48 Fun Facts About Firearms

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

China: fire lances, bamboo tubes packed with gunpowder and lashed to spears, were used at the siege of De'an in 1132 during the Song dynasty; metal-barrelled hand cannons followed in the 13th century.

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

Potassium nitrate (saltpetre) supplies the oxygen, letting the sulfur and charcoal burn without air; black powder is classed as a low explosive because it deflagrates at subsonic speed rather than detonating.

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.

A wheellock, developed around 1500, made its spark by spinning a steel wheel against a piece of what?

Pyrite: a spring-driven serrated wheel spun against a lump of iron pyrite held in the dog's jaws, showering sparks into the pan; it was the first self-igniting firearm but too costly and complex for most soldiers.

A percussion cap contains a small amount of which shock-sensitive explosive?

Mercury fulminate, discovered by Edward Howard in 1800, is the shock-sensitive priming compound; the hammer crushes the copper cap against a hollow nipple that acts as an anvil, firing the main charge in any weather.

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

Mauser's Gewehr 98, adopted in 1898, used a controlled-feed bolt action with a five-round internal magazine; its design was copied in rifles from the US Springfield M1903 to the Czech vz. 24.

What is a gun barrel without rifling grooves called?

Smoothbore describes a barrel with no rifling, as in muskets and most shotguns; without spiral grooves to spin the projectile, accuracy fell off sharply beyond short range.

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

Samuel Colt patented his revolving-cylinder design in February 1836 and opened a factory in Paterson, New Jersey; the business took off in 1847 with a government order for 1,000 Walker revolvers for the Mexican-American War.

The Colt Single Action Army revolver, standard US Army issue from 1873 to 1892, is famous under what nickname?

The Peacemaker was the civilian name Colt used for the Single Action Army; adopted by the US Army in 1873, it has been offered in more than 30 calibres over a production run that was revived twice.

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

The Winchester Model 1866 'Yellow Boy' was a direct improvement on the Henry, adding a loading gate and wooden forearm; Henrys themselves were carried by some Sioux and Cheyenne warriors at the Little Bighorn in 1876.

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

The British Army's Land Pattern Musket, nicknamed Brown Bess, served as its standard infantry arm from the 1720s until the 1830s; a .75-calibre flintlock, it was carried at Culloden, Bunker Hill and Waterloo.

Smith & Wesson's earlier Volcanic Repeating Arms was sold to which man, whose name became a rifle brand?

Oliver Winchester, a New Haven shirt manufacturer and investor, bought the assets of the bankrupt Volcanic Repeating Arms in 1857 and reorganised it as the New Haven Arms Company, which later bore his own name.

The Gatling gun, an early hand-cranked machine gun, was invented in 1861 by a man from which US state?

North Carolina: Richard Jordan Gatling was born in Hertford County in 1818 and patented the gun in 1862 while living in Indianapolis; its rotating barrels solved overheating, but the Union Army used it only occasionally.

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

The Maxim gun, patented by Hiram Maxim in 1884, harnessed the energy of each shot to eject the spent case and chamber the next round, firing about 600 rounds a minute; colonial armies used it ruthlessly across Africa.

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

Square bullets, which James Puckle's patent claimed would convince the Turks of the benefits of Christian civilisation; the flintlock revolver-cannon was called a 'machine gun' in a 1722 shipping manifest, and perhaps only two were made.

The M1911 pistol was the standard-issue US military sidearm from 1911 until which year?

1985 was when the US armed forces adopted the 9mm M9 as the new standard sidearm, ending 74 years of the M1911; John Browning's design has changed remarkably little across more than a century of production.

The M1911 is chambered primarily for which cartridge?

.45 ACP, the Automatic Colt Pistol round Browning designed for it in 1905; the Army adopted the pistol in 1911 after trials to replace the .38 revolvers whose stopping power had disappointed in the Philippines.

How many firearm patents was John Browning awarded in his life?

128 firearm patents: Browning built his first gun at 13 in his father's Ogden, Utah, shop and received his first patent, for a single-shot rifle, in 1879 at age 24; his designs include the M1911 and the Auto-5 shotgun.

The Thompson submachine gun was invented in 1918 by an officer of which rank?

Brigadier General John T. Thompson, who retired from the Army in 1918, meant his 'trench broom' to break the stalemate of the trenches; it arrived too late for the war and found fame with Prohibition-era gangsters instead.

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

The FBI: after four officers and their prisoner were killed in the June 1933 Kansas City massacre, Congress armed federal agents and the Bureau adopted the Thompson, which had been sold openly to civilians in the 1920s.

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

George S. Patton wrote the line in a January 1945 letter to the Army's Ordnance Department; the Garand, adopted in 1936 to replace the bolt-action Springfield, was America's first standard-issue autoloading rifle.

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

Canada: Jean Cantius Garand was born in St. Rémi, Quebec, in 1888 and moved to Connecticut as a boy; he spent his career at the Springfield Armory, where he designed the M1 in the 1930s.

The Lee-Enfield was the standard British service rifle from 1895 until which year?

1957, when the L1A1 self-loading rifle replaced it; the Lee-Enfield's ten-round magazine of .303 British could be loaded with five-round chargers, and it armed the Empire through both world wars.

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

The Soviet Union adopted the AK-47 in 1949 after Mikhail Kalashnikov's design, begun in 1945, won the army's assault-rifle trials; tens of millions were made at Izhevsk and under licence across the Eastern bloc.

