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Even in gun-crazy America, most of us aren't shooting things as part of our day-to-day routine. So most Americans actually know very little about guns. Hollywood writers realized this a long time ago and, being writers, used it as an excuse to never do any fact-checking ever again. #5.
Silencers Turn Gunfire Into a Gentle Whisper
Where You've Seen It: In The Line Of Fire, Die Hard 2, No Country For Old Men, Shooter, practically every James Bond movie. The Myth: Cautious spies and assassins know that if you're going to take out a bad guy in an office or a library, be sure to use a silencer. It turns the concussive "bang" into a neutered "ptew."
Itty-bitty handguns aren't the only things you can silence. Giant freaking shotguns can even be fitted with a special silencer that renders them inaudible in quiet suburban neighborhoods.
Also, while silencers look all slick and expensive and fancy, Hollywood says pretty much any long, hollow tube will do the job. Grab a two-liter, stuff it with socks or something, and you can be just as dangerous as Mark Wahlberg in Shooter.
The Problem: Exploding gunpowder is loud. Really loud. As loud as a jet engine. A little metal tube won't do a whole lot to stop that. This is what a suppressed handgun actually sounds like: If you can't watch the video, let us sum it up: It still sounds like a freaking handgun. It does not make a soft phut that you could mistake for a kitten landing on a pillow. An unsilenced gunshot is around 140 to 160 decibels--that's in the range where hearing it once can permanently damage your ears. If you've never had a gun go off next to you, trust us when we say it's loud enough that your whole body will flinch at the sound of it. A silencer can get that all the way down to 120 or 130 decibles, aka the sound of a jackhammer. Still loud enough to cause physical pain if it's close enough to you. So a silencer really just makes a large gun sound like a smaller gun. If you're James Bond and are sneaking into the enemy's compound with a silenced pistol, you're basically hoping the guards will decide your gun is too small and wimpy to be a serious threat, and leave you be.
So why the hell do silencers even exist? Well, if you're in an outdoor, noisy environment, they can make quite a bit of difference. Specifically, they make it really hard to tell where exactly the shot is coming from, or how far away it is. And as for silenced shotguns? They do exist. Here's one in action: Yeah, that actually seemed to make it louder. #4.
Machine Guns are Magical Death Machines
Where You've Seen It: Starship Troopers, The Mummy, Max Payne, Commando, every John Woo movie, Scarface. The Myth: It's an old joke by now that nobody runs out of bullets in action movies (unless it's suddenly convenient to the plot, that is). Hollywood shows some restraint with revolvers--usually no more than 10 or 11 shots per six-shot cylinder--but damn, do they go hog-wild with anything that fires full-auto. So much so that that most of us have wound up with an utterly ridiculous concept of how those guns work. They're seriously depicting these things firing a hundred times more bullets than they can actually hold. 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. So in Commando we see Arnold fire without changing magazines for what seems like half the movie: The Problem: If you've watched a news broadcast about U.S. troops in Iraq, or played Modern Warfare, you've seen this gun:
That's an M4 Carbine. It holds 30 bullets. Here is a video of a small child firing one of those on full-auto: He didn't give up after four seconds because he got tired. He was out of bullets. OK, how about the gun you always see the bad guys using, the AK-47?
Here's somebody firing a real one, full-auto: Again, empty after four seconds. That's because fully-automatic weapons fire really goddamn fast--around 700 rounds a minute. Only you don't have 700 rounds in the gun, you have 30. So, do the math. In fact, a U.S. infantryman only carries 210 rounds total, which means a battle conducted with full-auto machine gun fire would be over in less than a minute even if you count the time it takes to switch magazines. Fortunately, they fire on full-auto so rarely that many of the military's rifles don't even have that capability.
"But wait!" you say, "I've seen war footage from Vietnam and Iraq and everywhere else and you can totally hear machine fire chattering in the distance at all times. Somebody's using it, dammit!" That's true, they're just not shooting people with it. Full-auto is only really used for suppression, that is, to make the bad guys duck their heads and hunker down while your people maneuver into position. In fact, virtually all bullets are used for this. For each insurgent killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, 250,000 shots are fired that hit absolutely nothing. About three tons of ammunition for every one dude killed. Picture Arnold lugging that shit around. #3.
