It means a murderously effective weapon for effectively murdering people. Especially if it has scary stuff on it like carrying handles, folding stock, flash suppressors and Picatinny rails for attaching flashlights and Swiss Army Knives and whatnot.
Also, I don’t know about your school, but “jouralism majors” weren’t exactly considered brain surgeons or rocket scientists when I was in college. At least not compared to the engineering, business, pre-brain med and rocket science majors.
The late wife was a proud journalist out of the University of Missouri. She was by far the smartest person I knew; National Merit scholar; 4.0 average; and killer in her topics of Trivial Pursuit (together, we were unstoppable). But when she tried to tell me about a science story she was working on it was adorably cute how confused she got. SHe was absolutely unequivicably smarter than me and I have 4 degrees and a Ph.D. in chemistry.
I’m sure most journalists aren’t as sharp as she was, but I also don’t think they are slouches in the brains department either
I wasn’t trying to imply journalists were dumb, I was just saying that if the journalist writing this particular article were an expert at guns, he’d probably be writing for Guns & Ammo magazine and not a newspaper.
There are certainly journalists who are well-versed in topics other than journalism, even for video games. It’s just they don’t work at newspapers, generally-speaking.
I’ve been quoted in local newspapers a couple of times in my life and in neither case were the words attributed to me what I actually said. In fact, they were not even close.
I would hope that in higher profile stories they would be more careful and accurate, but to this day I assume every word in the news was written by the reporter, even the direct quotes.
same here. I was in some competition my senior year in high school, and one of the local papers sent a reporter to cover it. our team won, and the reporter who “interviewed” us got pretty much everything wrong but our names.
They do this crap with OP-ED letters too. I’ve written letters that were clear, brief, and always well below the amount of words allowed. Yet before publish they were edited so that they didn’t exactly say what I wanted to say. One was edited in such a manner that it actually ended up saying close to the opposite of the point I was trying to make! Grr!:mad:
Sounds like the gun buff was saying that because of the semiautomatic feature, it’s fun to do a “Mad Minute” (just fire away at maximum rate until you empty a couple of magazines) – thing is, a factory-stock good quality semiautomatic should have no problem firing off 30 rounds in 10 seconds right out of the box anyway; but for most people unless they are trained tactical shooters all that will accomplish is waste ammunition on mostly noise and missing the targets. Some get a rush from that but OTOH many other owners see no need to do Mad Minutes and instead prefer deliberate, aimed, specific-target shooting. It’s not “not using the semiautomatic feature”, it’s not using the semiautomatic feature to its maximum capacity gratuituously, in a way not related to most real-world practical situations where a civilian may use their weapon.
On a good day you could have hoped for “Ducati insists on denying he did ‘A’.”
(My old media coach would say, never repeat the accusation in the denial, they’ll quote THAT.)
Automatic firearms are either semi-automatic , full-automatic, or selective fire. A third selection, controlled burst (3-5 rounds per squeeze,) was added. But they’re all automatic firearms, as opposed to manually-operated arms (single shots, bolts, levers, revolvers, etc.)
Semi-automatic means that same thing it always has. The definition has not changed in the last century or so.
There are journalists who, deliberately or otherwise, throw around words like this with no concept what they are talking about.
FWIW, one time I saw a court case summary that repeatedly referred to a Glock revolver. I always wondered if shooting someone with a fictional weapon would be grounds for an appeal.
Wrong. Semi-automatic in the US, the OP’s question, means one shot for each pull of the trigger in a firearm with auto-loading action. The auto-loading action is usually gas operated. The gas expelled by a fired round kicks the action back, ejects the spent shell casing and reloads a fresh round. This does not make it an automatic firearm.
It is still one trigger pull, one shot.
You are confusing auto-loading with automatic fire.
Last week an on duty police officer was killed by her own husband. Not really a big deal, but
the Milwaukee Journal originally reported that he “then shot her several times in the face with her service revolver”.
