(If any of this is too elementary sorry; I just want to start from zero-knowledge for anyone reading.)
A bullet is what comes out of a gun when it's fired. That bullet is sold as a "round", which is the bullet as well as a brass cylinder containing gunpowder.
The round sits in what's called the chamber of the gun, at the back of the barrel. When the gun is fired, the bullet goes out of the barrel and the cylinder stays.
What happens next is what's important in terms of this suggestion.
In a manual-action gun, the shooter has to do something to open the chamber, get the cylinder out, and put a new round in.
In a revolver, a larger cylinder with multiple (usually six) chambers rotates , and those chambers have to be emptied and reloaded after all six are fired.
In a semi-automatic gun, the power from the recoil (or hot gas) is used to empty the chamber and pull the next round from a storage place. That storage place is called a magazine.
A gun can have an internal magazine, which you then have to feed individual rounds into one at a time. Or it can have a detachable magazine, which you take out and replace with another detachable magazine that you've preloaded while planning your rampage. Guns that are semi-automatic and accept detachable magazines are capable of firing the most bullets in a given period of time.
The NFA is the Federal law that makes you need a license to sell many guns in many circumstances (I'd like to see that become all guns in all circumstances), as well as making it prohibitively expensive and difficult to own, say, a machinegun.
Now, many people seem to think that the Assault Weapons Ban banned those types of guns, but it did not. It said if a weapon had those capabilities, it could not have a bayonet mount or have a grip of a certain shape. I don't want to go down that road again.
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