The Stories Behind Gun Names and Nicknames

Guns pick up nicknames the way old neighborhoods do: through stories, accidents, marketing, and the occasional flat-out myth. Some names you think you understand mean the exact opposite of what you assumed. Here are the real stories behind 15 of the most famous gun names and nicknames in America, including the one most people get completely wrong.

“AR” does not mean what you think

Start with the big one. The “AR” in AR-15 does not stand for “assault rifle” or “automatic rifle.” It stands for ArmaLite Rifle, after ArmaLite, the company where Eugene Stoner designed it in the 1950s. ArmaLite used the “AR” prefix across its whole catalog, the AR-5, AR-7, AR-10, AR-16, and more. It sold the design to Colt in 1959, but the original maker’s initials stuck. It’s just a 1950s company’s product code.

The Tommy Gun and the Chicago Typewriter

The Thompson submachine gun carries two of the most famous nicknames in firearms history. “Tommy Gun” comes straight from its developer, U.S. Army Brigadier General John T. Thompson, and the maker was savvy enough to trademark the nickname once gangsters made it famous. “Chicago Typewriter” came from Prohibition-era Chicago, where its rapid-fire clatter sounded like someone hammering typewriter keys. The irony: Thompson designed it as a “trench broom” to sweep enemy trenches in World War I, but it arrived too late for the war. The gun built for the Western Front made its name in Chicago instead.

The Peacemaker was a sales gimmick

The Colt Single Action Army of 1873 is “the gun that won the West,” and its nickname, the Peacemaker, is the most famous in American history. But Colt didn’t come up with it. A distributor, B. Kittredge & Co. of Cincinnati, slapped “Peacemaker” on the gun in its sales catalogs in the mid-1870s. It was a dealer’s marketing name. Colt only embraced it officially much later.

“Saturday Night Special” and a myth worth killing

This is the one to get right. “Saturday Night Special” describes a cheap, small handgun, and you may have read that the term comes from a racist phrase. It does not. The earliest documented use in print is from a Kansas newspaper, the Coffeyville Daily Journal, on September 29, 1917, already meaning simply “a cheap revolver.” The racist-origin story didn’t appear until an unsourced 1976 article, and a Duke Law study found no historical support for it. The genuinely ugly history is in old gun laws written to disarm the poor and Black Americans, not in the name itself.

Ma Deuce and the BAR: soldier shorthand

Some nicknames are pure phonetics. The M2 Browning .50-caliber machine gun became “Ma Deuce”, just say “M2” out loud and you’ll hear it. WWII GIs gave John Browning’s heavy gun that affectionate name, and the century-old design is still in front-line U.S. service today. The “BAR,” meanwhile, is a straight acronym: Browning Automatic Rifle, also a Browning design, which served from World War I through Vietnam.

Dirty Harry’s gun and the buying frenzy it caused

The Smith & Wesson Model 29 .44 Magnum existed for 16 years in relative quiet, then in 1971 Clint Eastwood pointed it at a crook and called it “the most powerful handgun in the world.” The line was actually true at the time, and the movie set off a buying frenzy that left the Model 29 on backorder for years. A single movie line turned a slow-selling revolver into a legend.

The “Bullpup” nobody can fully explain

A “bullpup” is a rifle with its action set behind the trigger, making it short and stocky. Where the word comes from is an honest mystery. The best lead, traced by Royal Armouries historian Jonathan Ferguson, is 1930s gun advertising that compared these squat, ugly-but-powerful guns to bulldog puppies. A term used in serious military contracts worldwide, and its likeliest origin is old marketing copy about ugly puppies.

Trench broom, widowmaker, and the rest

A few more worth knowing:

• Trench gun / trench sweeper: the Winchester Model 1897 pump shotgun of World War I. It had no trigger disconnector, so a soldier could hold the trigger and “slam-fire” all six shells in about two seconds, so devastating that Germany formally protested it as a war-crime weapon. The U.S. refused to stop using it.
• Widowmaker: the Winchester Model 1911 SL shotgun. To clear a jam, frustrated owners stood the butt on the ground and pressed the muzzle down toward themselves, hence the grim name, though researchers have found only a handful of actual deaths. The reputation outran the body count.
• The Judge (Taurus): named in 2006 after the company learned that judges in high-crime Miami courtrooms were buying its .45 Colt/.410 revolver for personal defense. The model number 4510 even encodes its dual chambering: .45 Colt and .410 bore.
• Wonder Nine: coined in 1980s gun magazines for the new high-capacity 9mm pistols, like the Beretta 92 and CZ 75, that doubled a cop’s firepower from six revolver rounds to 15-plus and drove police away from the wheel gun.
• Hand cannon: originally literal, the handheld 14th-century tube-on-a-stick firearms that started it all, now revived as slang for oversized magnum handguns like the Desert Eagle.

Names tell the story

Half these names came from marketing departments, half from soldiers and gangsters, and at least one survives on a myth that simply isn’t true. That’s the fun of it: a gun’s nickname is really a tiny piece of American history in disguise.

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