Magpul PMAG® D-50™ LR/SR GEN M3™
courtesy Magpul

This is what happens when you get your “gun safety” information from The Trace.

Gun enthusiasts say they need the firepower (of new, higher capacity magazines) for entertainment on the firing range.

Paranoid anti-government folks argue they need it to protect against tyranny.

Home-protection buffs believe they need to be armed like Rambo to defend themselves against intruders (though statistics show the presence of guns in the home, no matter the capacity, is much more likely to lead to domestic gun incidents or suicides than to chase off the bad guys).

The reality is that such high-capacity magazines and the weapons they feed were designed for combat and, like the assault-style weapons themselves, have now seeped into civilian use, endangering us all.

It’s insane that elected leaders side with the gun lobby over public safety and common sense. Military-style weapons, including accessories like high-capacity magazines, do not belong in the hands of civilians.

– Scott Martelle in Manufacturers are pushing larger gun magazines. Expect mass shootings to get worse

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

111 COMMENTS

  1. From what I’ve read those drum’s are jam-o-matics. I’ll stick to PMAG30/20/40.
    Also from what I’ve read some of the shootings in recent years did not involve big drum mags, as they’ve been available for some time.
    More like with the 2020’s upcoming, triggered loonies will be popping off and sane folks might need some capacity to stave off the rioting of the Demorat supporters.

    • The Aurora shooter (Batman) used one and it jammed and he switched to a shotgun and handgun. Not sure how many rounds he got off before it jammed.

        • They can be sensitive to dirt. Drums usually use graphite lubricants, so that should say something. I can’t speak for KCI’s reliability though, I never used the few drums I picked up in case of a war with NK. The war never came.

        • I have several..but the only one i’ve found to be truly reliable is the “ninety-rounder”…an all plastic affair with a clear back plate…i’ve filled and emptied it several times in both semi and full-auto without a single malfunction…..

        • They seemed to work better for SMG’s, for some reason. Both the Thompson and PPSH had ones that worked well.

        • Barn Animal my uneducated guess would be it’s a pistol vs rifle caliber thing. Probably easier to design a follower to push shorter rounds around a drum magazine.

        • Frank speak.
          90 rounder? the KCI mags I’m thinking of are 100 rounds, dual drum with a clear backplate. Or are they the same and only loaded to a capacity of 90 for reliability reasons?

    • Me, too.

      In my limited experience with the Magpul M60 it has been ultra-reliable and mounts high so that the weight does not affect center of gravity much.

      It fired all 60 rounds after storage in my GS fully loaded for over a year.

      That said, you absolutely CANNOT go wrong with an M2 Pmag with a cover clip for long term storage.

    • seemed to have completely dismissed the self-defense angle…perhaps they should talk to some korean shop owners?…..

    • I remember magazine articles in the 1980s noting AR drum magazines were not reliable enough for regular use. Even “operators” would only use one as their first magazine and then use conventional 30 round magazines afterwards.

  2. So that must mean, more illegals means more crime and pestilence! Who woulda thunk it?

  3. It sure was nice back when I was ignorant to the true extent of disingenuous propaganda in the media.

    • Ignorance is not bliss. To steal someone else’s line here, being as dumb as farm animals is not a good place to be.

  4. During the Rodney King Riots, property owners who possessed high capacity magazines kept looters and murderers at bay. The 60+ victims of that event probably lacked high capacity magazines.

    Did I mention that the LAPD were the First-To-Flee the scene as the action heated up ?

    • Reginald Denny could have used some high capacity magazines (and a gun to load them into).

    • I remember the Riots (I’ve been a SoCal resident my entire life). The LAPD was ordered by command to cordon off the blocks where the rioting was worst, and refrain from engaging to “let the trouble burn itself out”. The now-famous Rooftop Koreans were stuck inside that perimeter and defended their businesses with personal firepower. Meanwhile, innocents like Reginald Denny (I believe that was his name?) were attacked. The cops were nowhere to be found for 48 hours.

