When did the word 'fire' first start being used as meaning 'discharge your weapon'

According to the http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=fire&searchmode=none""to fire a gun," the ... sense being from "set fire to gunpowder," attested from 1530."

Followup question: what would the correct command be? Would it be "Loose!"?

Discharge.

I've read that the command "Volley!" has been used to command (say) longbowmen to shoot arrows.

I think 'loose!' was also used for archers, but I'm not sure why I think that. The original guns had you literally touching a slow match to an outer pan of gunpowder, which would catch fire, travel into the gun, and eventually cause the gun to fire. Eventually, they went to flintlock muskets, which is where the trigger came from; you'd cock the gun, and pulling the trigger would pull a piece of flint forward into a piece of iron, causing a shower of sparks to hit the pan. The pan would flash, the fire would burn its way inside, and then a heartbeat later, boom! You had to keep aiming the whole time. It was a very slow process. It was still obviously 'fire!' at that point. Once they went to percussion caps, which is still how it's done today, I suspect they just stayed with 'fire!' from tradition. Armies are very, very long on tradition; it's been said that they're always fighting the previous war. :)

You'll probably like http://walternelson.com/historia/2006/06/another_historical_pet_peevear.html where Walter Nelson complains about silliness related to Hollywood depiction of archery. He claims that the only accurate medieval commands were "knock" and "stretch."

: "Cause I was watchin Lord of the Rings (gotta love tnt marathons) and when they were battling and the org commander guy yells "FIRE!" I was like, hey they wouldn't say that. Cause they still use bows and arrows in that movie. There wouldn't have been a concept of FIRE." Examining the etymology of Lord of the Rings is a complicated task. In the setting of the books, no one is actually speaking English, instead they are speaking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westron. In fact, the storyline behind the story (in the Foreward of Fellowship) is that Tolkien translated the entire story from the Red Book of Westmarch (Frodo and Bilbo's memoirs), which were written in Westron, and in doing so translated virtually every name and location and other things into English. There a lot of examples in that Wikipedia article. This isn't to say it wasn't actually a mistake, but one could make the argument that it's not a big deal since in the "real" fictional history, the word yelled wouldn't have been "fire" or "shoot" or "volley" or any other English word, and thus it was just a mistranslation.

didn't see anyone had it yet, so thought I'd better -- it's orc, not org =D