Saturday, December 31, 2011

Five Gun Myths That Everyone Believes (Thanks to Hollywood)

Pretty good list. #4 is my personal pet peeve:
Machine Guns are Magical Death Machines
Where You've Seen It:
Starship Troopers, The Mummy, Max Payne, Commando, every John Woo movie, Scarface.
The Myth:
It's an old joke by now that nobody runs out of bullets in action movies (unless it's suddenly convenient to the plot, that is). Hollywood shows some restraint with revolvers--usually no more than 10 or 11 shots per six-shot cylinder--but damn, do they go hog-wild with anything that fires full-auto. So much so that that most of us have wound up with an utterly ridiculous concept of how those guns work. They're seriously depicting these things firing a hundred times more bullets than they can actually hold.
Because you can't actually see the bullets in a machine gun, Hollywood takes this as a blank check to treat the inside of a gun as a magical bullet factory. So in Commando we see Arnold fire without changing magazines for what seems like half the movie.

Read the whole thing. It covers body armor, the silly cocking of guns, and suppressors. The examples from the movies are contrasted with real-life YouTube clips.

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