines or risk going to prison.

The contention that ten rounds is sufficient for legitimate self defense is based on two flawed assumptions: that there will only be one or perhaps two assailants, and that an assault can reliably be stopped with only a few shots being fired.

Using the data gathered by Kleck ( http://www.guncite.com/gcdgklec.html ) in 1993 (fresher data would be much welcomed) we get a rough estimate of 212,000 incidents in one year of armed self defense using a semiautomatic pistol against three or more assailants, and 33,000 of those incidents where one or more shots were fired by the defender with intent to hit their attackers.

While not all of these incidents can be assumed to require many shots to resolve, it is also not reasonable to assume all of them could have been resolved with ten or fewer shots fired. If we take some small percentage, say 5%, that gives us a base estimate of 1,600 self defense instances in one year where magazine size was relevant, perhaps crucial, to successful self-defense.

A very rough average hit rate of US law enforcement officers is 50%. If we assume that a private citizen armed in self defense will do as well, then only five rounds in a ten round magazine will be effective. Further, the idea of "one-shot stop" is a Hollywood fantasy. One or more hits in vital areas are needed to reliably stop a determined attacker. As an extreme example, one of the bank robbers in the Miami FBI shootout took twelve hits to stop, and he was not under the influence of any of the drugs that make it possible to simply ignore minor injuries.

Imposing a ban on private ownership of pistol magazines holding more than ten rounds will potentially cause up to a thousand violent crimes a year to shift from "thwarted" to "successful", with the corresponding increase in the number of victims wounded and killed by criminal assailants.

But this daily dribble of lives won't catch the attention of the public the way a lurid mass murder does. Too many people simply don't know about it, or ignore it as background noise - or, worse, dismiss it as irrelevant or unworthy of consideration because the victims are people who've chosen to arm themselves for self-defense, and their lives are somehow less valuable or worthy of consideration than the lives of victims who are helpless to defend themselves.

As to the societal benefits of such a ban...

In the past five years, excluding instances where the murderer was carrying multiple firearms (e.g. several pistols, or pistols and a rifle or shotgun), or had plenty of time to reload at his leisure (VT and NIU), or obtained a pistol from a victim (in both cases, from a LEO after shooting them with a revolver), and thus legally-available magazine size wasn't relevant, there were four instances of mass murder using a single semiautomatic pistol. In those incidents, 19 people were killed and 19 more injured. That is four people injured and four people murdered per year, in incidents where the victim count _might_ have been reduced if the murderer couldn't obtain a "large capacity" magazine.

Finally, banning an object does not make that object magically disappear from the face of the earth, it only drives trade in that object underground, and increases the cost to obtain that object.

Given that banning "large capacity" magazines will do little to keep them out of criminal hands while turning tens of millions of non-criminals into overnight felons, and that such a ban might reduce four deaths and four injuries per year at the cost of possibly a thousand more deaths and injuries a year from the inability to successfully defend against multiple assailants, the cost/benefit analysis says the ban is not justified.

"But if it saves just one life..." is not a valid argument if it also costs twenty lives.

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