(MiniRant) I don't care which side of the Gun Debate you're on...

[seawasp]

... but will people stop saying "semi-automatic" in a context that shows that they think it means "shoots like a machine gun"???? and misusing the term "ASSAULT WEAPON". Real assault weapons are NOT semi-auto.

A semi-automatic weapon is not a machine gun. It is not "made to kill a lot of people quickly", as one spam I got today says.

Most pistols are semi-automatic. You pull the trigger, it shoots, and a mechanism in the gun brings the next cartridge up so you can PULL THE TRIGGER AGAIN, having spat out the now-expended first cartridge's remains (the "brass").

Revolvers do the same thing through a different mechanism, but unlike a semi-automatic pistol, they don't eject the cartridges themselves, so you have to open the revolver up and clean it out and reload after 6 shots pretty much by hand, while you can eject a magazine from your semi-auto and keep shooting -- one shot at a time.

FULL AUTO weapons are the ones that shoot lots of bullets much faster than you can pull a trigger (well, faster than MOST people can pull a trigger; some of the stunt shooters can manage an impressive rate of fire for a short time). Real assault weapons are full-auto (many can SWITCH to burst and/or semiauto, but what makes them good military weapons is that they are in fact capable of fully automatic fire.

Semi-automatic covers most handguns and a fair number of rifles and some shotguns.

Fully-automatic weapons have been illegal in most states for YEARS, and generally HAVEN'T been used in the killings people get up in arms over.

Comments

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

The lapse of the assault weapons ban of '94-'04 slightly changed gun crime, but not dramatically. It did lead to more casualties in mass shooting events, but mass shootings constitute a tiny proportion of overall gun crime in the US anyway. (They are vastly more visible, though, which is why they garner so much media and political attention.)

The big problem in the US is the ubiquity of handguns, according to FBI statistics where their presense in gun crime incidences dwarfs all other forms of firearms combined. Canada's overall better record on gun crime likely results from its immensely tighter controls on handguns (and outright ban on civilian CCW) rather than magazine limits. Alas that's a genie that's truly out of the bottle in America; I don't know how American law could address this, though I'm certain that ubiquitous CCW is a huge step in the wrong direction. (And "Stand Your Ground" is an even greater mistake.)

The magazine limits do help limit the damage in mass shootings and spree shootings, though, which is still worth doing in my opinion.

-- Steve has opined in the past that needing more than 5 rounds in a magazine is a sign of needing more training or more backup, but that may be biased by his own training and background.

[aardy.livejournal.com]

My go-to explanation of the U.S.'s problem with guns and what's wrong with the arguments of a lot of the gun-rights advocates (without necessarily turning around and saying that gun-control advocates are always right, either) has quickly become Bang Bang Crazy parts 1-4, by Jim Wright in his Stonekettle Station blog. (The "semi-automatic weapon isn't an 'assault weapon' " thing is partly covered in Part 1, but only in the form of addressing it in terms of layman's terminology rather than getting into the legalese of what was & wasn't covered by the 1994 ban and similar measures.) Whether you end up agreeing or disagreeing (or both) with what he said, I think all four parts (and the precursor, about the various stages of typical American collective reactions to high-profile shootings) are worth reading.