In Defense of Extended Magazines

I have to say, I was extremely, and pleasantly surprised to find an editorial in favor of allowing people to have extended magazines for pistols in today's Washington Post. Since the Tucson shooting the liberal press has been relentlessly trying to gin up outrage against guns in general, and pistols and extended magazines in particular.  The Post is a generally reliable tout for all things liberal, but once in a while they allow a lone conservative to sully their paper.  Some of the article is firearms history, probably well known to most who own and are interested in guns, but likely unknown to the average Post reader:

...During World War I, American armorers tried to adapt the 1903 Springfield into a counter-sniper "periscope rifle" by, among other things, installing a 25-round magazine. The Germans tried to turn the Luger pistol into a "trench broom" by devising a 32-round "snail drum" magazine (it fired the same round as the Glock 19). The Texas Ranger Frank Hamer carried a Remington Model 8 with an extended magazine in his hunt for Bonnie and Clyde in 1934. The Thompson submachine gun of World War II and the M-16 of Vietnam were improved by extending their magazine from 20 to 30 rounds. In 1957, the U.S. Army adopted the M-14 rifle, which was hardly more than an M-1 Garand rifle with an extended magazine. And who wouldn't want our soldiers, Marines and law officers to benefit from extended magazines?

But, IMHO the really significant parts of the article deal with the reality of using extended magazines for criminal purposes...:

What's often lost amid activists' carping is that the effect of the notorious extended magazine does little to improve the pistol's lethality except in extraordinary circumstances, such as Tucson. Neither Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech mass murderer, nor the alleged Fort Hood killer used extended magazines in their rampages. America's first gun mass murder, when Howard Unruh killed 13 people in 1949, was committed with a Luger.

In fact, the extended magazine actually vitiates the pistol's usefulness as a weapon for most needs, legitimate or illegitimate. The magazine destroys the pistol's essence; it is no longer concealable. Loughner allegedly wrapped the clumsy package in a coat for a short distance, but he could not have worn it in a belt or concealed it for an extended period. It had really ceased to be a pistol.

...and for home defense:

Particularly in rural Arizona, given the upsurge in border violence, it's likely that residents feel the need to defend themselves against drug predators, coyote gunmen or others. Yes, they can use semiautomatic rifles and shotguns, protected by the Second Amendment and unlikely to be banned by local law, but women generally don't care to put in the training needed to master them. Nor can the elderly handle them adeptly.

For them, the Glock with a 33-round magazine is the weapon of maximum utility. You can load it on Sunday and shoot it all month. (Nobody wants to reload a gun while being shot at.) It's light and easy to control. You don't have to carry it or conceal it; it's under the bed or in the drawer until needed. When the question arises of who needs an extended magazine, the answer is: the most defenseless of the defenseless.

As Insty often says, when seconds count, the police are only minutes away.  In parts of Arizona, it could be hours.