OK, another "I told you so" . . .
One of our Congressional Representatives, Diana DeGette is and has, for many years, been writing "Gun Control" bills in the House. In a speech this week she finally showed the public what many of us have said or at least suspected. She, along with many of her Peers, know nothing of what they legislate.
Here's what she said, and then what one of her aides, who apparently is just as uninformed, came back to spin it into something sensible, said as well.
The lead sponsor of a bill to ban high-capacity magazines for firearms dismissed concerns that the tens of millions of such devices already in use would render her ban pointless by explaining that that the existing ones would be used up in time.
"These are ammunition, they're bullets, so the people who have those now, they're going to shoot them, 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,” said Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., at a forum hosted by the Denver Post.
But magazines are re-loadable. That’s kind of the point of them. They are what one puts the ammunition in, not the ammunition itself.
DeGette revealed the divide between the two Americas on firearms and may have finally sunk Democratic hopes for substantive restrictions on weapons in the process.
DeGette’s office tried to clarify the blunder, with a spokeswoman saying that DeGette meant to say “clips,” not magazines. But clips, devices for quickly loading ammunition into a weapon, are mostly re-usable too.
And then you get even a glimpse of the ignorance of the press because they don't understand that the terms "Magazine" and "Clips" are basically interchangeable either.
The term "Clip" comes from early military bolt action and semi automatic rifles that used internal magazines. For loading this type of rifle (and some early semi auto pistols) a device known as a "Stripper Clip" was devised. This put the capacity of the particular gun's cartridges on a thin bar that was inserted into the top of the magazine and in most cases (M-1 Garand is an exception, it's "Clip" stayed in the rifle until the last round was fired then it was ejected) the "bar" or "Stripper Clip" was then pulled out and the cartridges stayed in the magazine. It made loading the cartridges one at a time un-necessary and increased the firing rate of the weapon being used. After WWII, because of the returning GI's and their jargon, the detachable magazine became known to many as a "Clip", especially when referring to the magazines in semi auto Pistols . .
Now you know more than Diana DeGette and her entire staff! And probaly most of the other people in and around the United States Congress . .