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The Minie Balls During The Civil War

1032 Words5 Pages

In 1861, the country of the United States was in a war with their own country. The war was about blacks being slaves and how they should be treated equally as whites are.The civil war had killed more people than any other war in the history of our world. If you add up the fatalities from the last 4 wars the United states had been apart of, the fatalities were still not as bad as they were in the civil war and that was for one reason. The war had introduced many new types of technology such as, the war submarine, the repeating rifle, the refrigerated train car and many others. There were many changes to the rifle and the ammunition that they used. The civil war technology that I will be talking about in this essay is the minie ball and how it …show more content…

Men were taking three times as much time to reload then to even shoot the gun. There was something better on the way for these soldiers and that was the repeating springfield rifle. The springfield rifle allowed men to shoot significantly faster than they would be able to with a musket rifle. With the minie ball being made in mass production, the springfield rifle was perfect for the minie ball bullets. The war changed significantly. The minie ball bullet was so accurate that many more men went down in the war than before the civil war. The catch with the minie ball though was that it flattened on impact which devastated the men that were being shot with it. The minie ball would flatten when it hit the men and it absolutely tore through them. It tore tendons and ligaments and sometimes went through bone. The minie ball was very helpful for the side who used it the most. It caused so much damage that it leads me to believe that the minie ball was the turning point in the war. I think that it was the reason why there were so many …show more content…

If you take a look at any bullet in any store in the world you will notice one thing. They all look about the same. They all have the same type of shape. Sure some are more sharp than others but they all have the same type of style. All the bullets take the shape of a football. They all look like the minie ball that was used so much in the civil war. They are so much cheaper to make in mass production and they are so much better to shoot with than the round ball that was used in the musket rifles so long ago. Now you might be asking how does that honestly impact the way we shoot today. Well, every rifle that is made in todays society is fit to shoot that type of football shaped bullet. Snipers in the wars that we have in the twentieth century are all so accurate because of the shape and accuracy of the minie ball. I honestly think that if the minie ball was not so huge in the civil war than we would not be this far as we are today on how accurate our bullets and guns are. I think that war would be a different monster as far as bullets and guns go. The minie ball has had a huge impact on guns and ammunition in the twentieth

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