Machine Gun History and Bibliography

This Article provides an introductory history of machine guns and books about them. First, the Article describes federal machine gun laws and regulations, and related legal resources. Then the Article presents the historical development of machine guns from 1862 to the present, covering the various types of machine guns: heavy, medium, light, general purpose, submachine gun, machine pistol, and assault rifle. The first machine gun to achieve broad commercial success was the Gatling gun, invented during the American Civil War. Although the Gatling had little effect on that war, shortly thereafter the Gatling gun and other manual machine guns started to change warfare. Later, heavy machine guns such as the automatic Maxim gun, and its successor, the Vickers gun, dominated battlefields. Towards the end of World War I, the heavy machine gun was dethroned from its supremacy by the widespread adoption of new, portable light machine guns, which could be used to suppress an enemy machine gun nest while other troops advanced. In the subsequent two decades, especially during World War II, machine guns that were easily portable by a single soldier became much more common, such as the Thompson submachine gun widely used by American and British forces. During the Cold War, the assault rifle, no bigger than an ordinary rifle, became increasingly important. Most influential, almost always for ill, was the Soviet Union’s AK-47 and its progeny. The American counterpart, the M16, proved much less effective in battle, at first due to technical problems, and everlastingly because of its puny bullet. Improvements in metallurgy, manufacturing, and design have improved the quality of infantry machine guns. But a soldier with a machine gun on a battlefield in the third decade of the twenty-first century will likely be using a machine gun of a broad type that was already in widespread use by the 1950s.