Machine gun

This article is about the specific category of firearms. For the broader topic of all automatic firearms, see automatic firearm. For other uses, see Machine gun (disambiguation).

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Czechoslovak 7.62 mm Universal Machine gun Model 1959

A .50 caliber M2 machine gun: John Browning's design has been one of the longest-serving and most successful machine gun designs

A machine gun (MG) is a fully automatic and rifled firearm designed for sustained direct fire. Automatic firearms of 20 mm (0.79 in) caliber or more are usually classified as autocannons rather than machine guns.

As a class of military kinetic projectile weapons, machine guns are designed to be mainly used as infantry support weapons and generally used when attached to a bipod or tripod, a fixed mount or a heavy weapons platform for stability against recoil. Many machine guns also use belt feeding and open bolt operation, features not normally found on other infantry firearms.