[Tagging] shop=gun shop=guns shop=weapons shop=firearms

[Greg Troxel]

Mateusz Konieczny via Tagging <tagging at openstreetmap.org> writes:

>> So I find the attention to legal definitions in the present discussion
>> bizarre.
>>
> That is a different situation. 
>
> shop=medical_cannabis would be analogous to shop=firearms
> as it is a legal term (if I understood it right) with variety of differences
> across places and wild changes in its definition over time,

Again this is paying too much attention to the law.

shop=medical_cannabis is

  a shop where you can buy cannabis, but only if you have some kind of
  medical permit/prescription/paperwork

It's true what kind of papers you need varies by jurisdiction, but that
is not relavant to drawing a boundary around the concept.

This is in fact the same difference between

  shop=chemist
  amenity=pharmacy

The first just sells stuff and the 2nd you need paperwork.  Which things
are in which category is an arbitrary matter of law that varies across
time and space.

> and therefore a poor terms to use in OSM (like shop=firearms
> apparently)

"Firearm" is first a technical term, and secondarily (and relatively
recently) a legal one.  The reason that's not a good word to use in a
tag is that many people are 1) unclear on normal usage 2) conclude out
of thin air that we need to worry about legal definitions, rather than
deciding how to draw a hyperblob around some sort of thing that occurs
enough in the real world to be worth naming.