Angus King: Rifles with Detachable Magazines Are ‘Useful only for Killing’

On Thursday’s broadcast of “CNN This Morning,” Sen. Angus King (I-ME) said that gun control legislation he introduced is a new approach to “assault weapons” because it says “that a gun that operated as these weapons do, as any rifle does, cannot have a detachable magazine, and must have an internal magazine with no more than 10 bullets.” And “To me, this is purely consistent with banning machine guns 100 years ago or sawed-off shotguns. These are particularly dangerous, useful only for killing people, and we want to diminish that lethality.”

King said, “This is a new approach to this problem of assault weapons, and what we’re really focusing on is the way it works, the way the gun actually works rather than what it looks like. And the heart of it, Erica, is that those big curved magazines that you see that hold 15, 20, 40 bullets, and our bill would essentially prohibit that. They would say that a gun that operated as these weapons do, as any rifle does, cannot have a detachable magazine, and must have an internal magazine with no more than 10 bullets. That’s it. And that’s — we’re focusing on the lethality of these things, rather than what they look like, and the whole idea here is to save lives. And one of the problems in a mass shooting is, if the shooter doesn’t have to stop and reload, they’re much more deadly. And, for example, the shooter in Maine, as I understand it, had two magazines duct-taped together, so when one was empty, he could flip it over and then jam the new one in. That’s what our law would prohibit, along with these devices like a bump stock that turns a gun that you have to pull the trigger each time it fires into what amounts to a machine gun. So, that’s what we’re after. We are talking to Republicans about it. To me, this is purely consistent with banning machine guns 100 years ago or sawed-off shotguns. These are particularly dangerous, useful only for killing people, and we want to diminish that lethality.”

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