Guns in the Movies

Today, more technical "nit picking."  Last month I went off on the novels of Dan Brown, and now it's the even easier target (pun intended) of guns in movies.  Although they are a staple of action flicks, it's amazing how often movies get the details of firearms wrong.  For example, I was watching the movie "Killers" yesterday, and Aston Kutcher asks his wife to bring him the Glock .45 he has in the nightstand.  Then, as he points it at his head of a rival hitman, you hear him cock the hammer.  Except that Glocks don't have external hammers.  They are what is known as "Double Action Only" (which, is arguably ALSO a misnomer, but I digress) and the only way to cock the internal hammer is by cycling the side.  But the Foley artist doing the sound for this movie knows that the sound that goes with putting a gun to someone's head threateningly is the cocking of the hammer.  Even if there is no hammer.

Another common source of errors has to do with "blanks" within the plot of a movie.  Blanks, when you know that they are firing blanks, are usually treated as though they behave like ammunition in every way, except that they don't fire a bullet.  But again, the devil is in the details.  In many semi-automatic rifles, like the AR-15/M-16, or the AK-47, the lack of a bullet with blank fire means that there isn't enough pressure developed in the barrel to cycle the action.  There are two ways to address this:  1) You can put a device over the muzzle of the gun called a "blank firing adapter" that restricts the gas flow out of the barrel enough to allow blank fire to cycle the action, or 2) You can manually cycle the action after every blank you fire.  But what you *can't* do is replace a magazine full of live ammo with a magazine full of blanks, and have the gun behave exactly the same except without the bullets (Yes, I'm looking at you, Die Hard 2.)  Oh, and if you DO fire live ammunition out of a gun with a blank firing adapter on the muzzle, it often blows up.

The effects of handguns are usually portrayed incorrectly in movies as well.  There are both errors in magnitude and time scale.  The impact of someone shot with a handgun is often wildly exaggerated, with people flung backwards, physically knocked off their feet.  If you've ever seen video of police shootings, though, what's striking is how someone being shot will often at first appear unaffected, or will just fall over as they go unconscious from shock or neurological trauma.  Next, there's the problem of time scale:  Most people shot in movies end up in one of two categories:  Dead or complete recovery.  The reality is that most people shot with handguns don't die (at least not immediately) but they will usually suffer adverse health effects for the rest of their lives.  You just can't poke holes in a person without significant risk of causing lifelong damage, whether it is orthopedic, gastrointestinal, respiratory, neurological, or otherwise.  People just aren't usually ever quite the same after they've been shot.

And finally, (and this is just a general rant...) there is the incredibly sloppy handling of guns in movies.  Watch video of properly trained police of military executing a raid, and you'll see that to a man they have their trigger finger along the frame of the gun, above the trigger, and outside the trigger guard.  From that position they can fire quickly if needed, but they aren't going to accidentally squeeze off a round if they are startled or bumped.  But in movies you regularly see people running around with their finger on the trigger.  That's a recipe for disaster.