Weaponology (2007–…): Season 1, Episode 3 - Rapid Fire - full transcript

You're watching the Military Channel.

Go behind the lines.

Through history, battles have been won by big hitters.

The Army with the most bombs, the most tanks, the most planes usually wins.

On the ground, same story.

Rapid fire, rapid death.

Rapid fire makes the enemy do what you want him to do, which is stop trying to
shoot you.

Get locked and loaded as we go back through generations of technology

to find out how machine guns, assault rifles, and submachine guns became the
best of the best.

I gotta get me one of these.

Rapid fire, it's time to go ballistic.



In the 21st century, rapid fire weapons are the fastest, deadliest, baddest
firearms on the block.

The latest models take it to the next level.

The new weapons are the most powerful, the most powerful, the most powerful, the
most powerful.

The Heckler & Koch MP7 punches well above its weight.

Using compact ultralight polymers, it weighs in under four pounds.

But when it comes to firepower, it's an undisputed heavyweight.

950 rounds per minute, all designed to penetrate body armor.

The capacity to kill has gone through the roof.

Currently issued to German special forces units, the MP7 is designated as a
personal defense weapon.

Short enough to go close quarters, hard-hitting enough to slap the enemy down.

Now weaponology will unlock its family tree, going back through generations of
technology

to reveal how heavy-caliber machine guns, submachine guns, assault rifles, and
automatic rifles

evolved into the most advanced rapid-fire weapon on the planet, the MP7.

The history of rapid fire goes back to the 1860s, when Richard Gatling, a self-
proclaimed pacifist,



unveiled his 11th patent application, a gun so terrible it would make war
impossible.

Richard Jordan Gatling put his mind to the problem of rapid fire, and he
believed that you could get

around the difficulty of loading an individual barrel, which was always the
issue.

How do you load and fire an individual barrel quickly?

He got around it by having a lot of barrels, and it was really a wonderful idea.

Gatling was obsessed with cyclical motion.

He designed ship propellers, wheat drills, bicycle wheels, and, infamously,

the first repeating firearm in history.

He figured out a way of turning a wheel to load and fire multiple barrels and
multiple bullets instantly.

As soon as they would turn a crank, it would fire not one barrel, but multiple
barrels.

As it turned around, you would fire one barrel and it loaded,

and then the next barrel would come up ready to be loaded and fired.

The Gatling represented a whole new philosophy of warfare, minimum manpower,
maximum firepower.

Mike, crank her up!

With a Gatling gun, you now had a weapon which a small crew could operate, two
to five soldiers,

and this one weapon would have the firepower of 100 or 200 soldiers on the
battlefield.

I got to get me one of these.

The Gatling was heavy, 90 pounds, and got wheeled into battle on a carriage.

As a result, the military saw it as an artillery piece, not unlike their
Napoleon guns.

19th century cannons fired canister shot against infantry.

The metal canister was full of lead balls, like a giant shotgun cartridge.

Everybody was trying to make a better canister gun.

When you shoot canister like out of the Napoleon, it comes out like a cone.

It's always spreading in all angles.

The Gatling gun lets you keep them all on a plane.

So you're keeping your ammunition right where the height of a person, and you
can just mow down the enemy.

The Gatling looked like the future, a locomotive of death.

But it had a major flaw.

Its design had outstripped the bullets it fired.

Metal cartridges were still on the drawing board, and the handmade paper-cased
rounds of the day caused regular jams.

The Gatling gun was relatively slow to make its presence felt.

Now in part that's because the first version didn't use proper metallic
cartridges,

so cartridges needed to develop.

It also jammed quite often, and was on a cumbersome carriage.

These glitches meant that at the time of the Civil War, just a handful of
Gatlings were sold,

most to a general on the Union side.

Federal forces, the federal government was not interested in them.

They saw the drawbacks of the invention and the lack of reliability.

General Benjamin Butler purchased some on his own behalf with his own finances,
and set the ball in motion.

Butler bought 12 Gatlings at a cost of $1,000 each.

On the Petersburg front, they rained death on Confederate forces, and made
traditional tactics look stupid.

They still stuck to linear warfare, you know, the charge forward.

The Gatling gun would knock as many down as possible.

