It was supposedly Samuel Taylor Coleridge, circa 1817, who first wrote that enjoying fictional entertainment required “a willing suspension of disbelief.”  I was reminded of that yesterday when, in a rare day that didn’t require class, court, or conveyance, the Evil Princess and I took half an afternoon off to go into a movie theater (we vaguely remembered having done so in the past) and watching “Jurassic World.”

Now, I’ll try like hell not to say anything that might spoil it for you, but as Backwoods Home’s resident gun guy, I need to warn you that you’ll have to willingly suspend your disbelief as to how a lever action rifle such as the Marlin Guide Gun can be fired, not to mention the “less-lethal weapons” stuff.  That aside, though, it’s a pretty cool movie.

Mainly, it flashed me back to a theater in Michigan in the early 1990s where some friends and I saw the first “Jurassic Park” movie.  Then as with this new version, it was the super-hot new movie of the season, and Time and Newsweek  and such were saying that it was so scary that parents should preview it before letting their kids see it.  My daughters were eager to catch that flick, and the youngest was about eight, so I felt duty-bound to check it out beforehand.

Good Lord…what a validation for those of us who are responsibly armed!

In that first “Jurassic Park,” those people had a good idea what they were getting into before they got there, and still went unarmed…and paid the price.  The time-proven FN FAL 7.62mm semiautomatic battle rifles and the SPAS-12 semiautomatic shotguns were kept in an armory, accessible only to the privileged elite (an allegory here, maybe?) when the dinosaurs started taking over.  Soon, there were some human body parts laying next to a jammed SPAS-12; being familiar with that particular weapon, I thought “Hey – that’s real!”

Throughout the movie, this or that T-rex was chasing folks and I found myself thinking, “The .458 Magnum elephant rifle I took to Africa would drop one of those.”  I know people who’d pay a king’s ransom to hunt a Tyrannosaurus Rex in Central America. As the packed theater audience cringed with “oohs” and “aahs” I thought, “What’s you people’s problem? Shoot the effing lizards!”

One character described the ominous characteristics of the Velociraptors: about six feet long with tough, leathery skin and sharp fangs and claws.  I actually pulled my concealing garment back as I sat in the theater and looked down at the Colt .45 automatic in my holster, and saw the reassuring little green eyes of the Trijicon rear night-sight look back up at me.  Six feet tall? Leather jacket? Multiple edged weapons? All over America, cops and law-abiding armed citizens deal with that every day with gear like what I’ve got on in this theater in 1993!

And, OMG, the ending of the original “Jurassic Park.”  For what I later counted as nine minutes or so, two poor little kids struggle desperately to stay ahead of the Velociraptors before their deux ex machina rescue. I knew then and there that if those children were my kick-ass daughters, they would have long since found their way into their armory and availed themselves of a couple of FN FALs.  When the Velociraptors kicked in the door on them, there would have been a short burst of well-directed, high-powered gunfire, and my kids would have spent the rest of those nine minutes asking each other, “How many purses and shoes and belts do you think we can make out of these suckers?”

33 COMMENTS

  1. I had to laugh as Chris Pratt shoots his Marlin Model 1895SBL repeatedly w/o using the lever action. The .45-70 rounds probably would be effective as your Colt, except for that dang lever!

  2. Gun people cannot do this kind of movies as they would be too short.

    “Mom! I think there is something wrong with Cujo. He looks mad and is foaming at the mouth.”
    “He is?”
    BANG BANG BANG

    The End.

  4. The wife and I don’t get out to the movies much anymore. There used to be something called common courtesy. It seems like I always get a seat in a row where someone can’t hold their water or someone seated behind me or my wife that thinks that our seats should be a foot rest just for them. When you say something to them they take on an air of indignation that someone would have the temerity to say something to them. Now that I am carrying I don’t think it would be a good idea to get involved in an altercation. We just wait for the movie to come out on DVD. We just recently watched American Sniper on DVD. I have a wide screen HD TV and Blue Ray player and a 7.1 sound system so I don’t think I am missing anything except the annoyance.

    The concept of cloning dinosaurs is intriguing however.
    When watching movies involving firearms I take pride in being able to identify them. In the series Blue Bloods, what is that firearm that Danny uses? Anyone Know? 2 tone compact 9?
    Mas, you probably don’t remember; one of our first discussions revolved around the first Dirty Harry movie, I was looking at it as pure entertainment, you were looking at it more critically, from the viewpoint of an leo. The one thing that we could both agree on was that the bad guy got his just desserts. He was a hell of an actor in that part.

