This is hair splitting.

All assault rifles, machine guns, submachine guns are all capable by design of operating in fully automatic mode.

The difference in name comes from two sources: foreign manufacturers translations, followed by individual government definitions OVER the years.

For those who are unaware:

Heavy machine gun (tripod)

Machine gun/machine rifle/ Maschinengewehr/ Ruchnoi pulemyot/

Light machine gun/ automatic rifle (as in BAR)

Assault rifle/Fusil automatique leger/LAR-light auto rifle

subachine guns/

Machine pistol/full auto pistol/Schnellfeuer

and these categories are not hard and fast. For example, the Communist East german Army called the AK47 (Rus: Avtomat Kalashnikova) the MPK or MaschinenPistoleKalaschnikow
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But all Swiss M-57 rifles fire a .30 caliber cartridge in single shot or automatic mode, so it is an automatic rifle used for armed/military assault .

There are NO assault rifles that fire ONLY one round per trigger pull. All are also full auto mode-equipped.


Hopefully this gets us from the use of loaded words and recirects the conversation.

I can make any semi-auto pistol except the Luger fire on full auto, but I was an armorer and knew what to look for. Besides, that's illegal and experimenters usually kill themselves. So don't try this at home.

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I don't know that it is hair-splitting, and if it is, it's splitting the definition where it deserves to be split.

People call a US civilian model AR15 an "assault rifle" which it is not. It is capable of semiautomatic fire only. This is directly on point to the discussion.

The assault weapon is capable of "select fire," which may or may not mean fully automatic in nature. Some of them use a three-round burst, but that is still a machine gun (actually, the BATFE term is "machinegun") because it can shoot more than one round with one pull of the trigger.

But as you state, select fire is not the only defining characteristic of an assault weapon. A .50 BMG certainly does not qualify.

Isn't it true that the AK 47s and M 16s sold as semi automatics can fairly easily be converted to full automatic?

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I have no idea about the AK, but the M15 (civilian designation) takes a few parts to convert it to select fire. Some civilian parts must be replaced, like the bolt carrier, hammer, trigger, sear and safety lever, and a few must be added.

While this may be possible, having any machine-gun-specific parts in your possession is the same as owning the machine gun itself. That's legal under some circumstances, but if you don't jump through all the hoops, it's something like 10 years in jail.

Supposedly there's a way to "shave" a component in the firing mechanism that will allow the ejection/insertion mechanism to "bypass" a tag/catch and allow the immediate firing of the next round without the operator having to release the trigger, then pull same again to fire off the next round...

But then, I wouldn't be able to remember, exactly, where I heard that...

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ~ Yogi Berra ~

NO for the AK and AR-15 there is not...

M1 Carbines on the other hands...

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