They could break a charge pretty quick if you had a couple Gatlings working real
well.

By 1865, Gatling had improved the weapon.

It now chambered modern cartridges and jammed less frequently.

Gatling's beast roared.

Gatling-type guns were even more effective against enemies unused to heavy
weapons.

In 1890, in the last battle between American troops and Native Indians,

153 Sioux Indians were indiscriminately mown down at wounded knee.

The Gatling gun gives you a high rate of fire, a high volume of fire,

and a lot of the fear factor when going up against people who are used to
rifles,

but are not used to this new horrible machine.

Over a century later, the Gatling is a museum piece, an elegant chunk of
American history.

It looks harmless enough, until you crank that handle.

This was one burst out of one Gatling gun on this area.

My daughter aimed at the back because it was her car and she wanted rid of it.

That was inside.

Anybody that once gives $3,000 for it will deliver.

Most people don't realize that the gun that shoots a projectile that was
designed 120-some years, 130 years ago,

will go through the whole way in a modern automobile.

It renders them in the junk pretty quick.

Gatling claimed he invented his gun to end wars.

By the late 20th century, he'd become the Henry Ford of industrialized death.

But Gatling's invention was eventually outstripped by an even more destructive
rapid-fire legend.

As long as you keep cold water flowing around the barrel, you can keep killing.

Machine guns, assault rifles, submachine guns, the deadliest family of weapons
on the planet.

With rapid-fire, there's nowhere to hide.

In 1861, Richard Gatling invented the first rapid-fire weapon.

But by the late 19th century, it was obsolete.

To find out why, you have to go back to this period and inventor Hiram Maxim.

Maxim was a former rival of Thomas Edison.

In 1881, he immigrated to London and had his own light bulb moment,

a flash of inspiration that will result in the birth of a new era in rapid-fire
history.

Hiram Maxim was an inventor and he happened to find himself in Paris at a
convention.

And somebody told him, if you want to make a pile of money, invent something
which will enable these Europeans

to cut one another's throats with greater facility.

Hiram Maxim's machine gun was a technological revolution.

The recoil-reload system made it the first truly automatic gun.

It is almost unrelated to the hand-powered Gatling gun.

Instead, the recoil of the gun ejected the spent cartridge

and delivered the fresh round into the firing mechanism.

The reason it made an impact is that the weapon was no longer hand-cranked.

Weapons like the Gardner, the Gatling, had to be cranked round.

They're not true machine guns.

But Hiram Maxim's weapon used the energy of the bullet going one way to reload.

Plucking a bullet out of a belt and giving you a rate of fire of 500 to 600
bullets a minute.

One cock places the cartridge ready to be loaded into the barrel.

The second one loads it and by releasing the safety, now I'm going to fire the
Maxim.

In the 20th century, the market for Maxim's machine gun was huge.

Tensions between the major global powers created a wide-scale military buildup

and the Americans, Germans, French and British all invested in Maxim's design.

And by 1900, most major powers had Maxim guns at the rate of about two per
battalion.

That's two machine guns per thousand soldiers.

They were heavy, they were cumbersome and nobody knew how to use them.

But in a deep and significant way, they did chart the way ahead.

A new automatic killing machine shook up battlefield tactics.

For hundreds of years, armies had attacked en masse ranks.

But the Maxim gun changed all that.

These things traversed a good deal and you could shoot 300, 400 rounds of ammo
in one traverse.

And if you're charged with a 300-man force of people, it wouldn't take you long
to kill every one of them.

Now when both sides do the same thing, it makes your mass charges almost
superfluous.

Despite its lethality, the Maxim was too heavy for mobile warfare.

It needed a big tripod and a two- to four-man team to operate.

But the First World War could have been designed with Sir Hiram's monster in
mind.

The machine gun was about to come of age.

As trench warfare develops, they don't have to worry about the difficulties of
carrying a big, heavy, often water-cooled machine gun.

Because they're sitting still in trenches for so long, the Maxim gun comes into
its own.

You can sit there all day in your trench with your Maxim gun, shooting at
whoever comes through no man's land towards you.

As long as you keep cold water flowing around the barrel, you can keep killing.

Maxim guns cause damage on both sides of the lines.

