Senate has a chance to save lives.


The video is blurry, but you can make out the man in a trench coat firing 20 to 30 rounds at the White House as screaming tourists run — until he tries to reload his SKS semiautomatic rifle and bystanders tackle him, knocking him to the sidewalk and ending the incident.

This isn't reality TV or a scene from a movie. It happened on a sunny Saturday afternoon in October 1994, when a deranged young man from Colorado opened fire. As in many other such shootings, potential victims escaped death when the shooter paused to reload.

OPPOSING VIEW: Magazine limits endanger safety

It happened again in Tucson in January 2011, when Jared Loughner killed six people and wounded 13 with his Glock 19 handgun. Only when Loughner tried to swap in a second 33-round magazine did bystanders tackle him and take away his gun.

And it might have happened again last December in Newtown, Conn., when Adam Lanza stopped his shooting rampage briefly to swap 30-round magazines in his AR-15 assault rifle. Families of the children and educators killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School told CBS' 60 Minutes that gave 11 children time to race to safety, sparing them the fate of the 20 first-graders and six educators Lanza managed to murder. "There's 11 kids out there today that are still running around on the playground," said Bill Sherlach, whose wife was killed when she tried to stop Lanza.

Much of the focus since the shootings at Newtown has been on the semiautomatic weapons that let shooters fire bullets as fast as they can pull the trigger: It took Loughner barely 16 seconds to fire 33 bullets, for example.

But as the Senate votes on gun safety proposals today, just as important as banning a class of weapons is limiting the high-capacity magazines that help make them so deadly.

Like the other proposals the Senate will consider — universal background checks, new penalties for gun trafficking and school safety measures — limiting magazine size to no more than 10 bullets is no panacea. But like the other proposals, it would help save lives, and the arguments against it are largely unconvincing.

Critics say limits are pointless because experienced shooters can swap magazines in two seconds or less. But examples like the ones above show that an agitated gunman in the heat of a rampage could take longer, and even a brief pause is long enough for someone to stop the shooter or for people to escape.

There's no compelling need for oversize magazines at the range, and hunters — who usually limit themselves to three to five rounds — deride them as unsportsmanlike and unnecessary.

Defenders of large magazines say they can be crucial for self-defense, but the number of Americans who find themselves in movie-like shootouts with bad guys is minuscule. The question is balance, and here the balance should tip in favor of making it harder for criminals and deranged shooters to get magazines that enable them to fire 30 rounds or more before they stop.

Critics point out that there are millions of high-capacity magazines in private hands already, so banning new ones will do little good. That was also true when Congress banned assault weapons and high-capacity magazines in 1994, but when the ban expired in 2004, both the weapons and the magazines had become scarcer and more expensive.

That's the goal now. It's a modest but important step, and the Senate has a chance to take it, and save lives.