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ARMAG

Search matches names, aliases and the text of every page. An arm found by its service designation is found by its alias, not its title.

Short recoil

A locked-breech action in which barrel and breech recoil together for a short distance, then separate.

The mechanism of almost every centre-fire pistol made since 1900, and of several machine guns. Barrel and slide are locked together at the moment of firing. They recoil as one unit for a few millimetres — long enough for pressure to fall to something safe — and then a cam, a link or a lug pulls the barrel out of engagement and stops it while the slide carries on.

Browning’s swinging link on the M1911 and the simpler tilting cam of the Glock are the same idea executed two ways, thirty years apart. At the other end of the scale the M2 Browning uses the same principle for a 12.7 mm cartridge, with an accelerator lever to throw the bolt back faster than the barrel alone could.