But it was the invention of a humble piece of farm equipment that made the
machine gun the terror of the trenches.

It would rewind two generations to a farm in Illinois and Joseph Glidden, the
brains behind barbed wire.

Barbed wire had started its life as being an innocent agricultural device
invented in DeKalb, Illinois, not far from Chicago,

designed to keep cattle in their fields.

Its military application was very quickly picked up because this spiked fence
would slow down military movement.

By itself, barbed wire is a nuisance.

By itself, the machine gun is dangerous.

The combination of slowing people down while they try to pick their way through
wire or cut their way through wire or blow up the wire

and get killed by a machine gun while they're doing it, that is deadly.

Barbed wire had been christened devil's rope even before the start of the war.

The twisted rolls of wire stretched from Switzerland to the English Channel,

slowing down troop movement and creating killing zones for the new weapon of
mass destruction.

Barbed wire and the machine gun, a marriage made in hell.

People would certainly try before a battle to send patrols out to cut wire, but
you needed really to do it on a large scale.

There was always the danger that the wire cutting would be selective.

In other words, all you succeed in doing would be making gaps in the wire,

and your attacking infantry would inevitably focus on the gaps,

and that's where the defender would be able to concentrate his firepower to do
real damage.

July 1st, 1916, day one of the Battle of the Somme.

19,000 British troops lie dead on the battlefield, most to German Maxim fire.

The plan had been to knock out the German defenders and shred the barbed wire
with five days of relentless artillery bombardment.

The reality, violently different.

The Germans were well dug in.

The wire breached only in places. The result, the bloodiest day in British
military history.

On its own, barbed wire won't stop an attacker, but cover that defense with
machine guns

and you've got something that can funnel the attackers and give you time to
slaughter them.

The nightmare of the trenches made military stratagem even more difficult.

It made military strategists determined to break the deadlock of static warfare.

Weaponologists set to work on a new family of light, but devastating rapid
firearms that excelled at close range.

If you're talking about having a close quarters combat situation,

I think this is superior to most any firearm on the market now.

The battlefield is a maelstrom of metal, millions of bullets, millions of
bodies.

Assault rifles, tripod mounted machine guns and automatic rifles play a vital
role in the carnage.

But what if that kind of firepower could be put in the hands of an ordinary
soldier?

After the static horror of the First World War, the race was on to design a
rapid fire weapon that could be wielded by one man.

Generals wanted to get their troops moving again.

The French were first with a dangerously unreliable Chauchat.

During the First World War, there were basically two different types of weapons
on the battlefield.

One was the bolt action single shot rifle. The other weapon was the machine gun.

Machine guns, however, were quite heavy.

The French were the first to come up with a weapon that would fire
automatically, but could be carried by one single soldier.

It was light enough.

But the Chauchat had issues. It was heavy and the magazine caused jams.

Weaponologists went back to the drawing board and realized that a lightweight
gun would need lightweight bullets.

Small pistol rounds provided the solution.

A submachine gun has the high rate of fire of a machine gun, but it's basically
a pistol.

It's something small enough and handy enough to be used close quarters and
carried by just the one gun.

It's a sort of a spray and pray machine. It's to keep troops that are advancing
at bay.

It isn't an accurate weapon. It's just a method of producing a large volume of
fire in a short period of time.

The enemy's in front of you. Get him!

These handheld killers were to become a key infantry weapon in the Second World
War.

The submachine gun worked on the principle that the more lead you loose off, the
greater your chance of killing.

The German MP40 was both compact and lethal.

It's got quite a limited range, being just a pistol round. But at close range it
can be quite devastating.

Up to 20 yards, this would probably penetrate two people.

It would go through one person and through a second person.

So it's got quite a penetrative power.

But one submachine gun towers over the rest of the family.

One of the earliest models, it combined the rugged metis of the Wild West with
the glamour of Hollywood.

Tommy Gunn, take a bow.

It's a Thompson M1A1 submachine gun.

John Hilliker is a sheriff's deputy and former Special Forces operative.

He's also a massive fan of the iconic Thompson.

Given the option, and I have the option as a sheriff's deputy, whether I would
carry an M16 or carry this Thompson.

