You can call it a Kazowie, it only makes you right in your own frame of reference. Is it doctrinally a machinegun in military terms? No. Is it legally a machinegun? Yes. Are you behaving like a brain-damaged asshole yourself to call someone wrong in some cosmic sense for referring to it as a machinegun on a discussion board? Unquestionably.
Funny how you're basically doing the same damn thing. Also funny how the law calls them "Assault Weapons", not machine guns.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Assault_Weapons_Ban
http://www.bradycampaign.org/facts/faqs/?page=awb
BTW, from the Brady Campaign's website:
Q: What is the difference between an automatic and a semi-automatic weapon?
A: An automatic weapon (machine gun) will continue to fire as long as the trigger is depressed (or until the ammunition magazine is emptied). A semi-automatic weapon will fire one round and instantly load the next round with each pull of the trigger. Semi-automatic firearms fire as rapidly as you can twitch your finger. This means that a semi-automatic fires a little more slowly than an automatic, but not much more slowly. When San Jose, California police test-fired an UZI, a 30-round magazine was emptied in slightly less than two seconds on full automatic while the same magazine was emptied in just five seconds on semi-automatic.
Ownership of machine guns has been tightly controlled since passage of the National Firearms Act of 1934, and their manufacture for the civilian market was halted in 1986. However, semi-automatic versions of those same guns were still being produced until the federal assault weapons ban was enacted.
Thanks for playing.
I'm not sure what your point is with the Brady quote, since it looks like it would support just about any usage, everything is a 'machine gun' to those guys except semi-autos, and it appears they aren't
too sure about them. It's a triviality anyway, and I shouldn't have said that 'acting like a brain-damaged asshole' part, sorry.
Tons of State laws, and Federal laws passed prior to 93, make them machineguns for staying-out-of-jail purposes, the three-round burst on the M16A2 and later variants is a twist, but still is legally a machinegun in any state codes that don't directly incorporate the Fed AWB lingo (all the States with which I'm familiar make up their own definition, a few out there somewhere probably have some have some catch-all "or prohibited by Federal law" clause at the end, I suppose).
FWIW, prior to adoption of the SAW and M240B, the infantry squad's automatic weapon support consisted of an automatic rifleman and an M60. The automatic rifleman was armed with the same M16/M16A1 as the rest of the squad, so whether it was a "Rifle" or an "Automatic Rifle" depended on who was carrying it, not the capabilities of the weapon. The SAW (which unlike the 240 variants doesn't actually have "machinegun" in its name, though it definitely is one by any definition) replaced the 'automatic rifle' role, not the M60's role.
