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This article presents a history of the visual merchandising of American firearms from the mid-19th century until the present day. Although the scholarly literature has investigated visual representations of guns in advertising and popular media, it has paid far less attention to how sellers have displayed these objects at or near the point of purchase.

Primary sources include frescoes, engravings and photographs, plus papers, advertising and illustrations in popular newspapers and trade magazines. These and other period visual data are supplemented by secondary sources from a variety of fields, especially retailing and firearms history.

Evidence shows that American firearms were merchandised visually by Samuel Colt at three world expositions in the 1850s, by gunmakers and retailers in the latter 19th century, by Winchester and Remington dealers in the 1920s and 1930s, by high- and low-end retailers in New York in the first half of the 20th century and by gun stores, auctions and shows up to the present day.

The history of visual merchandising generally has focused upon major department stores, their alluring street-front windows and their fancy interior displays. This research explores past and present visual merchandising of firearms by manufacturers and smaller retailers. To the best of the author’s knowledge, it is the first such history of the subject.

The purpose of this article is to carry out a lightweight design of the joint structure according to the service condition of the joint.

The finite element analysis techniques are used along with the variable density structure topology optimization method, the multi-island genetic algorithm for structural dimension optimization and the fatigue life analysis method.

Utilizing the topology optimization method and size optimization method, the mass of the optimized model for the A100 material model is 9.67 kg. Compared to the pre-optimized model, the mass decreases by 8.23 kg, representing a weight reduction of 46.0% in the optimized model; the fatigue life of the aircraft joint is predicted to be a maximum of 1,460,017 cycles.

The originality of this study is that it provides new design ideas for the lightweight design of aircraft load-bearing structures.