Firearm
A firearm is any type of gun that shoots projectiles using high explosive pressure, generated from the burning of a chemical propellant. The principle sounds simple. The journey behind it stretches across a thousand years and three continents. In 10th-century Song dynasty China, soldiers took bamboo tubes packed with gunpowder and pellets and lashed them to their spears. A single person could carry and fire one. This portable weapon was called the fire lance. It saw use as a shock weapon at the siege of De'an in 1132. From that bamboo tube to a weapon accurate beyond 2000 meters, the firearm evolved through metal barrels, hinged actions, self-sealing cartridges, and mass production. How did a flame-throwing spear become a precision instrument? Why does one word, firearm, cover everything from a pocket-sized derringer to a belt-fed machine gun? And how did a Chinese invention spread to every armed force on Earth?
The fire lance of 10th-century China was not a gun at all. It was an addition to a soldier's spear, a paper or bamboo barrel filled with incendiary gunpowder that could be lit once to project flames at the enemy. Sometimes troops dropped small projectiles into the barrel, though most of the explosive force went into the flame. Later the barrel was rebuilt in metal so that more powerful gunpowder could drive projectiles harder.
In the 13th century, Chinese smiths replaced those barrels with metal tubes and produced the hand cannon, or huochong. The proportion of saltpeter in the gunpowder rose to enhance explosive force. Loose shrapnel gave way to solid projectiles sized to fit the bore closely. A fuse at the rear was lit to ignite the powder and propel the shot, initially lead, later cast iron. The weapon was tremendously powerful but erratic. The gunner could barely aim, and inconsistent powder and ill-fitting shot produced wild inaccuracy.
An early depiction of such a weapon survives as a 12th-century sculpture from a cave in Sichuan, China, showing a figure carrying a vase-shaped bombard with flames and a cannonball bursting from it. The oldest gun that survives intact is the Heilongjiang hand cannon, a bronze piece dating to 1288. It was found in the Acheng District of Heilongjiang. The History of Yuan records that a Jurchen commander named Li Ting led soldiers armed with hand cannons that year to put down a rebellion.
The Arabs and Mamluks had firearms in the late 13th century, and Europeans obtained them in the 14th, as the technology gradually moved across Eurasia. The Koreans adopted firearms from the Chinese in the 14th century. The Iranians, first the Aq Qoyunlu and Safavids, and the Indians, first the Mughals, all acquired them no later than the 15th century, from the Ottoman Turks.
The people of the Nusantara archipelago of Southeast Asia used the long arquebus at least by the last quarter of the 15th century. The pole gun, the bedil tombak, had been recorded in use by Java as early as 1413, but true firearms came later, brought by Islamic nations of West Asia, most probably the Arabs, no earlier than 1460. Before the Portuguese arrived, the natives already held a weapon of their own, the Java arquebus.
Starting in 1513, German-Bohemian gun-making merged with Turkish traditions to form the Indo-Portuguese tradition of matchlocks. Indian craftsmen reshaped the design with a very short, almost pistol-like buttstock held against the cheek rather than the shoulder, and reduced the caliber for a lighter, more balanced gun. The Portuguese, who fought aboard ships and river craft, prized the compact result. Malaccan gunfounders, ranked alongside those of Germany, adapted these arms into a new arquebus called the istinggar. The Japanese did not acquire firearms until the 16th century, and then from the Portuguese rather than the Chinese.
Matchlocks were the first and simplest firing mechanisms. Powder in the barrel was ignited by a piece of burning cord, the match, wedged into an S-shaped piece of steel. Pulling the trigger, often a lever, brought the match down into a touch hole holding a small charge of powder. The match did not misfire, a real advantage. But rain could put it out, and its glow, sound, and smell betrayed a soldier's position. Asian pistols used matchlocks up through the 17th century.
