Quote:
Originally Posted by Pulpmeister
Author 1, me 0.
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Not necessarily.
Unless the type of gun was an actual plot point here's no way to actually know what the author was thinking and since automatics were new at the time it might be a reflection of ignorance of how the then-new "automatics" worked or of laziness. It might even be a messed up edit where an earlier draft said revolver and the author or the editor decided to replace it with automatic.
Author intent issues aren't easy to figure out without author comment.
A lot of authors are simply too cute for their own (or the reader's) good.
In your case, he could have just said gun and left it at that. Generic terms are perfectly acceptable.
It happens all the time in SF, with authors that try too hard to be "realistic" by the science of the time and end up inserting non-essential material that becomes anachronistic just a few years later. A lot of modern SF stories built around "dark matter/dark energy" are going to end up hilariously off base if it turns out that stuff like Quantized Inertia is the real explanation for what has been observed. The same is true of "infodumps" and overly didactic exposition or characters telling each other stuff they already know. Many of the best and most enduring stories leave the world-building "plumbing" purposefully vague.
Sometimes less detail is better.