What is the specter of the gun?

A specter is a mental representation of a haunting idea or image. What is the haunting image of the gun? That, my friends, is the image of the grim reaper, better known as death. Make no mistake about it, a gun is a weapon designed to kill and it has helped the grim reaper reap a huge harvest of souls ever since its conception.
A gun is essentially a tubular weapon designed to discharge a projectile at high velocity. Historians place the first gun to around 1000 AD in China after gunpowder was invented a century previous to this momentous event. Needless to say, these early so-called guns were very crude and dangerous to the poor devil that had to fire them.
Gunpowder, which consists of a mixture of saltpeter (Potassium nitrate), sulfur and charcoal made the gun possible. At first, a gun was nothing more than a hand-held cannon. That must have been fun! Eventually, firearms--as guns are called--became the primary weapon of war.
Why is this so significant? The answer is simple. Before the introduction of gunpowder and the gun, big strong men had to slug it out with others like them using swords, knives, spears or axes, sometimes for hours. You can imagine what kind of strength and stamina this arduous fighting required. The gun changed all of this. No longer did a soldier have to be big and strong. Anyone, including women and children could now kill without exerting a lot of energy and muscle strength. The only problem is that the gun made killing much more efficient and effective. Killing could be done on an industrial scale, especially after the invention of the machine gun.
The first application of firearms in war was in the form of a smooth bore gun known as a musket. Muskets were heavy and had to be loaded by a time consuming process that involved pouring gunpowder down the barrel of the gun, placing a lead ball on top of the powder and then adding a paper wadding and using a ram to smash it all down tight. The gun's hammer had to be cocked half way (this is where the term 'half cocked' comes from), powder added to the flash (priming) pan and then the hammer cocked all the way before firing. When the trigger was pulled, the hammer struck flint that caused a spark in the flash pan and this ignited the main powder charge to shoot the lead ball out of the gun's mussel at high velocity. It took time to load and fire these weapons and this lead to the formation fighting that is so familiar in the Revolutionary War.
By the time of the Civil War in the 1860's, this process was made a bit easier by using a paper cartridge that had the ball and powder combined. The soldier would use his teeth to tear off the twisted end of the cartridge and pour the powder from it into the mussel of the gun. This helped because before this the powder was kept in a powder horn, which meant that the soldier had to guess how much powder to add, which if it were too much could result in a gun barrel rupture. The paper cartridge idea made this process safer.
A musket was not very accurate and thus was only effective at short distance. This meant that lines of men in formation would shoot volleys until one side broke and ran. Needless to say, this resulted in lots of casualties, but not nearly as bad a when modern warfare came on the scene.
The invention of rifled barrels made the gun much more accurate because the spiraling grooves inside the barrel made the bullet spin and this made it fly through the air much straighter. This effect is much like how a spinning top is impervious to wind or even bumps. However, the rifled gun still had to be mussel loaded and it took more time because the bullet had a tighter fit than in a musket.
Of course, the metal cartridge made all of this much quicker and more efficient. By the time of World War I, rifles could be fired as quickly as the soldier could load a cartridge into the breech. The Gatling gun appeared at the end of the Civil War, but the machine guns used in World War I made warfare extremely deadly. Killing became much easier and effective.
By World War II the use of clips holding several bullets appeared and eventually assault rifles became available. In essence gun making has made guns much more efficient and accurate. Killing has gone high tech.
Modern rifles and handguns combined with more powerful ammunition has made killing easier than ever. This is both a benefit and a curse. The efficiency of guns has made hunting easier and effective, but it has also given mankind a way to kill that goes beyond anything imagined by the ancients.
So, the specter of the gun is death. Remember that he who lives by the sword will die by the sword. You can add the gun to this.

Thanks for reading.