The wheellock came next, supposedly invented by Leonardo da Vinci, who lived from 1452 to 1519. A small wheel, like that on a cigarette lighter, was wound with a key, then spun against flint when the trigger was pulled, throwing sparks into the powder. It removed the danger of a smoldering match near loose gunpowder. The clockwork mechanism cost so much that the wheellock never spread widely.
The flintlock used a sharpened flint clamped in the jaws of a cock, which struck a steel frizzen to make sparks. The spring-loaded arm earned the name cock for its resemblance to a rooster. It served widely through the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries in muskets and rifles. Then came the percussion cap, in wide service by the early 19th century. A self-contained charge sat in a small brass cap fastened to a nipple and struck by a hollow hammer. The touch hole was finally sealed from the weather, making the mechanism safer, more weatherproof, and far more reliable.
Frenchman Louis-Nicolas Flobert invented the first rimfire metallic cartridge in 1845, a percussion cap with a bullet attached to the top. He built parlor guns for it, rifles and pistols meant for indoor shooting parlors in large homes. The 6mm Flobert cartridge carries no powder at all, only the percussion cap as propellant, and reaches a low muzzle velocity of around 700 feet per second. In English-speaking countries it corresponds to .22 BB Cap and .22 CB Cap ammunition.
The brass cartridge united bullet, gunpowder, and primer in one weatherproof package. Its great technical advantage was sealing. Gas pressure forces the brass case to expand outward against the chamber wall, preventing hot gas from leaking back toward the shooter. Earlier, a cartridge was just a pre-measured charge of powder and a ball in a cloth bag or paper cylinder, rammed down a muzzleloader's barrel.
The primer charge sits at the base of the cartridge, either within the rim for a rimfire round or in a central cap for a centerfire round. Centerfire cartridges are generally more powerful, running at higher pressures, and safer too. A dropped rimfire cartridge can discharge if its rim strikes the ground hard enough, a risk nearly impossible with most centerfire rounds.
Most early firearms were muzzle-loading, a slow process that forced the shooter to point the weapon upright, pour powder down the muzzle, and ram the projectile home, all while exposed to enemy fire. As breech-sealing methods and weatherproof metallic cartridges matured, muzzleloaders gave way to single-shot breech loaders, and then to repeaters.
The most revolutionary weapons of this period appeared during the U.S. Civil War of 1861 to 1865, the Spencer and Henry repeating rifles. Both used fixed tubular magazines, the Spencer's in the buttstock and the Henry's under the barrel, which allowed a larger capacity. Internal magazines remained common from the late 19th century through the 1950s, in arms such as the Mosin-Nagant, the Mauser Kar 98k, the Springfield M1903, the M1 Garand, and the SKS. They were loaded in place, often with a stripper clip, a device that transfers cartridges into the magazine by holding them at the rim of the case.
The terms magazine and clip are often confused. A magazine stores ammunition and feeds it into the breech. A clip merely helps reload the magazine, as with revolver speedloaders, the stripper clip used on the Lee-Enfield, and the en-bloc clip used in the M1 Garand. Belt-fed weapons such as the M240, the M249, the M134 Minigun, and the PK machine gun feed cartridges from a belt, originally canvas or cloth but later built from permanently connected metal links to resist oil and solvents.
A handgun, defined in many gun laws as a firearm usable with a single hand, is the smallest of all firearms. It comes in two broad types, pistols with a single fixed firing chamber loaded from magazines, and revolvers with several charge holes in a revolving cylinder. The derringer is a third category, a small pocket-sized handgun that is neither a traditional pistol nor a revolver, with one or two barrels and no repeating mechanism.
A rifle is a long gun with spiral grooves, riflings, machined into the bore to spin the bullet for accuracy. A descendant of the musket, it strikes a single point of impact at long range. Shotguns instead use a predominantly smoothbore barrel to fire many shot pellets, ranging from 2 mm number 9 birdshot to 8.4 mm double-aught buckshot, and so spread their impacts. The assault rifle, a selective-fire weapon chambered in an intermediate cartridge with a detachable magazine, originated with the StG 44 built by Nazi Germany during World War II.
