Lessons We Should Learn from Rep. Gifford's Shooting

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That's strange. I work for the army - a group that knows a thing or two about weapons, and most of their planning for homeland defense, strategy, and resource allocation is based on the most likely scenarios. Things below the 5% confidence level in likelihood get little, if any, resources. Perhaps you are better versed in these type of things though.

Evidently, I was not very clear. My issue is not what I would do if someone were pointing a gun at me with a 30 round magazine. My issue is that such magazines are available for purchase at all, because the only practical thing I can think of that you can do with such a magazine that could not be accomplished with a standard magazine is killing a whole lot more people.

My issue was not in the total number of rounds in any given person's possession - as I have tried (and apparently failed) to make clear, the problem I have is having 30+ rounds in one magazine.

While largely unnecessary (most police officers do not routinely use their pistols as part of their daily job), I would not consider it overkill. For one, they are far more likely that the average person to be in a dangerous situation (afterall, it's part of their job). And two, it misses the point because I don't know of any police organization that issues 30 clip magazines to their officers.

You tell me - because I cannot think of a reasonable scenario where anyone would need more - especially in one magazine.

You have GOT to be kidding. Between the surveillance camera, the testimony of dozens of eye witnesses which corroborate one another, the dozens of news reports, and the sheriff himself, lead me to believe that we can draw some pretty firm conclusions as to what happened. Unless all the witnesses are lying and the sheriff watched the wrong videotape... Oh wait - I get it - since we cannot guarantee that didn't happen, we shouldn't exclude it as a possibility.

And that doesn't mean we need 30 round magazines. If you never know, maybe they should make 60 round magazines. Or hell, just a couple of hundred rounds - sure the grip of the handgun would be a meter long, but better to be prepared than to find yourself out of bullets? Really?

 

I was given to think about this when I went to the range last year. I had no illusions about my abilities with or knowledge concerning a handgun -- last one I shot was my Dad's WW2 service revolver in my teens -- but in that very short time I really noticed how many liberties Hollywood takes with gun practices and etiquette. I mean, how often do we see Bond reload? He carries a very small gun, concealable under a Tuxedo jacket, and yet he certainly seems to have unlimited rounds with with to take out the bad guys.

I know this'll aggravate some people but I am thinking mandatory gun training in schools, along with graphic real life footage (similar to the scared straight stuff they do for car licences) might impress upon young minds the seriousness and lethality of guns. I wouldn't go so far as to censor the television shows, but showing the kids truth and reality in an educational setting is not a bad thing.

 

Thinking of it, a thinking person probably rather wanted to be somewhere else in that case. But in the situation, then you would probably want to have a flak jacket, a ballistic helmet and a shotgun. If you really want to be prepared you'd need to carry that around at all times. After all, you never know.

If you carry these 45 rounds for your hand gun with you and the assailant is a sniper, it won't do you any good. Well, all that says is you probably also need to have a sniper rifle with you at all times. Just to be safe. You'd also probably need a mule for your equipment.

The quest for perpetual preparedness is a futile one. Point is, you cannot be prepared for every eventuality.

 

I, personally, would only need one shot. A Deringer would be sufficient.

 

Since you mention this, what exactly are your qualifications? Do you work for the army directly (i.e. you are an employee of the army), or are you employed by a civilian contractor? And is your role to consult on weapons tactics, homeland defense, strategy, et al? Honest questions.

I have never represented myself as an expert on these things, but I do have real world experience. I work in a field that among other things provides personal protective services to businesses and individuals, I own and use firearms routinely and train regularly in their use, and I have been involved in shootings.

Despite what you may think, I have never really advocated for 30 round magazines here. But I object to an arbitrary limitation of 15 rounds, implied in the statement:

With 30 rounds, you could at least match Loughner round for round. With 15 you could not.

I'm glad to hear that, but you did make the statement I quoted above. If all you want to do is ban 30 round magazines and have no moral objections to persons who carry 30 or 45 rounds in two or three magazines, I really have no objection to that.

There are plenty of civilian outfits that do high-risk work. At any rate, I'm also glad that you acknowledge that there is a possibility that more than 15 rounds may be needed. I would consider the Loughner matter to have been a dangerous situation, one which many civilians were exposed to and, sadly, few law enforcement officers were available to respond to.

Hm, you just said that police may get into dangerous situations that could require more than 15 rounds, never mind the magazine capacity. Still, some possible examples: the Loughner shooting, civil unrest like the LA riots of the nineties, being forced to defend yourself against mutiple assailants such as a gang attack, being caught in the middle of a scenario like the Hollywood bank robbery automatic weapons disaster of several years back, etc.

You tell me then, without consulting any internet searches: what, exactly, happened at the Loughner shooting scene? And as relates to the original context of this quote, describe the specifics of how Loughner was disarmed so that we can draw sound conclusions about whether he didn't have time to reload, fumbled his reload attempts, or was otherwise unable to do it. Note that speculation does us no good here, other than for purposes of ... speculation. In order to draw useful conclusions, we have to base our analysis on imperical data.

