As the FX channel’s well-crafted series “Justified,” based on an Elmore Leonard short story, winds toward its finale, there has been a boo-boo. Senior citizen crime queen Katherine fought rival gangster’s bodyguard Mikey to mutual destruction. She emptied her revolver into him but didn’t stop him from beating her to death before he died in the arms of his boss.
Thing of it was – and perhaps only a gun geek would notice – she fired one shot more than she could have in real life.
Her revolver was clearly a J-frame Smith & Wesson .38 Special, with an obviously visible five-shot cylinder – a Model 60 Chief Special, it looked like to me – and she shot him six times without reloading.
Things like that make the aficionado roll his or her eyes: it’s like spotting a wristwatch on a character who’s supposed to be playing Robin Hood. Gets in the way of that “willing suspension of disbelief” we all need for enjoyment of fiction.
Sure ain’t the first time something like that has happened. A couple which come to mind:
In “Tombstone,” Val Kilmer’s character starts the central shootout armed with a double barrel shotgun (2 shots), a Colt Single Action Army revolver (would have probably been carried with 5 rounds, but could have held 6) and in the actual gunfight near OK Corral used as backup a Lightning model double action .38 Colt (again likely 5, but 6 tops.) That’d be 15 rounds at most without reloading, but in the movie he gets three shots out of the double barrel, and with a revolver in each hand (he used them sequentially in the actual gunfight) fired over 20 shots total before I lost count.
On AMC’s popular zombie series “Walking Dead,” the firearms foul-ups were so frequent I lost count there, too. I found myself yelling at the screen, “There’s no rear sight on that rifle!” “Get your finger off the trigger, there’s nothing to shoot at!” It was Significant Other’s turn to roll her eyes and say with her patented long-suffering sigh, “You don’t accept a rifle with no rear sight, but you DO accept animated corpses?”
In the pilot episode of “Walking Dead,” the Rick Grimes character tells his brother officers to take off the safeties…on their Glock pistols, which normally don’t HAVE safeties. (Glock has produced the G17-S with manual safety, and I have and like Joe Cominolli’s patented thumb safety retrofit on one of my Glock 17 pistols, but the ones on the show weren’t so equipped.) Another fiction favorite is “I flipped off my revolver’s safety.” MOST revolvers don’t have manual safeties, but I have a left-handed Frank Murabito safety on one of my Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolvers, and the right-handed version works off the cylinder release latch.)
Ah, Hollywood…
Gun people, what is YOUR favorite (or perhaps, most teeth-grinding non-favorite) firearms faux pas on TV and movie screens?
This is nothing new, Mas. I remember Clayton Moore as The Lone Ranger doing the same thing but I discovered the secret. They were reloading when the camera switched viewing angles! (Sarcasm)
Second the “safety on a revolver” crap. But my all time teeth gritting moment is in “The Fugitive” and the second (?) Die Hard movie where EVERYONE racks the slide on their Glocks EVERY SINGLE TIME they draw!! WTH!?!?
My favorite was a PSA by the Texas DPS that probably wasn’t actually made by a DPS officer. It went like this. “An unrestrained child in a car crash has over 500 ft-lbs of kinetic energy; the same as the bullet from a .357 magnum. Do you still think you can hold the child in an accident?” The sentiment is properly directed, the physics is correct, but the interpretation was completely wrong. (KE vs. impulse) The preferred DPS handgun at the time was the .357 magnum and, since Newton’s third law holds, a lot of DPS officers were unhappy with the public being told they couldn’t hold on to their guns when they shot them. We had a lot of fun with it at the shooting range. By the way, kids are safest when buckled in the proper car seat. I am not ragging on the sentiment of the PSA.
All the above… but I notice the computer things on movies involving any technology. Those are just as hilarious to a computer nerd as these all are to a gun geek. Unfortunately, I’m both so get the worst of both worlds.
And of course, it isn’t just guns on The Walking Dead… how many times does Daryl doofus pull one of his crossbow bolts from a tree easily and and put it back in the quiver on his bow? The few bolts and arrows I’ve shot into stumps or trees were not nearly so easy to recover.
