Ooh, nitpick of all time. To be technical, a revolver “is not considered semi-automatic since the manual action of pulling the trigger is what advances the cylinder, not the energy of the preceding shot.” (Wikipedia)
If you are concerned about just the function, then revolvers and DA/SA semi-automatic pistols (“automatics”) work very similar. Single action revolvers are the ones that you have to pull back each time and the cowboys “fanned.”
Most likely these are mostly the case of the media not knowing what they’re talking about, when they report that the shooter had an “automatic assault weapon.” Some older firearms were modifiable (TEC-9 I believe?), but most are very difficult nowadays because they is no market to buy an automatic sear from without going through the more arduous legal channels.
IOW, many of them can be modified, but it is very difficult for someone to do that. A drug cartel might have the wherewithal, but your average 22 year old “loner” does not.
As a journalist, I’d just like to point out we don’t all hate guns. Just saying.
No; the action isn’t cycled by the recoil (or gases from the fired projectile) nor is the action automatically re-cocked. If you fire a double-action revolver, the spent cartridge remains in the cylinder chamber aligned with the barrel and the hammer uncocked until you pull the trigger again, rotating the cylinder and cocking the hammer.
In a semi-auto firearm, when you pull the trigger, the cartridge is fired, ejected, and a new one fed into the breech from the magazine, while the firing pin is re-cocked simultaneously to all this.
You also won’t hit the broadside of a barn, from the inside (except by sheer luck), firing that fast. The only time I ever fired a semi that fast, I was firing a .22LR w/30 round mag at a gallon milk jug at about 15 feet away. That’s about the lowest recoil you can get. I hit it maybe two or three times with those thirty shots.
They can’t get scientific subjects very close to accurate, either. Or anything else, for that matter. In fact, I’ve witnessed or participated in a number of things that wound up in print or TV news, and in every case, there were substantial differences in what I witnessed, or even what I said, and what I read/saw in the news. That’s an observation I’ve heard and read many other people make, too.
And here’s an example from this thread:
Journalists (well, there are some exceptions) are notorious for only getting a shallow [mis]understanding of what they are reporting. The rest of your post is giving them too much credit. It’s not willful distortion, it’s just ignorance, combined with a failure to recognize or understand that they are ignorant on the subject.
In other words, what several posters prior to me have said. Including DrCube, as quoted, and responses following.
In the mid 1980’s Denver shock jock (a liberal one) Allen Berg was assassinated by neo-nazis using a modified MAC-10. IIRC it was not a legal modification, though it would have been possible to do such in that era. (Forms, fees, background checks, etc.)
None of the fully automatic parts will just drop in to the semi-auto versions of an AK or an AR-15. Owning any of these parts as well as a semi-automatic gun that might be modified to accept them is known as constructive possession, and is treated as an illegal machine-gun by the law. Owning a semi-automatic gun that has been modified to accept the full-auto parts, but never owning the parts, still constitutes owning an illegal machine-gun.
Current AR-15 lowers are explicitly designed to interfere with one of the simpler ways conceived to make an AR fire full-auto. (known as the lightning-link)Journalists may encounter information about this modification without knowing that current guns were re-designed to defeat it.
So I can safely assume going forward that when people start talking about the plausibility of semi- being modified into full-, and saying that there will be automatic gunfire in the streets, they’re kind of exaggerating the situation?
The design may have changed with subsequent models, but all of the automatic parts (bolt carrier, hammer, trigger, disconnector, sear) would drop right into a pre-ban AR-15 – except for the auto sear. The non-auto AR-15’s rear portion of the lower receiver was narrower than the military (M-16) version, and the auto seat would not fit unless it was machined out. Also, a precisely-positioned hole needed to be drilled. Drop-in auto-sears are easily made, and they would fit in the space provided. Semi-auto bolt carriers could be modified with a ‘plug’. The design has since changed.
Taking a weapon that is only capable of semiautomatic fire and adding, changing, and removing parts & hardware so that it becomes capable of automatic fire. What do you think modify means?
from a site with another device to make it easier. The difference being bump firing and hellfire triggers and the stock in the first video is they don’t really work if the rifle is properly “shouldered”. The first videos stock and things like this crank might cross the line from “a fun way to waste money and ammo” to “that’s a very disturbing way to get around the NFA”.
(I’m entirely uncertain how I feel about these gadgets. I think we’d hear about it if the bad guys were using them, we aren’t, so .)
FYI - As a non-journalist, I expect journalists to make the effort to be as accurate as possible. Why would I want to read an article or blog that consists of nothing better than made up bits and bobs or bs?
When I read half-fast articles made up of misquotes and incorrect facts, I try to remember the writers name so I can ignore their next attempt to fool the public. just sayin’
It sounds like accuracy might be an issue; I assume he’s firing from the hip, for all intents and purposes at automatic-fire rate, and “aiming” with his weak hand, that’s getting pummeled by the movement of the weapon? Anyway, I’m not looking for a big debate on the semantics of whether or not this is one trigger pull or a whole bunch of trigger pulls by the weak hand; I was just looking for a little clarity on where the truth lies on the subject of modifying a weapon to automatic fire. Which sounds like, not too likely, since the parts & kits have been out there in the world for decades (probably since the ban went into effect), and it’s either not being done, or the weapons aren’t being used (often).
A lot of the public perception of firearms comes from Hollywood action movies. Arnie/Terminator walks into a gun store and gets some off-the-shelf weapons, then he walks outside and starts blazing away with fully automatic fire.
It would just be too boring or tedious if he had to pull the trigger each time, so the weapon is now fully auto. These guns would never be found in a gun store and are tightly regulated.
So when the average, non-gun owner hears ‘semi-auto’ they think of Arnie blazing away with a fully automatic, illegal weapon, and think that is what is available at your local gun shop.
There’s a lot of difference between “Not being 100% accurate because the subject is difficult/complex/the available information is unclear or misunderstood” and “making shit up”.
In common parlance, “automatic” refers to something doing something on its own - so I see why, to the average punter, “automatic weapons” cover any gun that reloads itself, regardless of how often (nor not) the trigger is pulled. As a firearms historian I know perfectly well that this is not actually correct and an “automatic” is a totally different kettle of fish to a semi-automatic - but I also see how a journalist working under a WE NEED THIS STORY 10 MINUTES AGO TO KEEP UP WITH OUR ROLLING COVERAGE panic-deadline isn’t going to be spending a lot of time looking up the differences between different types of firearm operating system.
If someone being interviewed says to a journalist “The suspect was waving an automatic weapon around”, the journalist doesn’t get to say “Well, I know it was actually a semi-auto because automatic weapons are so highly restricted as to be effectively illegal” and then just put that in the story - because what if the suspect actually had an illegal full-auto gun? If the journalist has been told the gun is an “automatic” that’s what they’re going to put in the story.
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