Weapon Type
Firearms
Gunpowder-propelled projectile weapons.
Firearms
Category Overview
Overview
Firearms use the rapid combustion of a propellant charge to propel a projectile at high velocity. Developed from Chinese gunpowder inventions and refined by European armorers from the 14th century onward, firearms progressively displaced every previous weapon type and have dominated land, sea, and air warfare for four centuries.
Development Timeline
| Era | Mechanism | Key Weapons | |-----|-----------|-------------| | 1300s–1400s | Hand cannon, matchlock | Arquebus, early musket | | 1500s–1600s | Matchlock, wheel lock | Musket, pistol | | 1600s–1700s | Flintlock | Brown Bess, Charleville, dueling pistol | | 1800s | Percussion cap, cartridge | Colt revolver, Springfield, Minié ball | | 1860s–1890s | Metallic cartridge, bolt action | Winchester, Mauser, Remington | | 1900s | Semi-auto, full-auto | Browning, Luger, Thompson, M1 Garand | | 1940s onward | Intermediate cartridge | AK-47, M16, assault rifle era |
Major Subcategories
- Muskets — Flintlock and percussion smoothbore long arms; the dominant military firearm 1600–1860. See: Muskets.
- Rifles — Rifled long arms; accurate to 300+ meters; the dominant infantry weapon from the American Civil War onward. See: Rifles.
- Pistols & Revolvers — Short-barreled handguns; cavalry, officer, and concealed-carry weapons. See: Pistols & Revolvers.
- Carbines — Shorter rifles for cavalry and vehicle crews. See: Carbines.
- Shotguns — Smoothbore long arms firing multiple pellets; close-range; trench warfare and police use. See: Shotguns.
- Submachine Guns — Short-barreled, pistol-caliber automatic weapons; close-quarters warfare. See: Submachine Guns.
- Machine Guns — Automatic weapons firing rifle caliber ammunition; the defining weapon of WWI and WWII. See: Machine Guns.
This article is a stub. Contributions covering specific firearms, mechanisms, and historical development are welcome.
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AK-47
The AK-47 is the most produced firearm in human history: Mikhail Kalashnikov's gas-operated assault rifle in 7.62x39mm, built around loose tolerances, a long-stroke piston, and an almost contemptuous indifference to mud, sand, ice, and neglect. Adopted by the Soviet Army in the late 1940s and manufactured with its descendants in the tens of millions, it armed the Warsaw Pact, both sides of dozens of insurgencies, and became a literal flag emblem — the weapon as twentieth-century geopolitics.
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Blunderbuss
The blunderbuss was a short-barreled, muzzle-loading firearm primarily used for close-range defense. Its name derives from the Dutch "donderbus," meaning "thunder pipe" or "thunder gun,"
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Brown Bess Musket
Brown Bess is the affectionate name for the British Land Pattern flintlock musket, the longest-serving firearm in British history. A .75 caliber smoothbore built around utter reliability of drill rather than precision of fire, it armed the redcoat through the conquest of empire, both sides of the American Revolution, and every field of the Napoleonic Wars from Corunna to Waterloo — well over a century of pattern service, several million produced, on every continent where Britain fought.
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Colt Single Action Army
The Colt Single Action Army of 1873 — the Peacemaker — is the revolver of the American West. Adopted by the U.S. Army in .45 Colt and sold across the frontier in dozens of calibers and barrel lengths, it combined a simple, strong single-action lockwork with the new self-contained metallic cartridge. Soldiers, lawmen, cowboys, and outlaws alike carried it, and its silhouette became — and remains — the visual shorthand for an entire era of American history.
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HK MP5
HK MP5 Submachine Gun
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HK MP7
Latest generation PDW from HK
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Hand Cannon
The hand cannon is the first true firearm: a small bronze or iron barrel on a pole or stock, loaded with powder and ball and touched off by hand with a hot wire or smoldering match. Born in thirteenth-century China and reaching Europe by the early fourteenth, it was crude, slow, and inaccurate — and it began the gunpowder revolution that would retire the knight, the castle, and eventually every weapon that came before it.
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Lee-Enfield Rifle
The Lee-Enfield was the British Empire's rifle for over half a century: a bolt-action .303 whose rear-locking action and ten-round magazine made it the fastest-cycling military bolt gun ever issued. The trained rapid fire of the BEF at Mons in 1914 was mistaken by the Germans for massed machine guns, and the rifle served from the Boer War's lessons through both World Wars into the 1950s, with well over ten million produced across the Empire.
