“The Gun Lobby Is Trying to Trick Americans—Again,” Giffords Vice President of Communications Chris Harris charged Friday in a propaganda screed designed to justify more disarmament edicts. “Rebranding large-capacity magazines as ‘standard’ is just a ploy by the gun lobby to boost its profits.”
What is “rebranding”?
“A standard capacity magazine generally means any detachable ammunition feeding device that is sold with a firearm when it is shipped new from the manufacturer,” the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation (which claims “bipartisan leadership in both the House and the Senate”) notes. “In some cases, such as modern sporting rifles, the standard capacity magazine is regularly 30 rounds.”
“The Webster’s dictionary for ‘standard’ … regularly and widely used, available, or supplied… According to a report by the NSSF at least 717,900,000 detachable magazines with a capacity exceeding 10 rounds have been supplied from manufacturers in the USA,” a “readers added context” clarification to Giffords’ X.com post promoting the Harris piece rebutted.
In a surprise to no one, the gun lobby is ramping up its efforts to undermine gun safety.
Its latest game? Trying to convince Americans that large-capacity magazines—used to fire dozens of rounds in mere seconds—are “standard.” https://t.co/EiDOz3zyWA
— GIFFORDS (@GIFFORDS_org) February 8, 2025
One only need look at the 1963 Colt AR-15 Sporter advertisement (which predated the sale of M16s to the military) to see that 20 round magazines were offered as standard options “if you’re a hunter, camper or collector” from the inception (the prototype had a 25-round magazine, and 30-rounders were introduced a few years later).
I didn’t mean to start with a history lesson, but it’s important to note this Harris character is shoveling manure right from the start, and he doesn’t stop spreading it there.
“An industry effort to convince us that 30-round magazines are ‘standard’ for everyday Americans is classic Orwellian doublespeak in the vein of ‘war is peace,’” Harris keeps digging. “Americans are smarter than that.”
Yes, we are, at least gun owning Americans, and we recognize projection when we see it. It’s pretty rich that the people who pejoratively label semiautomatics as “assault weapons” and “weapons of war,” and call citizen disarmament edicts “commonsense gun safety laws” would lecture us on Orwell. As the character Syme observed in 1984, “The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.”
Harris is also unintentionally conflating gun owners with Giffords followers, easily influenced to make real world decisions based on slick propaganda by those trying to “trick” them. That describes gun prohibitionists and their ad agencies to a “T.”
“Large-capacity magazines (LCMs) go hand-in-hand with mass shootings,” Harris declares, not defining what he means by either term (although later in his piece it appears 10 rounds is too much).
“The FBI has not set a minimum number of casualties to qualify an event as a mass shooting, but U.S. statute (the Investigative Assistance for Violent Crimes Act of 2012) defines a “mass killing” as ‘3 or more killings in a single incident,’” Britannica.com notes. In a report on fake mass shooting data by Lee Williams we learn:
“The FBI does not define ‘mass shooting’ at all. The agency defines ‘mass killing’ or ‘mass murder’ as an incident in which four or more victims are killed by any intentional means, which may include gun violence.
A criminal could rack up that tally with a simple revolver. And the other thing Harris doesn’t tell us, presumably because Giffords is manically fixated on banning AR-15s, is “Handguns are the most common weapon type used in mass shootings in the United States.”
That kind of takes the wind out of the sails on his thought that with lesser capacity magazines potential victims would be better able to disarm shooters—while that can happen, there needs to be such a convergence of circumstances, distances involved, and levels of preparedness, emotional states and physical capabilities of potential targets that mandating magazine capacity based on that cannot be substantiated with anything close to one-size-fits-all odds of success. And one wonders why Harris hasn’t demonstrated his prowess at doing that in a simulation.
No matter, because he relieves us of that responsibility by citing high profile mass shootings in places like Uvalde, Newtown, Orlando—“gun-free zones,” where the disarmament laws demanded by the Giffords prohibitionists mean the real “first responders” are either running for their lives or bleeding out instead of firing back.
“There’s nothing ‘standard’ about these weapon attachments,” he again insists. “They are banned for hunting purposes in many states.”
What does that have to do with the Second Amendment? Harris won’t say.
“The only place these magazines are standard is in the military, where the focus is on offensive killing—not defensive action, and certainly not hunting or sport shooting,” he asserts. The Second Amendment question still hasn’t been answered, and Harris seems to believe the Defense Department doesn’t deploy fully equipped troops for defensive purposes. If he has some relevant military expertise to validate his expert opinion (he does bill himself as a “Giffords expert”), there’s a gap in his LinkedIn experience.
“According to the NRA itself, self-defense situations typically use an average of 2.2 rounds fired—not remotely close to the 10 to 30 rounds a large-capacity magazine holds,” Harris continues, evidently figuring he’s identified a “gotcha.”
True, but not all self-defense situations are average. And just as many defensive gun uses can discourage an attack simply by presenting a firearm to an assailant and inducing him to move on to healthier pursuits, so too can the right firepower discourage, or ultimately defend against, multiple assailants.
It’s happened. And let more gun prohibitionists Democrats start acting out their violent fantasies and it can happen again.
“Extremists have also attempted to frame permitless carry… as so-called ‘constitutional carry,’” Harris continues. He’s got a point, and I call it “permitless” myself —if it was Constitutional, there would be no infringements, including on where. But when he says, “Their efforts have even reached Congress, with bills introduced in 2024 and 2025 to allow dangerous people to carry concealed guns nationwide, regardless of state laws,” he’s flat-out lying if he means they’ve been proven dangerous. None of those laws make it legal for “prohibited persons” to even touch a gun, let alone carry one (and that’s a subject for more discussion).
“But there is nothing in the Constitution requiring unvetted, potentially dangerous, and untrained people to be allowed to carry a gun in public,” Harris bleats, exposing his complete lack of understanding of the Second Amendment. It doesn’t “allow” us to have guns, it disallows government from infringing. As the Supreme Court’s Heller majority noted, citing an earlier decision:
“The very text of the Second Amendment implicitly recognizes the pre-existence of the right and declares only that it ‘shall not be infringed.’ As we said in United States v. Cruikshank, ‘[t]his is not a right granted by the Constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence. The Second Amendment declares that it shall not be infringed…’”
“This rewriting of facts is a slippery slope that we can’t afford to go down,” Harris concludes. Agreed.
Not all of us have the high capacity for swallowing disinformation and utter hogwash we find in your average Giffords supporter.
And me, I’m still waiting for that simulation.
About David Codrea:
David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating/defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” is a regularly featured contributor to Firearms News, and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.
