About the Kentucky school shooter. Has anyone heard anything about

[jberryhill]

26. You may find this helpful in addition

The mechanism of operation of semi-automatic weapons is extremely simple.

Watch this animation:

The rounds are held in a clip - like a PEZ dispenser - which has a spring mechanism to drive the rounds upwards.

First, you pull back on that upper sliding part to chamber the top round, which also positions the hammer in the firing position. The gun is now ready to fire.

With each shot, the recoil generated by the charge drives the slide back, ejects the casing of the fired round, chambers the next round, and cocks the hammer.

Here's a simpler and slower one:

There's no great mystery or technical voodoo about how these things work. There are a number of variations on that theme, but the basic idea of semi-auto weapons, whether pistols or rifles, is that the energy from firing the weapon is used to cycle the weapon to reload to the firing position each time the trigger is pulled.

The tricky part is that if you fire a couple of shots, and are finished firing, the gun is still ready to fire. To return to a safe position, you put your thumb on the hammer, pull the trigger, and use your thumb to - gently - put the hammer back into the non-firing position.

Full auto weapons operate on the same basic principle (again with a number of technical variations), with the exception that when the cycle comes back to the "round in the chamber" position, the firing mechanism is also actuated without having to pull the trigger another time.