Steve R and Paul Edwards: Andy Devine-style SA pistol-shoving was a flashy way of following the act of cocking on the up-stroke by mostly instinctive aiming in the forward thrust, while controlling muzzle flip. Old-timers may have used this regularly, especially when under severe inebriation, which could be called CONDITION FLASHING BRIGHT RED. Not quite up to Massad Ayoob’s “Stressfire” discipline, by any means. IMHO, Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) in “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” looks like he needs to throw forward to get enough force to pull the trigger on his empty .38 (always check your loads AT LEAST TWICE before the bandits arrive! You may have forgotten to reload, especially after dry firing. Or, you forgot you loaded before beginning dry fire practice. Ow!). Also, Fred could have used his sights, rather than aiming instinctively at his feet. He did get dry firing right, though. His last move, by the way.
Unnecessary racking of slide – multiple times on the same gun – is one of my peeves which has already been mentioned. Have these guys ever heard of continuity?
Hmmm . . . I recall hearing that in the old cinematic serials that the hero always kept his hat on during a fist fight because it saved on continuity. I sometimes wonder if modern day film/TV has saved on continuity by dispensing with it entirely.
I will cut TV/movies some slack on the matter of ahistorical guns. In the classic British film ‘Zulu’ the front rank carry Martini-Henrys while the rear ranks are armed with Lee-Enfields . . . I guess there just weren’t enough Martinis to go round.
Steve R – I have heard of Mr Hexum’s sad case. Though I have heard that he knew that the gun was loaded with blanks, but that he thought it was blank firing prop where the blast was ejected through a port in the top strap. Well, that’s what I’ve heard.
The ones I hate the most are the classic scenes in which someone shoots an automobile in the gas tank with a handgun or a rifle & the entire vehicle explodes into a million little pieces. I personally know several adult anti-gun liberals who believe all firearms should be banned because this is what happens in real life.
NCIS when Gibbs ( supposedly a former Marine sniper ) sniped a bad guy in Mexico with a .308 Lapua. Then only credited Carlos Hathcock with 39 confirmed kills. That was the ultimate sacrelidge to me
One from the movies – I believe it was in the Japanese B grade detective movie used for the Woody Allen spoof “Whats Up Tiger Lilly” – instead of a bullet the special effects has complete loaded cartridges flying through the air.
Worst of all time – ” …there was a terrible flash light lightning in the cave, a smell like gunpowder, and several of them fell dead.” All well and good but that’s from chapter four of The Hobbit! Be that so, perhaps Bilbo could have produced a .44 Charter Arms in response to Gollum asking “What has it got in its pocketses”?
spell check – ‘like lightning’ vice light lightning.
Hey, they probably got another 10 feet per second by shoving the gun forward when firing!
My personal peeve is some “at gunpoint” scene where the person with the gun decides they need to be more menacing, so they elaborately pull the hammer back to show they really, really mean business.
My wife isn’t much of a gunhead, but she knows a 1911, and has been known to make disparaging comments about people waving 1911s about with the hammer down… “What are you going to do with that, throw it at him?!”
If you’re into round counting, you gotta check out Bruce Willis in “Last Man Standing”. I never knew you could stuff so many rounds in a standard 1911 magazine.
In Shooter, Mark Walberg’s character is firing a semi-auto Barrett. And racks the slide every time. I asked the guys at the Barrett booth at the NRAAM. They said it was because blanks didn’t cycle the action.
Actually, one of my least favorite moves is when the actor shoots the gun dry and then throws it at someone! Or when they do what they need to do, then throw the gun away in disgust, like the gun was the cause of the problem. (Clearly reflecting the anti-gun bias of the industry.) And how about ol’ Josh Randall, carrying a cut down ’92 Winchester (prior to that year), with a belt full of .45-70 ammo which couldn’t possibly fit into the gun. Occasionally they show him making moves like he is reloading, but you never actually see him pull any rounds out of his belt. And, of course, you sometimes see him “fanning” the hammer during firing. While this could technically be possible if he was firing a previously chambered round on which he had lowered the hammer, there are times when he “fires” multiple rounds in succession by fanning.
