One for all

Uzi submachine gun, compact automatic weapon that is used throughout the world as a police and special-forces firearm. The Uzi is named for its designer, Uziel Gal, an Israeli army officer who developed it after the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. Gal based his weapon partly on earlier Czech designs, in which bullets were fed into the gun’s chamber from a box-shaped magazine inserted into the pistol grip. The bullets were fired by a hollowed-out bolt that slid around much of the barrel as it shot forward. Gal combined these features to produce a gun that was easy to load, of unprecedented compactness, reasonably stable and accurate even when fired automatically, and extremely well-tooled and durable. The weapon was phased out by the Israeli army in 2003.