96 Fun Facts About Firearms

The first firearms, bamboo fire lances mounted on spears, originated in which country?

China: Song dynasty fire lances began as short-range flamethrowers, and once soldiers packed shards and pellets in with the powder and swapped bamboo for metal, the tube had become the first hand cannon.

Traditional gunpowder is a mixture of sulfur, charcoal and which oxidiser?

Potassium nitrate (saltpetre) breaks down in the heat and gives off oxygen, so the sulfur and charcoal can burn inside a sealed barrel with no air; it makes up about three-quarters of the mix.

Which early European firearm was the first to have a trigger?

The matchlock arquebus, from the 15th century, was the first gun with a trigger: a lever dropped a smouldering cord into the priming pan, freeing the shooter from touching a match to the powder by hand.

Unlike the later flintlock, the wheellock of about 1500 struck sparks by spinning a steel wheel against which mineral?

Pyrite: a spring-driven wheel ground against a lump of it and showered sparks into the pan, so for the first time a loaded gun needed no burning match and could be carried ready, though the lock cost too much for most soldiers.

Which company's Gewehr 98 bolt-action became the standard rifle of the Imperial German Army?

Mauser: the Gewehr 98's bolt action was copied around the world, and America's Springfield M1903 followed it so closely that the US government ended up paying the German firm royalties.

Rifling, the grooves cut inside a gun barrel, makes a shot more accurate by forcing the bullet to do what?

Spin: the grooves spiral down the barrel and grip the bullet, and the spin steadies it in flight the way a gyroscope holds its axis; a ball from a smooth musket barrel had nothing to keep it on line.

Which inventor patented a "revolving gun" in 1836 and made mass-produced revolvers commercially viable?

Samuel Colt's first factory, in Paterson, New Jersey, failed and left him out of the gun trade until 1847, when Texas Ranger Samuel Walker asked for a bigger revolver and an order for 1,000 put him back in business.

The Single Action Army, the US Army's standard revolver of the Wild West era, is famous under what nickname?

The Peacemaker: its maker stopped building the old six-shooter for World War II and meant to leave it retired, but TV westerns made buyers want one again and it went back into production in 1956.

The 1860 Henry rifle, a sixteen-shot lever-action repeater, was the basis for which iconic Wild West rifle?

The Winchester of 1866 was the Henry improved and renamed; Confederates who met the original in battle are said to have cursed it as the Yankee rifle you could load on Sunday and fire all week.

Which army's standard musket for over a century was nicknamed 'Brown Bess'?

The British Army carried its Brown Bess from 1722 into the 1830s, and American rebels fired plenty of them straight back at the redcoats; how the musket got its name is still uncertain.

Which sharpshooter out-shot touring marksman Frank Butler in a match, married him, and became the star of Buffalo Bill's Wild West?

Annie Oakley beat Butler and married him; they joined Buffalo Bill in 1885, and as she became the star attraction the famous marksman stepped back to work as her manager.

A trained doctor invented which hand-cranked gun of 1862, hoping it would shrink armies and spare soldiers from disease?

The Gatling gun's inventor had studied medicine, and wrote that one man doing a hundred men's battle duty would shrink armies and cut deaths from disease; the Union barely used it, and the Army adopted it only in 1866.

Which 1884 weapon was the world's first fully automatic machine gun?

The Maxim gun fired for as long as the trigger was held, about 600 rounds a minute; at the Shangani river in 1893, some 700 colonial troops with a handful of them drove off 5,000 Matabele warriors.

The Puckle gun, patented in 1718, was designed to fire round shot at Christians and what at Muslim Turks?

Square bullets were reserved for Turks in James Puckle's 1718 design; at a public trial his gun got off 63 shots in seven minutes, yet the only known sale was of two guns.

The M1911 pistol was developed after Army revolvers failed against Moro warriors where?

The Philippines: in the Moro Rebellion, soldiers' revolvers often failed to drop charging attackers, so the Army hurriedly reissued its retired Wild West six-shooters while it hunted for a harder-hitting pistol.

The M1911 is chambered primarily for which cartridge?