All the lever and slide racking, of course, is for dramatic effect, as is the hammer cocking on revolvers. You could build up quite an ammo stash with all those ejected live rounds that are theoretically littering the various movies sets. And lets not forget all the times Army troopers are shown armed with lever action rifles, which were never standard issue for the Army. Some limited numbers did exist, but the Army was basically single-shots only until just before the Spanish American War. Even the success of the Henry and Spencer rifles in that pesky little 1861-65 conflict didn’t help them see the light. The 1873 Winchester may have “won the west,” but it did it in civilian hands.
Finally (could go on longer, but I’ll stop with this one): The Quick and the Dead (the one with Sharon Stone, Uncle Mas, not the Sam Elliott one) with bullets that shoot holes through people that are big and clean enough for daylight to shine through! Lots of stroking in that one too…the lever actions, I mean.
Ok, ok, one more: Paladin with his self described revolver, made to his “exact” specifications, “with a rifled barrel and a trigger that responds to one ounce of pressure.” Later described as “two ounces” btw…must have had a gunsmith modify it, on the advice of this attorney, no doubt.
I’m a verbiage snob. It bugs me to no end the number of guns in the shows that use “clips”.
No one mentioned Predator where a minigun carrying 400 rounds of ammo fires for a full 30 seconds before it runs out. They must have had that gun timed very slow.
Wife and I have been binge watching “Justified”. I noticed that usually the bad guys will be using Beretta 92s and the good guys are using Glocks. I too noticed that last episode and scene that you speak of, Mas. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what bothered me. Now I won’t have to watch it again. Too bad this is the last season for it.
The all time impossible firearms related movie and scene in recent memory that I can recall was called “Remo Williams the Adventure Begins”. I grew up reading the book–series so I was really excited to see the movie. Towards the finale Remo is hanging onto a tree trunk that is hanging by cables and suspended over a valley. The bad guys are in a jeep with a Browning .30 MG on a pedestal mount. Problem is the ammo belt hanging off the side of the weapon was .50 bmg. The gunner was just shaking the mount like it was actually firing, then the camera would cut away and show the squib loads exploding on the tree trunk.
Another movie that comes to mind is “McQ” with John Wayne. The first movie I saw with a Mac-10 and suppressor. There is a car chase on a beach where Wayne shoots up the side of the bad guys car with the Mac-10 but in a later scene the bullet holes have magically disappeared.
When shooting my cap and ball replica Navy 1871 .36cal revolver I have trouble with the spent caps that split and jam the cylinder when the hammer is cocked. I have found it helps to elevate the muzzle up when cocking so that the caps are more likely to fall free. “fanning” would be impossible.
Not on TV/movies, but any image showing a pair of hands holding a pistol, no finger on the trigger, slide in its usual resting position… and a flash coming out of the muzzle.
Nothing like grabbing the shotgun to meet a threat and immediately racking slide then racking it again at some point. Or the cop who draws pistol and operates slide to load when the weapon would have been loaded to begin with.
I’ve been trying to remember an amusing gun boo-boo I saw on TV. Finally remembered, darned Old timers disease.
British TV series on PBS. “Death In Paradise”.
A man is murdered supposedly with a 9MM handgun. Detective figures out why things did not add up.
The man was actually shot in the chest with a shotgun. The killer took a bullet he found where his brother had been target practicing, wrapped it on cloth and shoved it into a shot shell he’d removed the shot from and fired it into the victim , it was found on the ground behind the corpse.
You’uns prolly know a thing or two about hand loading, nuff said LOL!
This was a fun read… I liked the 25 shots from the shotgun without reloading. Maybe VP Biden’s shotgun would fire 50 rounds without a reload since it’s double barreled?
I never owned a gun until I was 37-years-old, so I believed some myths. I used to think if a rifle round hit someone’s bone, it would knock him down. A husband and wife at the range enlightened me that this was not the case. Some victims don’t even know a bullet has passed through the meat of their shoulder.
