Sport utility rifle sounds as stupid as assault rifle to me. Just call them what they are, semi-automatic rifles.
“Sport utility rifle sounds as stupid as assault rifle to me. Just call them what they are, semi-automatic rifles.” [mr meyer, post 7]
Everybody appears guilty, of playing fast & loose with nomenclature.
When semiauto arms first appeared - barely two generations after the metallic cartridge hit the market - industry bigwigs, gunwriters, and the shooting public called them auto”loaders”: they extracted and ejected the fired case and reloaded the chamber with a fresh round, without requiring additional manipulation by the user. At the same moment, Colt’s compounded the error, insisting their new sidearms conceived by John M Browning be called “automatic” pistols; perhaps as a cost-saving measure. Roll dies were very expensive and “automatic” is four characters shorter than “semiautomatic”.
The military establishment was of little help: they didn’t call early machine guns that, because since 1884, Hiram Stevens Maxim had been selling the only such gun, his belt-fed self-operating gun. Everybody simply referred to it as the Maxim Gun.
But competitors appeared with their own designs; generic terms were needed. Soon there were “heavy” and “light” machine guns, but the US military termed its first light gun - the Benet-Mercie M1909 - a “Machine Rifle”. They tried the same trick when John M Browning offered his select-fire light gun for adoption in 1917; Army Ordnance called it the “Browning Automatic Rifle” but it was at first called “Browning’s Machine Rifle” - perhaps because in World War One the French had sold Americans large quantities of their “Fusil Mitrailleur Modele 1915 CSRG” (Machine Rifle Model of 1915, designed by Chauchat, Sutter, Ribeyrolle, manufactured by Gladiator) - which the doughboys largely reviled as the “Chauchat”.
As time ground on, “heavy machine gun” came to mean a full-auto crew-served weapon firing from a fixed mount fed by belts, while “light machine gun” came to mean a full-auto weapon sometimes placed on a mount but operated by one troop, fed by detachable box magazines, twice as heavy as the issue rifle but much lighter than a heavy machine gun.
Submachine guns (US parlance), machine carbines (British parlance), or machine pistols (German parlance) were shoulder arms about as big as the issue rifle or a little shorter, but full-auto or select-fire, firing pistol cartridges (hence the German nomenclature).
“Heavy” machine guns got demoted to “medium” guns when the USA adopted its 50 cal machine gun in 1921 - a scaled-up version of John M Browning’s 30 cal belt-fed, water-cooled gun adopted in 1917 (developed and on the shelf by 1901). The 50 cal was developed as an anti-armor gun.
Users were still not happy: there was a gap in capability between the submachine gun (100 yds effective range) and the issue rifle (almost all bolt action, 2000 yds or greater effective range); what was wanted was the controllable firepower of the submachine gun, plus the range, punch, and accuracy closer to a traditional rifle.
Compromises had to be made. The Germans were the first to field one: after some bureaucratic back-and-forth, they called it the Sturmgewehr 1944 - the “Storming Rifle Model of 1944.” More suited to the assault than earlier arms, it became the first assault rifle: individual issue, closed-bolt, select fire, magazine fed, cartridge of 450m or so
effective range. The Soviets, the Brits, the Czechs, the Spaniards and finally the Americans copied it.
Thus, “assault rifle” has a real military meaning. And no rifle sold to civilians in the United States matches it (save the very few real assault rifles owned by civilian collectors and tightly controlled by the regulatory agency).
“Assault weapon” has no rigorous, objective meaning at all and was a scare-mongering term invented by the anti-gun organizations to confuse the ignorant: media buzz. Unfortunately, it’s caught on - to the point where many who ought to know better now use it. Including the military.