This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, July 17, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown.

The debate over guns has shifted and perhaps shrunk a bit to a debate over magazines and how many bullets those magazines should be allowed to contain.

Matthew Larosier is author of a New Cato Policy Bulletin losing count the empty case for

high-capacity magazine restrictions. It's available today at Cato.org.

How did we get to the point where this is a key point of contention within the gun debate?

It's interesting. It's just over the years people have and lawmakers have picked different things to obsess on with guns.

Like in the very beginning it was the price of guns.

Some guns were just too cheap and so we targeted Saturday night specials.

And of course the result of that was that the next cheapest guns would be much more lethal.

And so that was a nightmare.

Then we targeted machine guns and that didn't make any kind of a difference.

And so it seems over the past 30 years, I would feel like probably video games and media and people's exposure to

firearms in the media and that sort of thing

will cause people to just get this idea

that the number of shots somehow directly implicates

lethality.

And I mean, it rhetorically works pretty well, like people really buy it.

So I think that's kind of how that wound up

being where we're at even though in reality magazine capacity makes a very little

difference in terms of lethality. All right well well, I mean, and part of it has to be just the political realization that mass shootings,

that gun crime in the United States doesn't really move the needle that much when it comes to people's rights to own firearms.

Yeah, exactly. There's such rare events in the already rare context of shootings generally in this country.

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