More fodder for thought: The Democrats claim that reducing magazine capacity will save lives. How many lives? Let’s find out. First, I think we can agree that the only time magazine capacity limitations could ever affect the outcome of a crime is during an active shooter mass casualty event with 16 or more shots fired. The FBI has a nice collection of data on active shooter mass casualty events, henceforth ASMC, at
http://leb.fbi.gov/2014/january/acti...m-2000-to-2012. Using this data, we can estimate the number of active shooter events in the US per year to be 15, trending upwards, so let’s use 20. Looking at the history of ASMC events, we can estimate some number of shots fired based on number of people killed. Let’s say 15 shots kills ten people. Of all ASMC events, only 17% exceed ten people killed. Likewise, we should discount the events where pistols or shotguns were the primary weapon, as 15 round magazine limitations likely don’t apply, so only 26% of ASMC had any kind of rifle as the primary weapon. Let’s take a conservative position and saw that all of these were MSRs.
We have two other factors to estimate: the probability that an ASMC takes place in Colorado, as HB 13-1224 only applies there, and the probability that the shooter is totally unable to get any magazines greater than 15 rounds and is thus limited by law. Colorado is only one of fifty states, but the Denver metro area does seem to have more than the normal complement of crazies, so instead of 2% lets go with 10%. Let’s go with the same number for the chance that a shooter can’t get 30 round magazines, even though that number is closer to zero. You can play around with those probabilities for sensitivity analysis, but that’s left as an exercise for the reader.
Given these numbers, let’s calculate the odds. Number of events = 20. Percent using > 15 shots, 17%. Percent using an “assault weapon” = 26%. Happens in Colorado = 10%. Can’t get 30 round magazines = 10%. Multiplying these out we get 20 x .17 x .26 x .1 x .1 = 0.0087. Now, according to the FBI charts from the ASMC webpage, we’re trending towards 60 people killed each year in ASMC events. 60 x .0087 = .52. That’s a half person that is likely to be saved each year by a 15 round magazine capacity limit, given the constraints above. In ten years that can be extended to 5 lives saved.
According to the CDC’s WISQARs injury/fatality database, in the ten year period from 2001 to 2010, for the population of children 17 and under, 563 drowned in bathtubs, 2,825 drowned in pools and 1,434 died in bicycle accidents. If we use the ratio Colorado’s population to the US population to estimate Colorado’s share of those deaths, we see that over a ten year period we can estimate that 9 children will drown in the bathtub, 47 will drown in a swimming pool and 24 will be killed riding while riding their bicycles. If we passed legislation prohibiting any of these activities, more children would be saved many times over the amount that the feel good HB 13-1224 could be expected to save. Of course, the Democrats will argue that bicycles, tubs and pools have legitimate uses and 30 magazines are only useful to kill large amounts of people in a short time, but given that the FBI shows that large capacity magazines are indeed only used to kill large amounts of people in a short time about 0.86 times a year while the other tens of millions of 30 round magazines owned by the public and law enforcement are evidently used for purposes that don’t kill large amounts of people in a short time, that argument is easily countered.
More fodder for thought: The Democrats claim that reducing magazine capacity will save lives. How many lives? Let’s find out. First, I think we can agree that the only time magazine capacity limitations could ever affect the outcome of a crime is during an active shooter mass casualty event with 16 or more shots fired. The FBI has a nice collection of data on active shooter mass casualty events, henceforth ASMC, at http://leb.fbi.gov/2014/january/acti...m-2000-to-2012. Using this data, we can estimate the number of active shooter events in the US per year to be 15, trending upwards, so let’s use 20. Looking at the history of ASMC events, we can estimate some number of shots fired based on number of people killed. Let’s say 15 shots kills ten people. Of all ASMC events, only 17% exceed ten people killed. Likewise, we should discount the events where pistols or shotguns were the primary weapon, as 15 round magazine limitations likely don’t apply, so only 26% of ASMC had any kind of rifle as the primary weapon. Let’s take a conservative position and saw that all of these were MSRs.