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)Most words we hear we never look up in a dictionary. That's fine. We hear them used in sentences and we may discard our first guess as to the word's meaning the second or third time we hear it. Then we learn where it's okay to use the word and we narrow and shape the meaning(s).
Sometimes we get it wrong and words, over time, change meaning. "Stay the course" meant "to stay in the race until the end of the course." Like "stay the night." It wasn't common, people could interpret it to mean "not change the course", they liked how that definition fit and didn't see a reason to change there interpretation. Now "change the course", less than 10 years later, mostly means "not change course." Just like, apparently, "stay the night" means "not change the night."
That kind of change was responsible for the word "lord" going from the guy who handed out the bread on a work crew to the guy who owns and is responsible for a large manor to the supreme being, all in 400 years. Still, we're not talking 400 years and we're not talking about words that don't need detailed definitions. These are specialized terms and built into the law. You change the meanings only if you want to impose your meanings on experts and rewrite the law without legislation.
An automatic weapon is a weapon that reloads the chamber after each shot. You pull the trigger, and it will fire, reload, fire, reload, etc., until you release the trigger. It is fully automatic, you don't need to tell it to reload by letting go of the trigger.
A self-loading weapon is a weapon that is ready for a new shot with every pull of the trigger. You pull the trigger and it will fire; you release the trigger, it reloads. You can pull the trigger repeatedly and keep on shooting. But if you pull the trigger once, you can only fire a single round.
There are old fashioned self-loaders. Revolvers, for instance. It would move the chamber and bullet into place for the next shot. Pull trigger, fire shot, release trigger, cylinder moves and puts new bullet into place. After a few shots you have to remove the spent cartridges using gravity or your fingers, and then reload what amounts to a built-in merger of magazine and chamber. This is "Old West" tech, and the size and mass of the cylinder mattered: After 7 or 8 spots for bullets the cylinder becomes too big for a pistol, and the spring to make that mass move quickly becomes large. Revolvers are self-limiting.
A semi-automatic rifle (or pistol) is the same but different. You pull the trigger, fire shot, release trigger, a new bullet is put into place. That's the same. There are three big differences, of which two are irrelevant here: The first is that the spent catridge is expelled, so you never have to remove them (unless there's a jam). The second is that there's only one chamber, unlike a revolver in which the cylinder is a rotating chamber. The third, and arguably relevant point, is that since the mechanism just expels the cartridge and grabs a bullet from a magazine, any magazine that gets a bullet to the right spot for the mechanism works. It can hold 2 bullets. It could hold 2000. That means the real difference between a Dillinger or Tombstone shoot-out revolver and the AK-15 is one of "how many bullets can I fire before I have to stop."
The third kind are manual loading rifles or pistols. They can be pump action or bolt action. Or even things like muzzle loaders. In other words: pull trigger, fire bullet, release trigger. Then perform some sort of manual action to expel the spent cartridge or remove it, reload the chamber, and set the gun for the next round. When you're hunting this is slow and cumbersome. You want a semi-automatic for hunting, if at all possible. I knew hunters that had 3 or 4 rifles with them when they hunted. I didn't understand until somebody explained. They were bolt action. He'd fire one, drop it in his lap as he picked up the second and fired it. Slow, but faster--and a heck of a lot quieter--than reloading.
The problem is that people are hearing "assault rifle" and thinking "military-style rifle with big magazine" because almost every time they've heard the word "assault rifle" their self-produced definition fits what they see and also fits the context. It's wrong, but it's not obviously wrong. Then when they hear a sentence where their definition doesn't fit, they can't believe that they're wrong. It's like being told you've made an error is an insult. They don't want to take the time to admit that their definitions are wrong.
Same for "semi-automatic"--it's got to be big and scary because the guns we see described as "semi-automatic" are usually big and scary. Heck, the air gun firing pellets that my friend had in the '70s was semi-automatic.
It doesn't help that adjusting their speech to fit the specialized definition of these terms makes the target of their outrage hard to nail: They obviously hate something and want to ban something away from the less-competent for their own good, but if it's not "assault rifles", if it's not "semi-automatic weapons," then what is the target they're shooting at?
Then there's familiarity-based confusion. You hear "assault rifle" and "assault weapon" and don't understand the difference. You can't admit ignorance because we think that'st he same as being stupid, we're not going to waste time looking up the difference, so we ignore the difference. They mean the same thing, don't they? Others can't explain the difference so there isn't one. They're synonyms. But they're not. Assault weapon is a term made up for "big scary weapons with big magazines that are legal but still scary and still big." It lacks a good definition because it's not a term that needs precision or accuracy. "Big" and "scary" are hard to nail down. "Assault rifle" is a term with some precision. It absolutely needs to have an automatic firing setting, for instance.