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Concept
Repeating firearm
Summary
A repeating firearm or repeater is any firearm (either a handgun or long gun) that is capable of being fired repeatedly before having to manually reloaded with new ammunition into the weapon.
Unlike single-shot firearms, which can only hold and fire a one round of ammunition, a repeating firearm can store multiple cartridges inside a magazine (as in pistols, rifles, or shotguns), a cylinder (as in revolvers) or a belt (as in machine guns), and uses a moving action to manipulate each cartridge into, and out of, battery position (within the chamber and in alignment with the bore). This allows the weapon to be discharged repeatedly, in relatively quick succession, before a manual ammunition reload is needed.
Typically the term "repeaters" refers to the more ubiquitous single-barreled variants. Multiple-barrel firearms such as derringers, pepperbox guns, double-barreled rifles, double-barreled shotguns, combination guns, and volley guns can also hold and fire more than one cartridges (one in each chamber of every barrel) before needing reloads, but do not use magazines for ammunition storage and also lack any moving actions to facilitate ammunition-feeding, which makes them technically just bundled assemblies of multiple single-shot barrels fired in succession or simultaneously and therefore they are not considered true repeating firearms despite the functional resemblance. On the contrary, rotary-barrel firearms (e.g. Gatling guns), though also multi-barreled, do use belts and/or magazines with moving actions for feeding ammunition, which allow each barrel to fire repeatedly just like any single-barreled repeater, and therefore still qualify as a type of repeating firearm from a technical view point.
Although repeating flintlock breechloading firearms (e.g. the Lorenzóni repeater, Cookson repeater, and Kalthoff repeater) had been invented as early as the 17th century, the first repeating firearms that received widespread use were revolvers and lever-action repeating rifles in the latter half of the 19th century.
Official source
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