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Luger P08
The Luger P08 is the toggle-locked semi-automatic pistol of the German military through both World Wars, and for many the most recognizable handgun ever made. Georg Luger refined Hugo Borchardt's clockwork toggle action into an elegant, naturally pointing service pistol and, in 1902, necked his cartridge up to create the 9mm Parabellum — today the most widely used pistol round on earth. The pistol itself has been retired for generations; the cartridge it introduced rules the world's holsters still.
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M1 Garand
The M1 Garand was the first semi-automatic rifle adopted as the standard arm of any major power, giving the American infantryman of the Second World War a decisive firepower edge over every bolt-action rival. Gas-operated, chambered in .30-06, and fed by an eight-round en-bloc clip, it fired as fast as a man could aim. Patton's verdict — 'the greatest battle implement ever devised' — has headed every account of the rifle since he wrote it in 1945.
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M16 Rifle
The M16 brought the assault rifle to the West: Eugene Stoner's AR-15 design in 5.56mm, built of aluminum forgings and polymer around a direct-gas action, light enough to carry all day and controllable in automatic fire. Its Vietnam introduction was marred by a self-inflicted reliability scandal, but the matured M16A1 recovered completely and became the enduring pattern for more than more than fifty continuous years of American service rifles — today's standard-issue M4 carbine is its direct descendant.
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M1911 Pistol
The M1911 is John Browning's masterpiece: a short-recoil, single-action semi-automatic in .45 ACP that served as the standard American sidearm for an unmatched 74 years, from 1911 to 1985. Born of the Army's demand for real stopping power after the Philippine campaigns, it fought in both World Wars, Korea, and Vietnam, and its tilting-barrel action remains, unchanged in essentials, the mechanical basis of nearly all of the serious combat pistols still being designed and manufactured anywhere in the world today.
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M24 Sniper Weapon System
The M24 Sniper Weapon System (SWS), based on the commercial Remington Model 700 action, is a bolt-action sniper rifle adopted by the United States Army in 1988 as its standard sniper rifle.
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M3 Grease Gun
The M3 'Grease Gun' was America's Sten: a .45 caliber submachine gun of stamped steel and welded seams, designed in 1942 to replace the superb but slow-and-costly Thompson with something a car plant could stamp out by the hundred thousand. Ugly, slow-firing, and utterly practical, it armed tankers and GIs from Normandy to Korea and Vietnam — and stayed in U.S. armored vehicles until the 1990s, outliving the Thompson it replaced by half a century.
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MP40
The MP40 was Germany's war-production submachine gun: 9mm Parabellum from an open bolt, a plain tube receiver of stampings and welds, no wood anywhere, and the first folding stock ever standard on a service long arm. Issued to squad leaders, paratroopers, and vehicle crews rather than whole units, its controllable 500-rounds-per-minute cyclic rate and modern manufacture made it one of the most influential small arms of the Second World War — and, wrongly, 'the Schmeisser' to every Allied soldier who met one.
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Martini-Henry Rifle
The Martini-Henry was Britain's first purpose-built breechloading service rifle: a falling-block single-shot in .577/450, dropping its breech at the flick of an under-lever to take a fat rolled-brass cartridge. It armed the high-noon Victorian empire — Zulu War, Afghan campaigns, Egypt and Sudan — and its thunderous stopping power and rapid, steady single shots through the long night at Rorke's Drift made it one of the most storied and most collected military rifles of the entire colonial age.
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Matchlock Musket
The matchlock was the first firearm a soldier could aim and fire without taking his eyes off the enemy: a serpentine lever lowered a smoldering match-cord into the priming pan on the pull of a trigger. From the arquebuses of the Italian Wars to the heavy Spanish musket that stopped armored cavalry, matchlock weapons ended the reign of armor and bow alike, and carried gunpowder infantry from novelty to the center of every European, Ottoman, and Asian battlefield.
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Mauser Gewehr 98
The Gewehr 98 is the definitive Mauser: the 1898 pattern bolt-action whose controlled-round feed, dual front locking lugs, and massive claw extractor made it the strongest and most copied rifle action ever designed. It armed the German Empire through the First World War, evolved into the Karabiner 98k of the Second, and sired the sporting and military bolt rifles of half the world — the pattern against which every bolt action since has been measured.