Bulletproof Vests Are Magical Force Fields
Somehow your best laid plans have gone awry, and now a bunch of Libyans in a Volkswagen van are out for your blood. They plan to shoot you repeatedly with their AK-47s, but you have an ace in the hole: a bulletproof vest. In movies, body armor (made from a material called Kevlar) turns most guns from magical death-wands to hilariously overbuilt Airsoft rifles. A burst of fire from an AK-47 at point-blank range would turn most men's torsos into gooey paste suitable for spreading on crackers, but add a slab of Kevlar and you might as well have a Gandalf's magic protection bubble glowing around your torso.
The Problem: In the real word, the vest that protected Back to the Future's Emmett Brown from the terrorists would only have been useful for its ability to keep all of his bits in one convenient (for the mortician) package. In fact, despite an additional 25 years of armor development, no body armor today would be able to protect Doc from that kind of assault. The type of bulletproof vest you can actually conceal under your clothes provides exceptional protection against most handguns. But against an assault rifle like the terrorists were using up there? It's only slightly more effective than body paint and prayers to Khorne.
Our troops do have their own body armor, meant to protect against that sort of thing. It's much heavier and more rigid. But even it's only rated for effectiveness at further than 14 meters distance. When police wear body armor (45 percent do not) they don't tend to wear full military body armor. Probably because it weighs 33 freaking pounds and costs thousands of dollars. Since less than one percent of gun crimes involve military-style rifles, this is generally a pretty safe trade-off.
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The reason silencers don't work as portrayed is not because gunpowder is loud. It's because the round is supersonic and there's no escaping the sonic boom. Firing subsonic .22 caliber rounds with a suppressor is actually very quiet, almost like shooting a BB gun.
Entertaining article, but it's pretty sad to hear the writers use the term "bullets" when they mean "cartridges," "ammunition," etc. I thought the point was to dispel misconceptions, not perpetuate them.
WHOA WHOA WHOA. Slow down there! Let's do this in baby steps, Gun Wizard.
I was involved in a car accident, hit a guard rail backwards at high speed (car fishtailed), and one of the metal supports for the guard rail not only punctured the gas tank but basically ripped it in half. No explosion. The fire department did have to come to clean up the gasoline though.
The "cars always explode when shot" is something they joked about in "Last Action Hero". AS says "there you have another explosion for your movie" or something like that and then the car doesn't explode.
Oh wow shows how much I know about guns. This article has been a total eye opener for me.
It goes to show just how unrealistic movies are. And anyone who gets any stupid ideas from Die Hard need only read this lol.
But it got me thinking and I realize something even cooler.
My favorite show, 24 puts more thought into it than these movies.
The cars exploding from gun fire thing worked in season 1 because Jack took out his knife and cut open the gas tank. Then shot at the gas making a spark.
Also he tells people to use the tires instead of the doors as cover.
pretty good article but you screwed up at least one of the movie references. In back to the future doc isnt wearing a traditional bulletproof vest, hes wearing a metal plate over an inch thick, which if im not mistaken could easily stop a rifle shot
The force from the bullets would still be enough to crush his ribcage; even if the bullets don't go through, the armor can move so much that the armor itself goes through your stomach.
Maybe make a silencer at least one time before writing about how silencers don't work and make it right. Then you can pretty much just cut that whole section out of this article because it's obvious you don't know what you're talking about.
I don't understand your first sentence. I get the gist of it from the second one, but I just thought I'd let you know the first one makes you sound stupid.
ummm... a really good (expensive and effective) silencer on a small caliber gun with subsonic ammo will be really muted. the glock the guy fired-those are usually .40 caliber, right? that's around a ten millimeter bullet.
look at the H&K silenced MP5-that's much quieter than a regular gun.
but the entire gun is a silencer. and even good silencers sound more like loud coughs.
a perfect silence would be on a small caliber subsonic round firing gun, and would be over 1 meter long.
and the current US bulletproof vest, the PASGT can stop a 30 caliber round.
dragon skin armor can survive you landing on a grenade-your torso will be mostly whole, but your limbs will be gone. slim chance of surviving. and with new liquid armor, they will stop most anything in the way of bullets.
