Magazine Limits
Magazine limits have never been shown to have any impact on gun crime, crime, or casualties in mass shootings. Democrats demand low capacity magazines either knowing that (and not caring), or being ignorant of the topic they're trying to legislate. Persecuting someone knowing that your law can't help is kinda the definition of asshole.
Issue | Lie | Truth |
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Magazine Limits
đ€Ș Unreasonable
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Limiting magazine capacity can save lives. Standard capacity magazines have no practical application in self defense or hunting. It's the evil NRA and Gun Owners that block them, because they want to see their neighbors and children killed rather than give up playing weekend Rambo. | You can reload a magazine in less than a second: no one has ever closed the gap during a magazine drop, limiting magazine capacity doesn't matter. There are many self defense, sporting and hunting situations (multiple intruders, charging bear or boar, moving competitions) where 10 rounds is not enough. If they did anything good, the pro-gun crowd would at least be split: the fact that virtually none agree with the gun controllers, shows the gun controllers are ignorant, hateful bullies, or both. |
The first thing to know is that these laws are unconstitutional, and have been ruled so, many, many times. But aggressive legislators pass them anyways, knowing that they'll get the votes of the gullible for "doing something". The fact that's it's something stupid, offensive, and will lose in court, after wasting millions of dollars fighting over it, doesn't matter to them. Who cares about the law or their oath of office (to defend the Constitution), when you can get money, votes, and attention for breaking it?
Examples: 4 items
Reload Times - There's a fallacy amongst hoplophobes (gun phobics) that limiting magazines to 10 rounds will help against mass shooters, or that assault rifles are somehow unique. However:
- The time it takes to reload is less than the reaction time to know that a shooter is reloading.
- We fought all wars prior to the Korean war without removable magazines, and all wars prior to Vietnam with 10 round magazines (or less).
- The FBI studied mass shootings and found that the average mass shooting is 10 rounds over 5 minutes, most never even need to reload.
- In all the mass shootings in the U.S. there has never been a case where a shooter was charged and disarmed during a reload, even with revolvers.
- Shooting sprees end by them leaving, surrender, suicide or getting shot: virtually never by takedowns during reloads.
Magazine limits, assault rifle bans, outlawing removable magazines, and so on, sound great to those who don't know any better, but is just an infuriating ineffective annoyance to gun owners. Each bad law like this, makes it harder to pass "good" laws, as the tolerance for any more legislation was been wasted dividing us, instead of making a real difference.
Gun control or gun ban? - Some claim, "nobody wants to take your guns, we just want a few 'reasonable' controls on them". But if we pretend that gun control works (by ignoring facts and history), and we assume guns are the problem, then there is no such thing as gun-control: you need gun bans. "Controlling" semi-auto rifles means you have to control semi-auto-pistols... and then revolvers, and pump/lever action, then bolt action guns (which committed one of our worst mass shootings in American history) and the results are, there are no safe guns in the hands of crazies. Thus logic says they're lying, either to us, themselves or both. So I've yet to meet the gun-controller that will be satisfied with X, when that means their neighbors will still have guns.
Duncan v. Becerra - In 1994 the federal government enacted a "Assault Weapon" ban, with a sunset clause to end by 2000. After 6 years it was shown that it had done absolutely nothing to curb crime, gun crime or mass shootings -- so it went away and there was absolutely no noticeable difference in either. California quickly enacted a standard magazine ban (what they call high capacity magazines) to punish their citizens for not living in a free state -- but because ex-post facto laws (ones that make prior actions a crime) are generally unconstitutional, they grandfathered in old magazines. While the law was still technically unconstitutional, it wasn't clear how the Supreme's would rule, so the gun advocates took it, and could get around the law by claiming new magazines were pre-ban. Then in 2018 California figured fuck the Constitution they'd ban them all (without fair compensation). It was guaranteed to lose, but they could harass their citizens for years while it wound it's way through the court. Instead a judge quickly and brutally ruled against it, and made standard capacity magazines legal for a week: and over 1M of them were bought, showing how fraudulent and corrupt the ban was in the first place. If crime doesn't skyrocket, it proves that magazine bans aren't about public safety, but intolerance and people control.
2019.04.16 New Jersey Magazine Ban - New Jersey passed a law outlawing standard capacity magazines starting in 2018. There are estimated to be one million-gun owners with 10 million standard capacity magazines out there (10+). To see how effective the ban was, Ammoland asked how many had been turned in for destruction and compliance with the law, and after a lot of dodging and requiring an FOIA request (Freedom of Information Act) with both state and local law enforcement, and they were able to find exactly 0 that were turned in for compliance with the law. But to be fair, the State has never arrested anyone for breaking the law, nor does it even have guidelines of how to. So the law achieved no compliance, no enforcement, but turned 1 million otherwise law abiding citizens into theoretical criminals. Is that what a "reasonable" gun law looks like?
Conclusion
Even the name lets you know about the sides position. If they call it a "High Capacity" magazine ban, you know they're likely anti-2A and anti-Gun. What they are actually banning is the standard capacity 15, 18, 20, 30 round magazines that the guns often come with standard. And they limiting it to some arbitrary round number (like 10 or 15), under the brilliant theory that only the 12th round is dangerous. (10+1 in the chamber). The arbitrariness, lack of scientific evidence of any value, and the fact that it criminalizes older guns and magazines (especially without paying the owners fair market value and making ex-post-facto laws) means that they'll keep losing in court, or on appeal. But the goal isn't to help the public, but to garner votes by harassing gun owners.
What is reasonable when it comes to gun laws? I explain what it takes to be compliant with a few gun laws so that readers can decide how reasonable these laws are. Now I'm not a lawyer, and I don't play one on TV, so don't take this as legal advice. But these are just a small sampling of the 20,000: local, state and national gun control laws that every owner must know and comply with, under the legal concept of Ignorantia juris non excusat (Ignorance of the law is no excuse). The penalty for infraction is often a felony conviction, ruination and loss of gun rights by hyper-aggressive DA's who hate guns or want to get elected to higher office on the fraud that they're helping public safety. Or worse, the laws aren't enforced and teach both sides contempt for them. If any of these laws seem silly, annoying, or ineffective, you will begin to understand why gun-advocates mock and resist âreasonable gun controlâ and the legislators who create them.
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