pistol: see small arms small arms, firearms designed primarily to be carried and fired by one person and, generally, held in the hands, as distinguished from heavy arms, or artillery .
The first small arms came into general use at the end of the 14th cent.
..... Click the link for more information. .
Small firearm designed to be operated with one hand. The name may derive from the city of Pistoia, Italy, where handguns were made as early as the 15th century. It was originally a cavalry weapon. However, because the firepower of pistols must be kept low in order to reduce them to manageable weight, and because only skilled soldiers can shoot them accurately beyond 10 yards, they have never been satisfactory military weapons. In legal use, pistols are most frequently carried by police and other security personnel and serve mainly as a defensive weapon of last resort. Their compact size, low cost, and ease of operation make them a common weapon in violent crime, so that pistols are a common object of laws regulating the ownership of firearms. The two classes of pistol are revolvers and automatics. Automatics have a mechanism, actuated by the energy of recoil, that feeds cartridges from a magazine in the grip.
pistol [′pist·əl]
Early Small Arms
The first small arms came into general use at the end of the 14th cent.
..... Click the link for more information. .
pistol
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Parts of a semiautomatic pistol.
(credit: © Merriam-Webster Inc.)
pistol [′pist·əl]
(ordnance)
A short automatic or semiautomatic firearm aimed and fired from one hand, using the force of recoil to eject the empty shell and to insert a new round into the firing chamber.
Pistol
knight of the “killing tongue and quiet sword.” [Br. Lit.: II Henry IV]
See : Boastfulness
| pistol - [IBM] A tool that makes it all too easy for you to shoot yourself in the foot. "Unix "rm *" makes such a nice pistol!" |
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