Encyclopedia > Rifle

  Article Content

Rifle

A rifle is a gun with a grooved or "rifled" barrel. Rifled barrels are the modern norm, with the exception of shotguns and historical weapons and their reproductions, like muskets, muzzleloaders/blackpowder[?], blunderbusses[?], etc which are considered smoothbore. Most shotguns also do not have a rifled barrels, though shotguns that are specialized for firing slugs (which are just giant self-stabilizing bullets) do. The rifling, a series of cuts and lands strategely placed to cause an exiting bullet to spin, resulting in a more stable flight and hence more accuracy.

A rifle typically has a longer barrel than a handgun (see single-shot pistol[?]). Legally there are rules (usually local laws) for how short a barrel can be before a rifle turns into a handgun. There are exceptions such as the Contender line of firearms made by Thompson/Center Arms, which can be easily converted from pistol to rifle and back with a simple barrel change.

There are a variety of receiver actions used for rifles. These include bolt actions (e.g. Sako[?], Remington[?], Mauser[?], Krag-Jorgensen, Winchester[?], etc.) low wall and high wall single action (Browning No.1) and various semi-automatic rifle mechanisms.

The most common legal civilian uses for a rifle are hunting and "plinking" (informal target shooting), followed by police work, and various kinds of competition (e.g. benchrest[?], bullseye[?], etc). Rifles can be used routinely to a range of 500 yards, and up to 1500 yrds with specialized equipment (e.g. a scope, or a specific caliber).

For lists of specific types of rifles, see the articles for those types.

See also: assault rifle, sniper, firearm action



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
List of closed London Underground stations

... tube station[?] Waddesdon Road tube station[?] Wescott tube station[?] Wotton tube station[?] Church Siding tube station[?] Wood Siding tube station[?] Brill tube ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 36.4 ms