Latest right-wing meme- "No assault rifle used at Sandy Hook"

[Igel]

147. Of course it's semantics.

Every time you speak or write you're using semantics. It's basically matching meaning with form. That's something many have difficult with because it requires knowing both and what the relation is between them.

The "game" is when a word has a set semantic meaning and you decide to ignore it and tacitly redefine it. Then the non-serious approach is on the part of the fuzzy-minded user, the one who can't be bothered to understand how a word is used and often has no idea what, exactly, s/he has in mind because there's a shallowness of knowledge displayed in the imprecision.

You can often get by with imprecision if the context fills in the gaps. On this board, there's not enough context. You read posts and they agree on emotion and the need to Do Something. That "something" is always "banning" something. As soon as details matter--a rare occurrence--you find that few have a clue what they're talking about. There's an appearance of being a high-information poster, but in the end they're often just "high-outrage" posters with little information. Poseurs, in a word.

"Assault weapon" has a set of precise meanings. Why? Because when the term was made up, it was coined to "hold" those meanings and none others. To let it drift from that range of meanings is to let it mean "any weapon that is or can be used in an assault." That's basically redundant with the meaning of the word "weapon." We usually want it to be a rifle of some kind, but after that it gets to contain more emotion and heat than knowledge and light. The legislators were oddly wise enough to not try to redefine "automatic rifle" or to use it without the redefinition.

"Assault rifle" was calqued from the German. Has to be automatic with a semi-automatic setting. And be a rifle. A few other details have to hold. They're rare.

It's not hard. Just requires a bit of knowledge, that's all. And enough interest to try to be precise and accurate in making one's self understood. But if it's something that's important enough to talk about, it's important enough to make sense about.

The gun Lanza used wasn't an automatic rifle, by any stretch of a moderately informed imagination. It wasn't an assault weapon, in the usual accepted meaning of the squirrelly word.