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| | If we look objectively, then almost every type of weapon has left its trace in history and has become if not a legend then its part. From the time when man, having received fire arms in hands, he felt that he has become stronger and thus started the history of fire arms.
Interesting is the fact that while better cold steel arms were made in the East, practically all fire arm history is associated with the West. Wars and technical progress were part and parcel of this history. And the fineness of eastern relations could not be accommodated in the murderous wars of Europe.
Individual stages of evolution of firearms usually are illogical. Most of the inventions were before their times and models based on such know-how fell in to oblivion. For example the breech loading fire arm invented by Marshall Sakson in the era of muskets (XVII century) and named by him as amusette. This weapon was meant for fighting with artillery and could shoot as far as 2.5 km. But it became a dead branch for its time and vanished. Breech loaded arms finally arrived only in the 19 century.
Sometimes, at some point of time, as if puzzle pieces falling in place, old and new ideas formed in to new arms, which became starting points of whole classes of weapons. For example, rifled barrels were invented 300 years earlier to the arrival of “correct” capsules and “correct” bullets which allowed the construction of rifle.
But such situation is characteristic of peaceful times. War times set a bit different rules. Demands of the military and specific combat situations take the fore. Some models, in contradiction to the hopes of designers existed only for a few years after initial tests in the front. Others, having withstood the test of wide practice stayed in the national armaments for many a year.
In combats and wars fire arms have proved time and again that they are created on the principle “one against all”. But after completion of a war, civilized European communities did not hurry to part with their lethal weaponry and designers improved their inventions again and again. Carrying of firearms in peaceful times is allowed in many countries, in particular in USA. Contrary to the grim predictions made by antagonists of weapon legalization, Americans do not shoot each other at slight conflicts remembering that loaded pistol may be in the hands of the opponent. Russia, at the present, going by the information of mass media, is far from passing laws that may legalize carrying of firearms. It seems that our government is afraid of its own citizens than the citizens of each other.
In the history of weapons, frequently, a weapon became the object of worship for many impressed citizens and transformed from being an object in its own time to become a symbol of a whole era. This happened, for example, in the case of the famous American Colt, which has become an integral part of the times about which western films are made. Or the machine gun Maxim associated by our citizens with flying tank and the red army.
Weaponry takes hold of man at subconscious level, where we are still children and search for protection from the external world. Practically anyone of us, holding a heavy murderous toy, breathing the smell of gun powder, feels more self-confident in this world, and that is why we can forget about mass pacifism. And this means that fire arms shall still have a long future. |
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A whale caught off Alaskan coast in May had a weapon fragment embedded in its neck. The animal survived hunting more than a century ago and carried the antique arrow shaped projectile in its neck ever since. The weapon fragment allowed to identify the age of the whale which turned out to be over 130 years old.