I remember Jeff Cooper had an article which said that before movies, it was common for soldiers to remain standing after being shot. Jeff said it was probably a good idea to fall down after being shot, so you don’t get shot again. However, bullets don’t knock you off your feet, so it would be perfectly logical to remain standing after being shot. I’m sure most people believe that people who get shot have to fall down.
In the Clint Eastwood movie The Gauntlet, Clint drives a bus down a street with police lining both sides of a street. They’re all shooting at the bus but, miraculously, there are no friendly fire casualties.
In the first James Bond movie, “Dr. No,” Bond is issued a Walther PPK pistol. Later, he is carrying a Walther PP.
One of the most common anachronisms in Westerns is to have 1873 Colt revolvers and/or Winchester 1892 rifles in the 1860’s or earlier (e.g., The Searchers, Red River, Two Mules for Sister Sara). It may be as common as silencers on revolvers, safeties on revolvers and Glocks, and cocking handguns that don’t have external hammers.
Alistair MacLean’s “Breakheart Pass” was the opposite. The villains are smuggling Winchester ’73 rifles, and everyone acts as if lever-action repeaters are a new innovation. They never heard of the Henry or the Winchester 1866?
In the novel “The Taking of Pelham 123,” a plot point involves a manual safety on a cop’s .38 revolver. As I recall, it was left out of the movie.
I wonder if Jon-Erik Hexum got the idea that blanks are harmless from the Hill Street Blues episode where the SWAT commander, Lt. Hunter, shot himself in the temple with a blank-loaded magnum revolver and survived.
Plan 9 From Outer Space has a cult following as a kitsch classic, and may hold a record for gaffes (and not just involving the guns). It may not be the worst movie ever made, but it may be the worst that you will enjoy watching.
Most awesome one in my memory was an old Glen Ford western called ‘A time for killing’ set in the latter part of the Civil War. There’s a shootout between Ford’s Union cavalry soldiers and some Confederates. Some muskets, but mainly trapdoor Springfields employed. Mind you, the Springfields were on the scene only eight years early. Anyway, the scene changes to a later skirmish where magically, all the rifles have morphed into ’92 Winchesters. It was such a glaring error that I remember watching the movie the first time thinking “You’re kidding, what a load of BS!!!”
Ah well, that’s Hollyweird for you.
ooh.. all the click comments reminded me: empty semi-auto pistol, repeated clicks every time the trigger is pulled; with the slide open. or the slide is closed and it’s a glock or a 1911. click click click, hammer falling on an empty chamber. ho boy.
TC, you are sharp.
IIRC, just a few weeks before Hexum inadvertently killed himself, there was the episode of Hill Street Blues where the SWAT commander went into the men’s room, drew his revolver, and a shot was heard. It was a cliff-hanger into the next week’s episode, where the same guy showed up with a bandaid on his temple, ostensibly because someone had “jokingly” loaded his gun with blanks.
Clustercoitus upon clustercoitus.
At a seminar put on in the 1980s by elite LAPD investigators, I saw the photos of Hexum in the hospital bed before they pulled the plug on him. The muzzle blast from the blank had blown a chunk of temporal bone midway into his brain.
I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, but it was probably one of the few ACTUAL cases of brain damage from watching TV.
I don’t remember the title of the movie, but it was WWII themed.
During the rolling credits at the end there was a blurb that said that all the firing of the weapons was real. No dubbing.
It also said that there was something on the order of 5,000 rounds expended.
One of my favorites is in a Daniel Craig version of a James Bond flick (Quantum of Solace?). He does an entry into an apartment and searches it with Sig dramatically extended. Apparently, they took a break (or several) while doing the scene. While the pistol had it’s slide locked back for safety reasons during the break, no one returned it to battery before filming resumed.
The result is the actor searching the rest of the apartment with the slide locked back. Bond, James Bond, is so cool he can spot the bad guys a reload.
The easiest way to silence a revolver is not to pull the trigger.