  5. Late science fiction author L. Sprague de Camp asserted that large-caliber ordinary rifles would be adequate to hunt dinosaurs, including T Rex, in his classic story, A Gun for Dinosaur, first published in March, 1956.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Gun_for_Dinosaur

    or if you’d prefer to listen to an old time radio adaptation of it (and it’s a good yarn):

    http://ia800300.us.archive.org/15/items/XMinus1_A/xminusone_560307_AGunForDinosaur.mp3

    The time-travel guide in the story would not take hunters to the Jurassic or Cretaceous unless they could handle a .600 Continental Nitro Express. I’ll let you read or listen to the story to find out why.

  6. I just saw it one the other evening. I found it enjoyable, but then I’m pretty good at just letting go and enjoying things without worrying too much about pesky little things like physics, or reality.

  7. Point of order: there were no FALs in Jurassic Park, the movie:

    http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Jurassic_Park

    I don’t remember if there were FALs in the book, though. Having a stock of FALs on the island would have a made much more sense than most AR variants at the time, if for no other reason than caliber.

  8. The notorious John Taylor of the “Taylor KO Factor,” (see “Pondoro,” “African Rifles and Cartridges,” etc.) mentioned in one of his books, maybe in “Pondoro,” African narratives of prehistoric beasts still living deep in the swamps along the Zambezi or someplace. Some kind of hell-hole to enter for sure, but would make pretty interesting Reality adventure. Give me a stainless 4-inch .44 mag for a comfort blanket in those parts, plus a BAR, and lots of Deet. Taylor’s description of witnessing a crocodile council in the water, chaired by a giant, tailless one, is unforgettable. Kind of reminds me of a UN session. You probably don’t need Ty Rex in Africa, though, with the standard man-eating lions and crocs that still abound there.

  9. I remember asking (proverbially) the near same questions when I saw the original Jurassic park. Of course, if the protagonists had been adequately armed there would not have been much of a story. The Jurassic creepy crawlies would have all been candidates for the boot, belt, purse factories.

    I have been a reading fan of yours since your book, In The Gravest Extreme, came out. Keep up the FINE writing. I am never disappointed.

  11. Randy, on Blue Bloods I’ve seen the Danny character with both the Kahr K9, authorized for some time on NYPD, and the S&W 5946, which is still authorized there and probably the second most popular duty gun behind the Glock 19 on that department.

  12. Can’t recall what the online fora call it, but it was something like Redneck Horror Movie lines like: “Before we go down into that dark, nasty critter-crawly basement, how about we toss in Uncle Bubba’s Lucky Frag Grenade first?”

    I do recall when Scream came out. All I could think of was “*Where* are you? Dunno, pal, but I’m in the corner of a room with a loaded 12 gauge. Let’s party!”

    I much prefer actual fantasy/Sci-Fi movies so I don’t need to worry about how our reality works since what’s onscreen is the only reality that matters, and whether I suspend belief is irrelevant. And really, those kind of movie realities make much more sense than anything we read in the news today, right?

  14. Not that I want to start an argument, but this does raise the question, “Which is better for killing Jurassic Park dinosaurs: Star Trek phasers, Star Wars blasters, or The Terminator’s phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range?”

    I also agree with what Mas & Miguel said. I used to watch a lot of horror movies when I was younger & every single time I did I thought, “If any of these people had a gun, this would be a really short movie!”

  15. There has been a persistent theme through all of the Jurassic park series. Guns are evil. Spielberg seems very anti gun and it comes through in those movies. The shotgun jams in the first one, the professional hunter gets out thought by a velociraptor before he can shoot. In the one with Vince Vaughn, Vaughn plays a smug left wing idiot greenie who pulls the two projectiles from the cartridges in the hunter’s double rifle so the hunter can’t shoot the T-Rex.

    Of course the fact that people then get stomped and chewed to bits by said T-Rex is fine by Vaughn’s character. Kind of sad because Vaughn is apparently pro 2nd Amendment in real life. There are other examples throughout the first three movies.

    At least in Jurassic World a couple of dino’s do get killed with firearms. One with a rocket launcher (ok not a rifle, but it did work really well) and a pterodactyl that gets it from a helicopter.

  16. Haven’t seen it yet. I plan to check it out tomorrow night. I love movies. I can empathize with Randy about the inconveniences of the movie theatre. The older I get, the less I care to go out to places like movie theaters – TV at home is preferable – sporting events also.

    Anyway, the few times that I will go to a movie theater, I always attend the latest showing available. That way all the kiddies are at home in bed, the teens have already attended an earlier showing and are now out partying somewhere, and all the wise acres have attended earlier and are now out drinking somewhere else. Late at night the crowd has greatly diminished. I always have the row to myself. Heck, there were times that I was the only one in the theater and had a “private showing” on a stadium screen.

