NEW DELHI: How much you know of bolt action .303! It’s a vintage, yet reliable rifle of yore — starting from 1895 when it was adopted as the British Army’s standard rifle until 1957 when it was discarded. The news is Delhi Police has decided to dismantle the already discontinued legendary rifle.
“We have initiated the process to dismantle around 7,000 .303 rifles. They were discontinued several years back,” said DCP (Provisioning and Logistics) Vinit Kumar.
The gun brings us memories, some sad, some even saddest. Some of them take us to the 1962 war with China when Indian soldiers took the single-shot, heavy-lift rifles to face the advancing PLA troops who were better equipped. The episodes of that war lay bare before us the stories of the numbed fingers of our fallen soldiers. They held those .303s.
Apart from the .303, the officer said they are also ready to phase out and dismantle some carbines, called Sten submachine gun, of British era.
The Lee-Enfield or Enfield, a bolt-action magazine-fed repeating rifle featured a 10-round box magazine loaded with the .303 British cartridge manually from the top, either one round at a time or through five-round chargers. It was this .303 inch calibre i.e. 7.7 mm bullet from which it got its name three-naught-three rifle.
Invented by James Paris Lee, the rifle was initially manufactured by Royal Small Arms Factory, Enfield, in the UK.
The only problem with the rifle was that it could only fire one shot at a time, after which the barrel needed to be reloaded by pulling the bolt for the next shot.