You're going strangely out to left field here in what I gather is a misguided attempt to attribute paranoid delusions to me. Please don't do that. I neither suggested that any witnesses were lying or that the sheriff had watched the wrong video tape, nor did I advocate 200 round magazines. What I did say is that there is no way you can guarantee that more than 15 rounds will not be needed in a justified self-defense scenario.

If your emotions are getting the better of you here, I suggest you take a breather or a time-out to compose yourself. We're not going to get anywhere just sniping at each other, and if our intent here is to actually come to some common ground - whether that be closer to your side or mine - then we have a duty to the truth to be civil in that endeavor, as it's best served that way. You're not going to convince me of anything by being snide or misrepreseting my points. If all we're going to do is trade insults, it won't work, and I'm not interested.

Hopefully so, but can you be certain of that? I would think you'd have to be quite close to hit a target with a deringer. What if he shot you first, or what if you missed?

 

The number of rounds really doesn't matter. It is all about who fires a quality shot first. You don't need to match the other guy's magazine size unless you're planning on using a duck and cover tactic. I would argue a single officer, with any service revolver, would have stopped Loughner -- he was a coward firing on unarmed victims, return fire would most likely have caused him to panic.

 

Gaear, if I am reading you right you object to merely making an arbitrary limit on the magazine size. Fair enough. But the idea that there should be some limit is not too out there for you, I think. So the question is what is the limit? Empirical data for this would be highly subject to interpretation, but I would hazard that police reports regarding standoffs and other violent situations could be used as a guide.

So, going without that data, I'm going to serve up a simple opinion that doesn't pretend to be anything but that -- an opinion based on my limited experience. I can't see Joe Blow citizen needing to wander around with more than 15 rounds on his person. If he gets into a firefight of some sort (despite appearances, NOT an everyday occurance for the average citizen) if he needs more than 15 rounds, he's probably in way over his head anyways and having 300 rounds wouldn't make much difference -- outnumbered, outgunned, what have you. Possible, yes, anything is possible. But not really probable. You have to balance probable occurences with other considerations. Take a cop, for instance:

If we had cops outfitted as Ragusa described 24/7 that would be a bit of an overkill and set a really bad tone. Now if they are working security of something, I can see some more gear, but it is my understanding that even then they want to blend into the crowd at such events, not stand out like sore thumbs. Or at least some of them want to blend in, while others want to stick out so as to make a point to anyone getting violent ideas.

Bottom line, having a reasonable limit on the capacity of a single magazine doesn't seem to me to be a bad idea. So the question is, what number is reasonable? It would appear to me that 30 is excessive unless you have (as Gaear seems to, I'm starting to wonder if he is Chance from Human Target!) a damn good reason for it.

 

Again, probably, and hopefully. But not certainly. I'd like to have extra rounds available in case things didn't go my way at the outset.

Not so much the magazine size as the number of rounds in total. I don't think 30 round magazines are practical in a domestic law-enforcement sense or a civilian sense, because for one they make concealed carry impossible for civilians. (The sheriff who watched the video, for example, said that you could see that Loughner was armed under his clothing. The magazine was likely sticking out and 'printing' under his shirt.) So if 30 round magazines are impractical for lawful concealed carry, I see no reason not to prohibit them in order to reduce the likelihood that Loughner types would use them for mass shootings. And like I think NOG said earlier, you can switch out magazines at the range and still fire the same amount of bullets.

IMO the number of rounds carried should not be restricted though. In plain terms, its practical for a private citizen to carry concealed up to three magazines. Any more and you're really weighing yourself down. Personally I don't carry any backup magazines during routine activities, just a 15 round magazine with one round in the chamber. I add a second magazine during high-risk jobs, but that's just my preference. I'm by no means a mad man for doing that, and other guys' mileage may vary.

Additionally, police officers have a lot of wiggle room in enforcing this. If they stop you and discover that you have two or three magazines, lawfully, they're not going to be too worried unless you're acting weird. But if you're carrying 10 or 20 magazines you're going to have problems. You enter into the realm of 'suspicious person' at that point, even if you're properly licensed. It's too bad that the officer (or game warden or whatever) who pulled over Loughner earlier that morning didn't search him. Obviously a lot of red flags would have gone off, aside from the obvious fact that he was not legal.

Respectfully, LKD, we're dealing in the 'probably' realm here again. Stopping law-abiding citizens from having 45 rounds isn't going to stop Loughner, but it may stop them from saving themselves and their loved ones. "May" is of course the operative word. Most likely no one is ever going to need even one round, but what a shame if they needed 16 or 19 and didn't have them.

See above. Whatever capacity actually fits the firearm without protruding would seem reasonable to me. In Loughner's case, that would be 15 rounds. Go ahead and ban the 30 round magazines.

And no, I am not Chance , just another regular guy. I only speak up when I see potentially reckless propositions and suppositions being run up the flagpole. Like you and most other people, I'm one of the good guys.