.45 ACP won out after 1904 Army tests, which meant shooting live cattle and human cadavers, found nothing smaller would do; one tester, John T. Thompson, later gave his name to the Tommy gun.

Which gunsmith earned 128 firearm patents, including the M1911 pistol's?

John Browning tinkered in his Mormon father's Ogden workshop from boyhood; when his main buyer refused him royalties he took his designs elsewhere, and Colt and Belgium's FN gladly built them.

Besides 'Tommy gun', which nickname did the Thompson submachine gun earn in the hands of Prohibition-era gangsters?

The Chicago Typewriter was meant to sweep the trenches of World War I, but the war ended before it could ship and armies mostly passed; Prohibition's gangsters made its name instead.

Which US agency adopted the Thompson submachine gun after the Kansas City massacre?

The FBI bought its Thompsons in 1933, after machine-gun fire outside Kansas City's Union Station killed an agent, three other lawmen and the very prisoner the gunmen had come to free.

Which US general called the M1 Garand 'the greatest battle implement ever devised'?

George S. Patton was praising a rifle that let American infantry fire eight shots as fast as they could squeeze the trigger, while most of their enemies still had to work a bolt between every round.

The M1 Garand was named after its designer, John Garand, who was born in which country?

Canada: born in Quebec in 1888, John Garand moved to New England as a boy, gave his rifle to the US government royalty-free and never profited from the millions made; a bill in Congress to award him $100,000 failed.

Which British rifle let trained soldiers fire 20 to 30 aimed shots in a 'mad minute'?

Lee-Enfield: a slick bolt and a ten-round magazine made it the fastest military bolt-action of its day and kept it in front-line service from 1895 through both world wars.

The AK-47 assault rifle was developed in the late 1940s in which country?

The Soviet Union adopted it in 1949; designer Mikhail Kalashnikov was a tank sergeant wounded in 1941 who, by his own account, began sketching guns in hospital after hearing soldiers curse their rifles.

Roughly how many Kalashnikov-pattern rifles are estimated to have been built worldwide?

About 100 million is the usual estimate, enough to make the Kalashnikov the most abundant firearm on earth, and its Russian maker says most of the copies built abroad were never licensed.

The AK-47 fires which cartridge?

7.62×39mm is an 'intermediate' round, deliberately weaker than a full-size rifle cartridge: a soldier could carry far more of it, and its gentler kick kept a light rifle controllable in automatic fire.

Which engineer designed the ArmaLite AR-15, the rifle the US military adapted into the M16?

Eugene Stoner worked for an aircraft company's small-arms division, so he built his rifle around lightweight aircraft aluminium; short of money, ArmaLite sold the rights to Colt in 1959, and Colt reaped the military orders.

An army officer from which country designed the Uzi submachine gun in the late 1940s?

Israel: Uziel Gal finished his prototype in 1950 and asked that the gun not be named after him, but the request was refused and the army called it the Uzi anyway.

The Glock, adopted by the Austrian military in 1982, was the first commercially successful pistol to use what?

A polymer frame came naturally to Gaston Glock, an Austrian who made curtain rods and army knives and had never designed a gun; his first pistol beat the established makers in the army's trials anyway.

Which company, founded no later than 1526, is the oldest active firearm manufacturer in the world?

Beretta: a 1526 receipt records the Venetian Republic paying Bartolomeo Beretta of Gardone Val Trompia for 185 arquebus barrels, the earliest document of a firm run by the same family for almost five centuries.

Which compact German pistol is James Bond's signature sidearm in the novels and films?

Walther PPK: a gun-loving fan, Geoffrey Boothroyd, wrote to Ian Fleming that Bond's pistol was wrong for the job; Fleming took the advice in Dr. No and named the armourer who became Q after him.

The Desert Eagle is the pistol best known for chambering which massive cartridge?

.50 Action Express is so powerful that the Desert Eagle taps gas from the barrel to work a rotating bolt, a locking system far more common on rifles than on pistols.

John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln with which kind of small pistol?

A derringer: Booth's tiny single-shot pocket pistol left him no second bullet, so he slashed Major Henry Rathbone with a knife before leaping from the box to the stage.