And as you can see, I carry the Thompson. That's what rides in my squad car with
me.

If you're talking about having a close quarters combat situation, I think this
is superior to most any firearm on the market now.

The reason for the popularity of the Thompson was simple.

It packed extra punch.

Unlike European submachine guns, which tend to fire 9mm rounds, the Thompson
fired the very popular American.45 ACP round.

Which is a great big round.

The Tommy Gunn was firing a round that could knock people over.

And when you were being hit potentially by 20, 30 rounds of this stuff, you knew
you were being cut to pieces.

Gun designer General John Thompson discovered that a large, slow-moving bullet
could do a lot more damage than a round moving much faster.

There were a lot of experiments done by Thompson, the same man who made this, in
1904.

Thompson figured that the only way to get reliable data on body damage would be
to test on real flesh.

So he got some steers from the local slaughterhouse.

Basically what they came out with was to be an effective man-stopper, if you
like.

Velocity didn't matter. A big bullet, even if it is going slow, is much more
effective than a small bullet going much faster.

And so this is, in effect, a very good round of ammunition.

The Thompson fired an awesome 800 rounds per minute.

It packed a 50 bullet or 100 bullet magazine.

You therefore have a huge firepower, very effective at upsetting your
opposition.

I'll show you how the magazine goes in. Extended thumb off of the magazine, like
this, give it a couple of good taps to make sure it's in place.

You gentlemen have placed up some very aggressive lamps over there for me.

So rather than letting them attack us, I guess we should go see if we can handle
them.

In an urban environment, this is a very comfortable gun to either pull to your
shoulder or to actually fire from the hip.

And once you've done it a few times, you can get very good with it.

The Thompson was a whole new firearm flavor, and owners dig the taste.

Law enforcement officers liked the hard-hitting bullet that it had.

It was a very comfortable gun to use.

And owners dig the taste. Law enforcement officers liked the hard-hitting
bullets.

And gangsters liked its bad boy rep.

The Tommy gun became the sort of thing which we associate with the gangsters of
the 1930s.

It became something of a status symbol.

I mean, not simply good for sorting out your opponent across a bar or in a car
in the street outside,

but also went with the fedora and the cigar. Status weapon too.

The Thompson submachine gun was the weapon used during the St. Valentine's Day
massacre.

And for a gangster, it meant it was a relatively small weapon, giving him a high
volume of fire.

And something you could conceal. It fits inside a violin case.

But not every gangster wanted the Thompson.

First fielded in February 1918, the larger, heavier Browning automatic rifle
packed a bigger bullet and a bigger punch than the Thompson.

The Browning automatic rifle fires a rifle round.

A much bigger, much heavier round, even than the.45 ACP round that the Tommy gun
fires.

Now this is a completely different kettle of fish. It has got a huge amount of
power.

Clyde Barrow of Bonnie and Clyde fame used one of these.

And he sawed off the barrel to shorten it very slightly.

A close range with or without the six inches of barrel, the effect of this on a
person would be absolutely devastating.

A career criminal with a long rap sheet, Clyde often found himself going up
against Thompson packing police officers.

On more than one occasion, he turned the tables with the superior power of his
BAR.

The penetrating power of these weapons meant there was nowhere left to hide.

If you were hiding behind a car, you wouldn't have to wait until they popped
their head up to shoot them.

You just would shoot them through the car. It will go through both sides of the
car very easily.

This is a frightening weapon.

Despite the rise of the submachine gun family and weapons like the Browning,
rapid fire was still evolving.

By World War II, a new branch on the family tree had taken root.

One of the things that people are groping for in the early part of the 20th
century is a machine gun that's light enough to be carried by a single
infantryman,

but which can still suppress by having a huge volume of ammunition and a very
high rate of fire.

The evolution of lighter metals and stamped parts made this dream a reality.

A new wave of portable machine guns tumbled off production lines.

All the major powers bought into the technology, but in World War II, two
weapons outgunned the rest.

The German MG34 and its update, the 42.

Belt fed, these weapons guzzled ammo, easily outgunning smaller capacity,
magazine based rivals.

And the MG42, it combines lightness and high rate of fire because it can take a
feed off of a belt.

