Rational people don’t take gun control advocates seriously. They just don’t.
Why do I say that? Because anyone who looks at the statistics in context without defaulting to a knee jerk reaction about the issue very quickly comes to the conclusion that guns aren’t the problem (and neither are magazines, specifics types of sights, bump stocks, etc.). The tool has never been the issue. The issue is the human heart.
But gun control advocates don’t seem to think deeply about subjects like this or about the long-term consequences of their policies, and, so, they often make arguments for gun control that are downright silly.
One gun control advocate (who, bizarrely, still gets media attention) may have just made the single stupidest argument for limiting magazine capacity that you may ever hear. Alex Nitzberg writes,
Gun control activist David Hogg has suggested that 10 rounds per magazine should be sufficient for gun owners.
“If you need more than 10 rounds to hit something you need more range time or you need glasses, not a larger magazine. Hell, if you’re that bad of a shot you’re safer with a baseball bat because a gun will probably be turned on you. Especially if you are shooting a rifle and you can’t hit what you are aiming for in 10 rounds you need to check your sights, check your eye dominance, and/or improve trigger pull. 30 round mags are for two two [sic] things, war and people who don’t know how to shoot,” Hogg tweeted.
Now, to be fair to Hogg, he’s right that, if you’re on a range, most of which only allow shooting from a standing and still position, and you’re missing a ton of shots, then, yes, you need to check your eyes, check your sights, and spend more time on the range to work on your accuracy. On top of those three things, most of all, you probably need some training with someone who can help you to figure out why you’re shooting low left consistently, for example (you can find out about fixing that particular problem here).
What Hogg is talking about in his examples, though, isn’t a gunfight or a self-protection situation. Those situations involve a lot of movement on both sides. They don’t happen with both people standing still or, necessarily, standing.
So, his argument that you don’t need a non-California compliant (in other words, limited capacity) magazine may only make sense on the gun range (and in that case, magazine capacity limitations only mean having to pause to reload more often. They have nothing to do with protecting yourself from an attacker).
There should be no magazine capacity limitations because, in the real world, if you’re being attacked, you don’t know how many people are involved, and all of them are moving, and if you have to take the time to reload, that may be the pause in which you get shot.
That’s the real world, and to argue for magazine capacity limits on just shot accuracy in a low-stress, stationary, non-violent encounter situation is just dishonest. Or, as may be the case with Hogg, stupid.
