A Rifle for Every Age: From the Hall Rifle to the Daewoo K2

The Hall rifle was patented by John Hancock Hall in 1811 and adopted by the United States Army in 1819. It loaded at the breech through a pivoting chamber and was the first breech-loading rifle taken up in large numbers by any national army, though muskets and muzzle-loaders still outnumbered it until the Civil War.

The Minié rifle shows what a new bullet could do. After the Minié ball appeared in 1849, rifles could be loaded as quickly as smoothbores, and the rifle replaced the smoothbore musket as the soldier main weapon. Britain adopted it briefly in 1851 and the French Army officially in 1857.

Benjamin Tyler Henry designed this lever-action repeater, introduced in 1860 by the New Haven Arms Company. It fired a .44 caliber rimfire cartridge from a tubular magazine at an unusually high rate for its day, and about 14,000 were made before its design became the basis of the later Winchester rifles.

Paul Mauser developed the Model 1893 for the Spanish Army. Its short staggered-column box magazine held five smokeless 7x57mm rounds and could be refilled quickly with a stripper clip. Spanish troops carried it in 1898, and the United States answered with the M1903 Springfield after meeting it in the field.

Adopted by the French Fourth Republic in July 1949, the MAS-49 replaced earlier bolt-action rifles as the standard French service rifle. Chambered in 7.5x54mm French, it carried a rail on the left of the receiver for a sniper scope and stayed in service until the FAMAS began to replace it in 1979.

Designed by Mike Walker and made by Remington since 1962, the Model 700 is a bolt-action rifle with more than five million produced. Its action became the base of the M40 adopted by the Marine Corps in 1966 and the M24 Sniper Weapon System adopted by the Army in 1986.

Springfield Armory, Inc. began making the M1A in 1971 as a semi-automatic rifle based on the M14, sold to civilians and law enforcement. Early rifles were assembled from surplus government parts, and production moved from Devine, Texas to Geneseo, Illinois in 1974.

Designed by L. James Sullivan and William B. Ruger between 1967 and 1973, the Mini-14 is a scaled-down descendant of the M14 chambered in 5.56x45mm NATO. Introduced in 1973, it has stayed in production and has appeared with irregular and militia forces in the Rhodesian Bush War and the Troubles.

The K2 has been the South Korean military service rifle since its adoption in 1985. Developed by the Agency for Defense Development and built by Daewoo Precision Industries, it chambers 5.56x45mm NATO and replaced the M16A1 as the primary infantry rifle, though reservists still carry the older rifle.