Which meant that they could produce this stunning volume of fire.

The MG42 is perhaps the most celebrated machine gun ever.

It fired at 50 hundred rounds a minute.

So when this thing goes off, it doesn't sound like a machine gun, it sounds like
you take a big piece of canvas and tear it.

If you were a British or American soldier with your magazine fed machine gun
taking on an MG42,

you always had the feeling that somehow it was putting down a volume of fire
that you simply couldn't cope with.

June 6th, 1944, D-Day.

American forces land on Omaha Beach in Normandy.

German troops armed with MG42s look down onto the beachhead, unleashing a
tsunami of lead.

Despite the Germans being massively outnumbered, the fate of the landing hung in
the balance all day.

One single German gunner fired over 12,000 rounds that morning, killing hundreds
of American soldiers.

The great advantage that any German unit had in the Second World War,

once they had the MG42, was just simply greater firepower.

No matter how many Bren guns or Russian machine guns you've got, the Germans can
put more lead in the air than you can.

And if you were fighting against it, the weapon was highly effective and
incredibly demoralizing.

Recoil-operated weapons now dominated the battlefield.

But the birth of a new era in warfare was to change all that.

The Gatling gun, declared dead since 1900, came back to life, and in an even
deadlier form.

The entry hole is one size, the exit hole is a lot larger.

The four people in between now are all dead.

On the ground, rapid-fire weapons spit thousands of bullets, pinning the enemy
down and causing wholesale destruction.

But in the air, they cause even greater carnage.

Right on, baby.

And it's all thanks to technology that died out a hundred years ago.

The Gatling gun.

Jet fighters, jet aircraft, found that if you used a normal 50-caliber machine
gun or 20-millimeter autocannon with a single barrel,

that as the jet fighter made a pass over the ground or at an enemy fighter or
bomber, the time that they spent on target was very brief.

And so what has happened is the old technology, the multiple-barrel Gatling gun,
has been reintroduced and reborn as the Vulcan cannon.

It might be called the Vulcan, but with this angel of death flying above you,
you won't live long and you won't prosper.

But how did a hand-cranked machine gun come out of retirement to kick ass?

The answer? Electricity.

The Vulcan aircraft cannon is a 20-millimeter cannon that is, from an
engineering point of view, almost identical to the old Gatling gun.

It just goes a lot faster.

Modern electrical motors driving the old engineering of the Gatling gun can give
an enormously high rate of fire.

When the pilot flips off the safety and hits the trigger, the Vulcan cannon
jitters, screams, and lets loose 100 rounds a second, 6,000 per minute.

More barrels means more bullets.

And that, of course, makes it ideal for an aircraft.

It might not have much time to get a shot off, and during that time, with a
Gatling-type gun, it can deluge the target with fire.

Electric-powered Gatling guns made their first appearances on jet fighters in
the 1950s.

But it was in the 1970s that Dr. Gatling's gun reached its true potential with
the birth of the most terrifying weapon system on the modern battlefield.

It was developed by Fairchild with two monstrous jet engines.

Originally designated the Thunderbolt II, pilots called it the Warthog.

Strong, ugly, brutal. A beast.

Though no beauty, this plane's loved by those who serve alongside it, for one
good reason.

The A-10 is literally built around the Avenger cannon.

It's little more than a flying Gatling gun.

We can see, as we get down to the real business end here, we have seven rotating
barrels.

It's the same concept, basic concept, as the original Gatling gun.

It is extremely lethal. It fires a projectile about this size.

You can have depleted uranium-tipped ordnance. These are known as armor-piercing
incendiaries.

This is one hell of a can opener.

The uranium-hardened ordnance was built with one thing in mind, annihilating
Russian tanks.

Since the Second World War, the Soviet Union has churned out the greatest armor
in the world.

The A-10 was born out of the fear of vast hordes of communist tanks and troops
pouring across central Europe.

What we discovered after the Soviet archives opened is that on the top of their
list of things they were most concerned about in any kind of attack into Western
Europe was the A-10. It was a lethal weapon.

The A-10 never got the chance to prove itself against Russian tanks, but it did
excel in combat operations in both Gulf Wars.