 

Actually, the unwavering opposition of the NRA to gun control is a myth. Don't get me wrong, they're generally not supporters, but they have supported gun control laws in the past. For example, in the 2007 debate over H.R. 2640, the NICS Improvement Amendments Act, the NRA supported the bill. They are also supporting H.R. 5667, the Firearms, Microstamping, Evaluation and Study Act. Both of those are acts that gun control freaks opposed without good reason. The first strengthens inter-organization communication (on state and federal levels) on individuals prohibited from owning guns, while the second will authorize a study into the feasability of incorporating microstamping into the standard manufacturing process of firearm parts. Given that an apparent focus of the first law was to communicate lists of mentally ill and dangerous people, I don't think the NRA would oppose a process to formally identify such people, provided that it was done in a public, reviewable, and appealable way.

Considering the jobs of the groups you mentioned, that's rather discouraging. That means that, statistically, they're unprepared for 1 out of every 20 attacks. Maybe that's why people like the Underwear Bomber and the Time Square Bomber got through, because they were less likely attacks.

Not to mention that, in all the other scenarios discussed so far, there's opportunity to retreat and reload. If you're in your own home, you can do that. Police in the streets can generally do that. Madmen trying to slaughter a crowd are one of the few people who don't have that opportunity.

 

Gaear,

Perhaps we're not as far apart as we initially seem. Because I started my response (post #79) by saying that if Laughner only had a 15 round magazine that fewer people would have been wounded or killed, I thought it was clear that when I said that I cannot see any reasonable scenario where you'd need more than 15 that I was speaking of magazine size, and not total number of rounds carried. As I have also already conceded - such was apparanetly not clear.

I would still contend that Joe Citizen (which Loughner was) has no real need to have more than 15 rounds. If Joe Citizen needs more that 15, he's in way over his head, and even if he had a rotary mini-gun with 1000+ rounds of ammuition it wouldn't help.

Now with police officers and FBI agents (of which I also know more than a few) of course they carry additional clips. As you said, you never know if you are going to have to respond to a bank robbery or the like. My next door neighbor is a police officer, and I have seen him in uniform either going to or coming from work. I believe his sidearm is a Beretta 9mm, and he has two clips on his belt. Assuming he has a clip already in the weapon, that means he carries 45 rounds.

But since it seems we don't actually have any real disagreement here, I see no real need to go into additional detail. To answer your other questions, I am a civilian contractor for the Department of Defense, working through the Army, and my area of experitse is in risk analysis and acquisition.

Not really. Being below the 5% confidence level doesn't mean that it only has a 5% chance of happening. This is off topic, so I'll try to be as brief as possible. Risk analysis involves two factors: the likelihood of a particular event happening, and the consequence if such were to occur. Both likelihood and consequence are rated on a 5-point scale. For likelihood, a one indicates "remote", all the way up to five, indicating "near certain". For consequence, a one is "marginal" and a five is "catastrophic".

For something to be below the 5% confidence level, it has to not only have a low likelihood, but also have a low consequence. So while something like the Underwear Bomber would score low on the likelihood metric, it would score high on the consequence metric, and thus not be below the 5% confidence level. (Which you probably could have surmised given the amount of security at airports.)

 

Thanks, Aldeth.

So in summary, I think we can agree to agree on a prohibition of high capacity magazines for civilian use*, and we'll just have to agree to disgaree on the needs / competence of civilians as regards number of rounds carried.

Now where do we get the legislature to sign?

__

*I don't really want to stir the pot again, but I'm doubtful that Loughner's 30 round magazine being illegal would have stopped him from having it. Items like those always enter the black market one way or another, and with Loughner putting everything else on the line to pursue his insane quest (including his life, apparently), I don't suppose a question of legality of magazine capacity would have disuaded him. I don't think he was licensed to carry a pistol, for example, but that didn't stop him from bringing his to the supermarket. So will our proposal to ban high capacity magazines actually affect Loughner 2.0?

 

As Chandos mentioned, any roadblocks we can put in the way of people like Loughner are desirable actions. We can't stop 100% of this sort of stuff, but we can try our best and not make it easy for them.

Another lesson I'd like to learn is this -- what is Loughner's status now? Is he being evaluated by a shrink? Is he in protective custody in whatever facilty he is housed?

 

I don't know. While I have little doubt that Loughner wasn't mentally stable, it would appear that he wasn't stupid. We probably could of surmised as much given that he attended college, but there are some other factors here.

From the news reports, he apparently legally purchased the handgun in November 2010. He also legally purchased the 30 round clips. I have no idea if he was licensed to carry a handgun, but in most states, if you never intend to take the weapon from your home*, and the purpose of the weapon is home defense, I don't think you need a license. The point is, it shows malice of forethought, and at least a somewhat calculated decision to do this.

* There are usually a few provisions in each states law where you can take it out of your house. For example, you can take it a shooting range, or to get it repaired. However, in such instances it must be in a locked container during transport - like the trunk of your car. You cannot have it next to you on the front seat.

The last update I heard was a couple of days ago. He is going to have a psychiatric evaluation, and he is being held in custody. As of two days ago, he has refused to speak to police, only stating that he "pleads the 5th" whenever they say anything to him.