“The AR -15 is the select fire model. Mine is a simple semi-automatic CAR-15 .
The AR designation makes it military.
If its a publicly available model it can’t be an AR-15, its a CAR-15. The C is for “civilian.” “
The only full auto rifles that LOOK like the AR-15 (and its multitude of variants) are the M-16 and its (multitude of) variants, including the M4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M16_rifle
I hate to be a stickler for terminology, but the anti-gun people REGULARLY confuse semi-autos vs. full autos. This largely started in the late 1980s, when Josh Sugarmann (who founded the Violence Policy Center in 1988) called on anti-gunners to refer to semi-automatics as “automatics” in order to scare the public into leaning on Congress to outlaw https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2013/01/17/is-it-fair-to-call-them-assault-weapons/?utm_term=.92f140627612
Note that most people are not that familiar with firearms, and will go with whatever the (largely anti-gun) media tells them. Hence the reason for the anti-gun leadership to mislead the mass of people - they don’t care about the facts, they just want their preferred result, by any means necessary (just like ALL Leftists, including Nazis and Communists).
By the way, though I cannot find (and don’t have the extra time to look for) anything about the “CAR-15” rifle the you bought, perhaps the “C” part stands for “Compact?”
AR stands for Armalite - Period.
“...I hate to be a stickler for terminology, but the anti-gun people REGULARLY confuse semi-autos vs. full autos. This largely started in the late 1980s, when Josh Sugarmann (who founded the Violence Policy Center in 1988) called on anti-gunners to refer to semi-automatics as “automatics” in order to scare the public ... most people are not that familiar with firearms, and will go with whatever the (largely anti-gun) media tells them. ...” [Ancensthntr, post 134]
Word reached our ears (via _Small Arms Review_ magazine, if memory serves) that Josh Sugarman and his media helpers contacted a number of gun clubs in Virginia and Maryland or wherever, begging for information, to more accurately understand guns and thus improve the way firearms had been depicted and written about in news outlets.
Club members and other interested parties in the gun-rights activist community accommodated Sugarman and his camera crews: invited them to shooting ranges, tutored them let them fire various guns - even some legally-owned full-auto items. Videotaping of everything was allowed.
Activists and owners parted ways. Handshakes, thanks, mutual esteem all around.
After the next mass shooting. Footage hit the airwaves, of the full-auto firing sessions, while activists inveighed against the evils of semi-auto rifles. Reaction was akin to mass panic: who were all these sinister shooters, blazing away with MACHINE GUNS? How could mere citizens own such devastating weapons good only for killing masses of innocent human beings?
Fear and loathing from the pro-gun side at least. What the antigun folks thought has not been disclosed. Standard Left/Progressive duplicity.
In the interests of total honesty, gunmakers, advertising executives, and industry publicists haven’t been all that careful in terminology, going back generations. Competing companies have expropriated each other’s terms, or sneakily introduced their own near-identical item under a different name, just to avoid referring to their rivals by name in public.
Colt’s may have been the worst offender, stamping the word “AUTOMATIC” on its then-new semi-auto pistols. Other makers imitated them in markings and in print, when semi-auto rifles and shotguns came out. In bald terms, such arms can truthfully be called “automatic” in the sense that they reload their chambers after firing, without any input from the user. All prior guns had to be operated manually. “Autoloading” may be marginally closer, but that word has also been used & misused for more than a century.