> Literally the one difference between the "official", Hitler-approved definition of "assault rifle" and an AR-15 is that the AR-15 doesn't support selective fire.
In case anybody isn't clear on what that means: one is a machine gun and the other is not.
I mean, sort of? If we're going this deep into the weeds on terminology, a machine gun is optimized for sustained fully automatic fire; in particular, it's heavier and doesn't become impossible to handle due to heat after prolonged firing. Automatic rifles are not generally machine guns.
"Selective fire" is the gun nerd way of saying "capable of fully automatic fire".
All automatic rifles fall into the categories under machine guns and are thus banned as machine guns. A select fire carbine battle rifle such as the Uzi or the MP5 are in fact classified as sub-machine guns. The term machine gun denotes a firearm that can fire more than a single round with a single trigger pull. There are pistols that are classified as machine guns.
Incidentally, the National Firearms Act (1934) was originally meant to ban handguns. The current regulation on short barrel rifles and short barrel shotguns are vestigial remnants of this intent (if you ban handguns, it only makes sense to also ban somebody chopping up their shotgun to make it handgun-sized.)
All* full sized rifle rounds are supersonic and cause the cavitation the 5.56 has become infamous for (e.g. bruh it goes so fast it's basically explosive! - overheard in a cafe). The terminal effects of 5.56 on flesh are severe, but not moreso than other rifle rounds. A full sized rifle round will cause more damage and can do it from much further away.
* excepting a few that are deliberately manufactured to be subsonic, because they are niche products.
IIUC many military 5.56mm rounds are designed to fragment upon impact (against the spirit if not the letter of the Geneva convention). 7.62mm rounds are (or at least used to be) designed to hold together in one piece.
The latest military 5.56 rounds are actually steel, and designed for penetration, not fragmentation.
The US army is now using M855A1(Steel core, and steel penetrating tip), which replaces the M855(jacketed steel core) What you are thinking of is the 1899 Hague Convention, not the Geneva convention. Also, the USA was not a signing country.
https://www.army.mil/article/41283/army_begins_shipping_impr...
> If not energy, by what metric could the latter be described as "high powered"?
Well the Browning Hi-Power was so named for it's large magazine capacity. But I agree with the substance of what you're saying. 5.56 is not a "high power" rifle if that term is meant to distinguish it from other sorts of rifles. For magazine capacity, you can find 22lr magazines with larger capacities than your typical AR mag, but calling one of those high powered would be a bit silly.
The technical term for 5.56 and similar rounds is intermediate cartridge and includes 7.62×39mm, 5.56×45mm NATO, 5.45×39mm & 7.62x35mm among other cartridges. The definite from wiki is 'An intermediate cartridge is a rifle/carbine cartridge that is shorter than typical full-power battle rifle cartridges, but still has greater length than pistol/personal defense weapon cartridges.'
It's about as significant as IBM dropping out of the PC market because Dell,etc are preferred by consumers. The platform is standardized and the vast majority of AR-15s the public own have no Colt parts in them.
Colt are a big name, but from the perspective of the home consumer they are no longer significant.
fyi, methods being attached to structs/whatever is a property of single dispatch object systems, but not multiple dispatch object systems. The coupling/attached relationship derives from single dispatch systems privileging the first argument of the method.
Please don't conflate different terms for the purpose of making a glib point. It really doesn't help the conversation. They are different words because they mean different things.
From the perspective of a consumer, the difference is totally irrelevant. Why should the particulars of the exchange between the shill and the company matter to me? They don't.
The Verge regularly gets review units from Apple. Their editor, Joshua Topolsky, is not what you would describe as warm and enthusiastic about Apple and their products. When The Verge reviews an iPhone, they are not them engaging in advertising for Apple. If you think every tech outlet is a shill for the manufacturers, then you're just plain wrong about how the world works.
In case anybody isn't clear on what that means: one is a machine gun and the other is not.