Publisher's blurb: The future is quite often not as safe as people think. You need to defend yourself and others from those who seek to do you harm, through design or accident. You need a firearm. Strictly speaking, a firearm inflicts damage on targets by launching one or more projectiles driven by rapidly expanding high-pressure gas produced by exothermic combustion of propellant within an ammunition cartridge. The name has stuck through common use that it can apply, according to most people anyway, any personal ranged weapon.