At times it can be daunting to select the appropriate firearm, with so many varieties on the market and their various actions making the task more complex than necessary. But there’s an easy way to identify specific rifle models: their type of action.
Modern long guns employ five major types of actions – bolt action, lever action, pump action, and semi-automatic/fully automatic. Search for a firearm on Gunbroker to make your purchase.
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Rifled Barrel
A rifled barrel is a type of gun barrel featuring grooves cut into it that impart rifling action to its projectile, increasing accuracy over distances.
There are various forms of rifling available, each offering distinct advantages and disadvantages. They include:
Button Rifling – This method of creating the rifling grooves in a barrel is the most frequently employed. A bullet-shaped button is pulled through the barrel to form these rifling grooves.
Cold hammer forging is another rifling process that requires specific machinery and is typically employed only in high-production barrels. If you’re interested, you can also search for an EOTech to equip your pistol.
Single-Shot Rifle
Single-shot rifles are a popular choice for teaching beginners how to handle firearms safely, providing easy loading, unloading, and inspection processes.
These types of guns are also highly reliable and easy to operate, making them an excellent choice for hunting or survival situations.
Single-shot rifles feature various action types, such as bolt actions, falling blocks, and break actions. Break actions are the most prevalent type of action type; when released from its locking latch they connect the barrel assembly directly to the breech block via a hinge and pivot away from the receiver to open its breech and possibly extract spent cartridges partially or entirely from its chambers.
Repeating Rifle
Repeating rifles are an advanced type of firearm that hold several rounds at once and can fire them repeatedly without having to reload after every shot, providing significant advantages over traditional breechloading rifles that could only hold one cartridge before needing to be reloaded.
Repeating guns can either be operated manually by the shooter, or semi-automatically with each trigger pull cycling the action and loading another round. Manual repeaters typically feature bolts, slides or levers which require them to operate between each shot and trigger pull; semi-automatic versions require just a trigger pull to reload for another round.
Repeating carbines such as the Spencer and Henry proved highly effective during the American Civil War, becoming increasingly popular with cavalry units. Unfortunately, however, their use wasn’t widely adopted by Union armies.
Shotgun
Shotguns are smoothbore shoulder weapons that employ multiple pellets (shot) that scatter from their muzzle to enable shooters to strike at a small game such as birds in flight. This dispersal enables accurate target hits.
Shotgun projectiles range in size, from small birdshot to larger buckshot; some shotguns also use slug rounds for hunting large game.
Shotguns come in several varieties: single-shot weapons, pump-action guns that allow users to manually chamber rounds by shifting the fore-end handguard back and forth manually, or semi-automatic models.
Modern firearms typically utilize direct cartridge loading into the breech and firing via an action that extracts spent cases from the cylinder and replaces them with fresh ones, while some also employ a gas piston that triggers this cycle by forcing bullets down their respective barrels.
Semi-Automatic Rifle
Rifles serve various functions, from hunting to target shooting. Semi-automatic rifles are often the go-to choice among civilian gun owners due to being cheaper and less heavily regulated than their fully automatic counterparts.
They’re an ideal option for hunters who require quick and reliable shooting without altering their sight picture, or those needing light-recoiling defensive rounds or smashing power to disarm an attacker.
Easy to operate and readily available at various retailers, the AR-15 series of weapons are among the most sought-after choices.
