<$BlogRSDURL$>

An avid movie collector reviews movies, games, and TV shows for the common man, among other things. Spoiler Free

Tuesday, April 13, 2004

Guns in Hollywood

Guns are used constantly in Hollywood however they are often used wrong, and having gun training I thought I would help you all seperate some of the fact from the fiction. I know why they do the things they do, but sometimes I can't ignore the proper and actual way things work. Here are a few pictures to reference to understand what I am explaining however I am not going to dumb this all the way down because I am not in the mood to be as verbose. If you don't understand something e-mail me.


Revolver



Semi-Automatic Handgun


Cocking and Slide-racking

The most abused gun faux-pas is the unnecessary Cocking or slide racking of the gun. In a scene the hero is pointing a gun at the villain and the villain doesn’t believe he is serious so he cocks the gun to show he is serious. Unless he is holding a revolver he was holding a useless gun because without the hammer back the gun might as well be empty because it won’t fire. If he does have a revolver cocking it back makes the shot easier because you only have to nudge the trigger to fire, whereas uncocked the trigger must be pulled about an inch to fire. So this only makes sense with a Revolver.


Shotgun


As for shotguns, you get the gratuitous pumping. When you load a shotgun you do need to pump the action, once, and then you are loaded and ready until you fire a shot then you rack it again to dispel the spent shell and load a new one. Any additional pumping is wasting a bullet, because you expel an unfired shot. So when they keep racking the slide to make the cool sound, just know that they are dumb.

Click-Click-Click



When a gun runs out of ammo in the movies you get the Click-Click-Click sound as they pull the trigger and hit the hammer against the non-existent bullets. In real-life only a revolver would be able to do this. A semi-automatic gun would only click once because you do not cock the hammer with the trigger like you do with a revolver, the slide cocks the hammer for you when cycling out a used round. So you can’t continually drop the hammer without manually sliding the action back, or pulling the hammer back yourself.

One-handed firing



If you have ever fired a powerful handgun one-handed you know how ridiculous the movies are concerning one-handed shooting matches. You could shoot a BB gun or a 22 with one hand, but anything stronger than that will lead to extreme inaccuracy. When you pull the trigger the recoil is tremendous and you can’t steady the gun well at all, so while your first shot might be somewhat accurate, you are in no condition to quickly fire another. The recoil is very random when you shoot one-handed, whereas when you shoot two-handed all of your recoil is up and down because you are more in control of the gun. One-handed it spins left and right as well as up and down, so inaccuracy is far more difficult to overcome. As for really powerful handguns like the ones used in Clint Eastwood movies, you would be lucky to hit a wall with it one-handed and the recoil would probably spin the gun almost entirely out of your hand. Firing one-handed is fun, but I would never use it in real-life because I would like to hit my target with certainty and accuracy.

Accuracy



Guns can be difficult, but unless you are ghetto blasting one-handed you are most likely going to be accurate enough to be lethal, and should be able to land most of your shots into your target unless the distance is high. So in movies when someone is running away in a straight line and three men are standing there firing at him it would be most likely that he would have been shot by at least 60 percent of the bullets that were fired at him. I would assume that the policemen and full-time criminals that are featured in these action sequences would be proficient enough with a handgun to shoot moderately well, which would make them more than good enough to shoot fully revealed targets even if they are moving. Guns are not that complicated, it really does boil down to point and squeeze. I mean even Maggie was able to shoot Mr. Burns. This is the #1 reason that the end of Face/Off sucked.

Grenades



Grenades don’t explode quite like they do in the movies. Grenades are lethal because when they explode they launch shrapnel (pieces of metal) which will lodge themselves into the things around them. So when you throw a grenade into a foxhole, the people inside it don’t so much blow up but get dashed to bits by flying metal debris. However movies have fallen in love with the fireball explosions that we have grown to associate with grenades, however this is not the case with real grenades. That is why jumping on a grenade is a useful way of saving your friends in combat because you simply absorb all of the shrapnel into yourself, whereas if it really did explode like a bomb you would simply be getting a front seat to heaven. Don’t get me wrong grenades definitely explode just not as dramatic and enormous as on the screen.

I think that’s enough for today, most of the rest you know. Like you know that guns aren’t loaded with infinite bullets, so characters should be reloading on a semi-frequent basis. But that is more of a stretch than a screw-up, the things above just don’t make any practical sense. But ultimately who goes to an action movie for reality?


Some thoughts on Christina Aguilera



I was reading the Top 50 Immortals of Rock issue of Rolling Stone where popular artists and rock historians talk about the biggest “Immortals” of rock. It’s a great issue, and I have read most of it, and now I am reading about the people I care less about like Patti Smith. In that article Shirley Manson (of Garbage) says that Patti Smith is a true rebel and thinks it is a shame that we consider Christina Aguilera a rebel. I thought about it, and initially agreed with her but I found that I couldn’t think of why I am dismissing Christina as a non-authentic rebel. What circumstances would have to change for her to be taken seriously, or at least respected for what she is trying to accomplish? Would she have to step out of Pop music and move to a Rock album with her playing guitar to be taken seriously? It would seem that her genre is really what holds her back from credibility yet what if that is really the music she wants to make? She can either sell herself out to a less personal music and style to gain cred, or she can stay in Pop which is generally considered to be selling out by itself. Some people dismiss her for being a bit “slutty” however that seems to be the point of her rebellion if I understand the lyrics to her singles correctly (women should be able to be as sexual as men without the labeling of a “whore” etc.), so her changing that would then be selling out the thing that makes her “rebellious” in the first place. It just seems like she is doomed to be dismissed, and although I don’t love her music I kind of feel bad for her. She is always compared unfavorably to her peers, often without grounds, and she is so easily panned by serious artists because of the above position. I wonder what the world will think of her in years to come? Or will she even be able to tow the line without much success for much longer before she moves on to something else? I don’t know I was just pondering this, I have these debates all the time in my head, sometimes I remember to share them and sometimes I don’t.
Comments: Post a Comment

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?