What kind of gun is Alekhine's gun? This question is about chess linguistics. Alekhine's gun is the pattern where the queen is placed behind two rooks.


Who came up with the phrase?
Is it clear which kind of gun they had in mind? 
In which language did the phrase originate? 


I always imagined "gun" in this context meant a piece of artillery such as a cannon, because surely the three heaviest chess pieces put together must be a heavy weapon! :-)

I see that several of the non-English Wikipedia articles about it use cognates of cannon, for example, Cannone di Alechin (Italian) or Canhão de Alekhine (Portuguese). But on the Spanish-speaking world, the situation seems more confused: there are more Google hits for pistola de Alekhine than for cañón de Alekhine, and I can't tell which could be considered more authoritative. Could this have been a mistranslation?
 On the other hand, the metaphor of threatening the player across the table with a pistol is also interesting, and I've also seen the queen behind the bishop called Reti's rifle, so maybe there's more of a small arms tradition in chess phrases than I originally thought.
Alekhine's gun is a formation in chess named after the former world chess champion Alexander Alekhine. This formation was named after a game he played against Aron Nimzowitsch in Sanremo 1930, ending with Alekhine's decisive victory.