Joe Biden, Gun Mathematician

In honor of Middle Class Joe Biden's visit to Richmond today, we examine a line of reasoning he put forth recently in a Google online debate or whatever it was:

"I'm much less concerned quite frankly about what you'd call an assault weapon than I am about magazines and the number of rounds that can be held," Biden said.

One participant in the web discussion–who had initially asked the question about earthquakes–also followed up by asking whether a magazine cap would actually have an impact in a scenario such as the mass shooting at the Connecticut elementary school that left 26 dead, including 20 children.

Biden said that gunman, who had 30-round magazines, had to swap out "four or five times." If limited to 10 rounds, however, the vice president argued the gunman would have had to swap out 25 or 30 times.

"And so what would happen is the response time, in fact, may have saved one kid's life. Maybe if it took longer, maybe one more kid would be alive," Biden said.

Well. The "first responders" arrived at Sandy Hook twenty minutes after the first phone calls were put into dispatch. For ten-round magazines to really have made a difference, then the killer would have had to fire a magazine empty and reload a new one at the rate of one per minute-and-a-half or so. That's an astronomical amount of time to take firing ten bullets and reloading a new mag. Does Biden really believe his own logic?

It's a feint, anyway. If thirty-round magazines had been outlawed, and the killer had used ten-round magazines in his rampage instead, then Biden would have been on Google+ lecturing us on how we should reduce magazine capacity to two rounds per mag. The first rule of gun control is that gun control is never satisfied.