If you keep reading it is infact a modified firearm

The weapon of mass destruction charge was brought against Routh over a fully-automatic machine gun he had, according to the News & record.

I just saw this post that clarified it was a fully automatic machine gun. Weapon of mass destruction sounds like a nuke, but from a legislative perspective, I can see how a fully automatic machine gun would qualify.

Link to post

Maybe he just owned land with oil reserves in the ground?

If it reaches you how to add, subtract, divide, multiply, and such.

No wait... That's a weapon of math instruction.

The US government now uses it to charge people indiscriminately. I see the term in my local headlines once a month, at least, where someone gets tagged with this BS charge.

As one person said I used to think ‘dear God they must have a nuke in the basement’ but anymore you find out the person just had a sawed off shotgun or possibly the parts for a homemade silencer and a prosecutor got an instant hard on.

I would define it as any weapon which would be overkill (no pun intended) if you were to get them for any purpose aside from destruction, such as if you excused its possession on account of self-defense. One could say a regular handgun suffices as a tool of self-defense, you could take one shot and prevent the advancements of a perpetrator. To get something like an automatic gun of war or a flamethrower, supposedly for purposes of protection, is the self-defense equivalent of parents catching a small child eating all the cake while nobody is looking only to excuse themselves with "but I was hungry".

That was the traditional meaning of the word, yes. However it has been horribly misused to push headlines and in the legal arena it has been used to push for harder penalties on what would be considered traditional weapons.

It's a pet peve of mine because it dilutes the word, but home made preasure cooker bombs have been called WMDs in the US and people seem OK with it.