22 June 2010

Gun myths perpetuated by movies

An interesting article at Cracked.com debunks some modern misperceptions that the public has about guns:

#5. Silencers Turn Gunfire Into a Gentle Whisper ("An unsilenced gunshot is around 140 to 160 decibels... A silencer can get that all the way down to 120 or 130 decibles, aka the sound of a jackhammer.")

#4. Machine Guns are Magical Death Machines ("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.")

#3. Bulletproof Vests Are Magical Force Fields ("In movies, body armor (made from a material called Kevlar) turns most guns from magical death-wands to hilariously overbuilt Airsoft rifles.")

#2. Gratuitous Cocking ("That "click" is the sound of a hammer being cocked back, and movies seem to be saying, "This means the gun is ready to fire now, baby!" It doesn't mean that, however. It doesn't mean anything. The gun was already good to go.")

#1. Bullets Explode Everything ("In the movies, bullets and anything mildly flammable have a matter/anti-matter relationship. The second hot lead touches a car's gas tank, it and everyone inside are going up in flames.")

More details at the link.

5 comments:

  1. Item #4-- Years ago cowboys in the movies used to shoot all day long with a six-shooter. I guess that not all that much has changed in Hollywood.

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  2. #5 I've fired a MAC-10 .45 with a Sionics suppressor - all you can hear is the clickity-clickity-clack of the action cycling. Because it's subsonic.

    I also use suppressors on my big guns - a .308 and a .50 . You still get the sonic boom "crack", but the muzzle report is totally gone.

    This is a real advantage, as the .50 especially is _JARRING_ with just a muzzle brake - limiting a practice session to 20-30 rounds.

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  3. #2 On a revolver, cocking the hammer makes the weapon easier to fire with less finger pressure on the trigger.

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  4. #2.
    Some weapons, such as the 1911 and some revolvers are "Single Action Only" (SAO) which means the hammer HAS to be cocked before firing.
    On the SAO revolvers they have to be cocked before EACH shot (think of the old western movies with the shooter "fanning" the hammer to shoot quickly). Semi automatics that are SAO will typically only need to be cocked for that first shot. The slide cocks the hammer for the next shot during the backstroke.

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  5. These are great, but not entirely accurate (as others have already pointed out). I've shot just about everything short of artillery, and laugh through movies with guns most of the time.

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