Lott stated that a magazine ban would be inefective because the magazine is the easiest part to make since its a box with a spring.
It's actually not easy at all to make a
reliable sheet metal magazine. I can only think of a couple mags that truly are simple boxes; nearly all of them have tricky contours and indents that require more than a $500 sheet metal break to produce. The followers are tricky, too. I've machined them from ABS plastic, and it was a lot of trial and error to make one work correctly.
For instance, to make an AR mag, you'd really need to do it in four pieces to get the contour, and then would have to weld in strips of steel to make the thinner portion of the inside, which is normally done with stamped channels.
Perhaps I'll build an AR mag one evening and detail the process. It's certainly doable, but my guess is I'll have 4+ hours into an ugly magazine that will require several minor modifications to work reliably. And I have a vertical mill, acetylene torch, welders and a host of other tools, as well as years of metal fabrication and tinkering experience
He also mentioned the ability of 3D printers to make one.
That technology is getting there, but as of right now, the materials required for a decently durable mag need an expensive commercial grade printer to be used.
Lott's opponent, can't remember his name, stated it's easy to make a gun into full auto but no one does it because of NFA. That's where he mentioned how gun laws work.
NFA works in regards to MGs because it was done so long ago, and there were relatively few machine guns in circulation at the time. Today, there are about 174,000 transferable machine guns. Magazines, on the other hand, literally number in the hundreds of millions. A magazine ban would
eventually be effective to a large degree, but it will take generations. Neither you nor I, and most likely not even our great grand children, would see the day when standard capacity magazines are as hard to come by as machine guns.
Furthermore, if this guy and others with his argument had any idea how many unregistered NFA guns are probably circulating in the black market or sitting in Billy Joe Bob's cellar, they'd poop themselves. I can't even recall how many people I've talked to who freely admitted to having a sawed off shotgun, even though they knew it was illegal. Why they confided in someone they barely knew I don't understand, but they did. My guess is that not one of them will ever be caught, because they are probably otherwise law abiding people who don't show up on the radar. I'm sure there are literally millions out there with unregistered SBRs, SBSs, AOWs and DDs. They even turn up on youtube at times, seemingly by people who may not realize they're violating the law. I know there channels through which I and most other people could acquire unregistered machine guns fairly quickly if we wanted and had the cash (brother of a friend of friend of an acquaintance in a motorcycle gang kind of thing). The stuff is out there.
Most people just don't mess with MGs because legal ones are prohibitively expensive, illegal ones carry a hefty punishment, and they really aren't particularly useful in a normal person's life for anything other than wasting ammo. People who want to get that fix every now and then spend a couple hundred bucks at the MG shoot renting, and then go back to practical semi-autos.
