Because you have a 12 gauge as in a talking shotgun and then you also have a 12 gauge as in a 12 gauge needle which are two completely different sizes but gauge is a unit of measurement so how does that work
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Some units of measurement are standardized–for example the SI or ‘metric’ units which are all based on a physical standard–and other units are not standardized, but instead are used because of tradition or industry standards.
Gauges as used in firearms and wire gauges are units that originate in tradition and have become more standardized by industry. American Wire Gauge numbers, for example, were originally based on the number of times a wire had to be pulled through smaller and smaller sized die holes to achieve a certain thickness (ergo, a very small wire has a high ‘gauge’ because it had to be processed a higher number of times to make it small).
Needle sizes are based on the size of the hole in the tip of the needle while the ‘gauge’ of the needle can vary from manufacturer to manufacturer based on which needle gauge system they are using–because unfortunately there is more than one.
To make things even more difficult, now some types of ‘gauge’ are a logarithmic unit which basically just means you are numbering certain intervals of a mathematical curve or exponential change.
There have been attempts to standardize units of measurement, but it is almost always resisted by industry as it necessitates some cost in changing from one measurement to another for ‘no reason’ as the money hungry capitalist overlord pigs would describe it anyway.
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