LF: A little ingenuity renders Colorado 'high capacity' magazine ban toothless

When Colorado banned magazines with a capacity of 16 or more rounds back in March 2013, the ostensible justification was that doing so would limit the carnage a mass murderer could wreak when loosed on the soft targets of a "gun-free zone." That such targets can be mowed down in great numbers even without such capacity was apparently of no concern.

They can ban them, but they can't stop them

Magazine manufacturer Magpul has left Colorado as a result (although not before equipping Coloradans with tens of thousands of the soon-to-be-banned magazines--many of them for free--just before the law went into effect), taking their tax revenue and good jobs with them. But the political fallout went much further than that. State Senator John Morse (D), who as Senate President spearheaded the law, and Senator Angela Giron (D), became the first (and so far, the only) two Colorado senators to be kicked out of office on a recall vote (actually, the first two to have even faced a serious recall effort), despite an enormous funding advantage, courtesy of gun-hating billionaire and aspiring King of the Galaxy Michael Bloomberg. Then, when faced with her own recall vote--again because of her part in passing the magazine ban--Senator Evie Hudak (D) resigned her senate seat, so that, as per Colorado law, she would be replaced by a new senator from her own party, rather than lose the recall election to a Republican, thus shifting control of the senate.

The political fallout for Governor John Hickenlooper (D) has also been severe, to the point of causing him to flip-flop and waffle chaotically with regard to the ban--prompting the superbly ironic "Hickenlooper Blues" (do not cheat yourself out of the opportunity to watch the video).

And what have these politicians bought for their trouble, at the expense, for some, of their political lives (if Hickenlooper holds on to his office next Tuesday--anything but a foregone conclusion--he will only have lost his dignity, which in his case is no great loss) ? Certainly not public safety, but we already knew that. And as it turns out, they appear not even to have successfully bought much of a ban.

According to the breathless "reporting" of CBS Denver's Brian Maass, Colorado gun shops have found a couple methods of legally providing buyers with the ability to equip themselves with 30-round magazines. One way to do it is using parts kits:

In Colorado Springs at Old Colorado City Surplus, an Army Surplus store, a CBS4 producer bought two brand-new high capacity magazine “kits.”
The kits consist of the magazine hardware and a spring that needs to be inserted to make the unit operational.
The clerk opened the package, put it together in 24 seconds and sold CBS4 the 30 round magazine for $25.

According to the clerk, the kits are "selling really, really fast." Another method is to sell 30-round magazines that have been modified in such a way as to limit their capacity to 15, but the modification is easily reversed by the buyer:

At a northern Colorado gun show, a seller displayed an entire table full of 30 round magazines that had been “retrofitted” to hold 15 rounds and comply with the controversial law.
The seller was asked if anyone would care if a buyer removed the modification and turned the magazine back into a high capacity unit.

Restoring the magazine back to its standard, designed capacity of 30 rounds is as easy as popping a rivet out. This, of course, is without even delving into 3-D printed magazines. A magazines is, after all, little more than a box with a spring inside--it hardly requires a sophisticated factory to produce.

The CBS crew seems unconcerned about any prosecution they might face for possessing "illegal" magazines--perhaps they have secured for themselves the hallowed "David Gregory exemption" to onerous magazine bans.

Predictably, the CBS segment brought in Tom Mauser, the father of Columbine massacre victim Daniel Mauser. Mauser has ever since used the death of his son as justification to attack the gun rights of Coloradans and Americans in general. An enthusiastic supporter of magazine bans, the fact that his son was murdered in 1999--five years into the federal ban--apparently does nothing to reduce his zeal for such a ban. The article quotes him as saying, "I thought it would be an effective law." Perhaps he knows better now (but not likely).

Near the end of the segment (see accompanying video) Maass asks Mauser, who had just expressed his "disgust" at the successful efforts to make "a mockery of" the law (a law very worthy of mockery), "What do you do now?" Mauser sighed mournfully, hung his head, and eventually replied, "That's a good question."

Indeed it is, and its a question that the "gun control" zealots within the Colorado government appear to be utterly unable to answer.