Noun

guns

1. Plural form of gun.

Verb

guns

1. Third-person singular simple present indicative form of gun.

Noun

Singular guns

Plural plurale tantum

guns (plurale tantum)

1. (bodybuilding, slang) Well-developed muscles of the upper arm, especially the biceps and triceps.
   • 2005 — Joe Kita (ed.), Men's Health Best: Arms, page 6

     And there's still no better way to throw down the fitness gauntlet that to roll up your sleeves and unveil some powerful guns.

Synonyms

• (muscles of teh upper arm): biceps, pythons

In military parlance, a gun is a muzzle or breech-loaded projectile-firing weapon. There are various definitions depending on the nation and branch of service. A "gun" may be distinguised from other firearms in being a crew served weapon such as a howitzer or mortar, as opposed to a small arm like a rifle or pistol, but there are exceptions, such as the USAF's GUU5/P. At one time, Land-based Artillery tubes were called Cannon and Sea-based Naval Cannon were called Guns. The term "gun" morphed into a generic term for any tube launched projectile firing weapon used by sailors including boarding parties and Marines.

In modern parlance, a gun is a projectile weapon using a hollow, tubular barrel with a closed end—the breech—as the means for directing the projectile as well as other purposes—an expansion chamber for propellant, stabilizing the projectile's trajectory, aiming, etc.—and assumes a generally, flat trajectory for the projectile.

The generic form of a trigger-initiated, hand-held, and hand-directed tool with an extending bore has additionally been applied to implements resembling guns in either form or concept. Examples of this application include items such as staple guns, nail guns, and glue guns. Occasionally, this tendency is ironically reversed, such as the case of the American M3 submachine gun which carries the nickname "Grease Gun".

The projectile may be a simple, single-piece item like a bullet, a casing containing a payload like a shotshell or explosive shell, or complex projectile like a sub-caliber projectile and sabot. The propellant may be air, an explosive solid, or an explosive liquid. Some variations like the Gyrojet and certain other types combine the projectile and propellant into a single item.

Most guns are described by the type of barrel used, the means of firing, the purpose of the weapon, the caliber, or the commonly accepted name for a particular variation.

Barrel types include rifled—a series of spiraled grooves or angles within the barrel—when the projectile requires an induced spin to stabilize it and smoothbore when the projectile is stabilized by other means or is undesired or unnecessary. Typically, interior barrel diameter and the associated projectile size is a means to identify gun variations. Barrel diameter is reported in several ways. The more conventional measure is reporting the interior diameter of the barrel in decimal fractions of the inch or in millimeters. Some guns—such as shotguns—report the weapon's gauge or—as in some British ordnance—the weight of the weapon's usual projectile.

Contents

• 1 Sourced
• 2 Unsourced
• 3 Misattributed
• 4 External Links

Sourced

• "Every communist must grasp the truth, "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party. Yet, having guns, we can create Party organizations, as witness the powerful Party organizations which the Eighth Route Army has created in northern China. We can also create cadres, create schools, create culture, create mass movements. Everything in Yenan has been created by having guns. All things grow out of the barrel of a gun."
  • Mao Zedong, "Problems of War and Strategy", 1938 [1]. Mao was justifying war as a means to achieving political ends. The quote has been altered or otherwise interpreted by American gun control opponents as a totalitarian endorsement of gun control, for instance with the phrasing, "The communist party must command all the guns, that way, no guns can ever be used to command the party."

• "If gun laws in fact worked, the sponsors of this type of legislation should have no difficulty drawing upon long lists of examples of crime rates reduced by such legislation. That they cannot do so after a century and a half of trying -- that they must sweep under the rug the southern attempts at gun control in the 1870-1910 period, the northeastern attempts in the 1920-1939 period, the attempts at both Federal and State levels in 1965-1976 -- establishes the repeated, complete and inevitable failure of gun laws to control serious crime."
  • Orrin Hatch, "The Right to Keep and Bear Arms"

From Wikiquote under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Mon Jun 22 15:29:29 2009