You do have magnum shot shells.
… and the different gauges, conventionally increasing from .410 to 28, 20, 16, 12 and 10 ga. However, it would not be surprising if to a reporter a shotgun was “high-powered” relative to a sharp stick.
I remember after Columbine people were talking about the “high-tech” Tec-9 weapons the shooters used. The gun was later banned by name for being “Scary” and associated with massacres.
It’s a 9mm semiautomatic. There is absolutely nothing special about it.
An attempt at definitions.There are two (*) classes of firearm single action and double action
Single action: the firearm puts itself into battery (the position of readiness of a gun for firing) with each (a) trigger pull.
This includes semi-automatic weapons like the 1911 and the AR15, semi-automatic shotguns, and double action revolvers, and fully automatic and burst fire weapons.
Double action: requires an action other than a trigger pull to be placed in battery.
This includes bolt, lever, and pump action** rifles and shotguns and single action revolvers.*This excludes another class breech and muzzle loaded single shot weapons.
**Missing any?
That sound about right to everyone, missing anything?
CMC
Semi-automatic means the same thing in the U.S. as it does in Canada. Semi-auto refers only to how the weapon loads the next round. Pump action, lever action, semi-auto action, bolt action, etc.
The article itself is poorly researched and I suspect the quotes are probably taken out of context. ABC News has a history of getting firearm-related articles wrong and the author of the article, Alan Farnham, was paid by ABC News. Accuracy is no longer a requirement for publication.
Your common sense is more accurate that Farnham’s bs article.
I thought double action meant that you CAN have the gun in a partially cocked state. For example, my grandad had 38 S&W double action revolver. You could either pull back the hammer and lock which also rotated the cylinder to the next round and leave like that ready to fire or pull the trigger with the hammer fully down. That would bring it back to rotate the cylinder and down to fire in one motion. But you seem to be describing something different.
You have your “definitions” reversed.
A single-action trigger performs the single action of releasing the hammer/striker/firing pin to fire the weapon.
A double-action trigger performs multiple actions including cocking the weapon and releasing the hammer/striker/firing pin to fire the weapon.
Most double-action revolvers can also be fired single-action. Some, by design, can not.
You don’t say whether you’re a gun owner yourself. I am not, but I think this is a huge problem with the public’s perception of gun owners. It’s like almost everything else–the small percentage of irresponsible or whackos give a bad reputation to the whole group and cause these kneejerk reactions. I am not particularly pro-gun but think that people should be able to have guns for protection and hunting. It’s just hard to have that position when you see guys pretending to be commandos that really know nothing about it.
Just wanted to bounce that off your post, not trying to start a gun-control GD thread.
:smack:
I am, and though I pretty much have the basics I’d expand my collection a bit if I had money sitting around.
I always thought there was a divide in terminology based on the sort of firearm being referred to.
Rifle:
Manually operated: Bolt action, lever action, slide action, single-shot, muzzleloader, etc… The user manually handles the loading and ejection of each round through some mechanical method.
Semi-automatic: The rifle itself handles the loading and ejection of rounds from some kind of magazine(after the initial one) and the user simply pulls the trigger each time to fire the round. Sometimes in older literature and promotional stuff, you’ll see these described as “Automatic rifles”, in much the same way that we have automatic pistols and shotguns. See
Fully automatic: The rifle handles loading and ejection, and furthermore, will also continue to fire rounds as long as the trigger is pulled. This is ‘machine gun’ style.
Pistol:
2 main types: automatic and revolver.
**Automatic: ** Much like the rifle- the automatic pistol handles the loading and ejection of rounds from the magazine (after the 1st one), and user pulls the trigger to fire.
Revolver: Rounds are kept in a revolving cylinder (hence “revolver”) that is advanced by the user through some mechanism and then fired.
There are 2 more terms that apply to both kinds of pistols, although they mean slightly different things- single and double action.
**Double action: ** In revolvers double action means that each pull of the trigger cocks the hammer, revolves the cylinder and fires the round. In an automatic, it just means that ONCE a round is chambered, pulling the trigger will cock the hammer and fire the round. If a round’s not chambered, pulling the trigger won’t rack the slide and chamber one.