    I have often wondered about rifles and dinosaurs. A reptile (like a croc) has a limited nervous system. Shoot a hole in a croc and unless you hit something like the brain/stem he will continue to do what he was doing (maybe chasing you). The reptile will bleed to death/succumb eventually but just doesn’t submit to pain and trauma like a mammal. Remember all those gator shootings on the TV swamp programs? Only need a .22 on the monster, but it needs to be in the brain which is only about two inches across. Miss the brain and the beast keeps twisting and flipping.

    So, if gators and crocs act that way what about raptors and TRex? Well, I don’t know since science has a consensus these days that a true dinosaur was more like a bird than a reptile. The first Jurassic Park book (not movie) treated them like reptiles when it came to guns (used tranquilizer rifles). If they’re more like birds then maybe we should all load up with 7 1/2 shot in a 870? I guess you can pull out the plug and use an extended magazine since they are probably not migratory and of no concern to the US Parks and Wildlife folks. However, I think I would use an RPG (at least on TRex). {:o)

  17. Lmao. Thanks for the laugh re; your crumb crunchers reaction, Mas. I needed that.
    On a side note, did you notice the programming in the scene where Mom tells the youngest kid, “If anything chases you, RUN”. How about teaching him fight instead?

  18. It seems that the .577 Tyrannosaur would be a good caliber for a T-Rex and velociraptors. I expect I’ll break down and go see Jurassic World at the movies with my family. Jurassic Park was the first movie my then girlfriend, her son and I went to see together. I was working in a Biotech lab at the time and John kept saying “don’t you all have one of those” as they went through the cloning facilities.

  19. I’m sorry, I can’t dedicate much of my limited time (what’s left of it) on this rock, to sitting still and suffering the effects of the Hollywood industrial complex. That being said, I love good old books, including the original book by Crichton, which started the ball rolling the Jurassic style movies.

    My opinion concerning guns as viable tools to control Dino? If we have time to strategize and fight monsters real or imagined, on our terms, we win. But if we have to do it on their terms, in their time? Forget it. Something will go wrong. A good fictional reference book is: A Sound Of Thunder, by Ray Bradbury.

  21. To Randy–Republic of Illinois:

    Concerning attending movies in public these days, maybe it is just an Illinois thing, but I doubt it. Just as with you and your wife, my wife and I haven’t been to a public theater in more than a year, and well over a year before that time. We’re always disappointed by the low-lifes texting and talking on their cell phones, talking, laughing (about things unrelated to the movie), etc.

    I WANT to see this new Jurassic World movie at an IMAX theater, but I doubt we will. Just too expensive to be disappointed again.

    Concerning Danny’s weapon on Blue Bloods, he carries a Kahr K9. The Kahr K9 is one of few pistols approved for NYPD personnel. Being the fully stainless steel model (the two-tone P9 model has a black Polymer frame with the silver stainless steel slide), the K9 isn’t actually two-tone, but might look that way from certain angles as its grip is black.

  23. Hi Mas,

    I did a little research and I see I was wrong in my prior post concerning the Kahr K9 and the NYPD. Would you please amend my reply and change the pertinent sentence to read:

    “The Kahr K9 was one of few pistols approved for NYPD personnel for backup and off-duty use, though sadly, it no longer is, as the NYPD later requested an extremely heavy trigger pull of 13 pounds (instead of employing proper training practices) which Kahr could not achieve.”

    Thanks for keeping me from looking uninformed!

  24. Mas – as always, your writing continues to do it all – telling a story with great skill and humor while most importantly, teaching. I don’t think you really appreciate the effect you have on your readers. Please keep up the great work, Sir!

    To the subject here: I’d like to think that anyone undertaking a project like a “Jurassic Park/World” in real life would have waay more foresight for protection from anything that might happen. What, no full-autos, 10mms, rpgs, civilian contractors – just more bodies for security? It would be more action – something Hollywood usually loves.

    As much as I abhor the lack of civility amongst theatergoers in the modern age, there is nothing that compares to the theater “experience.” You can minimize the problems as TW said – going to late shows is the best tip. You can usually sit where you want (so important for video AND audio) and enjoy. I go to the movies to lose myself, something that is not possible at home. I look forward to seeing “Jurassic World” – in the theater – for that reason.

    Mas, I echo Jessica S.’s opinion re: training your daughters. I have always felt that educating our children and grandchildren is one subject in particular that needs more attention if we are ever going to have common sense prevail in this great country. Thanks for sharing that with us.

  25. . . . would have spent the rest of those nine minutes asking each other, “How many purses and shoes and belts do you think we can make out of these suckers?”

    Surely that should be, “How many custom holsters can we make? And how much should we charge for them?”