      • Yes, and it’s worth mentioning that 3 middle-class nearby residents (who were themselves Black) saw Denny get attacked by the thug named “Football” and independently decided that they had to help him. They walked through the middle of a riot and a pack of street thugs, got Denny in his truck, and drove him to a hospital. They saved his life. In the midst of chaos some sanity survived—on the roofs of Korean owned businesses and in the minds of 3 average citizens which risked their own lives to help a stranger.

      • The POLICE operate on the same rules as Civilians. When trouble starts, defend the home turf. Just look at Louisiana, during Hurricane Katrina. The refugees from New Orleans tried to cross the bridge, into higher and safer ground and the Louisiana Police turned them back. Now, if they hae been unlawful migrants, the story might have been different!

    • More than likely the LA Mayor and PD told their cops to get out of there so the violence won’t increase simply due to their presence (or more likely so there will be less lawsuits against the city). That means if you are not prepared to help yourself you are SOL.

      • Same for Baltimore, ‘just let ’em trash the place, it’s not my store so I don’t care’.

    • they were ordered out…something some of them objected to…the korean’s used both handguns and conventional long guns to defend themselves….effectively….

  5. LATimes, NYT, WAPOST, are all 100% propaganda outlets. Anyone who understands the agenda could write their articles for them, it’s that predictable.

    • Two million freedom mags flowed into commie kalifornia for a short time. Many many more came out of the closet, maybe unearthed and recovered from boating accidents. Hmmm……

      • 5 days to be exact. Those are just the ones we know about, that were delivered. Brownells themselves moved 300k+. Magpul was selling cases (100each) direct to buyers for $1k shipped.

        There are more magazines than people in this country, probably 10x. I’ve got 50 Pmags myself, plus other “high cap” mags. So who knows the real number.

  7. Bigger magazines make mass shootings more deadly?
    More deadly than carrying seven 30 round magazines plus 1 in the rifle? Like my Son did in Afghanistan.
    More deadly than a 2 second magazine swap?
    More deadly than a revolver and belt full of speed loaders?
    EVERY bullet is deadly no matter how few or how many you carry.

    • I didn’t realize how ridiculous that was till you pointed it out.

      Its loony how they try to jam as many everytown “factoids” into every propaganda piece they publish.

      • No it’s not loony, repeat the lies…over and over and over again…until people consider them facts. Propaganda 101.

        Look at how many of the “Rules for Radicals” that was employed in the L.A. Times attack including;

        Rule 10, 11, 12, and 13:

        “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a CONSTANT PRESSURE UPON THE OPPOSITION.”
        “If you PUSH A NEGATIVE hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.”
        “The price of a successful attack is a CONSTRUCTIVE ALTERNATIVE.”
        “Pick the target, freeze it, PERSONALIZE it, and POLARIZE it.”

        That is why they are winning, they are at war, and they know it. Conservatives don’t understand this, and say “Look how ‘loony’ they are” and walk away, confident that they are correct. But that false statement likely just influenced someone to their side.

        Look at the first posts immediately following the story, they are debating the merits of the frequency of jams for Magpuls new D60 mag. Absolutely in the weeds and clueless.

  9. Journ-o-list, there has it exactly backwards.

    Decent-capacity mags are for people left to use what they can grab, when someone decides to throw violence their way … 2.5 million times / year (per the CDC.)

    Spree killers, terrorists, n thugs are the ones who can plan n load up a backpack of ammo, even extra guns, to prep for the movie in their head.

    A single-shot bolt a tion with the ammo in a separate, lo ked container isn’t much impediment if yr sniping DC highways crom prepared locations (which happened.) But those rules turn yr gun into a club if a home invasion comes.

  10. Thank you President Trump for throwing more gasoline on this fire by referring to Semi-autos as entertainment last week.

    • Everyone knows that since Hilary was worse trump can debase 2A all he wants. Really freedom loving Americans would gladly let trump tread on them. It’s how we prove we’re not libtards.

    • I wish he would just STFU about guns, period. His son needs to have a heart-to-heart with him.

      • You seriously think Donald Trump Junior will convince his father of anything? He is dumber than a brick.

