Introduction to Rifle
Rifle, a shoulder weapon having grooves (called rifling) inside its barrel to improve accuracy; or an artillery piece or naval gun with a grooved barrel. The grooves are cut spirally to give the bullet or shell a rotary motion. This improves accuracy because spinning tends to cause a moving object to maintain a straight course. Shotguns and other firearms with smoothbore (unrifled) barrels are not classified as rifles.
A carbine was originally a short rifle for use by mounted troops, but the term was later applied to any short, lightweight rifle. An automatic rifle is similar to a machine gun; the principal distinction is weight and accuracy—an automatic rifle is lighter and, when firing in the automatic mode, less accurate. An assault rifle is a lightweight automatic rifle firing a cartridge with somewhat less power than the type of cartridge used by a full-size military rifle. The submachine gun is similar to an assault rifle but has a shorter range and fires a larger bullet.
In the United States, it is illegal to sell automatic and certain types of semiautomatic rifles to the general public.
How A Rifle Works
A rifle consists of a steel rifled barrel mounted on a wooden or plastic stock. The end from which the bullet leaves the barrel is the muzzle. The other end is known as the breech, or receiver. Here the cartridge is inserted into the firing chamber for firing. With a single-shot rifle, each cartridge is inserted into the firing chamber by hand; with a magazine-fed, rifle, successive cartridges are fed into the chamber from a container holding a number of cartridges.
A rifle is aimed by means of sights on or above the barrel. The front sight (over the muzzle) is a steel blade or bead. The rear sight may be circular (an aperture, or peep, sight) or V-shaped or half-circular (an open sight). For high accuracy, a telescopic sight—a telescope with cross-hairs-may be mounted over the barrel.
A rifle is fired by pulling the trigger with a gently squeezing motion. In a typical rifle, this action disengages a catch, or sear, that holds a hammer cocked against a spring. The spring thrusts the hammer against a firing pin, which in turn strikes the primer in the cartridge case, causing it to ignite the powder charge. The explosion of the powder sends the bullet out of the muzzle and forces the rifle to recoil, or “kick,” against the shooter's shoulder.
After the rifle is fired, the spent cartridge is removed from the firing chamber by a manually operated or automatic mechanism. In magazine-fed rifles, the operation of this mechanism also loads the next cartridge into the firing chamber; in most models, it also cocks the rifle for the next shot.
Manually operated magazine-fed rifles are called repeaters. They are classified into three chief types according to the mechanism they use. A lever-action mechanism is operated by lowering and raising a lever in the form of an enlarged trigger guard. A pump-action, or slide-action, mechanism is operated by pulling back and then pushing forward a part called the fore-end, located under the barrel. In a bolt-action rifle, the most common type, a cylinder called a bolt slides back and forth over the receiver. The bolt is moved by a handle near one end. (Most single-shot rifles also have bolts.)
Rifles that have an automatic loading mechanism use a bolt that is moved by the force of the recoil of the barrel or, more commonly, by a piston pushed by the gases generated by the explosion of the powder in the cartridge. In a semiautomatic, or self-loading, rifle the sear engages the hammer after each shot, and the trigger must be pulled for each shot. In an automatic rifle, the sear remains disengaged for more than one shot; it will either continue firing for as long as the finger maintains pressure on the trigger (until the ammunition is exhausted) or, in the case of a rifle equipped with a burst-control device, until a predetermined number of rounds have been fired. An automatic rifle usually has a switch that makes it possible to select either semiautomatic or automatic operation.
Kinds and Uses of Rifles
Rifles are generally classified as military, sporting, or target. Rifles are also classified by caliber. Caliber can refer either to the diameter of the bullet or to the diameter of the bore (inside) of the barrel. Calibers are expressed in hundredths (or thousandths) of an inch or in millimeters. Common calibers have ranged from .22 to .69 inches (5.59 to 17.5 mm).
Military RiflesA military rifle must be of sufficiently large caliber to stop an enemy in his tracks, at the same time being light enough to be carried for long periods of time. The military rifle must be sturdy, contain few parts, and be easily repaired under adverse conditions. Most military rifles today are automatic rifles.
The basic rifle of the U.S. Army is the M-16A2, an assault rifle, with an effective range of about 550 yards (500 m). The M-16A2 weighs slightly more than eight pounds (3.6 kg) and is about 40 inches (1 m) long. It holds a 30-round magazine and fires 5.56-mm ammunition. The weapon has a burst-control device that limits the number of rounds fired to three for each pull of the trigger. The standard assault rifle in the Russian army is the 5.45-mm AK-74. It has about the same range as the M-16A2.
Sporting Riflescome in wide variety, from long-range rifles used in big-game hunting to the light types used for hunting rabbits and squirrels. While a few “elephant guns” have been made in very large calibers, most big-game rifles are similar to, or modifications of, military rifles. Winchester, Remington, and Savage bolt-action rifles are in this class, as are such lever-action rifles as the Winchester Model 1893, made in calibers as large as .348 (8.8 mm). Most lever-action and pump-action rifles, however, come in smaller sizes. Semiautomatic and single-shot rifles are also used in hunting.
