Today’s CQ Roll Call newsletter illustrates one of the biggest obstacles to a functional gun regulation debate:

With no mention of banning AR-15-style rifles or jumbo ammunition clips, the [Mayors for Illegal Guns Washington-area Super Bowl] ad underscores how quickly the focus of gun control advocates has turned away from those ideas and almost entirely toward the background checks.

The problem? Clips and magazines are two different things.

Simply put, a clip is something that introduces cartridges into a magazine.

For my part, I nearly referred to cartridges as bullets in the course of making the distinction CQ Roll Call failed to, which demonstrates how easy it is for individuals who have not spent a lot of time handling guns to fundamentally misunderstand how they work.

Such misunderstanding is a recipe for bad policy, and in this context bad policy has clear life-and-death ramifications. Arguments surrounding gun regulation should be scrutinized for such errors on both sides, though perhaps one more than the other.