A shotgun's gauge counts how many of what weigh one pound?

Bore-sized lead balls: twelve make a pound for a 12-gauge and twenty for a 20-gauge, which is why the smaller number means the wider barrel.

Which hollow-based lead bullet expanded to grip a rifle's grooves and became the standard infantry round of the American Civil War?

The Minié ball slid easily down a muzzle-loader's barrel, then swelled on firing to bite the grooves, so ordinary infantry could load as fast as with a musket yet hit targets far beyond musket range.

Who drafted the Second Amendment after opposing a bill of rights?

James Madison had opposed a bill of rights, yet in June 1789 he introduced the amendments himself and badgered his colleagues in Congress until they passed.

Which 2008 Supreme Court case affirmed an individual Second Amendment right to self-defence at home?

District of Columbia v. Heller began with Dick Heller, a special police officer who carried a handgun on duty guarding a federal building yet was refused permission to keep one at home.

A matchlock's smouldering cord was held in a curved lever with what snake-inspired name?

The serpentine was a pivoting clamp that gripped the glowing cord and swung it down onto the priming powder in the pan to fire the gun.

Despite its name, the American 'Kentucky rifle' was developed by German gunsmiths in which colony?

Pennsylvania: immigrant gunsmiths around Lancaster took the short, large-bore hunting rifle of their homeland and stretched it into a lighter gun with a far longer barrel; the Kentucky nickname only came later.

The first fully automatic machine gun harnessed which force to eject each spent cartridge and load the next?

Recoil: the inventor traced the idea to a childhood memory of a rifle's kick, and put that wasted energy to work throwing out each spent case and chambering the next.

The Uzi's compact size comes from a telescoping bolt that lets the magazine sit where?

Inside the pistol grip: besides keeping the gun short, this lets a soldier reload by feel in the dark, because one hand always knows where the other is.

Storm-blown traders from which European country introduced the matchlock gun to Japan in 1543?

Portugal: a storm drove their ship ashore on the island of Tanegashima, where the local lord bought two guns and set his smiths to copying them, and Japanese matchlocks took the island's name.

The word 'arquebus' is traced to a Middle Dutch word with what literal meaning?

Hook gun: dictionaries trace it to Middle Dutch hakebusse, and the hook was a lug under the barrel that was rested over a wall or stand so the support, not the shooter, took the kick.

The rifle used to assassinate President Kennedy in 1963 was made in which country?

Italy: it was an army-surplus Carcano that Lee Harvey Oswald had ordered by mail from a Chicago sporting-goods store under the alias A. Hidell.

Which World War II weapon is regarded as the first assault rifle?

StG 44 is short for Sturmgewehr, and the English translation, assault rifle, named the whole class; fewer than half a million were built, too late to help Germany, but the idea took over infantry arms.

In a bullpup rifle configuration, where is the firing grip located?

In front of the breech: a bullpup tucks the action and magazine behind the trigger, inside the shoulder stock, so the whole weapon gets much shorter without losing any barrel length, as on the Steyr AUG.

Which country's national flag shows an AK-47 crossed with a hoe over an open book?

Mozambique set the rifle beside a hoe and an open book to stand for defence of the country, its farmers and education; the design grew out of the banner of the movement that won independence.

Which American gunmaker, founded in 1816, later sold the first commercial QWERTY typing machine?

Remington turned to keyboards in 1873 because gun sales had slumped, and it built sewing machines and farm tools too. Its engineers swapped the R key into the top row, fixing the layout still used today.

The phrase 'riding shotgun' comes from armed guards who sat beside the driver of which vehicle?

A stagecoach hauling cash or bullion carried a 'shotgun messenger' beside the driver, armed with a short coach gun to ward off bandits. The phrase itself caught on later, through Western stories and films.

Which everyday phrase meaning 'absolutely everything' began as a description of a complete musket?

Lock, stock and barrel are a musket's firing mechanism, its wooden body and its tube: put together, the whole gun. The phrase was being used for 'the lot' by the early 1800s.

Which Russian playwright advised that a rifle hanging on the wall in act one must go off by act three?