The sound of the TV "Silencer" was always a "pearnt" sound. I could list you a crapload of 70's/80's/90's TV shows and movies that seemed to have to have this requirement. If they made the damn thing sound like it's supposed to in-real-life, then I wouldn't want to kill the person who used the TV version. After I'm done holding my ears and twitching, of course.
At #5
It doesn't seem like you've fired a gun before. A gun without it on, sounds a whole lot louder.
I was hoping to see something about the fact that almost every movie with a gun in it tends to show the person getting shot thrown back by the 'force of the bullet' hitting them. No matter how big the gun is, be it a 12 gauge shotgun, or a .50 cal sniper rifle, the law of physics that states 'for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction' still holds true. So for these people to be thrown back however far by the bullet that hits them, the person that shoots the gun would need to be thrown back equally far. I would just hope that at some point movies start including more real physics to the action. One good (bad) example is the new Rambo. One guy, while infiltrating the enemy base, has a huge .50 cal sniper rifle, and yeah it's really cool, but when he shoots these guys on the road you can almost literally see the invisible wires attached to them yanking them back. In real life, graphic as it may be, the bullet would nearly decapitate the guys, while leaving the bodies exactly where they stood.. Even with something as powerful as a shotgun, the blowback the shooter receives is exactly as much as the person would receive on the other end.. aside from the fact that the victim is getting the worst of it being on the receiving end of either a load of pellets or a slug, it would look more like they got punched in the chest really hard.
hm. i guess it's already been touched on. sorry, that's what happens when there's over a thousand comments.
"So for these people to be thrown back however far by the bullet that hits them, the person that shoots the gun would need to be thrown back equally far."
Actually, I believe that the bullet would be pushed back. I may be wrong, though.
For the most part, this is true, but to be really accurate you must take the physics one step further. For example, take the case of someone being shot with a shotgun. The total force is roughly equal at the firing and impact (minus aerodynamic losses of the pellets), however if we assume that the projectile striking the target is still traveling at the same velocity as when it left the barrel, we must then consider the acceleration timeframe. That projectile, fired from a standard shotgun, accelerates from zero to muzzle velocity over the length of the barrel, usually at least 18 inches or more.
Now shotgun pellets typically penetrate a person's chest less than 8 inches, often only 6 or so. So, after accelerating from 0 to max velocity over 18 inches, the pellets decelerate from max V. to zero only only 6-8 inches, increasing the total force exerted on the target. So the target will feel greater impact. Add this to the fact that the shooter is probably shooting with their feet and body braced, the stock to their shoulder, meaning their body is configured to withstand the impact of the firing. The target is most likely not.
Physically, it is similar to being hit by a fastball, but pitchers do not typically get hurt or fall down when throwing a fastball. Batters hit by one usually do.
How about the fact that the desert eagle handgun would snap your wrist easily if fired wrong. A lot of people think nothing of it...
Actually, due to their weight and the fact of their gas operation, Desert Eagles are not terribly hard kickers....yes, even one handed there is no danger of broken bones.
They'll snap your wrist is you have a bone disease. The only bone they break is your nose if you don't expect the kick.
My husbands military armor weighs 82lbs, and thats only a large! The extra larges weigh even more. 33lbs is the soldiers that don't use all the plates their required to(because of the ridiculous weight)
I'm thinking that hes telling you his overall carry weight, Including bullets, water and other mission essentials.
the c**king of a shot gun or rifle actually is necessary after loading a magazine the chamber is empty c**king the gun loads the first round into the chamber, only after the first round is fired does it load itself
c**king c**ky c**kers is c**kle-c**kariffic, c**k!!
Also, in Double/Single actions pistols like the Beretta 92F, the c**king of the hammer when the chamber is loaded is not completely pointless. It changes the trigger function from a long, hard double-action to a short, light Single Action, increasing accuracy as well as intimidating everyone around you. :)
Racking the slide of a semi-automatic pistol that is already chambered is completely pointless and wastes a perfectly good round, as was stated.
