A little ingenuity renders “high capacity” magazine ban toothless!

DENVER, Colorado (PNN) - October 31, 2014 - When Colorado banned magazines with a capacity of 16 or more rounds back in March 2013, the ostensible justification was that doing so would limit the carnage a mass murderer could wreak when loosed on the soft targets of a "gun-free zone". That such targets can be mowed down in great numbers even without such capacity was apparently of no concern.

Magazine manufacturer Magpul has left Colorado as a result (although not before equipping Coloradans with tens of thousands of the soon-to-be-banned magazines - many of them for free - just before the law went into effect), taking their tax revenue and good jobs with them. But the political fallout went much further than that.

State Senator John Morse, who as Senate President spearheaded the law, and Senator Angela Giron, became the first (and so far, the only) two Colorado senators to be kicked out of office on a recall vote, despite an enormous funding advantage, courtesy of gun-hating billionaire and aspiring King of the Galaxy Michael Bloomberg. Then, when faced with her own recall vote - again because of her part in passing the magazine ban - Senator Evie Hudak resigned her senate seat, so that, as per Colorado law, she would be replaced by a new senator from her own party, rather than lose the recall election to a Republican, thus shifting control of the senate.

The political fallout for Governor John Hickenlooper has also been severe, to the point of causing him to flip-flop and waffle chaotically with regard to the ban - prompting the superbly ironic “Hickenlooper Blues”.

What have these politicians bought for their trouble, at the expense, for some, of their political lives? Certainly not public safety, but we already knew that. As it turns out, they appear not even to have successfully bought much of a ban.

According to the breathless "reporting" of CBS Denver's Brian Maass, Colorado gun shops have found a couple methods of legallyproviding buyers with the ability to equip themselves with 30-round magazines. One way to do it is using parts kits:

According to the clerk, the kits are "selling really, really fast." Another method is to sell 30-round magazines that have been modified in such a way as to limit their capacity to 15, but the modification is easily reversed by the buyer.

Restoring the magazine back to its standard, designed capacity of 30 rounds is as easy as popping a rivet out. This, of course, is without even delving into 3-D printed magazines. A magazine is, after all, little more than a box with a spring inside - it hardly requires a sophisticated factory to produce.

Predictably, the CBS segment brought in Tom Mauser, the father of Columbine massacre victim Daniel Mauser. Mauser has ever since used the death of his son as justification to attack the gun rights of Coloradans and Amerikans in general. An enthusiastic supporter of magazine bans, the fact that his son was murdered in 1999 - five years into the federal ban - apparently does nothing to reduce his zeal for such a ban. The article quotes him as saying, "I thought it would be an effective law." Perhaps he knows better now (but not likely).

Near the end of the segment, Maass asks Mauser, who had just expressed his “disgust” at the successful efforts to make "a mockery of" the law, "What do you do now?"

Mauser sighed mournfully, hung his head, and eventually replied, "That's a good question."

Indeed it is, and it’s a question that the gun control zealots within the Colorado government appear to be utterly unable to answer.