Right on, Onmilo
About that sticky nomenclature problem ...
Word snobbery (or maybe "overcertainty") is too common in certain circles, and the gun world is sadly one of them, even though there are some good reasons to be prickly about the use of terms like "automatic" and "machine gun."
By "good reasons," I mean to prevent (accidental) confusion and (completely intentional) misdirection on the part of those who either don't know the current (and sometimes place-specific) conventions for using terms like "automatic" or who want to muddle the issue.
(Sometimes people forget that there are terms of art which aren't always identical to the plain-language meaning of the words they contain, and that words and phrases generally are simply ambiguous without a good dose of context.)
"Autopistol" is short for "Automatic pistol," isn't it, even though generally speaking that term is applied to *semi-automatic* pistols?
Still, we've come to accept "automatic" in that case, for the good reason that it conveys a shared meaning.
In a very slightly different parallel universe, (double-action) revolvers could be called "semi-automatic" without raising an eyebrow, because they can be fired multiple times through the same barrel without manual reloading simply by repeatedly pulling the trigger. There's an arbitrary distinction that we follow now though which divides the world of single-barrel, multi-shot handguns into "autopistols" and "revolvers" ... for people unfamiliar with the terms, the difference may seem pretty odd. After all, there are quite a few systems for feeding cartridges to the chamber of an autopistol -- so why does the class of gun which happens to use a revolving cylinder get its own class?
What I'm getting at here is that in explaining to people who aren't (for instance) intuitively aware that a semi-automatic rifle is "only" semi-automatic rather than "automatic," or that a civilian-legal Saiga 308 is not a "machine gun" as that term is now generally employed, just remember that *no one* -- ever! anywhere! -- is intuitively aware of these
It's a matter of convention and definition, and most folks have no reason or opportunity to learn some of these distinctions. That's why to some people, a "machine gun" is anything that doesn't look like a revolver or a break-action shotgun, and that doesn't make them idiots. It just shows a gap in experience, which can be rectified by a non-patronizing, non-haughty explanation of how those terms are employed in the main by shooters, makers, and lawmakers. *
timothy
* Ignoring that each of these classes sometimes offers good examples of word uses that would cause forehead slapping and groaning among most readers of this board!