Riffelmann

German Riffe or Rieffe (groove, furrow) gave rise to riffeln (to groove) and eventually Büchse mit Riffeln (grooved gun barrel). The rifled musket — a firearm whose barrel had spiral grooves cut into its interior — had been known since the 15th century, but loading a rifled barrel was much slower than a smooth bore. Early rifles were luxury hunting weapons for the wealthy, not practical military tools.

German and Swiss Jäger (hunter) troops in the 18th century first deployed rifles in military skirmishing. Their tradition of accurate individual shooting contrasted with the massed volley fire of line infantry. The Pennsylvania Rifle — developed by German immigrant gunsmiths in the American colonies in the 1710s-1730s — was lighter, longer, and more accurate than European hunting rifles, and American frontiersmen trained as individual marksmen rather than volley firers.

The American Revolutionary War made the rifleman's value unmistakable. At the Battle of Saratoga in 1777, Timothy Murphy, a rifleman in Daniel Morgan's corps, reportedly shot British General Simon Fraser at 300 yards — a range unimaginable for smoothbore muskets. The shot broke the British advance and helped turn the tide of the battle. Rifle-armed skirmishers began changing military doctrine.

The rifled musket's mass adoption after 1840, and the subsequent development of the repeating rifle after the American Civil War, eventually eliminated line tactics entirely. The rifleman — the individual soldier trained to use aimed fire — became the basic unit of modern infantry. Every major army's primary weapon is a rifle, and every soldier is, in some sense, a rifleman.