What exactly does "semi-automatic" mean in U.S. gun terminology?

Factual Questions
121

And that would be if every police body were of equivalent jurisdiction, many of them overlap.

I can easily believe that a 911 call for a break-in in progress will take more than 15 minutes for a response. A whole lot of the USA is low-density areas with tight budgets. Heck, add to that high density areas with still tight budgets – I expect a 911 call in San Juan (pop. 420K city, 1.2M metro) to have a greater than 15 minute response time because they’d be so busy with other previous calls (and the traffic’s nuts)!

As to waiting vs. resisting, If I can’t determine a safe course of retreat and I have the means to exercise self-defense prudently and effectively before the police get there, I am under no moral obligation to keep myself or my family besieged until they do.

Regarding Warren v. DC – as I understand it that case (and others in NY and California) ruled that police forces and the governments that run them are not liable for a failure to provide adequate protection to every or any one individual in every or any particular situation i.e. you cannot sue the county/city/department for the police showing up late, or botching the response, so the criminal got you anyway (though individual officers or dispatchers may be fired if they fugged up badly enough). The police **will respond to a call about crime in progress, that is **their job duty, but they only have to do so as required by their SOP and dispatch instructions. You as an individual have no claim against any guarantee that they will make *your *call priority #1, show up on time with the right people and gear, and do whatever it takes to save you (unless you are someone who has been specifically placed under protection). It’s not, as seems to be getting misunderstood here, that they can just not show up or not place themselves at risk if they just don’t feel like it.

122

Every time I hear a politician say that people should “just call the police” it makes me so angry I want to scream. If you are justified in using lethal force, it means someone is attempting to KILL YOU RIGHT NOW. Not five minutes from now, not fifteen minutes from now, RIGHT GODDAMN NOW. This is the part that the anti-gun crowd just cannot get through their heads. And as above, assuming you survive, the Supreme Court has repeatedly held that if they police are late / don’t show up / don’t even care you can’t claim ANY recompense, no matter how negligent they are.

So various governments try to take away our ability to defend ourselves from harm (such as through mandatory gun storage laws) and at the same time take no responsibility whatsoever when we suffer the obvious and predictable outcome of violence that maybe, MAYBE we could have prevented. If I am in a lethal force situation, I would at least like the opportunity to decide whether I will defend myself rather than having that choice made for me.

And, of course, everything JRDelirious wrote operates on the assumption that there is even a policeman you can call. In situations like Katrina or the LA Riots the police were crippled to the point of ineffectiveness. It’s days like that when I need the biggest, scariest gun I can buy, regardless of what Diane Feinstein thinks. Every time I watch the LA Riot video of that guy getting hit the head with a brick, it makes me want to puke to think that some people think we should not be allowed to defend ourselves from evil.

“Hello, 911, I would like to report a crime… Yes, please send a police officer… Well, I appear to have a piece of brick intruding on my brain… Yes, I would like an ambulance, too. Okay, I will wait… I know you people are working long hours nowadays. Hopefully some nice person will help me stuff my skull back in while I wait for you to arrive.”

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I don’t expect anyone to die on my behalf, and find it abhorrent that you think it should be the done thing. In effect, you’re saying that a police officer’s life is worth less than yours. Great attitude.

because someone needs to investigate crimes and apprehend those responsible. That doesn’t extend to “being bullet traps.”

Thanks. except for the badge, that’s pretty much what we do here.

124

Many people don’t have a clue how the real world works. They’ve never (thankfully) been in a life-or-death situation needing immediate help to protect either themself or a loved one. Hopefully it’ll stay that way, but in many areas that just isn’t the case.

If you need immediate help, if you’re staring at a thug brandishing a knife 15 feet away, you can’t wait 30 seconds for help - and those 30 seconds will seem like an eternity. Imagine that thug wants to rape your 12 year old daughter.

If you don’t think a handgun can be useful for self defense, close your eyes and imagine that thug 15 feet away, and count to 30 seconds and see how long that is.

And that’s just 30 seconds, not even 30 minutes.

Be trained with your firearms. Not just with their mechanics of how they operate (and may jam/misfire, because they will), but also the mental scenarios and any applicable laws where you might have to use deadly force. Hopefully, you’ll never have to. Like almost all of us.

I’d rather be in jail doing time for blowing away the slime ball, instead of having watched him rape my little girl, or my wife, powerless to stop him.

You, on the other hand, might be okay with watching that happen. And having pissed your pants.

Your choice.

ETA: Here, “you” is the generic “you”, the ones who think police always respond in time to save you, no matter where you may be, and who vilify law-abiding gun owners, whether it’s pistols, long guns, or so-called “assault weapons”.