What annoys me are scenes where someone shoots someone else INSIDE a car, and the survivors act normal afterward. Everyone would have blood running out of their ears, holding their heads and screaming. Al Pacino does this in Scarface, and John Travolta accidentally shoots the bad guy in the back seat, the gun right beside Samuel Jackson’s head. There is an earlier scene where both shoot several times inside a closed room. This would produce similar results. When I was young and dumb, I once…ONCE, shot a .44 mag without ear protection, outside. That was enough to convince me of the favorability of using ear protection.
Many authors make firearms mistakes in otherwise believable written fiction. Characters checking the “safety catch” (I don’t know anybody who calls it a safety “catch”) on their revolvers. Referring to a gun as, “high caliber.” What is “high caliber?” Having the character load “bullets” into their “clip” when they mean rounds or cartridges into a magazine.
I made it through a couple pages of a novel by Eric Meyer before I had to give up. He had his hero “cocking the action” of his Glock and checking the safety. On one page he had the attacking AH-6 Little Bird helicopter firing it’s 30mm chain gun. I don’t think the AH-60 mounts a 30mm chain gun, but in any case, within a couple paragraphs, the same helicopter is hosing down the bad guys with it’s mini guns. He also had the escaping, as he referred to them, “seals” (as apposed to, SEALs) firing with great effect and accuracy on the pursuing bad guys from the back of a Soviet made 6X6 truck hauling ass down a rutted, potholed jungle trail. Imagine trying to put rounds (or even managing to stay on board the truck) on target in that situation.
There were several other mistakes and astonishing accomplishments, but you get the drift. I went to his website and left him a nastygram.
The one that leaves me rolling my eyes or shaking my head is the intentional round wasting we hear, immediately before going into action by racking slides and pumping shotguns. I guess that sound is the cue for the BGs to urinate, defecate, and crumple into a quivering posture of surrender!
Racking slides, cocking wheel guns, pumping shotguns, levering lever guns, charging semi auto rifles, on and on, shortly before firing. It’s called “gratuitous cocking” and runs rampant throughout the film and TV medium.
Mas, you don’t seem to realize that Follywood actors worship Jerry Miculek and practice constantly until they can recharge their revolvers even faster than the wheelgun master, therefore they can fire off a cylinder, reload and empty it again faster than us mere mortals. Movie characters can move so fast, we can’t even see their hands in motion. like the vampires in the TWILIGHT series of movies. So, now you know the truth.
Recently I’ve watched the first season of a TV series titled PENNY DREADFUL which takes place in 1891 England. In the final episode, Sir Malcolm walks into a gunshop in London (ah, the good old days) and purchases a Mauser C96 ‘Broomhandle’ which isn’t available until 1895.
My favorite pet peeve are the westerns, especially the Spaghetti Westerns where Clint Eastwood’s ‘The Man With No Name’ knocks off several bad guys with his single action by fanning the hammer, then holsters an empty gun, without immediately reloading. A smart villain would wait until Clint’s revolver is empty, then calmly shoot him down. Of course this being the movies, Eastwood would probably whip out a S&W model 29 with 6 1/2″ barrel from his shoulder holster hidden under his brown serape and tell the sneaky bad guy to “Go ahead, make my day!”
Procedural TV series v- whether its cops, FBI agents, CIA, mall guards, etc. How many of them ever shoot with both hands?
I swear. Every gun battle has them firing Glocks at each other one-handed and not hitting squat – except if you’re Reese, Shaw, or Root in the show, “Person of Interest.” It’s one of my favorites despite the impossibility of Root being guided by the benevolent Machine (not the evil Samaritan) into firing two handguns at a multiplicity of targets arrayed all around her (that all go down with one shot) while she never stops looking and walking straight ahead.
Robocop did it because he had several pairs of eyes (visual sensors) all around him that controlled the physical movements of his electromechanical extremities.
In “The Last Command” with Sterling Hayden, the 1836 Alamo garrison is equipped with Hollywood style , late 1930’s type cowboy hats and shoot Winchester rifles at the oncoming Mexican infantry.
I cannot even watch more than about 20 minutes.
