Saw this ni a movie a few minutes ago. It seems wrong so I’m hoping a resident firearms expert will clarify it.
Character A is a Bad Bad Man. Character B, whom A is blackmailing, gets ahold of A’s Glock and points it at A’s head. A laughs at her saying there’s no way he’d hand B a loaded weapon. B pulls out the apparently fully-loaded clip she’s pickpocketed from A, puts in the clip and slides back the slider top thing to chamber a round. A bullet falls out of the top of the gun. Doesn’t this mean that there was a round in the chamber and had B pulled the trigger A was toast?
If you insert a magazine, cycle the slide and a round ejects, then yes, there was already a round in the chamber. However, some guns will not fire if there is no magazine inserted, despite having a round in the chamber. I’m not sure if Glocks will fire without a mag inserted.
The way I think of it is that a magazine holds the rounds ‘within’ the firearm, while a clip holds the rounds together. For example, an AR-15 has a magazine that contains the rounds, which can be loaded with stripper clips that hold the rounds at their bases. A Winchester Model 94 has a tubular magazine, thich is not detatchable.
Someone will be along to mention the en bloc clip of the M1 Garand. Personally, that one seems a bit of a grey area to me. (Though I’m ready to be informed.)
A clip is a device that holds bullets in a way that facilitates loading them quickly into a mechanism within the firearm that stores and feeds them into the action. A magazine is a metal box that provides that same functionality when inserted into the firearm. It generally has a spring and presses the rounds upward into a shaped top that allows each cartridge to be in position to be fed and then allows the next to replace it.
Yes, the M1 is the rifle that goes “ping.” The Garand’s en-block clip is unique AFAIK in that it is actually loaded into the rifle’s magazine along with the eight cartridges it holds. It is an intergral part of the mechanism and the rifle cannot feed cartridges without it. It’s large and springy which gives it the characteristic sound.
Stripper clips which are vastly more commonplace even today are not loaded into the magazine, they just hold the cartridges in line while they are pushed in.
The M1 ( the only weapon I ever qualified “expert” on) accepted an eight round clip that loaded through the top of the receiver. When you fired the thing about all you heard was the bolt clanking against the rear of the receiver – it made so much noise you almost did not hear the cartridge detonate. When you fired the eighth round the clip was expelled with the last shell casing. It made a distinctive, almost bell like, noise as it popped free of the follower, the device that pushed the cartridges up into the path of the bolt. When the clip was ejected the bolt stayed open until a fresh loaded clip was inserted or the follower was manually depressed. Manually closing the breach could result in catching your thumb between the chamber and the face of the bolt as the bolt came forward, giving rise to a condition called "the M1 thumb.
The older 1903 Springfield used a stripper clip that allowed as many as five rounds to be loaded into the internal magazine at one go but did not actually get shoved into the rifles works. As I remember you had to put a full eight round clip in the M1 but that the Springfield would fire with any number of cartridges in the receiver. Of course the Springfield was a bolt action rifle, modeled on the Mauser, while the M1 was a semi-automatic. They both used the same ammunition, the .30 caliber model of 1906, thus the designation of 30/06. On both the follower, the gadget that actually fed the cartridges into the chamber, was part of the rifle. On the M14 and the M16 which use a detachable magazine the follower is a fold up spring in the detachable magazine its self. In the old days soldiers would not put the full 20 or 30 rounds in their magazines for fear of weakening the spring so that it would not feed the last two or three rounds.
I never understood that, either. I have a ninety year old 45 caliber magazine that has lain around for decades at a time with a full set of rounds in it. While it is not exactly the same as an M14 magazine, it seems to me that the fact that it has never once failed to feed in my pistol would indicate this practice was pretty much based on superstition.
There was a recent discussion of weakened magazine springs on Glocktalk. The conclusion was that leaving a loaded magazine around for a long time didn’t cause the springs to weaken and make the magazine unreliable. It was a well used magazine, with the spring compressing and expanding, that caused magazines to go bad.
The M-16 mag is notoriously flimsy. I qualified on M-16 and on Galil, and while we filled the much sturdier (and much heavier) Galil mags with a full 35 rounds, SOP was to put only 29 rounds for the M-16. I still do it.
