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Clips vs Magazines
Although many people use the terms "clip" and "magazine" interchangeably, there is a significant difference between the two. As a quick rule of thumb, if it has a spring, it's a magazine. If it's a simple piece of metal, it's a clip. It's another common misconception that rifles use magazines, and that pistols use clips. This is also not true.
This is an example of a clip, on the left, and the same clip, loaded with cartridges:
Clips simply hold together a number of cartridges by the groove around the base of the casing for easy loading into a magazine. In the example above, the clip holds five rounds together for loading into a Czech VZ24, a copy of the famous German Mauser 1898 rifle. The series of pictures below demonstrate how the clip is loaded into the fixed magazine of the rifle. Clips offer the ability to rapidly reload weapons with fixed magazines. The Russian SKS, for example, can take a while to be loaded if each cartridge had to be individually loaded into the magazine. With the stripper clip, the magazine can be recharged quickly.
On the other hand, a magazine uses a box like enclosure to hold rounds together for loading into a weapon. The rounds are held together by the force of the walls pressing the rounds together, and by a (usually) spring-loaded follower that presses up against the rounds, trying to feed them to the top of the magazine, and from there, into the chamber of the weapon that the magazine has been inserted into. Not all magazines are detachable; clip-fed weapons usually have a fixed magazine (a magazine that is built into the weapon) to hold the rounds after they've been stripped off of the clip. Some weapons have the option of either being fed by detachable magazine, or the magazine can be left in place and be refilled via stripper clips. The M14 and the English version of the FN-FAL, the L1A1, have this ability, for instance.
Here's some magazines, two 20rd FN-FAL magazines on the left, and a 8 round SIG P210 mag on the right (not to same scale):
Some people say that the distinction between a clip and a magazine is a distinction that doesn't matter much. "As long as you get the point," they say, "what does it matter?" Well, there are a number of reasons. The main reason is that when you speak to people who are familiar with firearms, you sound somewhat uneducated when you ask if you can run a clip through their AR-15. Secondly, for those of you who are lazy, to type in 'clip' takes 4 keystrokes, whereas 'mag' only takes 3. The distinction is similar to what you might feel when someone tells you that they have their monitor set up on top of their CPU. Of course, they don't have a 30 pound 19" monitor sitting on top of a $500 Pentium 3 chip - they have the monitor sitting atop their case. But if they make the mistake of saying that, don't you get a superior little smile on your face?
Last updated on: 30 Nov 2000
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