Rifles and carbines

The first small arm was a rudimentary lead cannon fastened to a stick, and fired by a match held in the hand. Called a ‘handgonne’, the muzzle-loading weapon existed in China since the thirteenth century and is attested in Europe since the fourteenth century. These early hand-held firearms were less powerful than crossbows.

The arquebus was invented in the late fourteenth century. A spring let loose by a trigger threw the match, which was fastened to it, forward into the pan containing the priming. It was from this spring that the gun took its name. But the weapon could still not be aimed: its butt was straight, placed against the breast when the gun was fired, which also made the force of recoil problematic. The Germans first conceived of the idea to bend the butt downward, so that the elevated barrel could be brought in range of the eye. The new type of arquebus quickly spread. Constructors experimented with various types of ignition (serpentine lock, snapping matchlock, sear lock matchlock) which all involved contact between a slow-burning match and the powder. For horsemen, a smaller size of arquebus was also made available: called the petronel, it was the ancestor of the carbine.K. Chase, Firearms: A global history to 1700, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 61; W. Y. Carman, A history of firearms from earliest times to 1914, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1955, pp. 125–6.

Rifles – that is, long guns with the characteristic rifling of the bore – also appeared in the late fifteenth century. The stabilising effect of a slight, regular spin on a projectile's flight was already known to archers. Smoothbore weapons lacked accuracy, but it was found this could be corrected by imparting the bullet a spin through twisted grooves cut into the sides of the bore. But early rifles, in addition to being costly to manufacture, were plagued by a major deficiency: in order to grip the rifling of the barrel, bullets had to fit the bore tightly and hence be forced down the barrel with a mallet, or wrapped in a piece of leather or fabric. As a result, rifles took much longer to load than smoothbore weapons. In addition, this loose fit meant that rifles suffered from fouling in the barrel. The weapon was clearly impractical in battle. It was used for hunting, but except for a few sharpshooters from the sixteenth century, it would be centuries before rifles would earn their place as a military weapon.K. Chase, Firearms: A global history to 1700, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 201; W. H. McNeill, The pursuit of power: technology, armed force, and society since A.D. 1000, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1982, p. 231; W. Y. Carman, A history of firearms from earliest times to 1914, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1955, pp. 105–6.

Instead, the musket was invented around 1520. More powerful than the arquebus, it was also heavier, which meant it needed to be fired from a Y-shaped rest, and musketeers had an assistant – usually a young boy – to help them carry the weapon. Muskets also relied on a matchlock firing mechanism, were long and hazardous to operate (they had to be reloaded while constantly holding a burning match in one hand), and were still fairly unreliable. But they were easy to produce in large quantities, and technological improvements gradually made them lighter and easier to handle, so that they became indistinguishable from the older arquebus.

Matchlock firing mechanisms were replaced in the mid-seventeenth century with a flintlock ignition system, whereby a piece of flint was attached to the cock (hammer) to produce sparks and ignite the powder. This was another major evolution, since firing a gun no longer required an external source of fire. Easier manipulation enabled to increase the rate of fire. The mechanism also enabled to carry small arms on horseback – something that would have been utterly impractical as long as the musketeer needed to constantly carry a burning match. The carbine, a shorter-barrelled musket easier to carry while riding a horse, was soon equipped with the new mechanism. Before long, muskets became the standard infantry weapon. But standardisation also slowed down innovation: in England, the ‘Brown Bess’ – a musket developed in 1690 – would change little over nearly the next 200 years.W. H. McNeill, The pursuit of power: technology, armed force, and society since A.D. 1000, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1982, p. 142; K. Chase, Firearms: A global history to 1700, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 201.

An essentially tactical change followed the invention of the bayonet in the late seventeenth century. From there on, pikemen lost their usefulness in battle and disappeared while musket-carrying infantry doubled its efficiency.K. Chase, Firearms: A global history to 1700, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 62 and 200–01.

