Screw it up for us and you screw it up for your enforcers too

I remember when an over-ten-round magazine cost less than thirty bucks, say, for a wondernine like the Beretta 92 or Browning P35 or the countless Glocks. I could find them anywhere, like Dershem's in Bellefonte, or Grice's or Bob's Army-Navy in Clearfield, Pennsylvania.

This was before the '94 AWB. It was even before the AWB was deliberated.

Prices started climbing as soon as the laws were proposed, and they kept climbing until, for all intents and purposes, the prices on some of these over-ten-round capacity magazines approached infinity. New ones could not be had at any price.

Ironically, since demand among the civilian sector approached zero, the manufacturers for these products found themselves serving a much smaller legal market, the police and gummint buyers. Said manufacturers could not keep their assembly lines busy so they scaled production back to the point where economies of scale no longer applied. Prices for the cops and the gummint climbed too.

High-volume magazines already imported or manufactured before the ban because of certain demand remained inexpensive, such as those for M16, AK, G3, and FAL. But they're the exception.

If, insh'allah, the AWB sunsets as anticipated, it may take some time for the supply to ramp back up for the return of legal private demand for high-cap magazines. But police departments everywhere were Taking It in the shorts for these ten years, paying triple or quintuple what they used to for replacement magazines for their sidearms. All in return for receiving a privileged status as the only lawful owners of new-production magazines.

It's happening again, as new blog-rollee Heartless Libertarian points us to Geekwitha45's report. The introduction of a new, badly needed cartridge for Uncle Sugar's service rifles is delayed because no manufacturer wants to undertake the project of supplying the magazine for it without the legal demand from private citizens.

Maybe next time policemen will remind themselves that supporting that ban has cost them and their departments, in real dollars and perhaps officers' lives, and maybe they'll think twice before allowing themselves to be used politically for similar bans in the future.