  12. Yes, I enjoy a standard capacity magazine and have been the proud owner of a Kel-Tec CP 33 .22lR pistol for a few months and it is a kick to shoot at the range. Thirty-three rounds of High Velocity 22 is cheap and fun. I have had no issues with this pistol as long as the magazines are loaded properly. Added a red dot to make my shooting even more accurate.

  13. The actual website allowed for comments to be posted and most were educated rational counter arguments that make the opinion writer look like a idiot.

    • More of that. The social signaling echo chamber falls down when one solution fact hits their bubble. (I had the best time with a “ban all the guns” barista the other day. “Good luck with that.” Blah, blah, blah, “should” blah, blah “dont need.” “Prohibitions don’t work real well. Mainly the sketchy people still have the banned stuff, while the rest of us don’t. So, how you gonna actually do that?”)

      That’s why they have to run all the counter (meaning actual) arguments off their platforms.

      — That award-winning educator teaching *about* some particular mainly German folk last century who must not be named?

      — Prager?

      — Crowder? (O K, he’s a bit of a tool, but come on…)

      It’s battlespace prep for orchestrated spasms to get the uninformed all wee-wee’d up for vote day. They’re hammering gun control, immigration, abortion, n soak the rich to program the bots with outrage. Drop the outrage-tapping headline day of n u get another million or two to the polls .. right or especially wrong.

      Such is direct democracy, or rule by American Idol.

      They started too early. Letting grounded responses leak out, like comments under that WaPo screed, drains off the emotion they were trying to create n store.

      The good news: along with tipping their hand, and wearing out the tactic, they’ve offered a blueprint.

      Myself, I’m O K with the standard, larger mags, because I don’t want to disarm a mother in a closet with her kids, holding off thugs.

      Thugs have what they planned, collected, and brought. She’ll have the one thing she can grab when they come, if we let her have it. I’d rather she didn’t run out.

    • More like swamp gas bouncing off Venus and detonating weather balloons. Amazing what ridiculous BS they can get the sheeple to believe, isn’t it? Like the ship that was supposedly hit by a torpedo above the waterline yesterday. So torpedoes fly now? Or was it Harry Potter with a magic wand? So then the story changes to hit a mine. So now mines fly? lefTARDs (lefties That Are Really Dumb)…
      🙂

      • I’m no torpedo expert but they have been known to ‘porpoise’ and hit above the water line. Especially if a 4th rate power like Iran is using and maintaining them.

        • Or it could have been an anti-tank rocket fired from a small boat. Iran runs lots of such craft.

        • Only when they malfunction, like the US mark 14 torpedo of WW2. It would sometimes porpoise, throwing its aim way off so they couldn’t even hit a shoreline, or dive straight to the bottom, or once in a great while, they’d hit their target and then fail to detonate.
          But torpedoes have come a long way since then, even in Iran.
          But this isn’t really relevant now, since the powers that be have already abandoned the torpedo BS in favor of flying limpet mines.
          That’s the first clue that somebody’s lying. Note a discrepancy in the liar’s story, and they just cover up with an even more unlikely story. Liars rely on being able to make up new stories quicker than anybody else can uncover the first ones. You’ve seen this happen every day inside the beltway. It’s S.O.P.

        • Mark N.
          They can’t make that dog hunt now either. They’ve already said they have video of an Iranian boat removing a mine from the ship above the waterline. OFC, it’s so poor in quality that nothing can be identified, and limpet mines go under the waterline anyway, but “Just trust us. Washington DC doesn’t lie…”
          Yeah, pull the other leg. It’s got bells on.
          “Somehow we find it hard to sell our values, namely that the rich should plunder the poor.” -John Foster Dulles, former US Secretary of State

        • But watch now for the story to change for a third time, probably to exactly that. A shoulder fired AT rocket. Japan is already saying that, so they’ll probably jump right on that bandwagon, and hope everybody will forget about the first two lies.
          https://www.veteranstoday.com/2019/06/14/japanese-tanker-owner-claims-crew-saw-flying-objects-before-attack-denies-ship-struck-mine/
          But then what? Pretend that every single terror org( plus probably many individuals also) in the world doesn’t have RPGs and/or LAWs, and only Iran could possibly have them?

