Docs Show How Gun Manufacturers Swamped the Market With Large Capacity Magazines

This story is published in partnership with The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence. Subscribe to its newsletters. 

Between 1990 and 2021, the gun industry flooded the American market with at least 717 million detachable firearm magazines that hold 11 or more rounds of ammunition, according to a study produced by the gun industry’s trade group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, and obtained by The Trace and Rolling Stone.

A magazine stores ammunition and feeds it into a gun’s chamber, allowing a person to continuously fire bullets without reloading. The larger the magazine, the more a person can shoot without interruption. In mass shootings, this makes it harder for people to escape, linking the device to high casualty counts.

Not all manufacturers of gun magazines provided data to the NSSF, the study stipulates, so its figures represent a “conservative estimate.” In addition, “Military and law enforcement sales were not counted.” The study, begun in 2023, says that roughly 46 percent of the magazines it accounted for — some 443 million — were rifle magazines that held 30 rounds or more. 

From 1994 to 2004, large capacity magazines — magazines holding 11 or more rounds — were prohibited under the Federal Assault Weapons Ban. Still, according to an NSSF spreadsheet that underpins the study, and was obtained through a public records request, production and distribution of these magazines, also known as LCMs, continued. This was due, at least in part, to loopholes and exemptions. During the ban, hundreds of thousands of pistol LCMs were produced and entered the market each year, as were millions of rifle magazines that held 30 rounds or more. 

In a 2024 deposition, the NSSF’s research director, Salam Fatohi, was asked by an attorney if he was surprised that, at a time when LCMs were illegal, manufacturers had produced such a large number in the 30-plus category. He answered, “I can only report what is provided to us in this estimate and through the survey data. That’s it.” He also said, of the manufacturers, “If they are truthful in their reporting — they give that to me — I trust their information because they have a vested interest in being open and honest with us.”
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Since the ban’s lapse, the gun industry has sought to normalize LCMs, pumping huge numbers of them into the civilian market. The spreadsheet shows that production and distribution of magazines holding 30 or more rounds skyrocketed starting in 2010, reaching 23 million — almost tripling the previous year’s number.

Over the last two decades, with no ban in place, mass shootings have become a familiar aspect of American life, and LCMs have become strongly associated with them. On Saturday, December 13, after a gunman opened fire at Brown University, killing two people and injuring nine others, police recovered 44 spent shell casings and two LCMs, according to an arrest affidavit. Each device was capable of holding roughly 30 rounds. 

Rhode Island, where Brown is located, has a ban on LCMs, but the restriction is dwarfed by the reality that the devices are available in most states. An examination of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban by criminologist Christopher Koper found its effects to be muddled because of the various loopholes and exemptions. But, he wrote, the “ban’s most important provision was arguably its prohibition on ammunition magazines holding more than 10 rounds.”

The NSSF’s study, titled the Detachable Magazine Report, and the spreadsheet provide an insider’s view into the breadth of the industry’s effort to use LCMs, in particular those holding more than 30 rounds, to turn a profit. Production and distribution largely continued to jump each year after 2010, peaking in 2018, the year of the Parkland mass shooting, at 37.4 million.
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The Trace and Rolling Stone obtained the documents for a series called “The Secret Files of the Gun Industry,” which uses a trove of records to reveal the industry’s inner workings.

The NSSF declined to provide a comment for this story. In a policy document posted on its website, the organization asserts, “Any capacity-based ban on the manufacture and sale of magazines would be utterly arbitrary.” It adds that a prohibition would “infringe upon the Second Amendment rights of Americans by having the government limit their ability to defend themselves, their loved ones and their property.”

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The NSSF’s claim, according to research by economist Lucy Allen, lacks empirical support. For litigation, she and a team analyzed 736 incidents, between January 2011 and May 2017, in which the National Rifle Association documented a person using a firearm for self-defense. The NRA had compiled these events for its Armed Citizen database, which, according to Allen, was the “largest collection of accounts of citizen self-defense compiled by others that I am able to find.” Her analysis found that the people in the database fired 2.2 shots on average, and out of the 736 total incidents, only two involved a person reportedly firing more than 10 bullets.

Allen also documented and examined 161 mass shootings that took place between 1982 and 2019. For 105 of them, the shooter’s magazine capacity was known. Of those, 63 — or 60 percent — involved LCMs. “In particular,” Allen noted, “we found an average number of fatalities or injuries of 27 per mass shooting with a large-capacity magazine versus 9 for those without.” Allen added that of the 63 incidents involving LCMs, there were 43 in which the number of shots fired could be determined. “Shooters fired more than 10 rounds in 40 of the 43 incidents,” she wrote, “and the average number of shots fired was 103.”