Single action: In revolvers single action means that the hammer needs to be cocked by hand, which also revolves the cylinder. Pulling the trigger simply releases the hammer to fire the pistol It’s very similar in automatics- once a round is chambered, the user needs to cock the hammer manually, and the trigger simply fires the round.
Of course, chambering a round in most(all?) automatics also cocks the hammer for the shot, so single/double action are only an issue when the gun is stored with a round in the chamber and the hammer’s down.
Shotguns
Shotguns classify into 2 broad categories: manual and automatic.
**Manual: ** This category encompasses anything from an old single-shot break-open to a modern pump-action shotgun. The user is in charge of physically loading and ejecting the shotgun shells through some mechanism.
**Automatic: ** Shells are loaded/ejected through the shotgun’s action themselves.
I think early ball and powder revolvers were called repeating firearms, which is technically accurate even if we wouldn’t classify them as such today. So the terminology is probably somewhat fluid, hence the need to distinguish between semi and fully automatic.
Although as most people with an interest in the subject probably realize, mechanically, semi and fully auto weapons are pretty much identical except for the addition (or absence, depending on the design I think) of a mechanism that halts the fire-eject-reload cycle in semi’s after one round has been fired. Otherwise, the exact mechanism, whether gas operated, blow-back, etc is pretty much the same in both. I think the only significant difference might be those fully auto weapons that have a burst or select fire mode that allow 3 or 3+ rounds to fired with one trigger pull.
This uses “automatic” in the same semantic sense as used for pistol: “automatic loading”.
However, there are shotguns which are “automatic” in the “rifle” sense: automatic-loading, like an automatic pistol, but also (like an automatic rifle) continuously discharge the weapon as long as the trigger is held back.
Wikipedia article. Uses the phrase “automatic shotgun” in this latter “machine gun” sense, not the “automatic pistol” sense.
And a further wrinkle: some single-handed and small dual-grip submachine guns are also called “machine pistols”, so in this sense they are pistols which are the other kind of “automatic”.
So what we call different classes of guns can be pretty damn confusing.
The only reason we wouldn’t classify them as such today is that repeating arms are the default and single-shots need to be differentiated.
I’ve heard such shotguns referred to as “street sweepers.” 
Johnny LA - thanks. I was thinking about this recently because I was curious if these would be considered exempt under the black powder exception but I didn’t find anything definitive with a quick search
It’s a brand name, Cobray/SWD Streetsweeper - a lower-end clone of the Armsel Striker, Kleenexified.
CMC
The street sweeper was not fully, or even semi-automatic. It was a clockwork driven 12 shot revolver. The Cobray version had a rather heavy Double action trigger pull I believe. It was specifically banned in the last AWB, IIRC.
There are, however, a number of semi-automatic shotguns. Due to reduced recoil, they are rather popular hunting arms, especially for waterfowl where they don’t need to be carried all day as common when hunting upland fowl. (they tend to be a little on the heavy side) A few are fed from detachable box magazines. There are even .410, 20, or 12 ga. shotgun versions of an AK-47. google Siaga-12
Two things that have been rattling around in my head, just for sake of know what’s going on these days…
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Are double action revolvers semi-automatic weapons?
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In all the debates & discussions & free-for-alls concerning semi-automatic weapons (particularly rifles), somebody brings up the point that all of these weapons can be modified for burst or automatic fire. I don’t recall any such modified weapons being used in, say, drive-by shootings, where you’d want to put as many poorly-aimed bullets downrange in as little a time as possible; having four people lean out of the car firing handguns into a meth lab is not going to be as impressive a display of rage as two guys with AR-15’s modified for full auto, each emptying a 30 round clip. Am I just reading the wrong news stories, or is this really not happening?
It’s not easy to do and being highly illegal (felony I assume), no one does it. The people that know how to do it are better off using their skills and knowledge in legal gunsmithing.
The dead guys who tried to rob a bank in North Hollywood in 1997 used illegally-modified AKMs ('AK-47’s) and AR-15s.