Everything below is answered somewhere in our articles and Nomad Notes — no trick questions, just the good stuff. Instant answers per question, a trail rank at the end, and nothing leaves your browser.
QUESTION 1 OF 10
What does a shotgun's gauge actually count?
Gauge is a recipe, not a ruler: cast a pound of lead into balls that exactly fit the bore, and count them. Twelve balls, twelve gauge.
QUESTION 2 OF 10
At the counter, a shooter asks for a 'clip' for a pistol. What does the pistol actually take?
Magazines feed the gun from inside, under spring pressure. Clips hold cartridges so they can be loaded into a magazine. The Garand's en-bloc clip is the famous exception that lives inside the gun.
QUESTION 3 OF 10
The AR in AR-15 stands for…
ArmaLite — the small company where Eugene Stoner designed the rifle in the 1950s. The name is a maker's mark, not a category.
QUESTION 4 OF 10
The '47' in AK-47 refers to…
Avtomat Kalashnikova, model of 1947 — the designer's surname and the year it appeared. A signature and a calendar.
QUESTION 5 OF 10
One MOA (minute of angle) at 100 yards spans about…
1.047 inches, to be exact about the approximation — close enough to an inch that shooters simply say an inch, and write ≈.
QUESTION 6 OF 10
One MIL (milliradian) at 1,000 yards spans exactly…
One unit at a thousand of the same unit: a yard at 1,000 yards, a meter at 1,000 meters. The ruler rescales itself.
QUESTION 7 OF 10
The smallest production pistol ever sold was…
Austria's Kolibri fired a 2.7mm cartridge and weighed under eight ounces — a real commercial pistol, sold before the First World War.
QUESTION 8 OF 10
The .410 shotgun is the oddball of the shelf because…
The .410's name is its bore diameter in inches. Run the lead-ball math and you'd get a 67½ 'gauge' — which is exactly why nobody does.
QUESTION 9 OF 10
Hiram Percy Maxim sold the same invention twice: his gun silencer, and…
He baffled gun gas and engine exhaust with the same idea and called both of them silencers. Cars eventually got their own word.
QUESTION 10 OF 10
The Colt Walker of 1847 stayed the most powerful production revolver until…
Eighty-eight years at the top. The Walker was designed by Samuel Colt with Captain Samuel Walker's battlefield input — and nothing out-powered it until 1935.
