The 10 Most Famous Guns in History

Some guns are just tools. A handful become something more. They turn up at the hinge of history, in the hand that started a war or ended an era, and they never quite leave the story afterward.

These are the most famous guns in history, each tied to a specific moment you have probably heard of. Not the rarest or the most expensive, but the ones that earned their place in the history books one trigger pull at a time.

The FN Model 1910: the pistol that started a world war

On June 28, 1914, a 19-year-old named Gavrilo Princip fired a compact Belgian pistol on a Sarajevo street and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie. Within weeks, the alliances of Europe collapsed into the First World War.

The gun was an FN Model 1910, a pocket automatic chambered in .380 ACP, serial number 19074. It is a humbling object: a small, cheap, concealable pistol that helped kill an estimated 20 million people by setting the 20th century on fire. It survives today in a Vienna military museum, displayed near the bloodstained car Franz Ferdinand was riding in.

The Philadelphia Deringer: the gun that killed Lincoln

On the night of April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth crept into the presidential box at Ford’s Theatre and shot Abraham Lincoln behind the left ear. The weapon was a Philadelphia Deringer, a single-shot pocket pistol barely six inches long.

That single shot is the whole point. Booth had exactly one, which is why he carried a knife too. The little .44 is named for its maker, Henry Deringer, and the spelling matters: the famous gun has one R, while the generic “derringer” with two came later. The original sits in the Ford’s Theatre museum to this day.

The Brown Bess: the musket that built an empire

For more than a century, the British Empire ran on a single gun. The Brown Bess, a .75-caliber flintlock musket introduced around 1722, armed redcoats from the American Revolution through the Napoleonic Wars.

It was one of the first firearms ever standardized across an entire army, and it was wildly inaccurate. A soldier could not really aim it at anything past a stone’s throw. So armies did not aim. They lined up shoulder to shoulder and fired massed volleys, which is exactly why those battle lines look so strange to modern eyes.

The Colt Single Action Army: the revolver that won the West

No handgun is more tangled up in the myth of the American frontier than the Colt Single Action Army, the 1873 “Peacemaker.” It was the sidearm of the U.S. Army, the lawman, the cowboy, and the outlaw alike.

Originally chambered in .45 Colt, it was soon offered in .44-40 so a man could feed his revolver and his rifle from the same box of cartridges. It is still in production today, 150 years on. If you want the truth behind the legend, we sorted out what the Wild West outlaws actually carried and what the movies got wrong.

The Winchester Model 1873: the rifle that won the West

If the Colt was the revolver that won the West, the Winchester Model 1873 was the rifle. Winchester said so itself, marketing it for decades as “The Gun That Won the West.” Both guns claim the line, and honestly they share it.

More than 720,000 were made, and like the Colt, it chambered the .44-40 so one cartridge fed both your rifle and your pistol. On the frontier, that kind of practicality was worth more than any feature on a spec sheet.

The Maxim Gun: the first true machine gun

In 1884, Hiram Maxim built something genuinely new: a gun that used its own recoil to reload itself, firing as long as you held the trigger and the belt fed. Around 600 rounds a minute, from one barrel, no hand crank.

The hand-cranked Gatling came earlier, but the Maxim was the first fully automatic, self-powered machine gun, and it changed war forever. A generation later, its descendants turned the fields of World War I into a slaughter that the generals of the Brown Bess era could never have imagined.

The Colt M1911: America’s sidearm for 74 years

John Browning’s .45 automatic was adopted by the U.S. military in 1911 and stayed the standard sidearm until 1985. That’s World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, all served on the same basic design.

Roughly 2.7 million were procured on military contracts, and Browning got the patent on Valentine’s Day, 1911. More than a century later it’s still beloved, still made by dozens of companies, and still one of the most copied pistol designs ever.

The M1 Garand: “the greatest battle implement ever devised”

When American GIs hit the beaches of World War II, most of their enemies were working bolt-action rifles by hand. The Americans had the M1 Garand, the first standard-issue semi-automatic battle rifle, and it gave them a real firepower edge.

General George Patton called it “the greatest battle implement ever devised” in a 1945 letter. To be fair, in that same letter he praised nearly all American ordnance, so it was part of a broad rave rather than one lonely verdict. But the line stuck, because the rifle earned it.

The AK-47: the most-produced firearm in history

Mikhail Kalashnikov designed his rugged automatic rifle in 1947, and the Soviet Army adopted it in 1949. What followed is hard to overstate. An estimated 100 million-plus have been built, more than any other firearm ever made.

It spread to more than 100 countries and turned up in nearly every conflict of the last 75 years, prized for working in mud, sand, and neglect that would choke a finer gun. It even appears on national flags. For more on the guns that armed the world’s militaries, see the most popular military small arms in the world.

The Thompson Submachine Gun: the gun of Prohibition

The “Tommy Gun” was built for soldiers, but it found its fame in the hands of 1920s gangsters. On February 14, 1929, Capone-linked gunmen used Thompsons to execute seven of Bugs Moran’s men in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, firing more than 70 rounds.

Public terror of the “Chicago typewriter” did something no gun had done before: it wrote a law. The National Firearms Act of 1934, America’s first federal gun-control law, was a direct response to the Tommy Gun’s reign in the headlines.

The ones that just missed the list

Plenty of famous guns did not quite make the cut. The Luger P08, with its unmistakable toggle action, became the war souvenir every GI wanted to bring home. The Smith & Wesson Model 10 rode on more police hips than any handgun of the 20th century. The Gatling gun terrified a generation before the Maxim made it obsolete.

And then there is the Glock 17, which rewrote the rulebook in the 1980s and now arms a majority of American police departments. Give it another 50 years and it may well belong on the main list. Fame, like history, is still being written.

Why these are the most famous guns in history

What ties this list together isn’t firepower or beauty. It’s timing. Each of these guns was in the right hand at the moment history turned, and the object soaked up the story around it. I have stood in museums in front of more than one of them, and the strange thing is always how ordinary they look up close.

That’s really what makes the most famous guns in history famous. Not what they were, but what they were there for. If you want to go deeper, we ranked the 14 guns that changed the world and the most expensive guns ever sold at auction.

Keep exploring Cool Guns

• The 10 Most Expensive Guns Ever Sold
• The Biggest Guns Ever Built
• The Strangest Military Weapons Ever Built
• The Oldest Gun Still Being Made Today