125

If I might try to bring this general question back on topic, I would say that semi-automatic weapons require one trigger pull (and nothing else) to discharge single sequential rounds. To those who are familiar with functionality of modern firearms, it is apparent that double action revolvers fall into this simple definition. This is something to keep in mind when someone calls for a ban on semi-automatic weapons.
At this point I would like to introduce a bit of pre-emptive argumentation. Argument - a double action revolver requires a heavy trigger pull to bring the next round into battery (firing alignment) before the sear releases the hammer. Reply – one of the most popular pistol (non-revolver) designs today is known as the double action only (DAO). This design does have a round already in battery, but requires a heavy trigger pull to bring the hammer to a firing position. The methods are different, the results are similar. If you are wondering why anyone would desire a pistol that required a heavy trigger pull, it is considered a safety feature for carrying a round in battery.
As to automatic fire (two or more rounds per trigger pull), it’s not even worth discussing, since new legal automatic weapons have been outlawed for some time, and the legal weapons that were grandfathered are collector’s items priced such that a lawbreaker would find black market imports cheaper.
If I might make a point about handguns. The single action revolver predates double action revolvers and pistols. A single action revolver requires that the hammer be retracted before each round is discharged. This might sound like a major disadvantage, but the recoil of rounds capable of effective use against large targets (150 lbs. or more) means that it more a matter of training than inherent advantage.
That single action revolver would be regarded as a repeating arm. This category also includes bolt, lever, and pump action weapons. Basically, anything that has the ability to bring a round into battery from an internal supply. The only weapons simpler than this are called single shot. Note that even this category has its nuances. A single shot might only require open action, insertion of cartridge, close action, and trigger pull, or it might require open action, removal of spent cartridge, insertion of cartridge, close action, activate hammer, de-activate safety, trigger pull.

126

I came into mention pretty much the same thing - all revolvers are pistols, but not all pistols are revolvers.

Certainly, in UK/Australian/NZ English, the terms “Pistol” and “Handgun” are synonyms; you’d describe something as a “revolver” or “semi-automatic” or “muzzleloading” if you wanted to be more specific than “handgun”.

I believe I’ve already addressed this earlier and come to the conclusion double-action revolvers are not technically semi-automatic handguns, as the act of pulling the trigger does not reload the gun - unlike a traditional semi-auto with a box magazine, where the cycle fires, extracts, ejects and reloads all from a single pull of the trigger.

127

I’m used to the US gun magazine definition of one-hand firearms as handguns but most gun writers AFAIK almost never say revolvers are pistols (though single-shot muzzle loaders are.)

British writers often call automatic pistols “revolvers.”

128

US gun writers. In other countries revolvers are indeed pistols, as I noted earlier. The official British designation for the Webley Mk VI service revolver in WWII was “Pistol, Revolver, No. 1 Mk VI” and the Enfield No. 2 Mk I was “Pistol, Revolver No 2 Mk I”.

Got some recent examples you can share to back your assertion up? Personally, I cannot say I’ve seen this since Biggles was new-release fiction, and even then it was sloppy writing and/or editing, not a deliberate Britishism.

129

Just to throw some more oddballs out there, did we already touch on the Colt revolving rifle? Modern copy here. But yes, despite the preceding, I have no problem with Martini Enfield’s statement classifying all revolvers as a subset of pistols. There are a lot of weird blind alleys in early firearms.

For what may be a modern blind alley—we’ll see—I think MetalStorm’s already been mentioned? I really hope their design is adequately shielded from stray RF…

All that said, I think we’re making this much harder than it needs to be. I have a clear picture in my head of what someone is talking about when they say a “semi-auto” firearm, and I think the rest of you do too. One pull of the trigger, and without further input from the operator, the cartridge is fired, the case is ejected, and a fresh cartridge is loaded into the chamber. Modify as necessary to account for weapons that fire from an open bolt (most of which are capable of full auto fire, IIRC.)

130

While I agree that your definition is closer to the common view (except for the ejection part, which would exclude weapons specifically referred to as semi-automatic revolvers, such as the Webley-Fosbery automatic revolver), I maintain that from a functional perspective (multiple pulls of a single finger makes multiple bangs) there is little difference between a double action revolver and striker fired (DAO) pistols.
I don’t normally think of double action revolvers as semi-auto either, but I believe that if a legal definition were being drafted, it would require quite a bit of verbiage to exclude double action revolvers but still include striker fired pistols.
And a nitpick – Re:” the act of pulling the trigger does not reload the gun”. Pulling the trigger of a double action revolver rotates the cylinder, moving a spent cartridge out of battery and placing a fresh cartridge into battery. Is this not reloading? :slight_smile:

131

This is instructive:

The public duty doctrine holds that the police are not not liable to individuals but to the public as a whole. That has been common law for hundreds of years. The police, by and large with a few exceptions, do a good job doing what they do: protecting the public. They are not your personal bodyguards who are waiting by the phone to rescue you. Individual protection is up to the individual.

Those who would say to “call the cops if you are in trouble” are abdicating their responsibility to protect themselves and their families.

132

As always, technical terms don’t apply to everything. What you mean is the law might restrict automatic firearms and other REPEATING weapons such as revolvers (SA or DA.) That might also cover manual repeating long arms like bolt-, lever-, and pump-action.

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It’s reloading facilitated by human intervention and not as a direct consequence of the gun firing the way it is in a semi-automatic.

Another way of looking at it: A semi-automatic fires first then reloads, a double-action revolver “reloads” first (using the energy imparted by the firer’s finger on the trigger to roate the cylinder and cock the gun) then fires. It’s a small but, I feel, important technical difference.

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Delirious-Your explanation of Warren is eminently reasonable! Thanks for the summary.

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BTW, *handguns for self-defense *are quite reasonable! If I lived in Detroit I know I’d want one.

136

This might be an extreme example but during the Rodney King riots when rioters and looters were trashing stores at night, weren’t some store owners defending their stores and property with “assault weapon” types like the AR-15?

If so, might it be reasonable to own an assault weapon for self defense? The police weren’t able to help during those riots.