    • Actually healthy unvaccinated school kids cause global warming and increase the risk of violence…..shit, I think I just gave the WAPOST it’s next opinion piece.

  15. The LA Times needs to check its own archive. The one of the mass shooter in southern california was a police officer who murdered other cops and used a suppressed weapon to do it with. As well as standard capacity magazines.

    Liberals the Left can say what they want to about cops. At the end of the day, they totally trust the police. Because cities in blue states are run by Liberals and the Left.

    https://reason.com/2019/06/13/the-city-of-vallejo-california-has-a-police-problem-and-its-all-being-caught-on-camera/

  16. The the L A Times and their supplier of fake facts are so wrong on many levels,where to start.
    The end to Gun Free Zone shooting galleries would be the best start,criminals don’t care for their intended victims shooting back.

  17. These rocket scientists should ask themselves why our soldiers don’t carry these magazines.

    • they look “scary”….and they actually are scary…if you’re going to stake your life on one of them performing properly…many is the time i’ve had to return from a shoot with drums with rounds remaining in them to be cleared and unjammed later…..

  18. What is all this crap about ‘needs?’

    You don’t get to decide for me what I do or don’t need and the arrogance you exhibit trying to make that decision for me is unwanted. I have a choice four-letter words that fits perfectly before You and equally well before Off.

  19. Have now seeped into civilian hands.
    Like those 50 round Thompson drums from 1918?
    Their Luddite fear of the modern kinda falls apart when they hit on century old examples.

  20. They key variable in mass shootings is engagement rate. If the shooter can’t engage more than 10 targets a minute then any magazine with the capacity greater that 10 rounds is irrelevant. I suspect most mass shooters aren’t exactly Rambo. The death toll is more a function of armed response time than anything else.

  21. Yeah i am armed like Rambo. I have a bow on the wall next to my bed incase of an uninvited house guest. If only i had exploding tips.

  22. I always hate these correlation / Causation arguments.

    Guess what, having married people in the home also increases the likelyhood of divorce.
    Having cars in the home increases likely hood that the owner will have a car accident.
    Having Paper in the home increases the likely hood that someone may get a papercut.

    When someone can draw the inverse. Having 10 shot magazines will in fact decrease fatalities in a mass shooting event, that might…MIGHT…have relevance. Not much thought because, ya see, “shall not be infringed” is a much much stronger argument than “might cause in infinitesimally small increase in loss of life”

    Liberals
    Can’t live with um, can’t educate um.

    • I’m pretty sure that in all of the recent mass shootings the shooter was wearing shoes. Shoes make shootings more deadly – I have data.

  23. Note how the headline is about spree killings, while most of the article conflates peaceful people with intentional thugs.

    Knock-off cognac, there, doesn’t read as bright enough to do that. He’s getting programmed with content from somewhere else.

    • The entirety of his “reasoning” is included in this statement:

      “It’s insane that elected leaders side with the gun lobby over public safety and common sense. Military-style weapons, including accessories like high-capacity magazines, do not belong in the hands of civilians.”

      It doesn’t really matter what it is, magazines, ammo, certain types of (or all) guns, he just wants control over all those unwashed masses he regards as too stupid to live their lives without his input.

      He cannot actually establish that there is some risk to public safety from large magazines – he just assumes it to be true. In his mind, common-sense, necessarily dictates that more ammunition = more death. Never mind the fact that there are already enough guns in the country, and enough ammo, that even if they were all single-shot weapons everyone in the country could be shot by day’s end and we would still have a surplus of millions of unfired weapons and billions of unfired rounds. He also employs the “military-style” nomenclature. Indicating that he, and the gun-controllers, are starting to hear all of us pounding home the fact that scary black rifles are not, in fact, military hardware. Even though there is nothing magically extra-deadly about military rifles, the continued use of “military-style” as an adjective for guns and accessories is clearly intended to imply that there is some heightened risk to the public from the mere presence of such guns in society. His entire argument boils down to an assumption, formed with no basis in data or logic, to support an already-reached conclusion that banning some, or all, firearms is a good and necessary thing.