This is armor similar to a modern tank. The entry hole is one size, the exit
hole is a lot larger. The poor people in between now are probably all dead.

The A-10 was designed specifically for the intimate support of ground troops,
for going in low, for taking on enemy troops on the ground, able to absorb
punishment.

And built around this very, very potent weapon system.

The truth of the matter is that one or two A-10s can take on a mechanized unit
and as long as there is no air support for that mechanized unit, that mechanized
unit will cease to exist.

The new cannon wasn't restricted to jet fighter aircraft. Only the amazing
firepower of the Gatling could turn a humble transporter into a devastating
killer.

Once it's proved on the 20 millimeter Vulcan cannon that you can get an
appallingly high rate of fire out of the Gatling gun concept, then smaller and
smaller versions of the Gatling gun are made.

They were added to non-combat aircraft like Huey Chopper's and Hercules troop
carriers. They were converted instantly into fearsome destroyers.

What I'm touching right here is the GAU-2, better known as the GAU-2. It's a
Gatling type gun. It has six barrels used in mostly in the Vietnam conflict.

This would probably be one of several lead gunships that would come in. Very
effective anti-personnel weapon.

The rate of fire theoretically could be as much as 6,000 rounds a minute.

It was also Gatling type guns like this one were used for fixed wing gunships
such as the AC-47.

On the ground and in the air, the Gatling is a legend. Over a century of carnage
and those barrels are still turning.

But firearms are always evolving. In the 20th century, weaponologists got locked
and loaded on a whole new branch of the rapid fire family tree.

The M16 is one of those guns that is either loved or hated.

Nine of us had M16s up in a firefight. We almost got killed.

Until World War II, heavy machine guns, automatic rifles and submachine guns
dominated the world of rapid fire.

But what if you could create a weapon that combined the best elements of all
three?

What if you could give soldiers a weapon that had the firepower of a heavy
machine gun, the hard hitting bullet of an automatic rifle and the portability
of a submachine gun?

In 1943, the world found out as a new rapid fire legend was born, the German
Sturmgewehr.

It was so much more useful for the individual soldier to carry a rifle that
fired a rifle round, but which could still, especially in close quarters, get
that spray effect that the submachine gun was able to provide.

And the result was the assault rifle.

The assault rifle gives the ordinary infantry private soldier the ability to put
down that rapid fire which had previously been the preserve of the machine gun.

The Sturmgewehr could fire 600 rounds per minute and was accurate out to 330
yards.

Initially, Hitler banned development of the weapon, believing that rifles and
submachine guns were all his troops needed.

But in 1944, he was presented with one on a tour of the Eastern Front and was
blown away.

He christened it the Sturmgewehr, or assault rifle.

Only a few thousand made it into the troops' hands.

It had performed well, but it had come too late to influence the battlefield.

Just a few years later, a Russian tank commander, Mikhail Kalashnikov, gave
birth to the greatest assault rifle of them all, the legendary AK.

Kalashnikov's great genius was to recognize that he needed to create a weapon
which was going to be suitable for a massive conscript army.

That's the secret. If a Russian conscript can handle it, so too can an Afghan
guerrilla.

Working alongside Hugo Schmeisser, the father of the Sturmgewehr, Kalashnikov
unveiled the new assault rifle in 1947.

The automatic Kalashnikov, or AK-47, was born.

From the Sturmgewehr of the Second World War, we see the Russians developing an
assault rifle issued not simply to a few soldiers,

but to absolutely everybody, and becoming in the AK-47 and its many derivatives,
perhaps the most democratic combat arm in world history.

Like the Sturmgewehr, the AK-47 fired 600 rounds per minute and was effective to
330 yards.

Identical weapons? No.

Built with incredible tolerances, the AK can take sand, mud and water, but never
jams.

Even today, around the world, we are picking up Kalashnikovs made out of
unmatched parts,

in which you may have a Chinese receiver and a Yugoslav barrel, and all of this
stuff all cobbled together in a Frankenstein weapon,

which can still fire pretty much just as well as the designer, Mr. Kalashnikov,
intended.

Soldier armed with an AK-47 knows, when he lifts it to his shoulder to fire,
he's got about a 99% chance of it going off the first time, every time.

Let's give it a try.

