Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The BAR made its successful combat debut in World War I, and approximately 50,000 were made before the war came to an end. [ 15 ] [ 16 ] The BAR arose from the concept of " walking fire ", an idea urged upon the Americans by the French who used the Chauchat light machine gun to fulfill that role. [ 15 ]
The Maxim gun is a recoil-operated machine gun invented in 1884 by Hiram Stevens Maxim.It was the first fully automatic machine gun in the world. [15]The Maxim gun has been called "the weapon most associated with imperial conquest" by historian Martin Gilbert, [16] and was heavily used by colonial powers during the "Scramble for Africa".
Hand cannon, Ming dynasty, 1379 The first firearms were invented in China, following the invention of gunpowder.The earliest known depiction of a gunpowder weapon is the illustration of a fire lance on a mid-10th century silk banner from Dunhuang. [2]
In the United States, taxes and strict regulations affect the manufacture and sale of fully automatic firearms under the National Firearms Act of 1934 and the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986; the latter act banned civilian machine gun ownership, grandfathering in existing legally owned weapons. As legally owned weapons were registered ...
This amounts to "120.5 firearms for every 100 residents." [ 3 ] The world's armed forces control about 133 million (about 13 percent) of the global total of small arms, of which over 43 percent belong to two countries, the Russian Federation (30.3 million) and the People's Republic of China (27.5 million). [ 2 ]
The heavy machine gun is a term originating in World War I to describe heavyweight medium machine guns and persisted into World War II with Japanese Hotchkiss M1914 clones; today, however, it is used to refer to automatic weapons with a caliber of at least 12.7 mm (0.5 in), [3] but less than 20 mm (0.8 in). A general-purpose machine gun is ...
Only 55 were produced by the time of the Polish Defensive War. However it was in the air war that these weapons played their most important part in the conflict. During the First World War, rifle-calibre machine guns became the standard weapons of military aircraft. In the Second, several factors brought about their replacement by autocannon.
The Colt AR-15, a type of semi-automatic rifle. A semi-automatic firearm, also called a self-loading or autoloading firearm (fully automatic and selective fire firearms are also variations on self-loading firearms), is a repeating firearm whose action mechanism automatically loads a following round of cartridge into the chamber and prepares it for subsequent firing, but requires the shooter to ...