Hmm , I dont know much about hand guns. ive only fird a browning 9mm twice. but if i remember rightly, when c**king the weopon you pull the working parts on top of the pistol to the rear and let it slide back loading a round into the chamber. The hammer that is being talked about was automaticly c**ked by this action as it lies directly in the path of the moving parts of the wepon, so it would be impossible to chamber a round without c**king the hammer. Is this not true of all handguns?
And there is the recoil problem :D Also, shooting a guy with a shotgun doesn't make him crash through a wall :P
I would've liked that to have been in the article. Good thinking.
Yeah I would have to agree with dwtc24. To be completely honest this is a one sided piece. - There is a huge difference between a suppressor and a silencer. A suppressor removes muzzle flash. Silencer removes sound. - And any round that is supersonic creates a sonic boom from the point that it is at, it is a small sharp crack, much like a whip, that does not travel far. So if someone tried to shoot you, you would hear the bullet as it passes you not when it leaves the barrel of the gun. Effectively it would conceal the person shooting at you, but not the fact that they were being shot at. -
good read though, enjoyed it.
You're thinking of a flash suppressor, which just hides the flash. And "silencers" don't exist, they're just called suppressors, and the whole point of the article was to show that suppressed weapons still make noise, just not as much as an unsuppressed weapon, and how movies lead everyone to believe that "silencers" are the quietest thing known to man.
I agree with all you have said, however, if one were to use sub-sonic ammunition than the noise would be much less noticible. That's not to say it would be the puny sputtering sound that most movies portray it to be but it would sound quiet enough to go unnoticed.
Even if you had a true silencer that would remove all noise from the explosion involved in firing a gun, it would still not silence all the mechanical noise involved.
One of the funny things I found was the part about the machine being death machines and not reloading. One good example of this was the classic 'Aliens' - Towards the part when they take a tally of all their weapons, they point out that they have about 50 rounds per each rifle. Well if you have seen the movie, they never actually run out of ammo save for the incident in the vent shafts but they blow away just much more than 50 rounds per rifle. Just thought that was funny! Good article though, and dont listen to dwtc24. Somehow being a gunsmith for 40 years took away his sense of humor lol
well guys love the site, but u f**ked up on the gun myths. But then again my father was a gun smith, and i have 40 yrs exp with guns. U need to check facts farther i this area. your article here really comes off as another left wing anti-gun piece. again I loveyour site but this was sad
Um, this article was criticizing gun misrepresentation..................in movies. It was in no way arguing about current gun laws in the united states. Did you actually read this article? You seem to have just saw the phrase "gun myths" in the title and automatically thought it was left wing.
Just what is 'left wing anti-gun' about this article? That guns don't perform as depicted in Hollywood?
It's not always about how 'they' are out to 'take away guns' -- IMO, it never is.
Actually, I got the exact opposite impression from the article. So many who seek to ban guns do so largely because they believe these myths, and think that anyone with any type of gun is capable of instantly killing everyone around them. If you ask me, clearing up these myths is damaging to the gun-control movement, not supporting.
I'm not reading all this, but I will say that part of making a SILENCER (or Suppressor - they're the SAME thing) work properly is choosing the proper gear. Any use of supersonic ammo pretty much negates the effect of the silencer and turns your stupidly expensive metal tube into just that... a metal tube. Choosing both the right ammo and right gun for the job.. For instance... the Walther P22... definitely the right gun. With the Gemtech silencer attached, and with subsonic ammo. you actually just hear the action of the firearm. No boom, no bang. Wanna see it? Go to Youtube and search for "Silence P22 Gemtech" and run the video with the side-by-side. AND they're using regular ammo!
Or use a powerful air gun, assuming you can find one that's not designed for killing rabbits etc. In WW1 the Germans used airguns as sniper weapons!
Pretty sure "c**king the gun to show you mean business" is called chambering a round.
Yeah, except if its semi or fully automatic there will already be one loaded, the gun will already be c**ked.
in a semi and full auto if you empty the mag and replace it with a full one then you have to release the slide this will make half the c**king sound and chamber the first round.
And exactly how many times in Hollywood movies are they actually c**king the gun after loading a new magazine? That was the articles point - not that it's completely unnecessary to c**k a gun, but rather unnecessary when they do so.
BADASSERY IS NEVER UNNECESSARY. YOU TAKE THAT BACK, SEANKLAPPERICH.