Somewhere between 50 and 70 million AK-47s or various versions have been made by
as many as 15 countries around the world since the late 1940s.

You can buy one of these for $15 in the Arms Bazaar in Mogadishu.

I thought it was a great weapon, and I thought it was a great weapon, and I
thought it was a great weapon, and I thought it was a great weapon,

I assumed that these were going to be around for at least another generation.

In America, the response to the AK-47 was slow in coming.

The first attempts were flawed, as they tried to get the balance right between
the precision and punch of a rifle, and the brutal spray of a machine gun.

It wasn't until 1950 that the American army began to take a stand against the
AK-47.

It wasn't until 1957 that the American military got their hands on an assault
rifle.

When they did, it was worth the wait.

The M14 is the first modern assault rifle that the US Army and Marine Corps use,
and it is a remarkably accurate weapon.

M14s are still used today as hunting rifles.

A fully automatic rifle with a massive punch and awesome accuracy.

The M14 had it all.

Accuracy is still a very high priority. Let me show you.

You can put 50 rounds down range, and if you haven't hit anybody with it, you
haven't done anything, except wasted 50 rounds.

But after just five years in service, incredibly it was withdrawn.

It was too heavy and too expensive to produce on the scale needed.

The problem with it was that it was really too good for the requirements of the
US Army. Nobody needed a rifle that accurate.

Experiments from the First World War by the Germans determined that most
soldiers engaged targets at 300 yards or 300 meters or less on the battlefield.

Well, the rifles were effective out to 1,000 meters and could kill at well over
3,000 yards. It was too much.

American designers led by Eugene Stoner set out to produce a rifle that was
lighter, had a greater volume of fire, but still had enough accuracy at short
distances.

The result was the M16.

Made from steel, aluminum and composite plastics, it fired a smaller bullet, the
5.56 millimeter, and weighed just over six pounds.

At little more than half the weight of the Kalashnikov, it was a lightweight,
space-age stuff. But soldiers on the ground weren't convinced.

When the M16 was first adopted by the United States military in 1965, the old
traditionalists hated it.

It looked like a toy and felt like a toy, and they didn't feel that the bullet
would actually be effective in combat, because it was fairly short range and it
didn't seem to do much.

When I was in service and using the M16s, it didn't seem to have the stopping
power that a military firearm should have.

We called it the Natal 16 because it was made of plastic. To me at that time it
was a piece of garbage.

The M16 is one of those guns that is either loved or hated.

And plenty of soldiers in Vietnam did hate it. They'd been told that they didn't
need cleaning kits for their M16s, that they were so advanced they'd never jam.

But in the field, the M16 was totally unreliable.

We hated it, because if it got any grime or corruption or dirt in it, which you
always get any rifle at in the field, it'll malfunction.

The shells ruptured in the chambers, and the only way to get the shell out was
to put a cleaning rod.

So you can imagine in a firefight trying to clean your weapon after two, three
rounds. It was a nightmare for Marines at the time.

Nine of us had M16s seize up in a firefight. We almost got killed.

The jamming problems were eventually solved by incorporating a chrome-lined
bore-in chamber to eliminate corrosion and stuck cartridges.

Cleaning kits were also issued, and a forward assist button added.

Redesignated the M16A1, the rifle was reborn.

The M16A1 was a very efficient and a very effective firearm.

Now the M16 is a much different weapon because they've had time to perfect it.

It very quickly became the Sweet 16.

The AK-47 and M16 have dominated rapid fire for half a century.

But to survive, you have to adapt. And that's what assault rifles like the MP7
are doing.

A future combat weapon, the MP7 is lighter and shorter than the AK and M16.

It also packs a bigger punch, firing a 4.6x30mm armor-piercing round.

Combining portability, accuracy, and firepower, the MP7 is the future of rapid
fire.

The end product of everything that's been learned down the years.

Drawn together, the branches on its family tree reflect its unique genesis.

Richard Gatling fathered the first machine gun.

The marriage of Maxim guns and barbed wire changed the battlefield.

Submachine guns put firepower into the hands of soldiers.

And assault rifles led to a new generation of deadly rapid fire weapons.

The end result? The MP7.

Weaponologically, it's the top of the tree.