MONDAY, AUGUST 19 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
many people evidently want them.
The NRA estimates that more
than 250 million magazines with a
capacity of 11 rounds or greater are
in circulation. Of those, 100 mil-
lion have a capacity of at least 30
rounds.
Gun experts say their populari-
ty has undoubtedly grown as tech-
nology has advanced, making the
devices lighter and less prone to
jams.
A 100-round drum is still too
heavy to make it useful for law
enforcement or for self-defense,
and it is not needed for hunting,
said Rick Vasquez, a retired fire-
arms officer and trainer for the
federal government.
At the range where he and other
professionals shoot, he said, he
has never seen a 100-round maga-
zine in use.
But to a certain demographic,
the appeal is all about the image.
“You put it on your gun and take
a YouTube video of yourself,” said
Vasquez, who now runs Texas-
based Active Crisis Consulting. “It
looks really cool to the younger
generation.”
At the online gun retailer
Cheaper Than Dirt, where a drum
similar to the one used in Dayton
is on sale for $181.33, fun is what is
emphasized.
“This 100 round drum maga-
zine lets you shoot while your
friends reload,” the seller boasts,
noting that whether “stress relief
or Zombie horde destruction fire
this magazine lets the good times
roll.”
Cheaper Than Dirt did not re-
spond to a request for comment.
Even if a 100-round magazine is
not particularly useful, Vasquez
said, he believes there is little ben-
efit in banning it. The Dayton
shooter, he said, “wanted to create
havoc. He could have done that
with 30-round magazines, 20-
round magazines or 10-round
magazines. It didn’t matter.”
Gun-control advocates say that
misses the point. And they say
they suspect the real point for the
gun industry in defending high-
capacity magazines is that they
are lucrative.
“They make a lot of money off
these devices,” said Laura Cutillet-
ta, who, like Chipman, pushes for
gun control at Gifford. “They’re
reluctant to let any law get in the
way of their profit.”
[email protected]suggest limits can be effective.
“There’s not a shred of evidence
that high-capacity-magazine bans
work,” said NRA spokeswoman
Catherine Mortensen. “Politicians
ought to focus on solutions that
keep guns out of the hands of
dangerous criminals.”
The situation is similar at the
federal level, where President
Trump has expressed a willing-
ness to work with Democrats on
background checks. But he has
said there is not sufficient “politi-
cal appetite” for any bans — de-
spite the fact that polls show a
large majority of the public in
favor. Republicans in Congress
have echoed that view, with many
recoiling even at the idea of stron-
ger background checks.
Democrats on the presidential
campaign trail have said they
would prioritize the magazine is-
sue if elected, and they have ex-
pressed incredulity that it has not
been addressed.
“Who in God’s name needs a
weapon that has 100 rounds?” for-
mer vice president and Democrat-
ic poll leader Joe Biden asked a
crowd in Iowa. “For God’s sake.”
Whether anyone needs them,don’t know if you have the right to
bear all the ammunition in the
world.’ ”
There is precedent for accesso-
ry bans, even with pro-gun-rights
Republicans in charge: The
Trump administration last
year banned bump stocks, the de-
vice that allowed the Las Vegas
shooter to fire a semiautomatic
rifle almost as fast as a machine
gun.
In Ohio, however, there is little
indication that a renewed maga-
zine limit is viable. Republican
Gov. Mike DeWine — who was
greeted with cries of “Do some-
thing!” in his first appearance af-
ter the Aug. 4 Dayton attack — has
proposed a range of measures that
includes background checks and
increased funding for mental
health care.
A high-capacity-magazine ban
is not among them. In a legislature
dominated by Republicans — as
well as some Democrats —
who prize their ratings with the
NRA, few dare defy the group,
which calls magazines with more
than 10 bullets “standard equip-
ment for many handguns and ri-
fles” and disputes findings thatat loosening gun laws.
“They just slipped it through,”
said Cecil Thomas, a Democrat in
the Ohio Senate. Following the
Dayton attack, Thomas and other
Democrats are pushing for new
limits.
Thomas, a 27-year veteran of
the Cincinnati Police Department,
said he had to worry as an officer
that, with a 15-round clip and one
in the chamber of his pistol, crimi-
nals would outgun him. “My little
nine-millimeter would be useless
against an AR-15,” he said, refer-
ring to his standard-issue hand-
gun and a high-powered rifle that
has proved popular among mass
killers.