    🙂

  26. Speaking of texting in a movie theater, retired Tampa police captain’s murder trial is set to start on August 24th.

  27. ‘Surely that should be, “How many custom holsters can we make? And how much should we charge for them?”’

    I’m with Fruitbat44 on this one. I for one could use a new cowboy action rig (with matching boots? Hello B-Western category…), and Velociraptor hide seems like it would fit the bill nicely. Who needs snakeskin when you have this stuff!

    I have been similarly bothered by the previous Jurassic Park movies in how they deal with firearms. (Don’t even get me started on horror films…) In #1, the only armed person on the island gets eaten. In #2, a number of the well-armed and equipped hunters are tracked down and eaten, and there’s the obvious anti-hunting message. #3 is the worst so far- The heavily armed mercenaries are the first ones eaten, while the obnoxious, loud tourist parents somehow make it. Infuriating.

    I’ll still see Jurassic World though. I’ve been looking forward to it for a while. Mas, thanks for another well-written and entertaining article.

  28. On daughters and guns,
    While driving back from the range not long ago my daughter (who had just finished depleting my stock of .45 ammo through my 1911) inquired about the process involved in obtaining a CCW permit (pretty simple in our state) and opined that receiving her own pistol would make a fine birthday or Christmas present.

    My grand daughters visited this week. On the drive out they passed by a life size statue of a brontosaurus standing alongside the interstate. Mom pointed out the gigantic beast standing there and the four year old commented, “My daddy has a pistol. I wish we could shoot a dinosaur with a pistol.”
    Those are my girls.

    On movies in general: Not long ago it was discussed here all the glaring mistakes and general BS one sees in movies regarding firearms. I rented “American Sniper” not long ago on Pay-Per-View. There is a scene that shows potential sniper candidates firing on the range. The simulation of recoil from the actors is absolutely idiotic. Most of them jump straight up from a seated position as the rifle “fires.”

    Most of the comments here suggest the largest rifle possible for hunting dinosaurs. I read where JD Jones is out with something like a .95 caliber monster (over 38,000 lbs of muzzle energy). My shoulder became bruised just watching guys firing the thing.
    Personally, I’d take a M240 and cut them in half.

  29. I just saw this movie last night and I cringed when the main hero kept fingering the trigger of his Marlin. I felt the same when I saw the big round lead nose bullets he was carrying for defense. I loved that the main characters were not all hippies but it was laughable when the main bad dino was shot with an AT4 and shrugged it off. Also a .454 would have dropped that engineered dino like a sack of potatoes.

  30. Some years/decades back, someone made an excellent creepy short. Woman at home alone at night, noises outside etc. Extremely well done racheting up of the tension without giving away the possible threat.

    Then, she starts down the stairs into the basement. Looking through the stairs you see her feet & legs as she descends. She reaches the floor pivots and raises the 12 gauge double. I believe the screen faded to black with the firing of 2 shots.

    I didn’t notice the lack of working the lever on the Guide Gun. I did kinda wonder how the otherwise farily competent male lead could miss the lungs on a target that big at that range. OK, maybe if it’d been real and I’d been there I might not have hit the ground, much less the critter, but still.

  31. Mas,
    I am a huge fan of your writing and love the daughter’s dialog, although custom holsters seems more in line.
    There is a pretty good reference for firearms that appear in movies and on TV: http://www.imfdb.org (Internet movie firearm database). They list the S&W 5946 as Danny Reagan’s duty weapon for season one, but for season two and forward, they list Kahr K9 Stainless as his sidearm.

    Thanks for all the great writing,
    Richard
    The Great Republic of Maryland (not)

  32. I saw this movie last night and really enjoyed it despite the gun-related flaws. I did notice Owen’s total lack of trigger discipline with his Marlin, and that made me cringe. Of course, with all the screen time the Marlin got, I now find myself wanting one. Marlin couldn’t have asked for better product placement!

    Honestly though, what made me cringe the most was the scene with the minigun. Great scene visually, but they used the wrong sound effect for the minigun- some kind of generic, chugging heavy machine gun sound instead of the very distinctive, very cool sound a minigun actually makes. IIRC, Avengers: Age of Ultron made the same mistake and it bothered me then, too.

    Flaws aside, I got a kick out of Jurassic World and wouldn’t mind seeing it again.

  33. The answer to all of this is, of Course:

    1. All movie actors, know, or should know, for a fact, that their weapons are only Firing Blanks (Bruce Lee Included).

    2. Everything they do is, or is supposed to be, IN THE SCRIPT.

    So, hopefully, no body get hurt, or injured, no matter how un-knowledgeably, or stupidly, they handle, or mishandle, those weapons.

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