M1911 pistolThe M1911 (Colt 1911 or Colt Government) is a single-action, recoil-operated, semi-automatic pistol chambered for the .45 ACP cartridge. The pistol's formal U.S. military designation as of 1940 was Automatic Pistol, Caliber .45, M1911 for the original model adopted in March 1911, and Automatic Pistol, Caliber .45, M1911A1 for the improved M1911A1 model which entered service in 1926. The designation changed to Pistol, Caliber .45, Automatic, M1911A1 in the Vietnam War era.
GlockGlock (stylized as GLOCK) is a brand of polymer-framed, short recoil-operated, locked-breech semi-automatic pistols designed and produced by Austrian manufacturer Glock Ges.m.b.H. The firearm entered Austrian military and police service by 1982 after becoming the top performer in reliability and safety tests. Glock pistols have become the company's most profitable line of products, and have been supplied to national armed forces, security agencies, and police forces in at least 48 countries.
MauserMauser, originally Königlich Württembergische Gewehrfabrik ("Royal Württemberg Rifle Factory"), is a German arms manufacturer. Their line of bolt-action rifles and semi-automatic pistols has been produced since the 1870s for the German armed forces. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Mauser designs were also exported and licensed to many countries which adopted them as military and civilian sporting firearms. The Gewehr 98 in particular was widely adopted and copied, and is the foundation of many of today's sporting bolt-action rifles.
Primer (firearms)In firearms and artillery, the primer (ˈpraɪmər) is the chemical and/or device responsible for initiating the propellant combustion that will propel the projectiles out of the gun barrel. In early black powder guns such as muzzleloaders, the primer was essentially the same chemical as the main propellant (albeit usually in a finer-powdered form), but poured into an external flash pan, where it could be ignited by an ignition source such as a slow match or a flintlock, though some muzzleloaders have primers like cap gun caps.
Machine gunA machine gun is a fully automatic, rifled auto-loading firearm designed for sustained direct fire with rifle cartridges. Other automatic firearms such as automatic shotguns and automatic rifles (including assault rifles and battle rifles) are typically designed more for firing short bursts rather than continuous firepower and are not considered true machine guns. Submachine guns fire handgun cartridges rather than rifle cartridges, therefore they are not considered machine guns, while automatic firearms of caliber or more are classified as autocannons rather than machine guns.
Automatic firearmAn automatic firearm or fully automatic firearm (to avoid confusion with semi-automatic firearms) is an autoloading firearm that continuously chambers and fires rounds when the trigger mechanism is actuated. The action of an automatic firearm is capable of harvesting the excess energy released from a previous discharge to feed a new ammunition round into the chamber, and then igniting the propellant and discharging the projectile (either bullet, shot, or slug) by delivering a hammer or striker impact on the primer.
Bolt actionBolt-action is a type of manual firearm action that is operated by directly manipulating the bolt via a bolt handle, which is most commonly placed on the right-hand side of the firearm (as most users are right-handed). Most bolt-action firearms use a rotating bolt design, where the handle must first be rotated upward to unlock the bolt from the receiver, then pulled back to open the breech and allowing any spent cartridge case to be extracted and ejected.
StenThe STEN (or Sten gun) is a British submachine gun chambered in 9×19mm which was used extensively by British and Commonwealth forces throughout World War II and post war including the Korean War. The Sten was a simple design with very low production cost for mass production to meet demand for submachine guns. As well as equipping regular units, the Sten was distributed to resistance groups within occupied Europe; its simple design making it an effective insurgency weapons for resistance groups.
AR-15–style rifleAn AR-15–style rifle is any lightweight semi-automatic rifle based on or similar to the Colt AR-15 design. The Colt model removed the selective fire feature of its predecessor, the original ArmaLite AR-15, itself a scaled-down derivative of the AR-10 design by Eugene Stoner. ArmaLite sold the patent and trademarks for both to Colt's Manufacturing Company in 1959 after the military rejected the design in favor of the M14. After most of the patents for the Colt AR-15 expired in 1977, many firearm manufacturers began to produce copies of the rifle under various names.
M3 submachine gunThe M3 is an American .45-caliber submachine gun adopted by the U.S. Army on 12 December 1942, as the United States Submachine Gun, Cal. .45, M3. The M3 was chambered for the same .45 ACP round fired by the Thompson submachine gun, but was cheaper to mass produce and lighter, at the expense of accuracy. The M3 was commonly referred to as the "Grease Gun" or simply "the Greaser," owing to its visual similarity to the mechanic's tool. The M3 was intended as a replacement for the Thompson, and began to enter frontline service in mid-1944.
