2aguy
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- Jul 19, 2014
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Magazines have nothing to do with how many people die in mass public shootings...
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Large-Capacity Magazines and the Casualty Counts in Mass Shootings: The Plausibility of Linkages by Gary Kleck :: SSRN
I.
Do bans on large-capacity magazines (LCMs) for semiautomatic firearms have significant potential for reducing the number of deaths and injuries in mass shootings?
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In sum, in nearly all LCM-involved mass shootings, the time it takes to reload a detachable magazine is no greater than the average time between shots that the shooter takes anyway when not reloading.
Consequently, there is no affirmative evidence that reloading detachable magazines slows mass shooters’ rates of fire, and thus no affirmative evidence that the number of victims who could escape the killers due to additional pauses in the shooting is increased by the shooter’s need to change magazines.
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The most common rationale for an effect of LCM use is that they allow mass killers to fire many rounds without reloading.
LCMs are used is less than 1/3 of 1% of mass shootings.
News accounts of 23 shootings in which more than six people were killed or wounded and LCMs were used, occurring in the U.S. in 1994-2013, were examined.
There was only one incident in which the shooter may have been stopped by bystander intervention when he tried to reload.
In all of these 23 incidents the shooter possessed either multiple guns or multiple magazines, meaning that the shooter, even if denied LCMs, could have continued firing without significant interruption by either switching loaded guns or by changing smaller loaded magazines with only a 2-4 second delay for each magazine change.
Finally, the data indicate that mass shooters maintain slow enough rates of fire such that the time needed to reload would not increase the time between shots and thus the time available for prospective victims to escape.
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We did not employ the oft-used definition of “mass murder” as a homicide in which four or more victims were killed, because most of these involve just four to six victims (Duwe 2007), which could therefore have involved as few as six rounds fired, a number that shooters using even ordinary revolvers are capable of firing without reloading.
LCMs obviously cannot help shooters who fire no more rounds than could be fired without LCMs, so the inclusion of “nonaffectable” cases with only four to six victims would dilute the sample, reducing the percent of sample incidents in which an LCM might have affected the number of casualties.
Further, had we studied only homicides with four or more dead victims, drawn from the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports, we would have missed cases in which huge numbers of people were shot, and huge numbers of rounds were fired, but three or fewer of the victims died.
For example, in one widely publicized shooting carried out in Los Angeles on February 28, 1997, two bank robbers shot a total of 18 people - surely a mass shooting by any reasonable standard (Table 1).
Yet, because none of the people they shot died, this incident would not qualify as a mass murder (or even murder of any kind).
Exclusion of such incidents would bias the sample against the proposition that LCM use increases the number of victims by excluding incidents with large numbers of victims. We also excluded shootings in which more than six persons were shot over the entire course of the incident but shootings occurred in multiple locations with no more than six people shot in any one of the locations, and substantial periods of time intervened between episodes of shooting. An example is the series of killings committed by Rodrick Dantzler on July 7, 2011.
Once eligible incidents were identified, we searched through news accounts for details related to whether the use of LCMs could have influenced the casualty counts.
Specifically, we searched for
(1) the number of magazines in the shooter’s immediate possession,
(2) the capacity of the largest magazine,
(3) the number of guns in the shooter’s immediate possession during the incident,
(4) the types of guns possessed,
(5) whether the shooter reloaded during the incident,
(6) the number of rounds fired,
(7) the duration of the shooting from the first shot fired to the last, and (8) whether anyone intervened to stop the shooter.
Findings How Many Mass Shootings were Committed Using LCMs?
We identified 23 total incidents in which more than six people were shot at a single time and place in the U.S. from 1994 through 2013 and that were known to involve use of any magazines with capacities over ten rounds.
Table 1 summarizes key details of the LCMinvolved mass shootings relevant to the issues addressed in this paper.
(Table 1 about here) What fraction of all mass shootings involve LCMs?
There is no comprehensive listing of all mass shootings available for the entire 1994-2013 period, but the most extensive one currently available is at the Shootingtracker.com website, which only began its coverage in 2013.
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The offenders in LCM-involved mass shootings were also known to have reloaded during 14 of the 23 (61%) incidents with magazine holding over 10 rounds.
The shooters were known to have not reloaded in another two of these 20 incidents and it could not be determined if they reloaded in the remaining seven incidents.
Thus, even if the shooters had been denied LCMs, we know that most of them definitely would have been able to reload smaller detachable magazines without interference from bystanders since they in fact did change magazines.
The fact that this percentage is less than 100% should not, however, be interpreted to mean that the shooters were unable to reload in the other nine incidents.
It is possible that the shooters could also have reloaded in many of these nine shootings, but chose not to do so, or did not need to do so in order to fire all the rounds they wanted to fire. This is consistent with the fact that there has been at most only one mass shootings in twenty years in which reloading a semiautomatic firearm might have been blocked by bystanders intervening and thereby stopping the shooter from doing all the shooting he wanted to do. All we know is that in two incidents the shooter did not reload, and news accounts of seven other incidents did not mention whether the offender reloaded.
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For example, a story in the Hartford Courant about the Sandy Hook elementary school killings in 2012 was headlined “Shooter Paused, and Six Escaped,” the text asserting that as many as six children may have survived because the shooter paused to reload (December 23, 2012). ''
The author of the story, however, went on to concede that this was just a speculation by an unnamed source, and that it was also possible that some children simply escaped when the killer was shooting other children.
There was no reliable evidence that the pauses were due to the shooter reloading, rather than his guns jamming or the shooter simply choosing to pause his shooting while his gun was still loaded.
The plausibility of the “victims escape” rationale depends on the average rates of fire that shooters in mass shootings typically maintain.
If they fire very fast, the 2-4 seconds it takes to change box-type detachable magazines could produce a slowing of the rate of fire that the shooters otherwise would have maintained without the magazine changes, increasing the average time between rounds fired and potentially allowing more victims to escape during the betweenshot intervals.
On the other hand, if mass shooters fire their guns with the average interval between shots lasting more than 2-4 seconds, the pauses due to additional magazine changes would be no longer than the pauses the shooter typically took between shots even when not reloading.
In that case, there would be no more opportunity for potential victims to escape than there would have been without the additional magazine changes
