ZAUF: Clips, Magazines, and You

Following the common theme of ammunition, let’s take a look at how they’re loaded into a firearm. In the early days of single shot cannons and later on hand cannons and muskets, the process was excruciating: a shooter would have to load powder in through the muzzle (the business end), tamp it down, shove a wad and bullet in the gun and tamp that down, and then use a separate trigger activated fuse to fire. Thankfully, the invention of the fully encased metal cartridges we know and love has solved all of those problems and made possible for weapons to be magazine fed.

What is a magazine? It is a container where cartridges rest before being cycled into use. A magazine can be internal or removable. An internal magazine is fixed within the firearm itself, and cartridges are added by hand or with the help of a piece of metal called a clip. We’ll talk more about clips later, but the important point is that they are not magazines. Generally, removable magazines come in a few flavors, the most common of these is the box magazine. All that means is that it is boxy and rectangular. Other types of magazines include things such as helical drums that are significantly more common on shotguns and high capacity magazines.

There are generally two types of magazines that are in common use today: Single Stack and Double Stack. What does that mean? Within the body of the magazine the cartridges rest on top of each other in either a straight line or a staggered column. The straight line resting method is called a single stack for obvious reasons, and the staggered column is the double stack. The latter method allows more cartridges to fit into a magazine because of the staggered design.