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Remington Model 1875
The Remington Model 1875 was Remington's answer to the Colt Peacemaker: a big single-action Army revolver in .44 and .45 calibers, built on the frame lineage of the company's famous percussion Armys and instantly known by the distinctive web of metal under its ejector housing. It lost the Army contract race to Colt but armed frontier lawmen, outlaws — Frank James carried one — and foreign contracts, and it stands today as the great 'other' sixgun of the Old West.
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Springfield Model 1861
The Springfield Model 1861 was the standard infantry arm of the Union in the Civil War: a .58 caliber single-shot muzzleloading rifle-musket firing the hollow-based Minié ball, accurate to ranges no smoothbore approached. Over a million were produced by Springfield Armory and contractors, and its combination — old muzzleloading manual of arms, new rifled accuracy of the Minié revolution — is written in the war's terrible casualty lists that run from Antietam and Fredericksburg to Cold Harbor.
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StG 44
The StG 44 — Sturmgewehr, 'storm rifle' — was the first true assault rifle: select-fire, stamped-steel, and chambered for the intermediate 7.92x33mm Kurz cartridge that split the difference between pistol and full rifle power. Fielded by Germany from 1943 despite Hitler's early obstruction, it gave a single infantryman controllable automatic fire to 300 meters, and every assault rifle adopted since — the Kalashnikov first and most famously among them — walks the doctrinal path it opened.
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Sten Gun
The Sten was Britain's emergency submachine gun: a 9mm open-bolt weapon of stampings, tube, and spot welds that cost a few pounds and a few man-hours when invasion loomed and Thompsons cost dollars Britain didn't have. Over four million were made; it armed Tommies, paratroopers, and half the resistance movements of occupied Europe, and its crude pipework looks bred a soldier's contempt that its long and remarkably global battlefield record — from Normandy to Burma to the maquis — largely refuted.
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Thompson Submachine Gun
The Thompson was America's first submachine gun: a .45 ACP automatic designed as a trench broom for a war that ended before it shipped. Instead it found infamy in Prohibition Chicago, fame in Marine hands in the banana wars, and vindication by the million in the Second World War, where simplified M1 versions armed sergeants, raiders, and paratroopers of every Allied nation. No firearm carries a bigger spread of reputations — gangster icon and GI workhorse in one.
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Wheellock Pistol
The wheellock was the first self-igniting firearm: a spring-driven steel wheel spun against pyrite to shower sparks into the pan, no burning match required. That mechanical trick — clockmaker's work, plausibly connected to Leonardo's sketches — made the pistol possible: a gun that could wait, loaded and ready, in a holster or a coat. It armed the first pistol cavalry, provoked the first firearm bans, and produced some of the most lavish objects of the Renaissance.
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Winchester Model 1866
The Winchester Model 1866 — the Yellow Boy, for its gleaming brass receiver — was the first rifle to carry the Winchester name: the Civil War Henry improved with a wooden forearm and Nelson King's loading gate, which together turned a fragile war rifle into the frontier's first practical repeater. It armed settlers, Native warriors, and foreign armies from the Bozeman Trail to the Ottoman trenches at Plevna, and it founded the lever-action dynasty that followed.
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Winchester Model 1873
The Winchester Model 1873 is the archetypal lever-action of the American West: an iron-then-steel-framed repeater feeding centerfire .44-40 cartridges from a tube magazine as fast as a hand could work the lever. Sharing its ammunition with the Colt revolver on the same belt, produced in the hundreds of thousands as rifle, carbine, and musket, it armed ranchers, railroads, lawmen, and outlaws alike and earned the marketing title history decided to keep: the gun that won the West.
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Winchester Model 1892
The Winchester Model 1892 was John Browning's compact masterpiece of the lever-action line: the pistol-caliber Winchester rebuilt around his locking-block action, slimmer, stronger, and faster than the toggle-link 1873 it replaced. Over a million were made for the world's saddle scabbards and trap lines — and Hollywood made it immortal, putting the '92 in nearly every Western ever filmed, usually standing in for rifles a generation older than itself — the public's image of the frontier repeater is, anachronistically, mostly this gun.