Talk:Automatic firearm

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Contents


[edit] Patent link

The patent linked on the bottom of the page is, although having the title "Automatic gun", in fact a patent of a cooling system for automatic guns. Igram oxyd (talk) 21:15, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] NPOV

From the article "Automatic weapons tend to be restricted (...), due to their mistakenly supposed potential to kill many people quickly" - this seems an odd use of words - the article is about guns not people's suppositions. Changing article to remove the words after the comma (great article though!).

[edit] Change of content

Since "automatic firearm" can mean many things depending on context (of "automatic pistol", "automatic shotgun" and "automatic rifle", only one implies full auto), and since the content here is almost entirely redundant with other articles, I'm going to change it to a discussion of meaning and a set of links, so people can chose the appropriate meaning and find the right article. scot 18:19, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Automatic firearms and elephant poaching

So how exactly will the slaughter of elephants effect the nature of automatic firearms, to the extent that the article on automatic firearms will change? Just because an assault rifle or machinegun was used to kill elephants (and this isn't a new thing, it's been going on for decades) doesn't mean that it was intended for such use, or even that it's particularly well suited to the task, and I don't forsee anyone starting to market, say, an automatic rifle in .600 Nitro for specifically for elephant hunting. Elephant ivory is used for piano keys, do you think it's justified to tag the piano article as being subject to short-term change because someone is poaching elephants in Africa? I think the burden is on you to propose a causatave link from elephant poaching to changes in the automatic firearm article before you are justified in tagging it. scot 20:34, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

this is fairly simple:
  • the number of pianos manufactured will not depend on elephant poaching as the material used can be varied to a synthetic, whereas:
  • obviously the poachers chose to use automatic firearms, because they thought them to be efficient weapons for killing elephants in the wild (just as militia in the same region consider it an efficient weapon (assisted with burning of villages and airstrikes) for the approximate 100,000 civilians slaughtered by Janjaweed).
I fail to see your concern of letting wikipedia readers interpret for themselves viable linkages of information. i dont think your censorship of reasonable linkages honours the intelligence of our readers. if you care to respond to this posting, please do it here, as i am watching this page Anlace 20:50, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
The poachers chose the weapons they did because the Soviets shipped millions upon millions of them to Africa to support the Marxists there, and various Western powers shipped millions of them to support the counterrevolutionaries. Any 7.62mm rifle is very, very poorly suited to killing large game; the 7.63x39mm used by the AK-47 is considered useable only for game up to deer size, while the 7.62x51mm NATO and 7.62x54R Russian are only considered adequate up to elk sized game. Elephant cartridges are things like the .416 Rigby, the Nitro Express cartridges, and the like, which provide a much, much heavier bullet to get the penetration needed to take big game.
As for slaughtering thousands of civilians, again, it's not a matter of suitability, it's a matter of availability. Chemical weapons agents are far, far more efficient (just ask Saddam or Hitler) for wholesale slaughter, while bombs and artillery produce most of the casualties in warfare. Military full metal jacket ammunition, which is what they'd be using, is quite restricted on the damage it can produce, and the modern small caliber rounds such as the 5.56x45mm and 5.45x39mm assault rifle rounds produce wounds not much more significant than a .22 Long Rifle catridge--just at much greater ranges and with more penetrating ability. If you wanted to kill people, a hollow point bullet design is far more effective, which is why hunters use them. I think it's been well proven that the best way to kill millions in Africa is to control the water supplies--hence the term hydraulic empire.
As for censoring, I just see no possible way that the elephant poaching is going to have any significant impact on the article; I think you're just trolling for hits on your article--after all, to figure out what sort of current event might change the fundemental nature of automatic firearms, people have to click through and look. scot 21:03, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
People and animals are killed every day by automatic weapons in Iraq, Africa, South America, and all over the world. It would be ridiculous to link to every current event involving them. --Askaggs 12:50, 5 September 2006 (UTC)