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Quick Question: Guns In TV and Film

5K views 64 replies 42 participants last post by  M1911A1 
#1 · (Edited)
How much stock do you place in gun play and the equipment you see in action/drama TV shows and in film?

What do you think?

Was perusing firearms forum-land and reading about the 9mm Smith & Wesson back-up that Sonny Crockett carried on "Miami Vice" and how cool it was. It got me to thinking.

Seems that quite a few folks out there in firearms forum-land actually believe the stuff they see. They quote it like it's relevant in the real world. They refer to tactics, firearms, methods, holster choices as if they are meaningful. Many seem to pattern their firearms wants and acquisitions after what they see on the screen. They also appear to assume that their performance with their choices will duplicate what they see.

I know nothing about how video games impacts the gun world, but sense that it has quite an influence.

Youtube sure does. I can't comprehend the instructional need for videos illustrated with endless rapid-fire (oh and Armageddon rock music). Guess it's not exciting enough to simply show a fellow shooting for group. It's as if rapid-fire is the only way a handgun may be correctly utilized out there in video-land outside of some of Hickok45's shooting.

I remember a long ago discussion with a cousin my age where we were trading depictions of movie scenes of gun play that impressed us. Can't recall which of his films it was now, or exactly how the scene when down, but recall that I related how I'd seen John Wayne gun down an adversary and it actually showed blood spots appear. Seemed impressive at the time. We'd have been early elementary school age then so this would have been 1963-1966.

We watched "Dragnet" when I was little right up into the rerun era. Later my dad and I liked to watch Mannix and Hawaii Five-0.

I was in high school when "Dirty Harry" was released. We all knew all the action scenes, the movie lines and catch phrases. I wanted an N-Frame like Dirty Harry's only I wanted it in .41 Magnum and nickel. In my young teen Walter Mitty fantasies I could envision myself wiping out multiple bad guys at a time with that .41 Magnum Smith & Wesson.

I kinda went off of the action stuff as I got into adulthood. If it's well written with suspense and has some depth and intriguing twists it's great. Period pieces when correct attention given to depiction of firearms of the era are always good. But action for for action's sake, especially if its CGI, and gratuitous violence served up in thin plots seems pointless. Might as well be cartoons.

It was 40 years later that I indulged myself in my revolver childhood fantasy with a nickel 6-inch Smith & Wesson Model 57 .41 Magnum. I had that 6-inch Smith & Wesson Model 57 out for exercise the other day. It's a fairly similar representation of Harry Callahan's Model 29 .44 Magnum. It occurred to me that if I had to tote that heavy thing daily in a shoulder holster I think I'd rather take up something like banking rather than police work.

 
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#33 ·
Ha! We watched Blazing Saddles just last night. There's a scene where the bad guys all have their guns out pointing at the Sheriff ready to mow him down and not one of the hammers was cocked! Actually, with Mel Brooks in charge, that may have been intentional!

Something I see a lot of is scenes where the good guys are making an approach to the bad guys and they are all bunched up like fish in a barrel. I know it's so they are all in the camera "shot" but I find it annoying just the same.

(I see the same kind of mistakes made with hand -to-hand fighting.)
 
#35 ·
I think guns from movies/tv/video games can be pretty cool. I know you said you werent familiar with video game guns, but I am. Just recently I built a gaming PC and saw that Grand Theft Auto 5 was released for free for a couple days. I had played it before on Xbox, but with a gaming PC and a sweet new monitor, I had to jump at the chance to download a free $60 game. It is an incredibly well done game, with a life-like world that is supposed to mirror California. It was released back in 2013, and still to this day, has been the largest earning single multi-media release in world history, making more money than any album, movie, book, etc. What I found pretty funny is the first mission of the game...

You come to in a bank during a heist you and your crew is pulling off during winter in somewhere in upstate NY, and it says it was around 20 years ago. The mission is a flashback to your past which sets up some of the story of the game. What cracked me up is when youre in the game, in what is supposed to be sometime in the early 1980s, your character has an AR15 with a free float rail, modern flip up sights, and a modern stock. Even funnier, in one of the cutscenes where your character is being chased by the police, and breaks out the window to shoot his rifle back at the cops, he doesnt even have a magazine inserted, but the rifle just fires away like nothing is wrong. Hahaha

Anyway, I dont put much stock in any sort of media getting gun details right, but when I do notice they actually do, its definitely a welcome surprise. You can only listen to the sound effect of a revolver hammer being cocked back into single action so many times when the protagonist cop is holding a Glock 17 before you just have to tune it out and watch for the story.
 
#36 ·
Not much. What for the entertainment value. Or, try to. My wife catches bad gun handling. She knows I’m trying not to say anything and just trying to enjoy it. So, she calls them out for me.

Can’t stand when they don’t use the sights or when they have the finger on the trigger.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
#37 ·
Cop and "men's action books" are no better than the movies. The lack of information about firearms is monumental and seems to be evenly distributed. There are very few exceptions.

I don't watch TV and haven't seen a movie in yea many years, but I do regularly get offended by the totally far out wrong gun stuff in books. Sometimes it is so bad I have to quit reading the book. Other times I can fume a bit and continue reading.
 
#38 ·
I have noticed that in several TV scenes that the guns don't even fire. There's a CGI flash at the barrel, but the slide doesn't move. Finally, we have a reason that the actors don't have to reload-there's no ammo!
 
