At Least Eight Dead in Indianapolis

Shot at a FedEx facility.

What is going on?

 

Terrorism?!?

“I see a man come out with a rifle in his hand and he starts firing and he starts yellin’ stuff that I could not understand,” Levi Miller said.

 

As with any of these events, I will wait 48-72 hours before I even consider anything like that coming out. It is so chaotic in the first 24 hours, and that is why conspiracy theories abound around these things.

 

This. It happens every single time that in the rush to “get the scoop”, news outlets report absolute garbage. Once it’s out there, no matter how incorrect it is, it becomes fact in some people’s minds.

 

And of course the news is going to find the person who uses words like “assault rifle” and calls magazines “clips” to interview...

 

Eh, I find it funny to get corrected at this point on "assault rifles." And I am old enough to know "assault rifle" as a phrase does exist and has a meaning, however amorphous.

 

And 95% of people call magazines clips.

 

Yeah a rifle that has a detachable magazine and is select fire.

 

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/assault rifle
any of various intermediate-range, magazine-fed military rifles (such as the AK-47) that can be set for automatic or semiautomatic fire
also : a rifle that resembles a military assault rifle but is designed to allow only semiautomatic fire

 

So this is what an assault rifle is, or if it just looks like one

 

If they are going to be called military style weapons, call them military style names. It's a carbine.

Calling them assault rifles also helps perpetuate their use, because they sound badass and deadly.

If you called them fluffy bunny pew pew machines, maybe someone would choose something else.

 

Thermos or vacuum bottle?
Band-aid or adhesive bandage?
Aspirin or acetylsalicylic acid?

Language changes, and if someone is holding an AR-15 and I cannot see the selector switch, most likely I am going to call it an "assault rifle" and not "magazine fed, semi-automatic rifle".

 

And also think “AR” stands for “assault rifle”

 

If it is meant to imitate an assault rifle in every way but the selective fire mode, it is still an assault rifle (according to this dictionary). I'd be lying if I said I always agreed with dictionary definitions, but it has indeed been in the lexicon as such for my entire life.

 

But also, why do AR-15's look so much like M-16's? It isn't, uh, coincidental. It's because they are using the same features, ergonomics, parts/design, etc.

 

I'm down with this. But I don't know how you make people not call them that.

 

Was hoping to get in before this devolved into pedantry of guns. Oh well.

 

As you can see from the thread, it is "good pedantry." Like a "good shooting."

 

If people weren't talking about banning and limiting them, I wouldn't care about the terms at all or what you called it.

But the language matters greatly if we're going to flesh that out on trying to ban them.

 

Ultimately a ban is a half-measure that would cause more issues than it would solve. There is no way private property should be seized, there are already hundreds of millions of firearms of all sorts in the hands of the citizenry, and so a ban is not going to be terribly effective. The original assault weapon ban was somewhat effective, but human behavior since the ban phased out, like toilet paper hording, has essentially inoculated against a future ban IMO. So we will need to put on our big boy and girl pants and work on changing the culture rather than the laws. Take the fetishization down several notches.