Be sure to the read the story before you read this essay.
Hemingway's Use of Rifles as Indicators of Personality:
A Small Insight into the Macho Style
of "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"
Clearly Nobel-Prize-winner Ernest "Papa" Hemingway's famous macho tale of a hunting trip in Africa demonstrates how thorough his knowledge of big game hunting was. For example, Hemingway drew on his detailed knowledge of big game rifles to help create the three main characters in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." Robert Wilson, the 
professional hunter, uses a .505 Gibbs (say "a 5-O-5 Gibbs"); Francis Macomber usually uses a Springfield .30-06 (say "a Springfield thirty-aught-six"); and Margot, the adulterous wife of the originally wimpy Francis, climaxes the story by taking her husband out with one shot from a 6.5 Mannlicher [pronounced "MAN-LICKER"] rifle (say "a six-point-five Mannlicher"). As we shall see, each of these rifles highlights a little something about the personality of the person using the rifle.
The big game hunter Robert Wilson is a blunt, no-nonsense macho man who takes whatever he wants -- in this case he "takes" Mrs. Macomber into his bed. And that's exactly the sort of weapon the .505 Gibbs is. Nothing can withstand the force of a .505. It fires a round that is slightly more more than a half inch in diameter. (Most big game rifles have magazines that hold from five to eight rounds, but those Gibbs rounds are so large that the .505 only holds three rounds.) As one African big game hunter once put it, "if the .505 were any larger, you would have to call it a cannon. It is simply the most powerful game rifle there is." Also, the reader will recall, Wilson needs all three rounds from his .505 to stop that nearly unstoppable lion in the first half of Hemingway's story. It is indeed a completely suitable weapon for a macho guy who drinks straight gin under the noon-day sun in Equatorial Africa, who has affairs with his clients' wives, and who kills gigantic Cape buffalos as a regular part of his daily work.
On the other hand, Francis Macomber begins the story as a cowardly wimp who 
"bolts like a rabbit" when he has to face a wounded lion, who cannot keep his wife out of other men's beds, whose idea of a good drink is "lemon squash," and whose first name is Francis -- a really weak sort of name like Clarence or Nigel or Marion. At the beginning of the story, Francis is clearly the weakest of the three main characters, so it is appropriate that Hemingway armed him with the weakest of the three rifles mentioned in the story, the Springfield .30-06. Now the .30-06 round is only a little over half the size of a .505 round, and it is certainly powerful enough to kill a 200-pound man or a 125-pound white tail deer, but when going after a ton-and-a-half Cape buffalo or a three-ton elephant, a .30-06 is really not much more use than a pea-shooter or a slingshot. On the savannah of east Africa, a .30-06 is a wimpy gun for a wimpy hunter.
Actually the most interesting match-up of a rifle and a character is the 6.5 Mannlicher that Margot fires that one time at the very end of the story. First of all, the gun fits her personality. 
Margot is a tough and dominating woman who has affairs whenever she pleases, the sort of woman who is tough enough to drink gin in the hot sun just like the big game hunter does, and who is tough enough to handle a 6.5 Mannlicher. As the African game hunter who described the .505 Gibbs put it, "if ever I had to take down an elephant, a rhino, or a really big male lion without my Gibbs, I'd want to have the 6.5 Mannlicher." Second, and even more interesting, the 6.5 is a suitable weapon to use against the new-born macho hero, Francis Macomber. When she realizes at the end of the story that Francis has regained his courage and that he will probably divorce her when they return to America -- in other words, when she realizes that Francis is no longer a scared rabbit but a proud and happy lion -- she "accidentally" shoots him in the midst of the excitement during the buffalo hunt. He has become big game, and she needs a big game rifle to take him out.
Readers who are put off by the blood and macho code of Hemingway's story may not be completely convinced that "Papa" was a literary artist worthy of winning a Nobel Prize. Indeed, I have more than once encountered students who think Hemingway was unfair and "insensitive" in his portrayal of Margot. I can only hope that the small insight in this paper will persuade such readers that Hemingway was at the very least highly skilled in the art of building characters.