GunsHigh-capacity magazines, like the one used by the California mass shooter, are deadly and easily available

By Brian Freskos

The high-capacity ammunition magazine used to fatally shoot at least 12 people at a bar in California on Wednesday night would have been outlawed under a state ban. But a federal judge blocked it from taking effect. 

In June 2017, Judge Roger Benitez of the Southern District of California issued an injunction preventing the state from enforcing a ban on the possession of any magazine with the capacity of more than 10 rounds. The order arrived just two days before the ban was to take effect and resulted from a lawsuit brought by gun owners in San Diego County and the California Rifle & Pistol Association, an affiliate of the National Rifle Association.

Benitez’s ruling has drawn renewed scrutiny in the wake of Wednesday’s attack in Thousand Oaks, where a gunman used a .45-caliber Glock pistol to rampage through a “college night” event at Borderline Bar & Grill, killing at least a dozen people, including a local sheriff’s deputy. Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Sheriff Geoff Dean said the gunman’s pistol was outfitted with an extended magazine. Though he did not specify the magazine’s exact size, Dean did note that it had room to hold more than 10 rounds.

A growing body of evidence shows that high-capacity magazines can sharply increase the body count during a shooting by allowing gunmen to squeeze off more shots before having to stop to reload. Mother Jones examined 62 mass shootings between 1982 and 2012 and discovered that half of them involved magazines with more than 10 rounds. A subsequent study relying on the same dataset found that mass shootings involving high-capacity magazines produced 60 percent more fatalities and more than three times as many victims with nonfatal gunshot wounds.