Repeating firearm

A repeating firearm or repeater is any firearm (either a handgun or long gun) that is designed for multiple, repeated firings before the gun has to be reloaded with new ammunition. Unlike single-shot firearms, which can only hold and fire a single round of ammunition, a repeating firearm can store multiple cartridges inside a magazine (as in pistols, rifles, or shotguns), a cylinder (as in revolvers), or a belt (as in machine guns), and uses a moving action to manipulate each cartridge into and out of the battery position (within the chamber and in alignment with the bore). This allows the weapon to be discharged repeatedly in relatively quick succession, before manually reloading the ammunition is needed. Typically the term "repeaters" refers to the more ubiquitous single-barreled variants. Multiple-barrel firearms such as derringers, pepperbox guns, double-barreled shotguns/rifles, combination guns, and volley guns can also hold and fire more than one cartridge (one in each chamber of every barrel) before needing to be reloaded, but do not use magazines for ammunition storage and also lack any moving actions to facilitate ammunition-feeding, which makes them technically just bundled assemblies of multiple single-shot barrels fired in succession and/or simultaneously, therefore they are not considered true repeating firearms despite their functional resemblance. On the contrary, rotary-barrel firearms (e.g. Gatling guns), though also multi-barreled, do use belts and/or magazines with moving actions for feeding ammunition, which allow each barrel to fire repeatedly just like any single-barreled repeater, and therefore still qualify as a type of repeating firearm from a technical view point. Although repeating flintlock breechloading firearms (e.g. the Lorenzóni repeater, Cookson repeater, and Kalthoff repeater) had been invented as early as the 17th century, the first repeating firearms that received widespread use were revolvers and lever-action repeating rifles in the latter half of the...