The industrial revolution, with the introduction of steam power and metallurgy, induced a new period of major evolution in armaments, particularly in Britain, France, and Germany. The percussion lock appeared in the early nineteenth century, where a percussion cap containing fulminate of mercury was positioned so that it would be hit and ignited by the hammer. This was much more reliable than the flintlock, notably in wet conditions. Then, in 1848, a conical shaped bullet was invented – a revolutionary departure from the usual spherical bullets. What would become the Minié bullet had a hollow base which expanded on firing to fit the rifling grooves and seal the propellant gases behind the bullet. Expansion meant the bullet no longer needed to fit the bore very tightly, and was therefore easier to insert. Rifles suddenly became practical in battle.K. Krause, Arms and the State: Patterns of military production and trade, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 56–7; V. Di Maio, Gunshot wounds: practical aspects of firearms, ballistics, and forensic techniques, CRC Press, Boca Raton, 1985, p. 19.

Rifles were issued for the first time to French and British troops during the Crimean War (1853-1856). The weapons had a range of 1000 metres, five times that of a musket, which gave the French and British expeditionary forces a decisive edge over Russian troops. Immediately after that, rifles became standard issue in France, Prussia, Great Britain, and the United States. The wartime surge in demand also lead Europeans to apply industrial techniques of mass production to the weapons industry, something that had been done in the United States since the war of 1812. Small arms production plants were set up in Europe, with private businesses also selling sporting weapons to private individuals.W. H. McNeill, The pursuit of power: technology, armed force, and society since A.D. 1000, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1982, pp. 231 and 331.

Another major innovation were breech-loading rifles, which had an accurate range three-fold that of muzzle-loading weapons, and could be reloaded while lying down. Experiments with breech-loading muskets had been conducted for some time, even used by a troop of about 100 men in the United States in the late eighteenth century, but did not catch on before the nineteenth century. The Prussians secretly produced the so-called ‘needle guns’ since 1840. But artisanal production methods starkly limited the output of new guns. Only in 1866 was the Prussian army fully equipped with the new steel rifles, which were tested with great success in battle against the Austrians. Before long, one country after the other adopted the innovation, often with improvements of their own.K. Krause, Arms and the State: Patterns of military production and trade, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 56–7; W. H. McNeill, The pursuit of power: technology, armed force, and society since A.D. 1000, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1982, pp. 166, 233 and 236; M. J. Dougherty, Small arms: from the civil war to the present day, Barnes and Noble, New York, 2006, p. 12; W. Y. Carman, A history of firearms from earliest times to 1914, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1955, pp. 107–08 and 113–8.

As industrial production methods spread, new technological innovations would be much quicker to be adopted. The invention in 1867 of brass cartridges opened up the possibility for repeating rifles. Magazine rifles appeared in the 1880s: earlier trials with tubular magazines in the butt of the rifle had a risk of accidental discharge from the force of recoil, and eventually it was versions of the box magazine, with cartridges stored underneath each other, that stuck. The new rifles, including the British Lee-Enfield line that would be used until World War I, were ‘bolt-action’, that is, they were capable of ejecting the spent cartridge and chambering the next cartridge through manual action. From there, it was not long before self-loading rifles were invented, which used the forces of expanding gases or of recoil to carry out this operation.W. H. McNeill, The pursuit of power: technology, armed force, and society since A.D. 1000, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1982, p. 273, n. 18; K. Chase, Firearms: A global history to 1700, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 202; W. Y. Carman, A history of firearms from earliest times to 1914, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1955, pp. 120–4.

Rifles lost much of their military importance with the advent of the assault rifle after World War II. They have been confined to specialized roles, principally sharpshooting, and anti-materiel duties.

Anti-materiel rifles were developed after World War I in response to the introduction of the tank on the battlefield.Small Arms Survey, 'Anti-Materiel Rifles', Research Note No. 7, June 2011, p. 1. The early ‘T’ Gewehr fired a 13mm cartridge that could pierce the relatively thin armour of the early tank. With the improved protection of armoured vehicles, the rifle became obsolete until the introduction in 1982 of the Barrett M82 12.7mm self-loading rifle. Other sniper and anti-materiel rifles appeared on the market that use ammunition of 12.7mm to 20mm in calibre – mainly the military .50 BMG cartridge.J. Bevan and S. Pézard,‘Basic characteristics of ammunition: from handguns to MANPADS’, in Pézard and Anders, Targeting Ammunition: a Primer, p. 29.

Last updated on: 08 February 2014

This section details the intended effects of rifles and carbines. Their humanitarian impact is addressed in the entry dealing with small arms ammunition (health impact of penetrating trauma), as well as in the general entry on small arms (aggregate humanitarian impact).

Last updated on: 08 February 2014