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.
id call the common use of the term machine gun to be any automatic firearm accurate enough, but you also have a point about inflated language