WASHINGTON -- If you want to talk about guns, get the terminology right.

That's an adage from a number of firearms owners and enthusiasts who say terms like "assault weapon" and "automatic weapon" are thrown around carelessly. This is about more than showing off their gun vocabulary, they say, because the wrong words can make any discussion of guns and regulation meaningless.

Advance Local outlets including Cleveland.com, along with San Francisco-based Spaceship Media and several other partners, are conducting a month-long dialogue on guns, gun ownership, regulations and related topics. The only goal is to see if people on all sides of the debate can truly converse.

When launching "Guns, an American Conversation," which mostly takes place in a closed Facebook group, we decided it would help to present acceptable, accurate definitions.

So as we show the public some of what is occurring in the dialogue, these terms may be helpful for you to know, too.

What an assault weapon is and isn't:

"Assault weapon" is a term used somewhat loosely in the public conversation about firearms. The gun industry's traditional definition of an 'assault rifle' is a weapon the military generally uses and has 'select fire capabilities,' or the capability to switch between semi-automatic or a fully automatic mode," CNBC reported in February.

When the federal government had an assault weapon ban from 1994 to 2004, it included a lengthy glossary of what was included, and fully automatic weapons were already heavily regulated and largely restricted from civilian ownership. But the ban also included semi-automatic rifles that had an ability to accept a detachable magazine -- if the rifle had at least two of certain features, such as a folding or telescoping stock, or a pistol grip that protruded conspicuously beneath the action of the weapon. The law, which has since expired, had numerous exceptions, which is among the reasons studies for the Justice Department couldn't conclude whether the ban reduced gun deaths. The ban's effect in reducing mass shootings (itself a term without precision) is still debated.

Seven states and the District of Columbia have their own laws on assault weapons, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. One of them is California, which defines an assault rifle as a semiautomatic, center-fire rifle that does not have a fixed magazine but has any one of the following:

A pistol grip that protrudes conspicuously beneath the action of the weapon. A thumbhole stock. A folding or telescoping stock. A grenade launcher or flare launcher. A flash suppressor. A forward pistol grip.

California also includes under its assault weapons definitions a semiautomatic, centerfire rifle that has a fixed magazine with the capacity to accept more than 10 rounds, and a semiautomatic, centerfire rifle that has an overall length of less than 30 inches.

What an automatic firearm does:

Master-At-Arms 3rd Class Bryon McDonald, from Greeley, Colo., fires an M240B machine gun during a live-fire exercise aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Makin Island.

Fully automatic weapons fire repeated rounds with the single pull of a trigger. These are also referred to as machine guns, and machine guns are illegal, expensive and hard to get in most civilian applications.

"An assault rifle is fully automatic -- a machine gun. Automatic firearms have been severely restricted from civilian ownership since 1934," says the National Shooting Sports Federation, a firearms industry trade group.

What a semi-automatic firearm does:

A semi-automatic fires once with each pull of the trigger, according to gun rights and sports shooting groups including the Buckeye Firearms Association in Ohio. Some automatic and semi-automatic weapons look alike, but they operate differently.

A semi-automatic firearm automatically reloads the chamber with a cartridge from a magazine after each shot and is ready to fire again, says PolitiFact and a number of sport shooting groups. This allows for rounds to be fired as rapidly as someone can pull the trigger if ammunition is in the magazine.

How rapidly a semi-automatic weapon can realistically fire:

Tom Kehoe, a Florida firearms instructor and leather holster maker, wrote in a Quora post that top sporting competitors can pull the trigger "three times a second -- for short periods of time. So the theoretical 'cycling rate' might be 180 rounds per minute, but the reality is you're only maintaining it for bursts of a second or two.

"Rapid firing generates tremendous amounts of heat, he wrote, and most modern semi-automatic weapons use 30-round magazines, "which means the mag would have to be changed six times to reach the magic 180 number. An expert can change a mag on some rifles in about two to three seconds (depending on the gun and how he/she has staged the mags), but that's still 12-18 seconds of lost shooting time per minute." That would make the maximum theoretical rate about 138 rounds per minute, he said.

How a bump stock can alter that:

The semi-automatic rifle at right has been fitted with a so-called bump stock device to make it fire faster. It sits on a table at the Washington State Patrol crime laboratory in Seattle.

A bump stock is a device that attaches to a semi-automatic weapon and uses its recoil to fire more rapidly, explains Popular Mechanics. "So long as a shooter maintains forward pressure, the rifle will continue to fire at a rate much faster than could be accomplished with even the quickest possible series of manual trigger pulls."

Phrased slightly differently: A "bump stock" replaces a rifle's standard stock, which is the part held against the shoulder. It frees the weapon to slide back and forth rapidly, harnessing the energy from the kickback shooters feel when the weapon fires. This description is from a New York Times explanation of how they work.

Bump stocks became better known to the public after they were found in a Las Vegas hotel room following the Oct. 1, 2017, shooting of outdoor concert-goers. Fifty-eight people were killed and hundreds were reported wounded.

Bump stocks are legal, with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives giving an opinion in 2010 that since they were parts but not actual weapons, bump stocks could not be regulated under existing laws prohibiting certain firearms. A number of groups including the National Rifle Association say that needs to change.

"The NRA believes that devices designed to allow semi-automatic rifles to function like fully-automatic rifles should be subject to additional regulations," the NRA said in a statement.

President Donald Trump said in February he wanted the Justice Department to look into regulating bump stocks, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions on March 10 issued a notice of a proposed regulation "to clarify that the definition of machine gun in the National Firearms Act and Gun Control Act includes bump stock type devices, and that federal law accordingly prohibits the possession, sale, or manufacture of such devices."

Where the AR-15 fits in:

Gun shop owner Tiffany Teasdale-Causer displays a Ruger AR-15 semi-automatic rifle at her store in Lynnwood, Washington.

The civilian AR-15, which has appeared in mass shootings including the one that killed 17 people at a Parkland, Florida, high school in February, has only semi-automatic settings. A bump stock was not used in those shootings.

The "AR" part of the firearm's name does not mean assault rifle. Rather, it stands for ArmaLite rifle, after the company that developed it in the 1950s. The AR-15 is popular among hobbyists, with one in five firearms purchased in this country an AR-style weapon, according to National Shooting Sports Foundation figures cited by NBC News.

It is sleek, delivering a gratifying blast of adrenaline, and a symbol, the embodiment of core American values -- freedom, might, self-reliance, NBC said after interviewing a number of gun owners.

Gun control advocates say the AR-15 has a high muzzle velocity, which, combined with the small .223 round, "produces a violent ricochet through an animal body if it hits bone," the Washington Post reported.

But the AR-15 can be adopted for different uses and kinds of hunting. The National Shooting Sports Foundation says that because the AR-15 platform is modular, able to affix different "uppers" (barrel and chamber), its ammunition capability can include ".22, .223 (5.56 x 45mm), 6.8 SPC, .308, .450 Bushmaster and about a dozen others. Upper receivers for pistol calibers such as 9 mm, .40, and .45 are available. There are even .410 shotgun versions," the foundation says.

AR-15-style rifles "are no more powerful than other hunting rifles of the same caliber," the foundation says.