A helpful note to those fear-driven, paranoid, authoritarian hoplophobes who are hoping to heartlessly exploit the recent tragedy in Tucson as a basis for another round of pointless legislation limiting the size of magazines that can be manufactured:
To be perfectly fair, Joe does have a little experience when it comes to shooting accurately and reloading quickly, but it is sheer foolishness to think, even for a second, that someone intent on killing other people could not acquire similar experience himself.
Likewise, it is important to note that two seconds can be a long time, if you are prepared for them and ready, but here is a fun experiment for you: tell someone in your family or place of business to say a certain word to you in the coming week when they are within 15 or so feet of you; then, after they say that word, you have two seconds to touch them. Think you can do it? It is quite true that the average human reaction time, when they are expecting the stimulus in question and the expected response is simple, is somewhere around 2/10ths of a second, but what about a complete surprise? What about an incident that requires actual thought, much less an understanding of what is going on?
Now imagine someone is shooting at people around you, at you. Imagine the screaming, the running, the shoving, the pushing, the blood, the noise, the gunshots, the shock, the surprise, the panic, the crowd, the adrenaline, the horror… and now try to tell me, while maintaining any semblance of honesty, that you believe an average person could pick out the shooter, realize he or she was reloading, rush him or her, and reach him or her before the shooter’s slide was dropped and the gun is back on target.
Sorry, folks, but I am not buying it.
One popular misconception that seems to be fueling the craze to ban normal-capacity magazines is that the Tucson murderer was… restrained… while attempting to reload his firearm – while strictly true, it leaves out one important detail:
Police have said the gunman did manage to put another magazine into his firearm, but its spring failed.
It seems that the murderer had successfully dropped an expended magazine and reinserted a fresh one before anyone had reached him, but that magazine failed to operate properly… at that point, it became a question of his reaction time in responding to a malfunction (specifically, a failure to feed). Thankfully for everyone present, the time it took the murderer to identify, understand, and correct the malfunction was greater than the time it took Colonel (Retired) Bill Badger, Roger Salzgeber, Joseph Zamudio, and Patricia Maisch to identify him, understand what was happening, and respond heroically.
So, my dear, disgusting blood dancers, the only appropriate, rational response to your demands to reinstate the failed “Assault Weapon” Ban is, “No,” – the AWB had no discernible impact on crime, it would not have banned the magazines the murderer used, and, even if it had, it probably would not have mattered. Even better (at least for those of us who are interested in individual human rights), the new “gun control” legislation is likely to go nowhere. I would tell you to stop exploiting the deaths of innocents, and start relying on facts and logic to support your positions, but you and I both know you have neither…
He is good. His reloads are smooth, but actually not that fast. I generally do about the same reload times as Joe, but sometimes faster. And I am one of slowest to reload in the group I shoot with regularly. (I know and shoot with folks who can regularly do <1 sec reloads. (And yes, with moon clips, even faster with revolvers).
Your point, however, is well made.
Yep, as was stated in comments on Joe’s blog, one needs simply reload while selecting a new target, and very little time is lost in effective fire. It’s not a mag dump, reload, mag dump type deal. Sticking a reload into a series of controlled pairs on targets at odd distances or half behind cover or whatever probably only adds half a second to the split, if I have to move my feet at all.
Of course, the one major assumption in such a scenario is that nobody else will have a gun. I realize that’s (apparently) how it went down in Arizona, but add a capable bystander with a pistol and magazine capacity goes out the window. I’m not going to wait for the guy to reload to put half a mag in his chest, if I’m ever in the middle of a mass shooting.
The response to any emergency is much more important than the conditions preceding it. What’s easier, building your ship to be unsinkable, or making sure there are enough bloody lifeboats for the whole ship?
One also might add that The VT Massacre loadout was 2 15 round Glock 19 magazines, and the remainder of the Walther and Glock magazines were all AWB friendly 10 rounders. (Walther P22 only has 10 rounders, and the extra glock mags were bought on ebay who at the time complied with the AWB for legal reasons)
32 dead, and I imagine the shooter’s reloads were VERY sloppy.
Size DOES NOT matter.
@ Mr. B: I really need to get more magazines and practice a lot more often than I do… I can guarantee you that my reloads are significantly slower. By the same token, though, I do not shoot competitively, and a good month consists of me hitting the range twice; however, even with that, I can probably execute a full magazine swap inside of four seconds easily, and even that time is insufficient for someone caught off guard to react properly.
@ weambulance: I completely agree that adding an armed bystander to the mix completely changes the equation – at that point, the time necessary for them to complete a potentially successful reaction diminishes considerably, given that they do not need to close whatever distance they have between them and the shooter. At that point, simply shooting at the murderer – not even necessarily hitting him – would probably be sufficient to break off his attack for the time, allowing more people to escape and you to get a better bead on the scumbag (of course, shooting “at” requires an appropriate backstop, but that goes without saying).
In a world where law-abiding citizens are forcibly disarmed, this will be the norm. In a world where we are not, we might have a chance of fighting back. I prefer “a chance” to “no chance at all”.
@ Weer’d Beard: Very good point… Of course, if you bring that up to any average anti-rights nut, they will simply use it as an angle to ban all magazines (which is where this is headed… that is where things like this are always headed…).
Don’t give the Congress Critters any ideas, next they will ban all semi autos seeing the could be loaded so quickly. Thus leaving us only with 5 shot revolvers,but only after banning speed loaders, cause they sound dangerous. Sort of like the same way barrel shouds do.
You and I both know that certain people would have us go down that path in a heartbeat if they could force everyone else to go along with it, so we might as well identify the danger and start considering it…
Like Tam just said today, imposing an arbitrary magazine limitation very clearly states that you are ok with X fatalities, but not X+1… except they will never be happy with X, until it equals zero.
And, I have to admit, the whole barrel shroud thing just confuses the hell out of me… not just the whole “shoulder thing that goes up” bit, but rather the belief that people use their rifle’s shrouds to “aim more accurately”. Uhm, what?
The bottom line is we need to stay active and not worry about what the left anti gunners say. I’m not saying we shouldn’t listen to “what” they are saying, you have to know what your fighting against but not to panic and get all ammo hoarding crazy etc. This is just a wake up call for us to stay the course and continue the fight for our rights. That fight is never over until they throw dirt on you. Keep up the good work WOTC.
Thanks! I completely agree that trying to keep up with all of the nonsense the anti-rights nuts are spewing these days is somewhat pointless… it is almost all the same, old, tired, idiotic arguments, dragged out of some basement somewhere, briefly slathered with a new layer of righteous indignation, and tossed against the wall to see if it sticks. Fortunately, we pro-rights activists have been getting more and more teflon on that wall…
And, really, that is all we need to do – keep doing what we are doing – bigger, better, and more awesome-like – and we will eventually win. The same definitively cannot be said of the anti-rights jerkoffs.