You ever wonder why gun types get so pissed about gun control advocates? This should be Exhibit A- gun control advocates consistently don't know what they are talking about, but love to declare themselves the crusaders for common sense:
m.washingtontimes.com/blog/inside-politi...p-magazines-stumble/
Rep. Diana DeGette, Colorado Democrat and a co-sponsor of a bill to ban high-capacity magazines, appeared this week not to understand how they work.
Asked at a Denver Post forum how banning large-capacity magazines would help reduce gun violence, Ms. DeGette replied:
"I will tell you these are ammunition, they're bullets, so the people who have those now they're going to shoot them, and so if you ban them in the future, the number of these high capacity magazines is going to decrease dramatically over time because the bullets will have been shot and there won't be any more available," she said.
The Colorado Republican Party and National Rifle Association both took shots at the congresswoman's remarks, according to the Post, which also provided a statement Wednesday from DeGette spokeswoman Juliet Johnson, who said she simply misspoke.
"The congresswoman has been working on a high-capacity assault magazine ban for years, and has been deeply involved in the issue; she simply misspoke in referring to 'magazines' when she should have referred to 'clips,' which cannot be reused because they don't have a feeding mechanism," Ms. Johnson said. "Quite frankly, this is just another example of opponents of common-sense gun violence prevention trying to manipulate the facts to distract from the critical issue of keeping our children safe and keeping killing machines out of the hands of disturbed individuals. It's more political gamesmanship that stands in the way of responsible solutions."
According to a pool report, Ms. DeGette was one of the participants in a roundtable on gun violence in Colorado Wednesday with President Obama, Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr., other elected officials, law enforcement representatives, and parents of gun violence victims.
In case you are unfamiliar with how guns work (which I'm generally OK with,
as long as you aren't also proposing gun control measures), magazines are basically a box that hold bullets and are usually expected to be re-used and re-filled with bullets (especially as they can be expensive). What is particularly galling is the spokesman who tries to backstep from the original ignorant comment
still gets it wrong while claiming their camp has all this experience fighting the good fight. Clips are, technically speaking, simply metal strips that hold bullets together and used to reload magazines quickly. They are almost always 5 to 10 rounds, and there is nothing to stop them from being reused (although in practice they were often considered disposable). It's WWI technology that was being phased out by WWII; bringing them up now, especially to contrast them with magazines while pretending to be an expert, makes no sense.