Hollywood movie directors and script writers can rarely be accused of historical and technical accuracy in anything they produce. Mostly they get away with it because of their uninformed and indifferent audience that merely wants to be entertained. Hollywood’s oft-repeated firearms blunders include guns that never run out of ammunition, anachronistic weapons, “silenced” revolvers, fantasy guns that never existed, actors slamming double-action revolvers’ cylinders in and out (unfortunately mimicked by blockheads in real life), and so on. Dreadful stuff.
From a CSI Miami episode a few years ago: some genius created a gun that fired 200 rounds simultaneously from a rectangular box containing 200 barrels. So many rounds struck the victims that they were nearly vaporized–there were no body parts remaining bigger than a silver dollar. The bad guy was carrying this thing around with him by the handle on the top.
My issues: 200 barrels of a few inches each would have weighed at least a couple hundred pounds–not really man-portable. The weapon was fired multiple times, so clearly there were many hundreds of rounds in the weapon, adding more weight. No mention was ever made about the loading mechanism. It irked me enough that I wrote CBS suggesting they fire their technical adviser and offering my services. I haven’t heard back from them.
shooting someone in the head and getting blood splatter on the window from an exit wound but not breaking said window gets honorable mention, but the one that really gets me is Mr. and Mrs. Smith during the car chase. He shoots at BMW’s discovering that they are armored, she shoots (also with handgun) at same vehicle, the entire wheel flies off!
Nobody’s mentioned how often actors hold handguns only inches from the head of the cowed victim! Giving them orders, etc. Mike, of Better Call Saul, showed the foolishness of that tactic in the recent episode.
I like how all the law enforcement and Feds use FMJ ball ammo in thier handguns. I have yet to see a bullet in a movie or TV show that is of the hollowpoint variety.
True Lies
Full auto Mac 10 + stairs…
Well –
Every time someone fires a bullet to start a fire / explosion, from the “spark”
Every time someone is shot and then goes flying thru the air.
Almost all Cowboys in movies feature 2 belts. One for the pants, the other for the gun. When were belt loops invented? Levi’s states circa 1922. Some CAS have a couple of photos from just a few years earlier.
While we are on movie annoyances –
Have you noticed that every single car needs to have its brakes fixed?!
I do not remember the name of the movie but it was a civil war movie and one of the officers was carrying a 1873 colt revolver.
Don’t get me started on the many, many gun bloopers. I get OCD enough just watching characters “drink beer” out of obviously empty cans.
RE .Eric
While I did not see he CSI episode, caseless electronic multibarrel guns exist, Metalstorm I believe is one name, computer fired ,able to cove wide area. Reminded me of the close in defense systemin the sci fi book Hammer’s Slammers..On topic, M-16’s used in movies without handguards to make them futuristic.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned the combat/war movies and the muffled “thump” sound depicted when a mortar round is dropped in the tube. Any veteran who has been within a couple of hundred yards of a mortar in action will attest its launch is anything but a thump.
Bourne Identity: Jason shoots a propane tank with a shotgun and it goes up in a massive fireball.
Was watching the original Predator movie last weekend. Nobody in the movie aimed a firearm in that movie – not once. Rifles, pistols, machine guns – all fired from the hip, all surprisingly accurate, none ever needing to be reloaded.
I saw John Wick a few weeks ago. While silly, the firearms handling was a vast improvement.
The ones that bug me most are when I am watching any episode of Star Trek spanning the last nearly 50 years…
The muzzle control (or lack thereof) when handing phasers and phaser rifles is atrocious! They constantly point weapons that can vaporize a human at each other’s faces, they always have their fingers on the activation switch, muzzles sweeping across crowds during non-engagement.. it really detracted from the story, as a firearms enthusiast, it bothered me significantly.
Not reality, I know… but you’d think by the 23rd and 24th centuries, firearms and particle weapons handling would be taught at the most advanced academy in the galaxy.
Sigourney Weaver,
Made millions slaughtering Aliens with automatic weapons in the movies yet bashes firearms at every opportunity.
It appears that Alien 5 is in the works,
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