Firearm errors in media

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section may contain original research or unattributed claims. Please help Wikipedia by adding references. See the talk page for details.

Throughout the years, movies and television have taken liberties with reality in the interest of good visuals and larger than life characters. The effects of these special effects and the tendency for humans to believe what they see have created a multitude of myths regarding firearms. These range from how firearms operate to their effects down range. Some of these myths may be dangerous if imitated.

Contents 1 Operation 2 Ammunition use and effects 3 Common myths on common guns 4 References

[edit] Operation

• All firearms (with a few exceptions) must be cocked before use or after reloading. Usually seen in video games and some movies. This is not true, especially in the case of pistols and open-bolt firearms. In the case of pistols, there is only one instance where a shooter would need to cock (pull back the slide and release it) a pistol, which is after the first magazine is inserted into an empty pistol with its slide in the forward locked position (usually a stored gun). The slide on most pistols locks back after having fired its last round, and the shooter simply needs to press on the slide release when it has been reloaded to strip in the first cartridge. If there is a cartridge in the chamber, a firearm needs not be cocked back (since the only purpose of pulling the slide or charging handle on a pistol or rifle (respectively) is to strip in the first round out of a magazine into an empty chamber). For example, an automatic rifle or submachine gun that has been half emptied does not need to be cocked when reloaded, since there is a round in the chamber.

• Hammerless pistols like the Glock may be cocked as they are drawn. Many films and TV shows feature the distinctive sound of a hammer being cocked whenever striker-fired weapons like the Glock pistol are drawn or pointed at someone. These pistols have no hammer to cock and thus cannot make any such sound when drawn. The Glock in particular has its striker partially cocked, and is locked in place with a safety (disengaged by the small safety lever in the center of the Glock trigger). All semi-auto pistols featuring an internal hammer or a striker cannot be cocked or recocked without manually operating the slide.

• Silencers may be used on revolvers. Almost all revolvers contain a gap between the cylinder and the barrel. Supersonic gases and noise escape through this gap when the round is fired, thus rendering silencers useless.^[1] There are few exceptions. The Nagant M1895 revolver, a late 19th century Russian service revolver, can and has been silenced because the cylinder is cammed forward during the firing process to create a gas seal. Customized revolvers using rounds that encapsulate the propellant and a muzzle mounted suppressor have also been created for extremely specialized situations.

• The M1 Garand cannot be reloaded mid-clip. This is especially true in many video games, including but not limited to Day of Defeat: Source and Call of Duty. The shooter can remove the previous clip by pulling the bolt back, extracting the previously loaded cartridge, pressing down the magazine catch and removing the clip, then inserting a new clip.

• A semi-automatic handgun can be unloaded by removing the magazine. Some handguns may have a "magazine safety" that prevents the gun from firing when the magazine is removed, but most do not. The shooter must remove the magazine and clear the chamber to ensure a gun is unloaded.

• Glock pistols can be fired underwater, as claimed in U.S. Marshals. The average Glock pistol is extremely dangerous to fire underwater, as the striker is slowed by the pressure of water and thus can simply fail to fire, or when using higher pressure loads pressure can increase beyond acceptable limits and cause the gun to explode. Only the rare Glock 17 Mariner variant, or a Glock 17 fitted with special maritime spring cups and using standard pressure ball ammunition, allows safe firing underwater.

• Fully-automatic fire. There are many myths about fully-automatic firearms, from the effects to the usage and purpose. In reality, world militaries and police forces discourage full automatic fire because of its tendency to waste ammunition while achieving very few hits and potentially overheating the weapon. Instead, the fully automatic mode on rifle and machine guns is most often used for suppressive fire, utilizing short bursts to prevent an enemy from advancing or accurately returning fire. Submachine guns are a different case in that they are used primarily for short range, close quarters engagements where their high rate of fire and low recoil make them much more controllable on fully automatic fire than weapons chambered for full power rifle cartridges.

[edit] Ammunition use and effects

• Bullets can be stopped by items such as car doors, windshields (which can deflect depending on the angle fired and range along with what caliber), chairs, bath tubs, etc. Most will be penetrated quite easily with common pistol and rifle rounds. Some deviation in flight path while penetrating glass is a common. The 7.62x39mm Soviet rounds used by the North Hollywood bank robbers were shown to have penetrated an exterior wall and multiple interior walls.^[2]

• Impact grenades can be detonated at close ranges. This is not true, since most impact grenades (such as 40mm grenades) require some flight time to allow centrifugal force (caused by the grenade's spinning) to push out weighted pins that hold the fuze mechanism in place.^[3] This is a safety feature designed to prevent the grenade from detonating before it has travelled a safe distance. Only once the fuze mechanism has been released can the grenade explode on contact.

• Entire rounds, casing and bullet included, exit the barrel, such as in Major Payne when the title character offers a .22 LR round to his date saying he pulled it out of his heart when a man shot him. The casing is used to carry the propellant and bullet into the weapon. Once it is detonated, the bullet leaves the casing via the barrel and the casing is ejected when the weapon is cycled via the ejection port.