Firearms scale up from there. Submachine guns are magazine-fed carbines chambered in handgun cartridges, ideal for close quarters and cheap to mass-produce. Machine guns deliver sustained automatic fire and split into light, medium, and heavy types by weight and feed. Purpose-built sniper rifles and anti-materiel rifles reach beyond 2000 meters, the latter chambered between 12.7 mm and 14.5 mm to destroy vehicles and hardware.
Developments in firearms accelerated through the 19th and 20th centuries, and breech-loading became a near-universal standard, with exceptions such as mortars. Magazines holding multiple rounds replaced loading individual cartridges, speeding reloads. Automatic and semi-automatic mechanisms let one soldier fire more rounds in a minute than a vintage weapon could fire in an entire battle. Polymers and alloys made weapons steadily lighter.
Velocities climbed when bullets gained a jacket of copper or copper alloy over a lead core, helping the bullet glide down the barrel. These full metal jacket rounds are less likely to fragment, tend to pass through a target, and impart less tissue damage than expanding unjacketed bullets. Countries adhering to the Hague Convention of 1899 adopted them for military use.
The modern trigger-actuated machine gun arrived around the First World War of 1914 to 1918, with the German Spandau adopted in 1908 and the British Lewis gun in service from 1914. More than any single factor, mass production let manufacturers turn out vast quantities of weapons to a consistent standard. Yet the basic principle has not changed. A musket of several centuries ago still works like a modern rifle, using expanding gases to drive a projectile, only less accurately and far more slowly. As recently as 2026, the number of civilian-held firearms in the United States was estimated at as much as 500 million.
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Common questions
What is a firearm and how does it work?
A firearm is any type of gun that shoots projectiles using high explosive pressure generated from the combustion, or deflagration, of a chemical propellant. That propellant is most often black powder in antique firearms and smokeless powder in modern ones. The expanding high-pressure gas drives one or more projectiles down the barrel.
Where and when were the first firearms invented?
The first firearms originated in 10th-century Song dynasty China. Soldiers mounted bamboo tubes containing gunpowder and pellet projectiles onto spears to create the portable fire lance. It was used as a shock weapon in the siege of De'an in 1132.
What is the oldest surviving firearm?
The oldest surviving gun is the Heilongjiang hand cannon, a bronze hand cannon dating to 1288. It was found in the Acheng District of Heilongjiang, China. It had a 17.5 cm barrel of 2.5 cm diameter, measured 34 cm long, and weighed 3.54 kg without its wooden handle.
What is the difference between a handgun and a long gun?
A handgun is a firearm that can be used with a single hand and is the smallest of all firearms, common as a sidearm or concealed carry weapon. A long gun has a notably long barrel, typically 10 to 30 inches, and is designed to be held and fired with both hands while braced against the shoulder.
How many firearms are there in the world?
The Small Arms Survey reported over one billion firearms distributed globally, of which 857 million, about 85 percent, were in civilian hands. U.S. civilians alone account for 393 million, about 46 percent of the worldwide civilian-held total. The world's armed forces control about 133 million, and law enforcement agencies about 23 million.
What is the difference between an assault rifle and a battle rifle?
An assault rifle is a selective-fire rifle chambered in an intermediate cartridge such as 5.56x45mm NATO or 7.62x39mm and fed with a detachable magazine, originating with the StG 44 in World War II. A battle rifle is larger or longer and is chambered in a full-power cartridge such as 7.62x51mm NATO, examples including the M1 Garand and M14.
What were the main firearm firing mechanisms before modern guns?
The earliest mechanism was the matchlock, which ignited powder with a burning cord. It was followed by the wheellock, supposedly invented by Leonardo da Vinci, then the flintlock, which struck flint against a frizzen, and finally the percussion cap or caplock, which came into wide service in the early 19th century.