I know that Wauwatosa PD hasn’t issued revolvers for about 2 decades. The department certainly did not make a press release saying she had a revolver.
My point is, the media assume a lot of things, the #1 thing being that they know everything.
I’m voting for the idea that the reporter doesn’t understand the topic. Remember, this is a profession that often claims it’s better if the journalist DOESN’T understand science, so as to write a more accessible article.
This reporter also probably thinks a shotgun is a rifle.
**smithsb ** certainly knows better. My guess is he’s been around some ignorant Army guys and he is just sharing what he assumes is common across the Army. He definitely knows the difference between automatic, semiautomatic and burst.
I can say with certainty that it is not common in the Army to refer to burst fire as anything but “burst”.
And of course, the ATF still classifies burst fire as a machinegun, and it is legally equivalent to full-automatic. Two-round burst, four-round burst, full-auto, they are all machineguns.
As for the statement from the reporter, he is misunderstanding the guy. The guy isn’t talking about using or not using a “feature”. He is talking about the difference between shooting as fast as he can at something, versus taking slow, well-aimed shots at something else. It’s still semi-auto regardless.
What’s the long form of auto-loading or even just auto? ‘Automatic,’ right? I didn’t bother to explain what semi-automatic fire meant, nor did I bother to comment on the difference between discharging 30 rounds in 10 seconds (unknown mode) and slow semi-automatic fire.
As far as I know Americans and Canadians read the same gun magazines and same writers. There’s no confusion with terms to someone who knows guns.
And gas operation is one type of operation used by automatic weapons, whether semi, full, selective, and whatnot.
He’s just describing a difference in how you repeatedly pull the trigger, quickly or slowly. He either isn’t used to semi-automatic or is just overly enthusiastic about it. Semi-automatic has been around 100 years.
The most basic (and sometimes most accurate) firearms are lever action, bolt-action, or something similar. Before each shot you have to work a bolt/lever/something back and forth to chamber another around. Here is a good illustration of bolt-action, click the purple handle: Video: How a Bolt-Action Rifle Fires
Semi-automatic guns will automatically chamber another round after each shot, but you do still need to pull the trigger to fire the bullet: Handgun Animations In that animation what happens after you pull the trigger actually just takes a split second, they slow it down to show how another round is chambered.
Full automatic works much the same way, but it doesn’t require the trigger to be pulled each time, it just keeps feeding and firing rounds until you let go of the trigger or you run out of rounds.
I must differ in this particular implication. Lousy journalists’ shirk responsibility to shut their mouths about what they don’t know, or to bone up on what they simply can ask and understand. Half of interpreting and the quick study necessary is having the inner sense to question that, and of course technical (general) journalism is by and large horrible (for which, often, much blame goes to other sub, über, and copyeditors as the piece goes through the intestines.) And of course, as said here, knowing how two types of guns differ in the simplest ways is not even technical knowledge.
Nonetheless, having been an editor and writer for a science and technology magazine with a very wide audience, where for each article the learning curve was near vertical (we had time and, thank God, were reviewed by bona-fide experts in each field), I can say that the reason good journalists, editors, snd writers are not experts in the field are because experts in the field are in general not good journalists, editors, and writers.
Yes, we had all sorts of ex-rocket scientists, etc., but who would not be worth a damn in their now ex field. They are experts, besides in being smart and knowing how to interpret and when to ask, in knowing how to write. Separate profession.
Oh I’m sure plenty of journelists are smart. But when you’re writing about science or technical matters, those subjects tend to be very specific. No matter how “smart” someone inherently is, I would not expect them to necessarily be knowledgeable about subjects they did not study.
On related note, simply being a private in the Army doesn’t make one an expert on all things military any more than working the assembly line at a GM plant makes one an expert on all things related to General Motors.
Several years ago I heard a TV reporter (female, IIRC), breathlessly reporting that a recent murder had been committed by someone using a “high-powered” shotgun. I’ve always wondered since how a “high-powered” shotgun differed from a regular plain old garden-variety shotgun.