General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I am sincerely perplexed by the "it's not an assault rifle" meme... [View all]Igel
(35,300 posts)You can call the damned thing a "raging kitten" if you want to, as long as we all know that "raging kitten" has a specific meaning and that the term is consistently used in laws, regulation, and normative communication.
If I use "raging kitten" to mean a truly pissed off feline and *you* use "raging kitten" to mean a "semi-automatic weapon with a large magazine and scary colors" while the guy across the street uses it to mean his pissed off girlfriend, then we're not going to communicate. We all all sit around and use the words, but there's no real communication happening.
Except in this case if we make semi-automatics into "assault rifles" then what we've done is effectively made the laws passed decades ago "living," in the sense that they we can always make the law mean whatever it needs to mean at the present. No need for actual legislatures and representatives to talk about them.
Have a law using terms with precise meanings.
Have a minority redefine the terms.
Have the minority order everbody complaining about the new definitions to shut up.
Apply the old law with all the new meanings.
Hoist a cold one to Orwell's defeat and Democratic minority rule.
Sorry, bad idea. Let's keep the terms that we have and the definitions that we've used and put into law and common discourse. Sometimes assimilation is ambiguously voluptuous. Or really good, depending on what you think "ambiguously" and "really," "voluptuous" and "good" mean.