Sure, you could commit a massacre, if all your friends came equipped with guns, musket balls, a horn of gunpowder each, and ramrods. Then, if they were all properly trained and drilled, they could form a cascade formation and fire in a line then kneel and reload while the line behind them fired. If you could coordinate that and hold rank while people tried to attack you, you could probably kill a bunch of people at 100 yards with somewhat reasonable accuracy. Totally the same as an AR-15, which can fire 180 rounds a minute at 500 yard accuracy and shoots bullets at three times the velocity of a handgun’s bullets and can liquidate organs and disintegrate bones on contact.
Also, muskets in the 18th century were extremely expensive, and most historians have come to the conclusion that very few households owned even one that was in working order. It was “possible to own many guns” only if you were extremely wealthy. This anon thinks the founders should have been thinking about a scenario in which a bunch of farmers were gonna get together with their non-existent muskets, and slaughter a few people for fun?
And not that it really matters anymore, but there’s literally nothing in the second amendment that says you can’t ban specific kinds of guns. The idea that “the right to bear arms” means there’s a constitutional right for individuals to own any type of firearm is the product of years of NRA propaganda.
That first point is another overlooked historical context: guns weren’t mass produced. If you wanted 50 guns, you had to have the money to hire a gunsmith and have him only work for you for years. You can now amass that arsenal in one trip to a gun show.
a semi-automatic weapon is just any gun you don’t have to cock between shots. so basically every handgun except old-fashioned revolvers are semi-automatic. when describing weapons capable of firing bursts or continuously, you want ‘machine pistol’ for something like an uzi, ‘assault rifle’ for your ak-47′s and such, and ‘machine gun’ for a weapon large enough to be mounted on a tripod or vehicle.
for your reference when writing soldiers and other characters who are familiar with firearms, may i present…
single action revolver:
semi-automatic or semiauto:
machine pistol:
assault rifle or tactical rifle:
shotgun:
machine gun:
happy writing!
(also please can screenwriters stop having everyone cock their weapons to make a menacing noise, it’s tremendously silly. if you don’t have the safety off and a round chambered when you’re aiming it at the bad guy, it might as well have ‘replica’ written on it. joe random civilian might make that mistake, but james bond or bucky barnes or emma peal won’t.)
just moving along like everyone else 