One of the most common questions we get asked is "how do muzzlebrakes actually work?". There is a lot of erroneous concepts and information about that topic if you peruse the various gun-oriented websites, so we're going to provide you with a simple and concise explanation. Muzzlebrakes operate by some very simple physics principles that we're all familiar with. We are going to explain this in a step-by-step format and with a minimum amount of headache (hopefully). Most of us learned Newton's Laws of Motion at some point in time in our studies, we are going to look at each one, in order, because each is relevant to this topic. Newton's First Law states: Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a straight line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it. Basically this means that the gun is not going to move or counter recoil by itself. The gun will not move or exert force until a force is exerted on it. Newton's Second Law states: The acceleration produced by a particular force acting on a body is directly proportional to the magnitude of the force and inversely proportional to the mass of the body. This means that how fast an object (bullet, gun, '87 Toyota, etc) accelerates is going to depend directly on the amount of force applied to it and the weight of the object. If you were to double the mass of an object, it would take twice as much force to keep the acceleration rate the same. From this Law we get the familiar equation: F=ma where 'F' is the force applied, 'm' is the mass of the object, and 'a' is the acceleration rate.