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#39 ·
When I started shooting in the mid 60s I didn't know anyone that had ear protection, or if it even existed. 38s, 44's, 12 Gs, etc.
Never wore them until indoor range in 1987.
Maybe that why I wear hearing aids & have tinnitus?
Lots of great shows & movies mentioned above but they are just entertainment for me.
Wife hate em, thats why God made his & hers TVs.
 
#42 ·
I love the scene where vehicles come together and seven bad guys jump out with full autos blazing. Two good guys get out and duck while drawing their service pistols. At the end of the scene, there are seven dead guys and one good guy has a minor wound on his upper arm..
 
#43 ·
Very few gun scenes are very real. Twenty shot six-shooters? Silencers that actually silence? Most realistic shootout? Well, my favorite anyway. When the alien shoots Captain Marvel with a deadly assault nerf gun. One of the more realistic scenes I've seen.
 
#48 ·
I liked the one where Cagney pushes the half grapefruit into the moll's face. Now that is realism!
 
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#50 ·
Looks like they did their research on this one, tried to be realistic. :diablotin: :evillaugh2:




:wall:
 
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#55 ·
I think one of the most outrageous movie scenes I have seen was in a schlocky SiFi move titled Chupacabra VS the Alamo
Chupacabras attack people and they hole up in the Alamo to fight off the invasion. Break into the display cases which are filled with
flint and cap lock muzzle loaders and proceed to shoot the critters rapid fire like they are semi auto rifles.
Awesome movie if you are pretty inebriated
 
#56 ·
what most people don't realize is that Prop guns do not fire full loads, if they fire load cartridges at all. Many of the long guns are fueled by Freon canisters and the flame is via a spark plug ignition device. There are some that fire blanks of course, but there are also prop handguns that merely present a flash of light at the muzzle for close range head shots. Then there are rubber dummy prop guns that actually do nothing other than provide a visual firearm for the camera shot with muzzle flash added on post production, often used for pistol whipping and rifle beating scenes. Of course, all of them have SFX added in post, no matter what the sound might need to be, since they don't make much noise on the set to begin with.

And now, all of the visual effects of bullet impact is done in post production, digitally, so there is no longer a need for squibs to be affixed to the actor and triggered off camera by the FX rigger.

So, let's take a close range head shot, for example: A "Flashlight" pistol is used, producing just a flash of harmless light at the muzzle. The actor firing the pistol has to "act" the recoil as the actor being "shot" has to "act" the reaction. Then, in post production, muzzle blast, audio SFX, and impact/brain matter are all added digitally.

The art of faking it on film is now at an all new level. Then, there's the infamous scenes where the shooter thumb cocks the hammer on his Glock with the 4 click C-O-L-T hammer SFX added in post production. Drives me crazy!

But what I can't figure out is why every detective who exits his vehicle or pulls his pistol from his holster always racks the slide on his pistol, even if they racked it in a previous scene. Apparently actor detectives don't carry cocked and locked.
lol
 
#59 ·
I'm on a collect TV/movie gun kick. Certain shows I watched, I'm buying guns in those shows. For example, Magnum PI carried a 1911 Govt Model (yeah i know they changed it to 9mm). James Bond carried Walther. Axel Foley carried a Hi Power. Hans Gruber - MP5.

It's silly I know but there isn't much else to do.
 
#60 ·
I saw a television show several years ago. The scene opens with a man on a blanket on an ocean beach around twilight. It cuts to a beautiful woman in a skimpy bikini walking barefoot down the beach. It swaps back and forth until she reaches the man. A Desert Eagle .50 AE appears in her hand and she shoots him with zero recoil impulse. I am thinking she is incredibly strong and has one heck of a concealment system.
 
#61 ·
A close friend of mine was one of the property gun and advisers on Miami Vice the series. When Don Johnson’s own original Bren-Ten malfunctioned he loaned the show his own S&W semi auto 45 to use. It was easy to adapt to fire blanks, he said. No damage to the gun was suffered.

Some shows are these days, unbelievably accurate in terms of firearms use. SWAT and SEAL TEAM and the old series
THE UNIT come to mind. Criminal Minds and the new FBI franchise are pretty good. Blue Bloods is very good and it better be because Tom Selleck is an NRA Board Member! Or he was for awhile. The writers are usually antigun so some 💩 slips by. The version of Hawaii Five-O that just ended was pretty good. The old Magnum PI and the current version are also good. NCIS is decent. Mark Harmon is antigun.

Now the old Hawaii Five-O with Jack Lord was ridiculous. That’s because Jack Lord was notoriously antigun and was proud of that. I remember one episode that traced a stolen gun through the island underworld noting all the blood THE GUN WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR! Steve McGarrett was also known fir spectacular shots like shooting the gun out of the bad guy’s hand at 50 yards with his S&W M36 Chief’s Special snub nose revolver.

I loved that show until I got old enough to understand politics and gun control. It helped that my dad was born in 1907 in Moscow, Russia while the Czars ruled. He was a first hand witness to both the Russian Revolution and WW1. I was raised with a bright, sharp and clear understanding of Communism.

The OLD McGuiver with Harry Dean Anderson was awful. Anderson was on the board of the National Coalition to Ban Handguns. I don’t watch the new show.
 
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