Welcome to the debut of our new PrepperGuns 101: Firearms Information For Beginning Preppers
Today’s installment is about “magazines and clips”. What exactly are they? What kinds are there? What is the difference between a magazine and a clip? These answers to these questions and a lot more are coming right up!
One convention before we start: This and all PrepperGuns 101 articles take for granted that we are discussing human-portable firearms that are legal for civilians to own. For example, when talking about magazines we mean the ones for small-arms, not the ones sealed deep within the bowels of a warship that feed large navy cannons.
First, what is a magazine? Well, in it’s basic form, magazine is the container where unfired bullets sit before they are fed into the firing chamber. Magazines can be internal or external, they can be fixed (built into the gun or semi-permanently attached) or they can be removable.
Tapco AK-47 magazine with speed-loader attached
Example: One of the guns we are most familiar with in the prepping community, the AR-15, has a detachable magazine. A full magazine is placed into the gun, the bolt is “charged” moving the first round out of the magazine and into the chamber, where the gun can fire it. The rest of the rounds in the magazine basically sit there and wait for the gun to cycle.
When the gun fires, the bolt carrier group moves to the rear of the action area, and the spent round casing is ejected. The bolt carrier group moves forward again, picking up the next round out of the magazine.
This is the basic operational procedure for most semi-automatic (one bang per one pull of the trigger) and fully-automatic (the gun goes bang as long as the trigger is pulled and ammunition is available), no matter if the gun is a rifle, carbine or handgun.
A brief anatomy of a typical removable interchangeable magazine. There are four main parts of the typical magazine, the body, the floor plate, the follower and the spring.The magazine body is an empty tube which is open on both ends. Basically, to assemble (or reassemble after cleaning) a magazine, you place the follower in the tube, followed by the spring. You then close the floor plate. Bullets are then loaded through the lips of the magazine on top of the follower, which compresses down (under tension of the spring) as you load the rounds.
There are some semi-automatic guns that do not have a removable magazine as a part of their normal configuration. The Soviet-bloc SKS is a very popular example of this type of gun.
The SKS is loaded from the top with up to 10 rounds, which sit in an internal magazine. Functionally, it works the same as the AR-15, but instead of simply replacing the removable magazine with a loaded one, the SKS’s internal magazine must be reloaded before normal firing can occur.
That brings us to the question “So, if that’s a magazine, what is a clip?”
A clip is, literally, a metal band to which a number of rounds are attached to ease and speed up the loading of magazines.
Let’s look back at our SKS. The SKS has a slot in the top where the clip fits. To load the gun quickly, you place the clip in the slot and push down on the bullets, allowing all 10 rounds to slide into the internal magazine.
Generally, clips are an obsolete design and have been replaced by external quick change magazines in military and law enforcement environments, however there is one huge advantage to a clip-fed gun like the SKS… they are legal to own in most areas that ban so-called “assault weapons” like California, New Jersey and Canada.
Pro Tip: Gun people really, really get annoyed when people call magazines “clips”. If you want to be one of the cool kids at Prepper school, magazines are ALWAYS called magazines, not clips.
Not nearly as many bolt action rifles have external interchangeable magazines (but there are some models that do, and I personally favor those guns). Some hunting rifles have magazines that are loaded and snapped into place in the bottom of the gun, and these are generally “flush” to the bottom so that they don’t protrude. After all, if you are deer hunting you don’t need more than 5 rounds at a time.
Rounds loaded into the internal magazine of a Mosin-Nagant rifle
OK, got it! So all I need to know is that there are magazines, and that there are clips, right? I have a gun that takes external magazines, I just need to buy a few extra and I am good?
Well…
Yes and no.
Just like everything, there are good manufacturers and bad manufacturers of magazines (and, surprisingly enough, clips).
Like a lot of preppers, I am a big fan of buying the best quality magazines that I can get, and that generally means buying them from the manufacturer of your gun, even though many times aftermarket magazines are 1/2 or 1/3 of the price.
To me, it doesn’t matter the price, I’d rather own 2 magazines that I stone cold know are going to work in a gun fight than 10 magazines that will “probably” work.
If you own, say, a Glock 19, then buy spare Glock brand magazines. After you get them, you should take them out and put several hundred rounds through them to make SURE they will work.
Where things become a bit tougher is when you get to guns like the AR-15. Let’s say you buy a Colt AR-15 M4, does that mean you need to buy only Colt made metal magazines like the one that came in your gun?
In this case, no. What you want to look for is either ACTUAL military specifications (mil-spec) metal magazines, or high quality polymer magazines that have been battle tested.
Spice and I use Tavor X95’s as our primary defense weapons, and our X95’s came with Magpul brand polymer magazines. Magpul magazines have been widely used by members of the US military for many years under the harshest conditions, and most GI’s I know actually prefer them to metal magazines.
Another wise choice, in my opinion, are metal magazines that are made by military contractors like Brownells. Brownells developed an anti-tilt follower (the part of the magazine that the bottom bullet sits on) which is now widely used throughout the industry and the military.
So if magazines are so simple, why should I not just buy cheap import ones?
The answer is quality control. Cheap magazines often don’t have nearly as good fit and finish, especially around the feed lips. For many things in life, fit and finish is more a matter of aesthetics than use, but not in a magazine. The fit, finish and quality of the magazine lips is the single most important factor when it comes to the reliability of a semi-auto firearm. Without a good, clean, accurate loading system, any gun will become a nightmare to operate.
I’ve even seen problems with clips when it comes to fit and finish, which seems crazy as simple as they are. There’s a type of SKS clip being sold that doesn’t fit into any SKS I have ever seen. Be very careful when you buy SKS clips, get 10 and make sure they work before you order a bunch of them.
OK, that’s a basic overview of magazines and clips.
Next up? Understanding what all those weird ammunition markings and sizes mean.
NOTE: I think it’s important to remind everybody that we do not have any sponsors of any kind, so any comments made about particular brands are our own, entirely non-reimbursed opinions.
Thank you for that article, Salty! I never paid any attention to magazines and didn’t really care. Now that I am aware of their importance and what to look for, I will factor that into my future purchases.