Background

Tools used to harm people, animals, or buildings. Usually their use is in wars, crime and hunting.
Weapons have been in use since the dawn of history, when early man chipped stones into knives.
In general, weapons are divided into cold weapons and weapons (armament). When a cold weapon is a weapon that does not use energy sources (heat, explosives) to activate it, examples of such weapons are knives, axes, bow and arrow and more. When a firearm uses explosives (usually) to operate: rifles, pistols, cannons and so.

The world wars accelerated the development of firearms, so that they became much more lethal.

Types of firearms
Rifle
Small firearm that shoot bullets. A rifle is characterized by a long barrel as opposed to a pistol which has a short barrel. The first guns appeared as early as the tenth century (in China). Between the 17th and 19th centuries, a musket rifle was used, a rifle loaded through the muzzle. Later, the bolt-action rifle, a breech-loading rifle, was developed, and then the magazine was developed, in which several bullets could be stored. Initially the cartridges were made of paper , and later metal cartridges.
The more advanced development is automatic and semi-automatic rifles that can fire a bunch of bullets with a single pull of the trigger.

Machine gun
The first machine gun was produced in 1884, and in 1912 the Vickers machine gun was developed. Acceleration in the development of machine guns and submachine guns was during World War II in which the Browning machine guns were developed.

Cannon
A firearm that fires shells at a distance.
The cannon was probably invented by the Chinese back in the 11th century, and is probably one of the oldest firearms .
Cannons can be stationary, or mobile, when they are mounted on a special vehicle, tank, fighter plane, warships and more.
At first they used cannonballs made of stone , then they switched to iron, and today they use shells with different types of explosives to increase the impact. One of them is the Shrapnel shell - The Shrapnel shell, developed by Henry Shrapnel in 1780, a shell to which metal fragments were added, so that the damage is also from the metal fragments and not only from the explosion
In the world wars cannons were widely used
Lighter weapons similar to a cannon, are mortars | 3309|, when it should be noted the Israeli mortar "Davidka" which was developed during the War of Independence

Tank
Tank - an armored vehicle that moves on caterpillars and has a cannon on it. The name was given to it by the British who created it for the first time and wanted to mislead the enemy and not to betray the essence of the tool.
The tank was developed during World War I, and the first use of them was in 1916 in the fighting at Flares (tank mark 1). In World War II the Allied forces had to deal with the German panzer tanks. The American Sherman tanks (named after General Sherman ) were competitive, and towards the end of the war, the British Comet tank was developed which succeeded in competing with the German tanks .
The State of Israel engaged in the development of tanks following the initiative of the former commander of the Armored Corps, Major General Israel Tal. The tank is called Merkava Tank, the first model of which was developed in 1979 , and as of this writing (2023), its fourth generation already exists (mark 4).

Bombs
Weapons that are usually dropped from aircraft. In World War II, bombs were widely used, such as in the Battle of Britain in the bombing of London , and in the bombing of Rotterdam

Weapon of mass destruction
A nickname for an atomic-biological-chemical weapon, a weapon also known as a weapon of mass destruction. Atomic weapons were used twice in World War II (in the bombs dropped by the United States on Japanese cities: Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Although no weapons have been used since then, the Cold War in which both sides (the Soviet bloc and the Western countries) were equipped with atomic weapons caused extensive protection efforts