Combat Semantics 101

Guns Magazine, June, 2001 by Massad Ayoob

There is room for some discussion of Combat Semantics in the vocabulary of the gun. We are told that only the untutored would say "revolver and automatic," and that the proper terminology is "revolver and semiautomatic." This bears some discussion.

Since the accepted terminology is "automatic" for something like a machine gun, and "semiautomatic" for something that only fires one shot per pull of the trigger we are obviously defining the nature of the device by its firing mechanism. Well, guess what? The revolver's cylinder doesn't "revolve."

The Earth revolves around the sun once a year, and the only way the sixgun's cylinder could revolve would be if it went in an orbit around the outside of the frame. The cylinder rotates on an axis, as the Earth also does each day, which is why any revolver shooter who knows the drill speaks of things like "cylinder rotation checks."

The damn thing isn't a revolver; it's a rotator! Samuel Colt didn't check the dictionary, neither did anyone at the U.S. Patent Office at the time, apparently, and everybody has gotten the name wrong.

The only thing on that type of gun that revolves is the cartridge supply. If anybody wants to say, "Well, that's the baseline of definition, and that's why we called it a revolver," they have to answer one question. How does an "autoloader" feed its cartridge supply? The answer is, of course, "automatically."

Therefore, it's gotta be either "revolver and automatic" or "rotator and semiautomatic" to be semantically correct. Ya can't have it both ways. End of argument.