Although it may seem like ages ago, it was just exactly two months ago today when Arizona Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head by Jared Loughner, who ended up killing six people and wounding twelve others in a horrifying shooting spree in Tucson, Arizona.
Although the immediate discussion about "toning down the rhetoric" has sort of become empty rhetoric, the fact that Loughner had such a large magazine of bullets was something that was also discussed in the immediate aftermath, since the Federal Assault Weapons Ban that was allowed to expire in 2004 prevented such large clips from being sold legally.
The 1994 ban, enacted in part after a 1993 mass killing in downtown San Francisco, as well as the Waco incident, limited gun magazines to a maximum of ten rounds, not the 31 rounds that Loughner used to gun down 19 people.
New York Democratic Representative Carolyn McCarthy in the House and New Jersey U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg proposed bills the following week in Congress that would ban magazines that hold more than 10 rounds.
