It's a pretty long lived term, used atleast as far back as America's founding and probably older than that. I think I might have heard the term when reading Common Sense, but I'm not sure.
It's meaningless for gun control nuts because anything used in war can be technically called a weapon of war. Should we ban handguns because they're used in war? What about knives? Dogs? MREs?
Weapons of War
This site is literally the most userfriendly and easy to use imageboard I have ever seen, and yet none of you faggots make use of even the simplest features.
If we assume that 'weapon of war' means what it clearly implies anything that has ever been used in any war would fall under that category. That would include pretty much anything that can potentially be used to kill a man. Semi auto .308 rifle? That's a weapon of war. Bolt action .303, that's a weapon of war. Any kind of bow or crossbow, that's a weapon of war. Any form of bladed tool, congratulations that's now a sword or axe and thus a weapon of war. You own a few pieces of string and could, potentially, have access to rocks? Look at this warmonger trying to build a sling, which was used for millennia across the world as one of the most widespread and long feared weapons of war! Cutlery means knives, and knives are weapons of war. Wait a minute, are those hands on the end of your arms? Don't you know that hands can be used to form fists, and that fists are the most basic weapon of war possible! You surgically removed your hands huh? Well I'm pretty sure that at some time in history a soldier has battered a hostile combatant to death with a mutilated arm, so that's a weapon of war too.
Was about to suggest this exact thing.
To take this argument further, consider the Mauser bolt action and its derivatives.
It is the single most popular design of sporting rifle ever, and has been for a hundred plus years running. When the design was codified with the Gewehr 98, it was the pinnacle of military small arms technology – anybody who was anybody had the Mauser as their service rifle, or was making a domestic copy. And despite being a 'weapon of war' it was sold concurrently as a sporting rifle.
Well, they wanted their sci-fi adventure with a vaguely mythological paintjob; and their sponsors at the Pentagon wanted something exciting, fun, cool, and heroic rather than the depressing meatgrinder or skin crawlingly morally questionable spec ops shit that war with the System Lords would have turned into.
Consider the average Zig Forums design thread. With a little work and thought pretty much anything solid (not to mention most gasses and liquids) can be turned into some very lethal shit; and that's before we get to the jokes that look less and less silly every day.
Ban assault water now!
Story is a bit retarded. Humans never really mastered energy weaponry because it requires n-th level complication to produce an effect that a gun can with millions of fewer moving parts. The Mobile Attack Turret (MAT) would be a more likely thing to send through the gate. It's basically a FRED with a mountable machine gun plus armor.
Also if we just shot everything we saw we likely wouldn't have Tokra as allies, which means the Apophis/Klorel invasion would have killed us in the first season because we wouldn't have warning of it, or the Anubis naquadah asteroid because we wouldn't have the Tokra cargo ship, or any number of Goa'ould assaults because we wouldn't be under the Protected Planets Treaty. If we somehow survived all of this…. the ancients wouldn't be willing to activate their tech for us, so Anubis would have kicked our asses with his supership. If we somehow survived the Goa'ould, our lack of asgard and ancient tech would get us killed by the Ori or Replicators eventually. If we survived all the threats in our galaxy using good old howitzers, we'd have to deal with the Wraith, Asurans and Vanir.
TV show even has examples of versions of realities where humans just sent nukes through gates to eliminate threats… they got their ass kicked by a ship invasion.
kek
Diamond dozen, doggy dog world, etcetera
Do you even Realpolitik bro?
Analogy time. It's kind of like being from a tiny island nation who is insanely good at ground combat. We stow away on a cargo ship with a brigade of all our insanely good ground combat equipment and 1000 of our best troops, and use it to invade a nation with a million battleships. No matter how many of them we kill in ground combat once we exit the cargo ship, the enemy is going to absorb those losses and our island nation will be raped by battleships.