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Yemen weapons dealers selling machine guns on X
(www.bbc.com)
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this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2024
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An AK-47 is an assault rifle, not a machine gun.
Assault rifles -- the main weapon that most countries issue their infantry these days -- are a weapon that are typically used in semi-automatic mode, but also have a select fire mode to optionally fire in burst or fully-automatic mode. They can't sustain fully-automatic fire for an extended period of time.
Machine guns are heavier weapons that can deal with dissipating more heat and so are more-amenable to be fired in fully-automatic mode for a sustained period of time.
If you wanted a machine gun that'd go with the AK-47, it'd be something like the RPD.
I have a sneaking suspicion that journalists intentionally do this to make their articles sound more exciting, because every time I see a weapon term used incorrectly -- often calling a weapon a machine gun or some lighter vehicle a "tank" -- I saw this done in some media with VN-4s during the Venezuelan political unrest, which is not a vehicle that looks much like a tank -- it is substituting a more-powerful weapon for a less-powerful one, and not the reverse.
taking a word that has different meaning in different contexts and insisting that it can only have one possible meaning just so you can sound smarter than others is not where it's at.
according to US legal code,
Sure, but that's also not the common-use definition; it includes things like bump stocks. There are plenty of examples in which legal terminology doesn't reflect plain English, and the journalist obviously isn't using US legalese.
just because something isn't common around you doesn't mean it's not common.
Just because it is common around you doesn't mean it is common on a societal scale, which is the one they are speaking to. You know this. You know, that the general public defines guns this way. The technical definition is not the common one.
that's literally what I just fucking said
I apologize, the way my phone collapses a lot of comments to fit the screen made it look like you were @tal@lemmy.today. Which made it seem like you were saying, basically the opposite. I didn't notice the difference in commenter names until I expanded each little downward pointing chevron on this thread.