On High-Capacity Magazines

It always pains me to point out the obvious, so I omitted mention of so-called high-capacity magazines from my recent comments on reasonable gun control. However, much of the latest gun-control discussion (including President Obama’s own disingenuous remarks) has focused on the notion of limiting magazine capacities. Therefore, I am forced to point out the obvious.

Limiting magazine capacities for firearms would be difficult both practically and constitutionally. I will deal with the constitutional side first, since that may be less obvious for those who haven’t studied the history of gun control or U.S. constitutional law. To begin, though, we must define just what exactly a high-capacity magazine is—and that is a big part of the problem in itself.

An ammunition magazine is a device for feeding cartridges into a repeating firearm.¹ The capacity of that magazine will vary depending on the type and size of the gun and the size and weight of its ammunition and will generally be limited by how reliable and convenient it is in normal use. What is high capacity for one firearm may be low capacity for another. For example, magnum revolvers commonly have five- to eight-round cylinders, mid-sized semi-automatic pistols are often designed for 15-round magazines, and many small-bore rifles (such as the AR-15) are usually equipped with 20- or 30-round magazines.

In D.C. v. Heller, the U.S. Supreme Court established a common-use test for firearms protected by the Second Amendment. Since the guns described in the above example are all in common use for lawful purposes, their standard magazines will most likely be ruled protected as well. For what it’s worth, this fact may leave true high-capacity magazines constitutionally vulnerable.

What are “true high-capacity magazines”? These are the gimmicky and awkward products designed to separate gun owners from their money. They may hold scores and scores of cartridges, but they push the material limits of the magazines themselves and the endurance limits of the shooter, making them both unreliable and uncomfortable. In fact, the failures of such magazines appear to have foreshortened some recent mass-murder incidents—which leads off on a tangent that I will probably explore in the future.

Setting the Constitution aside, controlling high-capacity magazines is impractical, because doing so is essentially impossible. An ammunition magazine is little more than a box with a spring inside of it. Any high-school dropout could make one in his mother’s basement, and in a few more years, so-called 3D printing will enable anyone to manufacture all the necessary components save the steel springs. In other words, the technology is too simple to control without sending our civilization back to the Stone Age.

This is also why existing and proposed magazine restrictions bother me mostly for their idiocy. In California, it is currently illegal to manufacture or sell magazines with greater than 10-round capacities. While this law is effectively unenforceable and has no impact on violent crime, law-abiding citizens such as myself dutifully follow it, but I offer this detail with a caveat. I may have no personal or immediate need for high-capacity magazines, but should such need develop, I expect that they will be easy enough to come by.

Now for your bonus tactical argument! Why are high-capacity magazines actually good for lawful defense but mostly irrelevant to criminal offense? The gun-control theory goes that when a would-be mass killer stops to reload, his potential unarmed victims have an opportunity to tackle him safely, but this is the exception rather than the rule.² When faced with imminent violence, those not properly prepared or trained to respond in kind will naturally tend to flee or hide, leaving the murderer with ample time to reload or switch weapons. On the other hand, the defensive shooter is already in the fight by definition. Her attackers will be pressing their assault and not cowering or running, so she won’t have the luxury of calmly reloading her weapon with another low-capacity magazine.

Magazine limitations are pointless and probably unconstitutional and like other unreasonable gun-control schemes hinder only law-abiding citizens and not the violent criminals they supposedly target.

1. It’s worth noting that repeating firearms (capable of more than one shot before reloading) have been around for nearly 700 years, though they didn’t become economical to manufacture widely until the mid-19th century.


2. The garden-variety violent criminal needs to fire only a couple shots while trying to murder a rival gang member.