Intro To The Constitution (Part 12)
Previous article in this series: Self-Defense (i.e. Just Call The Cops)
If you are ever talking to someone, and they earnestly say the phrase: “Fully Semi-Automatic”, then stop listening to them immediately, because they either have no fucking clue what they’re talking about, or they are deliberately trying to deceive you. Let me explain why.
In simplest terms, a gun has 3 components:
- Cartridges (often called “rounds”), which contain the gunpowder charge, a primer to ignite the charge, and the bullet (i.e. the chunk of lead that gets shot out).
- Some kind of firing mechanism which is capable of initiating the firing of a cartridge.
- A barrel which the bullet travels down, to enable you to aim the trajectory of the bullet.
Single-shot rifles, such as a bolt-action, only have that. To fire them, you open the bolt, put a round in, close the bolt, fire the gun, open the bolt, and remove the spent cartridge. The only thing that the firing mechanism does is trigger the cartridge to fire the round; everything else is a manual process. In other words, the process of: {[opening the bolt], [expelling the spent cartridge], [loading a new round], [closing the bolt], and [resetting the firing mechanism]}, is not automated at all; it is Non-Automatic. So, if you load up a bolt action rifle with a round, then pull the trigger, and hold it down, 1 bullet comes out, and then it stops. It doesn’t matter how hard you pull the trigger or how long you hold it down, when you pull the trigger, only 1 bullet comes out. In order to shoot another round, you must let go of the trigger, and then manually open the bolt, remove the spent cartridge, load another round, close the bolt, and then pull the trigger again. Even the more advanced bolt-action rifles like the Mosin Nagant used by the Soviets in WW2, which have an internal magazine allowing them to hold multiple rounds, they still only shoot 1 bullet at a time. [217] All that the magazine does is skip the step of manually loading the next cartridge, but you still have to manually {open & close} the bolt for that to happen; the gun is just designed in such a way that when you manually {open & close} the bolt, that movement engages mechanisms which use your muscle power to also eject the spent round, and load a new one. But even that is still manual; the gun is not doing it automatically. You are doing it when you move the bolt {back & forth}; the gun is just designed in a way that makes that movement serve double-duty.
For more information on the internal function of bolt action rifles, I recommend this video [218], which uses a 3D model animation of another bolt action rifle (the German Kar98k), and shows the internal mechanisms while a voiceover explains their purpose & function.
The next step up is guns which partially automate that process. When you pull the trigger, and fire a round, the gun captures some of that energy (either through exhaust gasses or momentum), and leverages that energy to perform some of this work automatically. When you fire a round, the gun automatically opens the bolt, expels the spent cartridge, pulls a fresh round from the magazine, loads it into the gun, and closes the bolt. But that’s it. It doesn’t activate the trigger mechanism again, and it doesn’t fire the next round. In other words, the mechanical process is only “partially” automated; i.e. “semi-automatic”. So, if you load up a semi-automatic gun with rounds, then pull the trigger, and hold it down, only 1 bullet comes out, and then it stops. It doesn’t matter how hard you pull the trigger, or how long you hold it down, if you pull the trigger once, then only 1 bullet comes out. The difference between a bolt action and a semi-automatic is that with a bolt action, after each shot, you have to manually cycle the bolt to load a new round. However, with a semi-automatic, that part of the process is automated, so you don’t have to do it. Instead, with a semi-automatic, all you have to do is let go of the trigger, and pull it again. So, with a semi-automatic, you can just pull the trigger over and over without the need to do anything else, but each pull of the trigger only fires 1 bullet.
Now, finally we get to the big daddy: Fully Automatic. In a Fully-Automatic gun (often simply called “full-auto”), the entire firing process is completely (i.e “fully”) automated. So, it does everything that the semi-automatic gun does to expel the old round and load a new one, but it also activates the trigger mechanism again, and automatically shoots another bullet. This is the gun that you see in movies, where you pull the trigger, hold it down, and bullets just keep firing over and over as long as you hold down the trigger. This is what people call a “machine gun”.
For more information on how the semi-automatic & fully-automatic mechanisms work, as well as the difference between them, as well as a look into a 3-round burst mode, I recommend this video [219]. It is another video from the same channel, which uses a 3D model animation of a semi-automatic AR-15 & it’s military full-auto counterpart, and shows the internal mechanisms while a voiceover explains their purpose & function.
So, now that you understand what those terms actually mean, it should be obvious that the phrase “Fully Semi-Automatic” is bullshit nonsense. Because what you are saying is that it is “Completely Partially Automated”. It makes no sense, and it is not a phrase that is used by anyone who actually owns & uses guns, at all. The only reason someone would say that is if they were deliberately trying to trick you into thinking that they were talking about fully-automatic machine guns, even though they’re actually talking about semi-automatic guns. Either that or they have no idea what the fuck they’re talking about.
Next article in this series: “The Right of The People”
Citations
This entire Constitution series was written as a single big document over the course of several years; so, all the citations are mixed up together. When I went back to break it up into pieces, I wasn’t confident that I could redistribute all the citations & their reference numbers without screwing something up. So, I decided to leave all the citations together, and post them as the final article in the series.