Anton Chekhov gave the advice to young playwrights in several letters, and writers now call the rule Chekhov's gun. It means every detail in a story has to earn its place.

Which Winter Olympic sport, born from Scandinavian military ski patrols, pairs skiing with rifle shooting?

Biathlon usually punishes each missed target with a penalty loop on skis, so racers must calm a pounding heart before they fire. Norwegians simply call the sport 'ski shooting'.

Which US Vice President accidentally shot lawyer Harry Whittington during a Texas quail hunt?

Dick Cheney peppered the 78-year-old with birdshot from a 28-gauge shotgun in 2006, and doctors left about 30 pellets in Whittington's body. Both men called it an accident.

Which fibre, discovered by chemist Stephanie Kwolek in 1965, is woven into bullet-resistant vests?

Kevlar is five times stronger than steel for its weight, yet its first commercial job was replacing steel in racing tyres. Kwolek had been hunting for a lighter tyre fibre ahead of a feared fuel shortage.

Hungary's Károly Takács won two Olympic pistol golds after a faulty grenade forced him to change what?

His shooting hand had been his right until an army training accident in 1938, so Takács taught himself to fire left-handed. He won the 25 metre rapid fire pistol event in both 1948 and 1952.

The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, which lasted about 30 seconds, took place in which silver-mining boomtown?

Tombstone's famous shootout did not happen in the corral at all, but in a narrow lot beside a photography studio six doors away. The lawmen were enforcing a ban on carrying weapons in town.

Which sitting US Vice President fatally shot Alexander Hamilton in a pistol duel at Weehawken, New Jersey?

Aaron Burr was charged with murder in two states, yet neither case reached trial and he went back to Washington to finish his term. The rivals had rowed across the Hudson at dawn in separate boats.

Which Clint Eastwood film made the .44 Magnum revolver famous as 'the most powerful handgun in the world'?

Dirty Harry turned the Model 29 revolver from a niche gun for hunters and enthusiasts into a worldwide star in 1971. Eastwood's detective levels it at a robber and tells him to ask himself, 'Do I feel lucky?'

Which actor was fatally wounded by a prop gun on the set of The Crow, with most of his scenes already filmed?

Brandon Lee was hit when a blank round drove out a bullet left stuck in the barrel by a badly made dummy cartridge. He was 28, and the son of martial-arts star Bruce Lee.

'Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes' is a legendary order from which Revolutionary War battle?

Bunker Hill's defenders were running low on powder and ammunition, so holding fire for a close-range volley made sense. Historians treat the famous order itself as apocryphal.

Which English leader is credited with telling his troops to 'trust in God and keep your powder dry'?

Oliver Cromwell gets the credit, but the line first appeared in print in 1834, in a poem imagining him addressing his army in Ireland. Damp gunpowder would not ignite, so the advice was practical too.

'Smoking gun' echoes a 'smoking pistol' in 'The Adventure of the Gloria Scott', a story about which detective?

Sherlock Holmes hears of a chaplain caught with the weapon in his hand in the 1893 tale. A just-fired gun found on a suspect is near-unshakable proof, so the phrase now means any conclusive evidence.

Most cartridge cases are made of brass, an alloy of copper and which other metal?

Zinc and copper make brass, the favourite case metal because it resists corrosion and is soft enough to be reshaped and reloaded many times. Copper with tin would give bronze instead.

Which bullet type, a soft lead core in a harder shell, gave Stanley Kubrick's Vietnam War film its title?

Full metal jacket was a phrase Kubrick came across in a gun catalogue while hunting for a better title than the source novel's. The hard coating lets a bullet fly faster without smearing lead along the barrel.

A gun's backward kick against the shooter's shoulder is a textbook example of which physical law?

Newton's third law says every action has an equal and opposite reaction: the gun shoves the bullet and hot gas forward, and they shove the gun back with matching momentum.

Which Old West gunfighter was shot from behind in a Deadwood saloon while reportedly holding aces and eights?

Wild Bill Hickok was killed mid-poker game in 1876 by Jack McCall, a failed gambler. The cards he supposedly held, black aces and black eights, are now known as the 'dead man's hand'.

