Depends on the 12 yr old, and on the machinegun. The AK47 is a machinegun, and there are 12 year olds in many countries that have fired them. A 50 caliber Browning machinegun weighs a couple of hundred pounds, and takes a LOT of upper body strength to fire well.
no
It was a very strong machine gun even if it needed 4-6 crew members to operate it. It could fire 400-600 small calibe rounds per minute.
It is called a machine, not a gun.
There really isn't a "traditional" word for it. It could be a machine gun section, machine gun squad, machine gun platoon, machine gun company, a group or cluster of machine guns, etc.
Before the development of a rapid fire firearm (the machine gun) the fastest you could shoot would be with repeater rifles which couldn't hold as much ammunition as a machine gun could.
A machine gun uses energy from the fired cartridge to operate the mechanism to unload the fired catridge, and to load a fresh cartridge- which is fired, and repeats the cycle.
Machine guns, as we think of them today, were invented by Hiram Maxim. There were earlier battery guns (many barrels firing at once) but the Maxim machine gun was the first to use the energy of a fired cartridge to operate the gun.
The Vickers machine gun was designed in 1912 and was manufactured from 1912 till 1968.
a light machine gun is a fully automatic rifle that one man can operate. during ww2 the most common light machine gun was the BAR (browning automatic rifle) in 30 cal. or 3006 in todays lingo.
Machine Guns, like any other gun (with the possible exception of an air soft gun) could seriously harm, and even kill you if at point blank range. Any gun could kill you, so, yes. a machine gun is powerful.
1924 /
Sorry, no, there is not.