Rifle

About

A rifle is a long-barreled firearm designed for accurate shooting, distinguished by a barrel cut with a helical or spiralling pattern of grooves called rifling. Most rifles are designed to be held with both hands and braced against the shoulder via a buttstock for stability. The raised areas of a barrel's rifling are called lands, and they make contact with and exert torque on the projectile as it moves down the bore, imparting a spin that lends gyroscopic stability and increases accuracy and effective range. Rifles are used in warfare, law enforcement, hunting and target shooting sports. The invention of rifling separated such firearms from earlier smoothbore weapons like arquebuses and muskets, greatly elevating their accuracy and general effectiveness. The term rifle was originally applied to rifled guns, with the verb to rifle referring to the early modern machining process of creating grooves with cutting tools.