Which American gunmaker launched the .357 Magnum in 1935, a round able to pierce steel car doors?

Smith & Wesson built the round on its own .38 Special, and highway patrols took to it in the gangster era because it could punch through car bodies and early ballistic vests.

A firearm's caliber, written as a figure such as .22 or 9mm, is a measurement of what?

Barrel's inner diameter is the figure: .22 means 22 hundredths of an inch, while 9mm is simply metric. Rounds of one calibre can still differ hugely in case length and power.

Which type of firearm fires one round per trigger pull while reloading itself for the next shot?

Semi-automatic guns use the energy of each shot to throw out the empty case and chamber a fresh round, yet fire only once per pull. A fully automatic weapon keeps shooting for as long as the trigger is held.

Which tapered constriction at the muzzle of a shotgun barrel controls how widely the pellets spread?

The choke squeezes the cloud of pellets as it leaves, keeping the pattern dense enough to hit at longer range. A tighter one suits distant birds; a more open one suits close, fast clay targets.

The .22 Long Rifle, the world's best-selling cartridge, uses which type of ignition?

Rimfire rounds carry their primer in the hollow rim of the case, which the firing pin crushes to set off the powder. The thin rim cannot take high pressure, so the design survives mainly in small calibres.

Bullet and powder weights are traditionally given in which tiny unit, 7,000 of which make one pound?

Grains go back to the weight of a single barley seed, and one is about 65 milligrams. A 150-grain hunting bullet therefore weighs a little under ten grams.

Expanding 'dum-dum' bullets take their name from a colonial-era arsenal near which Indian city?

Calcutta's Dum Dum Arsenal produced a soft-nosed .303 round in 1896 that mushroomed on impact. Three years later delegates at the Hague Convention moved to prohibit such bullets in war.

The sharp crack of a rifle bullet passing overhead is a miniature version of which phenomenon?

A sonic boom trails anything that outruns sound, as most rifle bullets do. The crack of a bullwhip is the same thing in miniature: the tip of the whip goes supersonic.

Cotton gin inventor Eli Whitney championed which manufacturing idea while building muskets for the US Army?

Interchangeable parts were more promise than practice for Whitney: the muskets he contracted for in 1798 were not all delivered until 1809. The idea still went on to transform Northern factories.

Abolitionist John Brown tried to spark a slave revolt in 1859 by seizing a federal armory in which town?

Harpers Ferry's arsenal was thought to hold 100,000 muskets and rifles. Brown's raid lasted two days before Marines under Colonel Robert E. Lee stormed his refuge.

Before designing his first pistol at 52, Gaston Glock ran a business making which household items?

Curtain rods, plus field knives for the Austrian army, were his trade, so he came to handguns with no gunmaking habits to unlearn. He bought his first injection-moulding machine just to make knife handles.

Mikhail Kalashnikov turned to gun design while recovering from wounds suffered commanding which vehicle?

A tank commander wounded at Bryansk in 1941, he spent months in hospital hearing fellow soldiers complain that their rifles kept jamming. He had started his service as a mechanic.

The pistol Gavrilo Princip used to kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo was made in which country?

Belgium's Fabrique Nationale built the compact Model 1910, serial number 19074, whose shots set off the First World War. For years, books wrongly named an older FN model as the weapon.

Which kingdom's fast-firing Dreyse 'needle gun' helped its infantry defeat Austria in 1866?

Prussia fielded 270,000 of the rifles in 1866, each firing about six rounds a minute against one or two from Austria's muzzle-loaders. Its long firing pin pierced a paper cartridge like a needle.

Lewis and Clark impressed the Native nations they met with a repeating rifle powered by what?

Compressed air held in a detachable reservoir let the Girardoni rifle fire up to 30 shots on one fill. Lewis demonstrated it to nearly every tribe the expedition met, at least 16 times in all.

Charles Guiteau favoured an ivory-handled revolver, thinking it would look better in a museum, to kill which president?

James Garfield's killer could not afford the ivory model's extra dollar, so the shopkeeper dropped the price for him. Doctors probing for the bullet likely introduced the infection that killed the president weeks later.