  24. I want big magazines, just cause some jerks DON’T want me to have them.
    Oh ya, me forgets, I already have some come to think of it..,
    Never mind.

    • I used to buy a 10 pack of pmags whenever I saw something like this. After two weeks I had 50 and gave up.

  25. The fewer-rounds-save-lives argument has become an icon on the gun-control movement and isn’t likely to be abandoned. We should keep in mind that the obvious illogic of the argument is not at all apparent with people who are completely ignorant about guns and how they are used. For instance: only 30% of millennials own a hammer. When you have an entire demographic that doesn’t know how to fix things, its easy to see how the magical thinking of gun control arguments makes sense to them. The problem is that they don’t know that they don’t know.

  26. Golly all I have is standard capacity mags for my AR…just picked up a MFT “extreme duty” mag cheap. Anyone have experience with the newer MFT mags???

  27. Fashion magazines, such as “Vogue,” sell huge, oversize editions in the month of September, to introduce all the new fall fashions. These oversize fashion magazines should be banned.

  28. If you guys want to pay comments, you should do it on the LA Times article itself.
    This idiot “journalist” is already getting ripped my his own readers. I say we dog pile on him!

    Who’s with me?

  29. I believe the attempts to use magazines over the standard 30 round capacity, by crazed mass murderers, has had the effect of reducing casualties. These people are typically not very competent with firearms and select options they do not understand and fail to learn the skilled use of, or to simply test to determine that they work. So, drums jam, but that’s not all of it. Bump-stocks are so sloppy that most shots fired at a massive crowd do not harm anyone.

    For all the horror these evil people do, we are lucky they are typically not competent in their chosen weapons.

  30. With all the numbers they throw around they forgot to tell us how long it takes a practiced individual to reload a (box magazine fed) gun. They also forgot to tell us how far the average person can run in those 2-4 seconds. And they forget to mention how many of those mass shootings happened in a zone where guns are not allowed.

    In the Mandalay Bay shooting, the gunman fired around 1000 rounds, he only killed 58 people out of thousands present (most of those killed were standing still or laying down). Those magazines, all that ammo, those bump fire stocks, the dozens of “high powered assault weapons” didn’t get twice as many kills as a Muslim man inside a homosexual night club who used one rifle and a lot less ammo. The police didn’t even fire a single shot at him although they had the same gun and people were dying next to them.

    Look at the Christchurch shootings and the Parkland shooting to see examples of people thinking they could run away while the gunman reloads. They had a few seconds to assess and escape, they didn’t make it; they died running because people can’t outrun a bullet (the Parkland gunman knew this). In a theoretical world, those few seconds could allow everyone to escape, but I wouldn’t rely on 2 seconds to save me.

    If you outlaw magazines greater than 10 rounds, people will continue to go to gun free zones to amass a large death count because they have all the time they need to reload. Others might switch to using two pistols at once (“dual wield” as the gamers would say).

    The Virginia shootings were done by relatively smart people, they both used two pistols. The Christchurch gunmen was no dummy either, he used about a dozen guns, when empty he tossed some of them. The Mandalay Bay shooter was very smart, he planned his attack for at least a year and he brought dozens of guns with him to throw down when they got too hot (his gloves wouldn’t be so helpful at some point). The Columbine gunmen also brought two guns and two knives for themselves (they likely watched The Matrix before their attack).

    So their common sense solution won’t stop the gun free zone shootings or decrease the amount of people that die in them. Their solution will fail because it doesn’t address the immediate problem and the problems that lead up to it. Ultimately, they will call for restrictions on how many guns a person can own at one time as a solution to stop people from shooting up gun free zones like it’s The Matrix.

