Therefore I have thought so for many years, but, as I search, I found that perhaps firearms have a quite important role on the history. In this paper, I’m going to write about how firearms affected history. First of all, I define the meaning of the firearms. According to the Oxford dictionary, a firearm means “a gun that can be carried” and gun means “a weapon that is used for firing bullets or shells”. Therefore, in …show more content…
In Europe, how the technology of firearms was introduced was unknown. However, it is known that they are used in the Hundred Years’ War. And then, firearms spread to all over the world. The first practical firearms were the muskets and it changed battles. Although muskets were inferior to bows and catapults, in accuracy, range and rapidness, muskets completely replaced them, because muskets were much easier to learn to shoot the musket than them and they were just cheaper. For example, The Venetian Army in end of the 15th century stopped using the catapult and replaced all of them with muskets. Only the advent of one new weapon extinguished the older weapon used for thousands of years. Much after that, in the mid-19th century, two revolutionary rifles, the minie and the dreyse rifle, appeared. The minie rifle is still a muzzle loading type rifle (a gun in which you have to put bullets from the muzzle) like muskets. The trajectory of bullets is stable when shoot by rifles, because the bullets have motion of horizontal spin, while bullets of muskets, which are smoothbore guns, don’t. The dreyse rifle, also known as the first “bolt action rifle”, was invented in Prussia, about 1830 and it is a breech loading rifle. With these two rifles, soldiers can shoot the target from 300