Which 1990 action sequel invented the 'Glock 7', a porcelain pistol supposedly invisible to airport X-rays?

Die Hard 2 got it all wrong: no such model exists, and real Glocks are mostly steel by weight and show up clearly on scanners. The myth it repeated had already prompted a 1988 US law against undetectable guns.

Which prize founder invented the smokeless powder ballistite and built Bofors into a major cannon maker?

Alfred Nobel patented ballistite in 1887, twenty years after dynamite, and it became a forerunner of cordite, the propellant of countless rifle rounds. Arms and explosives helped pay for the prizes that carry his name.

Which American chemical giant began in 1802 as a gunpowder mill on Brandywine Creek in Delaware?

DuPont supplied between a third and a half of the powder that Northern troops burned in the Civil War. Its original mills beside the creek kept making explosives until 1921.

The Liberator pistol, whose plans were downloaded 100,000 times in two days in 2013, is made by which method?

3D printing made the single-shot Liberator the first such gun design shared widely online. The US State Department demanded the files be withdrawn within days of their release.

The name TASER is a loose acronym honouring which fictional boy inventor and his 'electric rifle'?

Tom Swift was the childhood hero of inventor Jack Cover, who named his stun weapon after a 1911 adventure novel. The first model on sale used gunpowder as its propellant, so US regulators classed it as a firearm.

A gun's magazine and a printed magazine both take their name from an Arabic word meaning what?

Storehouse is the sense of the Arabic makhzan: English first used 'magazine' for a depot of military ammunition. The first periodical borrowed the word in 1731 to suggest a store of information.

The word 'gun' is apparently short for Gunilda, a weapon listed at Windsor Castle in 1330 with what kind of name?

A woman's name, from Old Norse Gunnhildr, whose two halves both mean 'war' or 'battle'. Soldiers have long named big weapons after women, as with the cannon Mons Meg and the howitzer Big Bertha.

Which short gun with a funnel-shaped muzzle takes its name from Dutch words meaning 'thunder gun'?

Blunderbuss is the Dutch donderbus, reshaped by English speakers who heard 'blunder' in it. English coachmen carried one against highwaymen, because its wide spray of shot was easy to land from a moving coach.

Skeet, the clay-target sport, was named in a 1926 magazine contest as an old form of which word?

Shoot was the claimed root: Gertrude Hurlbutt won the 100-dollar prize by offering 'skeet' as a very old form of the word. A Norse-derived dialect term may really lie behind it.

The spiral grooves cut into a rifle barrel leave raised ridges between them, which are known by what name?

Lands press into the bullet and engrave it on its way up the barrel, leaving marks distinctive enough for forensic examiners to compare. A barrel's calibre can be measured across them or across the grooves.

Guncotton, the basis of smokeless powder, is made by treating cotton with sulfuric acid and which other acid?

Nitric acid turns cotton's cellulose into nitrocellulose. Chemist Christian Schönbein found a practical recipe around 1846, in a tale that has a spill mopped up with a cotton apron that later went up in a flash.

Which Massachusetts city's federal armory, founded as an arsenal in 1777, made US military rifles until 1968?

Springfield's armory was the target of Shays' Rebellion in 1787, when indebted farmers tried to seize its weapons. Generations of American service muskets and rifles later carried the city's name.

Lever-action rifles are worked by swinging down a loop that usually forms part of which component?

The trigger guard doubles as the operating handle: pivoting it forward and back throws out the spent case, feeds a fresh round and cocks the hammer, all without lowering the rifle.

Which submachine gun became an icon when SAS troopers stormed London's Iranian Embassy in 1980?

MP5s fitted with torches were carried by the troopers who assaulted the building and rescued the hostages. The six-day siege made both the gun and the regiment world famous.

'This is my rifle, there are many like it, but this one is mine' opens the creed of which US military branch?

The Marine Corps creed was written by William Rupertus, one of its generals, soon after Pearl Harbor, to teach recruits that a rifle was all that stood between them and death. It first ran in a base newspaper in 1942.