A revolver (also called a wheel gun) is a
repeating handgun
A handgun is a short- barrelled gun, typically a firearm, that is designed to be usable with only one hand. It is distinguished from a long gun (i.e. rifle, shotgun or machine gun, etc.), which needs to be held by both hands and also braced ...
that has at least one
barrel and uses a revolving
cylinder containing multiple
chambers (each holding a single
cartridge) for firing. Because most revolver models hold up to six rounds of cartridge before needing to reload, revolvers are also commonly called six shooters.
Before firing, cocking the revolver's
hammer
A hammer is a tool, most often a hand tool, consisting of a weighted "head" fixed to a long handle that is swung to deliver an impact to a small area of an object. This can be, for example, to drive nails into wood, to shape metal (as w ...
partially rotates the cylinder,
indexing one of the cylinder chambers into alignment with the barrel, allowing the
bullet to be fired through the bore. The hammer cocking in nearly all revolvers are manually driven, and can be achieved either by the user using the
thumb
The thumb is the first digit of the hand, next to the index finger. When a person is standing in the medical anatomical position (where the palm is facing to the front), the thumb is the outermost digit. The Medical Latin English noun for thumb ...
to directly pull back the hammer (as in
single-action
A trigger is a mechanism that actuates the function of a ranged weapon such as a firearm, airgun, crossbow, or speargun. The word may also be used to describe a switch that initiates the operation of other non-shooting devices such as a trap, a ...
), via internal
linkage
Linkage may refer to:
* ''Linkage'' (album), by J-pop singer Mami Kawada, released in 2010
*Linkage (graph theory), the maximum min-degree of any of its subgraphs
*Linkage (horse), an American Thoroughbred racehorse
* Linkage (hierarchical cluster ...
relaying the force of the trigger-pull (as in
double-action), or both (as in
double/single-action). By sequentially rotating through each chamber, the revolver allows the user to fire multiple times until having to reload the gun, unlike ol