The Dayton shooter’s killing
rampage — carried out with a
large magazine and other equip-
ment obtained from a friend — has
only deepened Thomas’s convic-
tion that the laws need to be
toughened. He said he hopes Re-
publicans will be amenable to a
change that would not infringe on
the legality of guns themselves.
“I hear all the time from Repub-
licans about the constitutional
right to bear arms,” Thomas said.
“I say ‘You can bear the arms. But I2017 to February 2018 claimed 101
lives and injured 459 people at an
outdoor concert, in a church and
inside a public high school.
They were also used in the 2011
Tucson shooting of then-Rep. Ga-
brielle Giffords (D-Ariz.), for
whom Chipman’s group is named.
That attack was interrupted when
the shooter, who was using a 33-
round clip, stopped to reload and
fumbled the fresh ammunition. A
bystander seized the chance, club-
bing him in the back of the head
with a folding chair while another
tackled him to the ground.
With smaller-capacity maga-
zines, said Robert Spitzer, a State
University of New York at Cort-
land professor who has written
five books on gun policy, “you
could still do bad things. But not
nearly to the same scale.”
Studies have bolstered the view
that a ban could have an impact.
Magazines with a capacity of
more than 10 bullets were prohib-
ited from 1994 to 2004 under fed-
eral law that included a prohibi-
tion on assault weapons. But since
the law lapsed, gun crimes involv-
ing high-capacity semiautomatic
weapons have increased marked-
ly, research conducted by George
Mason University criminologist
Christopher S. Koper found.
A Washington Post analysis in
2011 came to a similar conclusion,
finding that the percentage of fire-
arms equipped with high-capacity
magazines seized by police agen-
cies in Virginia dropped during
the decade covered by the federal
ban, only to rise sharply once the
restrictions were lifted.
In more recent research, to be
published in the coming
months, Koper and his colleagues
have found promising signs about
the potential for large-capacity-
magazine prohibitions and their
ability to yield reductions in mass-
shooting deaths and injuries.
Boston University professor
Michael Siegel has found that
states limiting the size of maga-
zines are less likely to experience a
mass shooting. Nine states and the
District of Columbia have such
bans on the books, with most lim-
iting magazines to 10 bullets.
Until 2015, Ohio had its own
restrictions, capping magazines at
30 bullets. But the Republican-
dominated state legislature
erased those rules as part of a
broader package of changes aimedmake the attacks less deadly, giv-
ing potential targets precious sec-
onds 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.”
Chipman, who now serves as a
senior policy adviser for Giffords,
a group that advocates for gun
control, said banning the devices
“does seem like a logical policy
choice if you’re trying to stop a
killer from turning into a killing
machine.”
The odds that Congress or state
legislatures will act still appear
relatively remote. Powerful gun
rights lobbying groups, including
the National Rifle Association,
vigorously oppose high-capacity
magazine bans or limits, arguing
that criminals will find a way to
obtain the devices regardless of
the law, just as they do with weap-
ons. Would-be killers, they say, can
always arm themselves with mul-
tiple weapons or magazines, effec-
tively skirting any ban.
A man in Philadelphia held po-
lice at bay for seven hours Wednes-
day with an arsenal of weapons
and ammunition that, as a felon,
he should not have been able to
have at all; he shot and injured six
police officers before surrender-
ing, and authorities have said it
was a “miracle” that no one died.
Still, a growing body of evi-
dence suggests that past federal
and current state-level restric-
tions on magazine capacity have
been effective. And with high-
capacity magazines becoming a
staple of mass shootings, experts
have an ever-longer litany of case
studies to bolster their argument.
Magazines like the one used in
Dayton have little utility in hunt-
ing, law enforcement or self-de-
fense. But high-capacity devices,
which are readily available online
and in stores, have been used in
more than half of all mass shoot-
ings in recent years, including es-
pecially deadly attacks in Las Ve-
gas, Sutherland Springs, Tex., and
Parkland, Fla. Taken together,
those three attacks from October
GUNS FROM A
As mass shootings rise, a focus on high-capacity magazines
MARLENA SLOSS/THE WASHINGTON POST
At a rally against white supremacy in Washington in August, Caron Martinez holds a sign that she also
marched with after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting.