46 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.