    It’s as if they don’t have any intelligence. Actually, that would be untrue. They are intelligent. So intelligent they offer solutions that lead to more solutions that give them more power over the people, which creates a society where the government/corporation owns/controls humans as a resource and those slaves can’t do a thing about it. Sounds great if you’re a banker, an owner of a corporation, a celebrity, a leader of a religion, a politician, a law enforcement officer, a soldier…

    Two semi auto handguns with 10 round magazines makes 22 rounds available at once. This attack strategy allows the ease of concealment of multiple guns and two guns to be fired at the same time. They could fire until empty then pull out their other guns like they used to do back when revolvers were commonly carried.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqAgsVOP2S8

  31. Once again, we find ourselves in need of “common sense” journalism control. If I have to get government permission before I buy a gun, this commie scumbag should need to get permission before he spews his garbage all over a major newspaper.

  32. So… If I ever do need to defend myself against someone who might kill me, that’s NOT combat.

    But if it’s not combat, then what is it? And if I can’t engage in combat, or whatever the progs want me to call it, how can I defend myself?

    Never mind. Rhetorical question. We already know the answer.

  33. Maybe we should all play the same game the gun grabbers do. They advocate wild ideas for gun control so that something more mild sounds palatable.
    We should do the same. We will start advocating the sale of 750 round “clips” that are fired from “automatic” assault…..things. Even 900 and 1000 round clips are for sale online that a child can buy for a few cents.
    OMG!!! Maybe my 30 and 40 round mags won’t be so shocking then. But you know, if they keep bitching, I’m going to buy a bunch of those 1000 round bullet clip things for my automatic.

      • OK! That’s a great idea. What’s actually ridiculous to us, the mainstream idiots will think is true.
        Belt fed pistols! Stupid people will think it’s real.

  36. “Armed like Rambo” to me means M60. We had one set up with dummy rounds at a meet the locals open day just after the original movie came out. Had a line of young people, mostly males, all day when they realised we would let them pick it and pose for photos.

  38. I love the leftist statistics where they pad the numbers with irrelevant suicide numbers. What’s that got to do with home invasions?

    Here are some relevant stats. Home invasions have an average of 2.8 invaders. That means that if you have one home invasion in your life it will most likely have 3 invaders. Now if my shooting hit rate is the same as the NYPD, I will miss 60% of the time. So if I figure that I might need to shoot each of the perps twice, to protect my life and limb, then I’m going to need 15 rounds. It’s almost as though gun manufacturers understand what is needed in a standard capacity magazine.

    Wait,… What if there are 4 invaders? Heck, maybe I should keep two loaded mags. at the ready?

  39. Anybody else notice the irony of “Paranoid anti-government folks argue they need it to protect against tyranny.” in an article seeking to infringe upon the 2nd by the government ?

    • The whole thing is a paragraph structured version of the anti’s talking points, right down to the insults meant to demean the opposition and damage their credibility so that the audience is less accepting of anything they say.

    • “Paranoid anti-government folks argue they need it to protect against tyranny.”

      If so, we are in good company with the Founders.

      King George III and the gun-controllers are the same sh!t, different day.

  40. Scott Martelle hasn’t a clue!!!!! “Paranoid anti-government folks argue they need it to protect against tyranny.”. What???

    then Our Founding Fathers who fought tyranny must have been a bunch of paranoid men, because that is why we have the Second Ammendment , as a way of preventing tyranny.

  41. Gary Kleck published a study within the last couple of years that shows that this is not the case. Say what you will about the DGU 1995 study(I don’t think it’s accurate), but everything else from him is solid.

  42. I’ve never seen anyone in the US military using a Magpul drum mag.

    I have one and it’s still shrink-wrapped in the box.

  43. Having played in the SE Asia war games, Having extra ammo is essential! especially when it is free!! However no longer being a young stud; who the F**k is going to hump that shit??

  44. So again we’re going to ignore that hi capacity mags have been around longer than “mass” shootings have been a thing? Gotcha.

  45. Why don’t these “journalists” ask the U.S. Military Services (5), all the Fed/State LE agencies if they use AR magazines that hold more than 30 rounds and why not?

Comments are closed.