JSTOR ( July 2023) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)Ī vehicle with a Sumitomo M2 heavy machine gun mounted at the rear. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources in this section. This section needs additional citations for verification. Machine guns can be further categorized as light machine guns, medium machine guns, heavy machine guns, general-purpose machine guns, and squad automatic weapons. Many machine guns also use belt feeding and open bolt operation, features not normally found on other infantry firearms. Submachine guns fire handgun cartridges rather than rifle cartridges, therefore they are not considered machine guns, while automatic firearms of 20 mm (0.79 in) caliber or more are classified as autocannons rather than machine guns.Īs a class of military kinetic projectile weapons, machine guns are designed to be mainly used as infantry support weapons and generally used when attached to a bipod or tripod, a fixed mount or a heavy weapons platform for stability against recoils. 
Other automatic firearms such as automatic shotguns and automatic rifles (including assault rifles and battle rifles) are typically designed more for firing short bursts rather than continuous firepower and are not considered true machine guns. 50 caliber M2 machine gun: John Browning's design has been one of the longest-serving and most successful machine gun designsĪ machine gun is a fully automatic, rifled auto-loading firearm designed for sustained direct fire with rifle cartridges. Top: IWI Negev Bottom: FN MAG (general purpose machine gun) Czechoslovak 7.62 mm Universal Machine gun Model 1959 A. For other uses, see Machine gun (disambiguation).
For the broader topic of all automatic firearms, see automatic firearm. This article is about the specific category of firearms.
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