As of 2004, roughly what share of the world's 500 million firearms belonged to the Kalashnikov family?

About one fifth: of the estimated 500 million firearms in the world in 2004, roughly 100 million were Kalashnikov-pattern rifles, and about three-quarters of those were AK-47s, prized for reliability in harsh conditions and low cost.

The AK-47 fires which cartridge?

7.62×39mm, the intermediate M43 cartridge the Soviets developed in 1943 as a lighter round than the full-power 7.62×54mmR; the AK's American rival, the M16, fires the smaller 5.56×45mm.

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

Eugene Stoner designed the AR-15 at ArmaLite in the mid-1950s, with an aluminium receiver and a direct-gas system; the M16A1 derived from it replaced the M14 as the US standard service rifle in 1969.

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

Israel: Major Uziel Gal of the new Israel Defense Forces began the design in 1948; it was adopted in 1951, entered service in 1954 and went on to be exported to over 90 countries.

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

A polymer frame: the Glock 17's nylon-based polymer grip frame drew ridicule as a 'plastic gun' and airport-security fears, though the slide and barrel are steel; its Safe Action trigger uses three internal safeties instead of a manual one.

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: Ian Fleming switched Bond from his small Italian .25 automatic to the 7.65mm PPK in Dr. No (1958) on the advice of firearms expert Geoffrey Boothroyd, and the films kept it from 1962 onward.

The Desert Eagle chambers which cartridge, the largest centrefire round of any magazine-fed self-loading pistol?

.50 Action Express, developed in 1988 for the Desert Eagle; the pistol, designed by Magnum Research, uses a gas-operated, rotating-bolt action closer to a rifle's than a typical pistol's, which is what lets it handle such a round.

The word 'derringer' is a misspelling that spread during reporting of which event?

The Lincoln assassination of April 1865: John Wilkes Booth fired a single-shot Philadelphia Deringer, and newspaper coverage spread the double-r spelling that became the generic word; Henry Deringer's firm built about 15,000 of the pistols.

Which two shotgun gauges are by far the most common?

12 and 20 gauge account for the great majority of shotguns sold; gauge is an old measure, the number of lead balls of bore diameter that weigh a pound, so a 12-gauge bore is about 0.73 inches.

Which French gunsmith introduced the self-contained breech-loading cartridge in 1835?

Casimir Lefaucheux patented the pinfire cartridge in 1835: a cardboard-and-brass case with a pin that struck its internal primer when hit by the hammer, an ancestor of the metallic cartridges that ended the muzzle-loading era.

In which year was the Second Amendment to the US Constitution ratified?

1791: the Second Amendment was ratified on 15 December 1791 as one of the ten articles that make up the Bill of Rights, drafted by James Madison and proposed by the First Congress in 1789.

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

District of Columbia v. Heller, decided 5-4 in June 2008 with Justice Scalia writing, struck down the District's handgun ban and recognised an individual right to keep a handgun at home for self-defence.

The first confirmed reference to gunpowder appears in Chinese texts of which era?

The 800s: a Taoist alchemical text of the mid-9th century, the Zhenyuan miaodao yaolüe, warns that a certain mixture had burned alchemists' hands and even the house they worked in; they had been seeking an elixir of life.

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

The serpentine, an S-shaped lever, held the burning match cord; pulling the trigger dropped the match into the flash pan, and the flash travelled through the touch hole to the main charge.

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

Pennsylvania: German and Swiss immigrant gunsmiths around Lancaster developed the long rifle in the early 1700s, and it picked up the Kentucky name after frontiersmen carried it west and into the Battle of New Orleans.

The Maxim gun harnessed which force to eject each spent cartridge and load the next?

Recoil: Hiram Maxim's 1884 design let the barrel and bolt recoil together for a short distance, using that energy to extract the spent case, cock the action and chamber the next round; descendants include the Vickers and the MG 08.

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

Inside the pistol grip: the telescoping bolt wraps around the rear of the barrel, letting the magazine well sit in the grip and keeping the weapon short; the gun reached army special forces in 1954.

Which Chinese province yielded a bronze hand cannon dated to 1288, among the oldest surviving guns?

Heilongjiang: the bronze hand cannon was unearthed in Acheng District in 1970 and is dated to about 1288, when the History of Yuan records a Jurchen commander's troops using hand cannons to put down a rebellion there.

The word 'arquebus' derives from a Dutch word meaning what?

Hook gun: Dutch haakbus (German Hakenbüchse) named the hook under the barrel that braced early pieces against a wall or rest to absorb kickback; a stock and matchlock later made them handheld.

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

Italy: Lee Harvey Oswald's mail-order rifle was a 6.5mm Carcano Model 91/38, an Italian military bolt-action, bought 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, the German Sturmgewehr ('storm rifle') fielded from 1944, fired the intermediate 7.92×33mm Kurz round from a 30-round detachable magazine in semi- or full-automatic fire, a template later assault rifles followed.

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

In front of the breech: a bullpup puts the action and magazine behind the trigger and grip, inside the butt, so the overall weapon is shorter without shortening the barrel; the Steyr AUG and the FAMAS are examples.

A 12th-century cave sculpture in which Chinese province is an early depiction of a firearm?

Sichuan: among the Dazu Rock Carvings, in an area administered as Chongqing since 1997, a figure dated to about 1128 carries a vase-shaped bombard with flames and a cannonball emerging from it.