NYT: Obama May Ban 'High-Capacity Clips'

Sigh.

Lawmakers and other officials said that the president could use a public event as soon as Wednesday to signal his intention to engage in the biggest Congressional fight over guns in nearly two decades, focusing on the heightened background checks and including efforts to ban assault weapons and their high-capacity clips. But given the difficulty of pushing new rules through a bitterly divided Congress, Mr. Obama will also promise to act on his own to reduce gun violence wherever possible.

The word the Times‘ scribes are looking for, even though they don’t realize it, is not clip. It’s magazine. Banning “high-capacity clips” is among the 19 things that Obama is reportedly considering to do about guns. None of them would have stopped the Newtown killer. Keeping killers in prison for life — actual life, not phony life sentences — would have saved the firefighters murdered in Webster, NY. But that idea isn’t even on Obama’s radar. He’s consistent about going after law-abiding citizens rather than habitual lawbreakers.

Anyway, back to Obama’s and the media’s ignorance on the subject of guns.

Here’s the definition of a clip. That Wiki definition must have been written by a firearm owner who is tired of seeing the media and politicians get this wrong:

The term clip is commonly (incorrectly) used to describe a firearm magazine, especially in newspapers, movies, and on television. Because of this usage, the Merriam-Webster dictionary now defines a clip as “a device to hold cartridges for charging the magazines of some rifles; also :a magazine from which ammunition is fed into the chamber of a firearm”. However, this usage is technically incorrect. In the correct usage, a clip is used to feed a magazine or revolving cylinder, while a magazine or a belt is used to load cartridges into the chamber of a firearm. In essence, the clip stores the rounds of ammunition before being inserted into the magazine, which houses the clip inside for use by the firearm. Most weapons that use clips, such as the M1 Garand as seen above, utilize the clip by loading it directly into the firearm.^[1]

If we’re to have a mature, intelligent conversation about firearms, it would help if the side that favors bans would learn to accurately describe what it is that it wants to ban.

I have a modest additional suggestion. Liberals who seek to ban guns should do two things. First, they should go through the process of actually buying a gun in a retail setting. Second, they should go to a range and fire one of those super skeery semiautomatic handguns. From the first thing, they would learn that we already do have a pretty good background check system, which does ask about wanted felon status and mental health issues among other things. From the second, they would see that gun ranges emphasize safety, will not tolerate any unsafe behavior, and that learning to fire a gun accurately is actually a pretty fun thing to do.