r/interestingasfuck • u/AdministrativeMud907 • 7d ago

A girl saves her boyfriend from a robbery by pointing a machine gun at two armed robbers.(Texas) r/all

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

98.1k Upvotes

83% Upvoted

5.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

11

u/Erichillz 7d ago

Assault rifles like the one in the video are not typically considered true machine guns even if they may be fully automatic

-7

u/jdhdowlcn 7d ago

Haha wtf is this comment. Let me clarify this, a machine gun under US law is any automatic firearm. Doesn't matter if it's a rifle or pistol. If there is more than one "pew per trigger pull" it's a machine gun. Assault rifle has no current legal definition.

2

u/Erichillz 7d ago

Good thing I don't care about US law, certainly not civil law. In the military, firearms are categorised based on their respective roles. Assault rifles or battle rifles refer to firearms that are intended to be carried by a single combatant and fire short bursts, whereas machine guns are usually operated by multiple people and are used for continuous supressive fire. There's gray area of course, but this the typical distinction between machine guns and other firearms in the context of firearms manufacturing or military history. Nowhere in this thread was US law mentioned until you brought it up.

-1

u/jdhdowlcn 7d ago

Also, you distinction is a little off. How would you classify a M249?

1

u/Extaupin 7d ago

What is its official denomination?

According to wikipedia:

The M249 SAW (Squad Automatic Weapon),[4][5][6] formally the Light Machine Gun, 5.56 mm, M249,

So machine gun.

Words mean different things in different context, for the "battlefield role" context you can just check the official name of the thing in their respective military users.

0

u/jdhdowlcn 7d ago

Yeah my guy, you're missing the point I was trying to make with the other comment poster.

1

u/runnin_man5 7d ago

A belt fed machine gun that can sorta kinda take magazines

0

u/Erichillz 7d ago

The M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW) was specifically developed to have both sustained fire capability like a machine gun to replace the M60 while having the portability of an assault rifle. It's a light machine gun that was used in a supportive role, like a machine gun would be. It's mostly obsolete and has been replaced in favour of assault rifles for the portability and accuracy aspects and more modern light support weapons for the sustained fire. Also, it's not MY distinction, you flatter me. It's the distinction that the institutions that the vast majority of firearms are made for use, the military. Assault rifles and machine guns are not developed for civilians, they are designed to fill specific combat roles in the military like I alluded to.

1

u/jdhdowlcn 7d ago

Except you're unnecessarily conflating the term machine gun. Random question. Are you American? I'm not trying to be inflammatory, just curious because that opens up a whole other discussion about civilians and machine guns.

1

u/Erichillz 7d ago

Am not conflating anything, I am clearly defining the context of the definitions I'm using. If you ask a quartermaster if the M16 is a machine gun, you will get a very clear "no". I concede that if you ask the same question to an American judge, you might get a different answer. What I'm saying is that the opinion of the judge is not relevant in the context of firearms categorisation. And no, I'm not American luckily. Our firearm laws are quite different from yours (assuming you are), and outside of very specific exceptions, only single-shot or bolt-action rifles are legal here for hunting.

1

u/jdhdowlcn 7d ago

Yeah... and that's where the contention is coming from. I get what you're saying but given that this happened in the US, under US law, maybe we could just stick with those definitions?