• Black Talon rounds will tear through body armor and are "Cop-Killer" bullets. Seen on Law & Order: SVU. Winchester's Black Talon JHP rounds have no special capability against body armor. As a matter of fact, they are designed to rapidly expand on impact decreasing their ability to penetrate bullet resistant armor. The National Institute of Justice, who sets standards for law enforcement body armor, specifically employs full metal jacketed (FMJ) bullets in testing as they tend to outpenetrate hollow points in most calibers.

• Hollow-point rounds make massive exit wounds. It is true that they expand but definitely not to the degree usually depicted. In fact, most JHP ammunition is designed to fully stop within 6 to 8 inches of tissue (about the length of the average human torso) to minimize danger to bystanders and collateral damage, thereby having no exit wounds at all.

• A person being shot is sent flying. As stated in Newton's laws of motion: "Every action has an equal and opposite reaction." It has been documented using various techniques that even the huge .50 Browning Machine Gun round does not have sufficient momentum to knock a person backwards. The Discovery Channel show Mythbusters tested this myth in season two episode 5 (and again in season 3 episode 38) using various calibers of weapons, including 9mm Parabellum, .30-06, .44 Magnum, .50 BMG (in an Armalite AR-50 rifle), and 12-gauge shotgun slug, and found that no common caliber of weapon could produce this effect. This myth may find its roots in the fact that a person not prepared for the impact of a bullet might be knocked off balance when shot.

• All bullets have almost the same level of stopping power. As seen in the Death Wish series. Handgun rounds can be divided into various performance classes, and performance within those classes are roughly similar. However, the difference between a "pocket gun caliber" such as the .25 ACP and a "magnum handgun caliber" such as the .44 Magnum is pronounced.

• 5.56mm rounds are "buzz-saw" bullets that tear through a person before tumbling inside them. Most high velocity rifle rounds of spitzer (pointed) design will begin to yaw and tumble once slowed by hydraulic pressure such as human tissue, expending their energy creating a large internal wound. Depending on the location of the impact and the velocity of the bullet (and bullet design), this yawing may not occur in all wounds. Accuracy is not generally impacted in flight but bullets exiting a target or barrier (such as wallboard) may have radically different trajectories. The 5.56mm NATO round is of note however, in that the bullet is narrow enough that it may fragment while tumbling if it hits the target at a high enough velocity, thus causing much more dramatic wounds than the small bullet size would normally suggest. However, this only occurs out to a certain range, usually 100 meters out of an M16 length barrel and less for shorter barrels, and the effect is hardly that of a "buzz saw."

• .44 Magnum is the "Most powerful handgun in the world." as mentioned in Dirty Harry. The .44 Magnum is not a handgun, but rather a cartridge. It was the most powerful in the world until 1959, in which it was superseded by the .454 Casull.^[4] The .500 S&W Magnum is the current holder of the "most powerful commercially manufactured handgun cartridge" title.

[edit] Common myths on common guns

• Glock pistols will not be detected by metal detectors.^[5] This myth started with an article in the Washington Post^[6] about the Glock 17 handgun that was designed to use a large amount of high-density plastic and as a result has an appearance atypical for a handgun and may therefor be more difficult to identify as a firearm in an x-ray image. That and subsequent articles in other publications led to proposed US federal legislation.^[7] This myth was exploited in the movie Die Hard II when John McClane made a comment about a nonexistent "Glock 7".^[8] In reality, 83% of the Glock 17's weight is steel.^[5] Glock handguns use steel slides and barrels, and though the frame largely consists of synthetic material, it does have molded in metal guide rails which would be impossible to remove without destroying the firearm. This means that none of the Glock's vital parts could pass through a metal detector undetected. Though the one in the movie is supposed to be entirely ceramic.^[8] A plastic pistol was also used by the assassin in In the Line of Fire, neither Glock nor any other gun maker has ever produced a "ceramic" or "plastic" firearm which is undetectable by ordinary security screening devices.

• M16s are notoriously unreliable. This was true for the M16 issued during Vietnam due to a variety of reasons. Cleaning kits were not issued due to production delays, resulting in the erroneous assumption that the weapon was self-cleaning. In addition, the military changed the type of powder used over the objections of the designer - this resulted in more fouling than anticipated. While not as reliable as many other military rifles, most problems have been remedied and the M16 is generally reliable if kept clean and maintained properly. Furthermore, the first batch of M16 rifles issues to combat troops did not have hard chrome barrel and chamber plating. This feature was specified by Eugene Stoner during the design phase of the rifle, but was initially dropped (despite protestation from Stoner) due to budget constraints. Later versions of the rifle employed chrome plated barrels and chambers.

• Bullet-proof vests render a person invulnerable to most rounds. There is no such thing as a completely "bullet-proof" vest. However, there is body armor that offers protection against pistol and shotgun rounds (to a degree). Rifle rounds punch through normal body armor except for Armor plates designed for rifle rounds. Multiple shots can ensure penetrating and there is still the case of severe bruising or broken bones with armor.

• Barrett .50 BMG sniper rifles can be used to shoot down commercial jets.^[9] Although .50 caliber firearms are very powerful compared to other small arms, the cartridge's power is not adequate to cripple a large airplane by sheer impact alone. Most major air forces stopped using .50 caliber machine guns in their fighter aircraft shortly after World War II for this reason^{[citation needed]}.

[edit] References