Target RiflesTarget shooting may be done to improve accuracy for military or hunting purposes, but it is also a sport in itself. Related sports are trapshooting and skeet shooting, done with shotguns. Any rifle can be used for target shooting, but the best results are obtained with rifles designed especially for that purpose. Such rifles are designed with many refinements, such as stocks personally fitted to the user and special sights. Many target shooters use .22 rifles, which are preferred because of their light recoil and inexpensive ammunition.
Contests in target shooting are included in the Olympic Games. The largest of the many target shooting and rifle organizations in the United States is:
National Rifle Association of America (NRA), or, more commonly, National Rifle Association. It consists of hunters, marksmen, and collectors of firearms. Membership is about 2,500,000. The NRA publishes American Hunter and American Rifleman. Headquarters are in Washington, D.C.
History
Early RiflesGerman gunmakers in the 16th century first developed guns with rifling. Like all early guns, the rifle was loaded through the muzzle, into which powder and ball were inserted and tamped into place with a ramrod. The rifle was slower to load than the smoothbore, because it required tighter-fitting ammunition, either in the form of a larger-size ball or a ball wrapped in a greased patch. Sportsmen began using rifles, but armies, whose tactics in those days depended more on rapid rate of fire than on accuracy, found them unsuitable.
In the 1730's German gunmakers in Pennsylvania began producing the Kentucky rifle, so called because it was designed to be used on the Kentucky frontier. Its extra-long barrel (51 to 77 inches [130 to 196 cm]) and relatively small caliber (about .45, or 11 mm) made it the most accurate rifle of its day. The gunpowder was ignited by sparks that were struck when the hammer, containing a piece of flint, was released. Such a weapon was called a flintlock. The Kentucky rifle was used in the French and Indian War and the American Revolutionary War by militia and irregular troops.
Gunmakers worked to find a way to speed the loading of rifles, and during the 18th and early 19th centuries various armies experimented with breechloaders. During the American Revolution, the British briefly tried out the breechloaders invented by Patrick Ferguson. John H. Hall perfected a breechloader that was adopted by some U.S. Army troops in 1819. A Hall rifle carbine was one of the first in which the flintlock system of ignition was replaced by the percussion system, which used a chemical-filled cap that exploded upon being struck. In 1841 the Prussian army adopted a breechloader, invented by Johann Dreyse and known as the “needlegun” for the long slender pin used to strike its percussion cap. Defects in the early breechloaders prevented their complete acceptance.
In 1849 Claude tienne Mini invented an elongated bullet (the Mini ball) whose base would expand (through the force of the explosion) to fit the rifling. The loose-fitting bullet allowed fast loading, and most armies switched to rifles. In the United States, the standard infantry weapon of the Civil War was the musket-rifle, a muzzle-loading percussion weapon that used the Mini ball.
Modern RiflesMeanwhile, in 1848 Christian Sharps had perfected a breechloader. It was used in limited numbers in the Civil War and was a popular buffalo gun on the frontier. The Colt, Spencer, Henry, and other breech-loading repeater rifles were used by Civil War cavalry troops. At the close of the war, the U.S. Army adopted as its standard infantry weapon a single-shot breechloader. Gradually the breechloader replaced muzzleloaders in all armies.
The repeating rifle, including Winchester's 1873 and the Remington, was popular among sportsmen and on the American frontier. Rifles designed especially for sportsmen began to appear in the late 1800's; many were refinements of military rifle designs. The U.S. Army first adopted a repeater as the standard infantry weapon in 1894. It was the .30-caliber (7.62-mm) bolt-action Krag-jgensen, invented in Norway, and used in the Spanish-American War. This was superseded by the United States Magazine Rifle, Model of 1903 (commonly called the “Springfield” or the “ '03”), which was modified in 1906 to take a slightly different cartridge. Sporting guns using this cartridge are said to be of caliber .30-06. After World War I the Springfield and the German infantry rifle, the Mauser M-98, formed the basis of many sporting and target rifles.
In 1936 the U.S. Army adopted the semiautomatic .30-caliber M-1 rifle developed by J. C. Garand at the Springfield Armory. It was the standard infantry weapon of World War II and the Korean War. The 7.62-mm (.308-caliber) automatic M-14 rifle was adopted by the United States in 1957.
Meanwhile, in World War II, the Germans developed a new kind of rifle, the Sturmgewehr StG-44 ("assault rifle"), which had a short range, but had the advantage of using short, lightweight bullets and having fully automatic fire. After the war, other countries began developing similar rifles. In 1947, the Soviet Union introduced the 7.62-mm AK-47, which eventually was adopted by more armies than any other rifle. In the late 1970's the Soviets replaced the AK-47 with the 5.45-mm AK-74. In 1964, the United States replaced the M-14 with the 5.56-mm M-16.
Armies also began developing new sniper rifles, because snipers found automatic-loading rifles less suitable than the earlier bolt-action rifles. Bolt-action sniper rifles introduced since the mid-1980's include the United States armed forces' 7.62-mm M-24 and .50 caliber M-82A1A.