Talk:automatic weapon

automatic weapon

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for deletion.

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

---

SOP: automatic (Adjective sense 3: "(of a firearm such as a machine gun) Firing continuously as long as the trigger is pressed until ammunition is exhausted") + weapon Chuck Entz (talk) 21:28, 4 July 2016 (UTC)

• Delete. But we are a bit deficient in the vocabulary of firearms, especially in light of the extensive discussion in the US of firearms regulation. DCDuring TALK 23:46, 4 July 2016 (UTC)
• Keep. Not all weapons are firearms, but all automatic weapons are. bd2412 T 01:58, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
  • Is that a matter of definition, or just a consequence of the fact that only firearms are normally capable of unassisted repeat fire? Let's say that you had a crossbow with an automatic reloading mechanism, and keeping the trigger pressed caused it to keep firing as long as it didn't run out of bolts- wouldn't that be an automatic weapon? Chuck Entz (talk) 03:20, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
    • You mean like this? bd2412 T 03:33, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
      • Close enough. My point is that it all follows from the "automatic" part, not from the combination of the two (I think "automatic" is short for "automatic-firing": something that emitted a continuous stream, like an energy weapon or a water gun, wouldn't be considered automatic just because it kept going as long as you kept the trigger pressed). It's sort of like the phrase "feathered biped": 50 years ago one could have made a similar argument that "not all bipeds are birds, but all feathered bipeds are". I said "50 years ago", because nowadays it's pretty certain that big, meat-eating theropods like Tyrannosaurus rex had feathers. Chuck Entz (talk) 05:56, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
• Keep: per BD Purplebackpack89 05:02, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
• What about the various other actions (semi-automatic, burst mode, selective action; bolt action, lever action, pump action) for various specific firearms, like pistols, rifles, shotguns, etc. Isn't it in the essence of language to combine a relatively small number of individual words to make more numerous multi-word expressions? Keeping these trivializes English and misleads users who might take our whimsically included MWEs as being better expressions than the whimsically excluded ones. It's hard enough to include economical, intelligible definitions of individual words and true idioms without squandering effort on misleading MWE entries. DCDuring TALK 05:50, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
  • Let me approach this from the opposite direction. Suppose you heard on the news that a gunman was at large, and was carrying an automatic weapon. What image would come to mind? I would bet for most people, they would immediately picture a person with a machine gun. I think that it is also useful to define terms that have technical meanings that are broader than what people might expect, even if this broadness is precisely because the definition is closer to being SOP than common usage would entail. bd2412 T 15:16, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

    Context: Gunman ⇒ firearm; automatic could mean machine pistol/automatic pistol or automatic rifle, very unlikely machine gun, generally too heavy for a lone gunman. DCDuring TALK 17:18, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

    Maybe I also have a different image of what a machine gun is (e.g. "Machine Gun Kelly"), and am thinking of an automatic rifle. I don't think people would picture an "automatic pistol" (or, obviously, an "automatic" crossbow or other such weapon). bd2412 T 19:21, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

    Machine Gun Kelly had a WWI-surplus Thompson submachine gun (a Tommy gun). The uzi machine pistol is a staple of the high-violence TV we real Americans like to watch. DCDuring TALK 20:04, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

DC speaks wise words. Delete. --Hekaheka (talk) 12:54, 8 July 2016 (UTC)

Delete because automatic sense 3 makes it laughably redundant. Equinox ◑ 14:03, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Delete or delete sense from automatic. Renard Migrant (talk) 19:49, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

Deleted. bd2412 T 01:13, 10 August 2016 (UTC)