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darksaints 20 hours ago [-]
One of the things about fiction is that it gets almost everything wrong. It isn’t just guns. It’s professions like spies and snipers, cars, boats, planes, programming/hacking, radios, technology, etc. And those are just the areas that I personally know they get wrong, because I know more than the average person in those areas.
Some people judge fiction way too harshly for inconsequential but inaccurate details which only serve for narrative structure. There are actually tons of authors who get all of these details right, but you almost never read their books because if they can get them published at all, nobody reads them, because they absolutely suck. An author that gets these details right and is actually a good storyteller is extremely rare. It’s basically a list consisting of Tom Clancy and John Le Carre.
It’s just a pet peeve. At some point you have to let it go, or you’ll end up wasting your time writing blog posts begging authors (who largely don’t care) to talk to you so they won’t get inconsequential details wrong.
thrill 16 hours ago [-]
When a certain now famous (in those circles) narrator was first getting started he mentioned on his FB page he wanted help with pronunciation of certain military terminology. I offered to help, knowing people in many fields plus my own. And ... my goodness, the absolute poor quality of some the writing he sent me. One author would use the full terminology for every firearm every time he looked at it, picked it up, loaded it, holstered it, drew it, released the safety, fired it, cleaned it, thought about while in the shower, whatever. You got tired of reading about the "Heckler & Koch HK45 Compact Tactical (HK45CT) MK-24 Mod-0" fully spelled out three times a page.
And then the author with his own specialty started writing about my field ... oh so badly.
So, knowledge of weapons doesn't translate in knowledge of writing (or vice versa). My only criteria any longer is just don't say "clip" unless your character has scored himself a Mauser C96 or similar and we're good.
geerlingguy 19 hours ago [-]
A modern author who's fairly good in this regard is Andy Weir; the main thing is you have to do a ton of research while writing and have trusted sources (I think Clancy had many) to rely on when mulling over the details.
The tough thing is, once you get "above average" in terms of accuracy, those of us who like to be a little more pedantic will grade on a curve!
JKCalhoun 19 hours ago [-]
So hand-wavy is the correct answer.
rascul 14 hours ago [-]
I just wish they would wear military uniforms properly in movies. I can handle the rest.
dn3500 20 hours ago [-]
I'm not a handgun expert at all but I've caught a few of these, like the guy who racked the slide on his revolver. The author who really impressed me, although not with his handgun knowledge, was Tom Clancy. I was in the anti-submarine warfare business in the 1970s and some of what he wrote in Red October I only knew from classified sources.
bombcar 20 hours ago [-]
Didn’t he piece rumors and made intelligent guesses so well that the government freaked out wondering where the leak was?
lukan 20 hours ago [-]
Possible he had a real source?
djeastm 20 hours ago [-]
Possibly, but I can't imagine a writer taking that kind of chance at the height of the Cold War just for verisimilitude.
lukan 19 hours ago [-]
I mean, the way I imagine it is he chatted with one ore more guys and after a while he got bits here and there he was technically not supposed to have, not enough of its own, but with imagination enough to get the rough picture of how it worked and got very close. But I don't think conscious braking of classified information happened. More carelessness I guess.
bombcar 18 hours ago [-]
That's what I've heard - intelligent research, combined with unclassified facts gleaned from conversations at coffeeshops and bars, led to a pretty accurate picture.
rolph 8 hours ago [-]
sometimes, you just have to hang out in the right bar, and you will hear a multitude of secrets, this is why some projects had thier own towns so none of the inside would get out.
Simulacra 20 hours ago [-]
I seem to recall reading that is basically what he did. He had good sources, he was an excellent writer, and a world class researcher.
dvh 20 hours ago [-]
Chuck Norris can rack the slide on his revolver
waltwalther 20 hours ago [-]
Church Norris can spin the cylinder on his Glock.
short_sells_poo 19 hours ago [-]
Chuck Norris can play a game of Russian Roulette with a loaded semi-auto handgun and win. Repeatedly.
kibibu 20 hours ago [-]
Until it came to anything vaguely to do with computing or electronics, which turned into basically magic
fractallyte 16 hours ago [-]
Precedent: A 1944 science fiction story accurately described an atomic bomb – so much so that it prompted a visit from the FBI to the NY office of Astounding Science Fiction. Definitely a point of pride for editor John W Campbell.
There's a rumor that Reagan very seriously asked his admirals repeatedly if it was true. I know he "couldn't put it down."
Tangentaly related observation, but Reagan may have been the only president to really pay attention to movies and entertainment for inspiration of future events, and possibilities. It was said that he had a similar reaction to War Games, and took it very seriously
doikor 20 hours ago [-]
One thing I have noticed messed up in a lot of fiction (written/tv/movies/etc) is how loud guns actually are. Scenes of multiple people without any hearing protection emptying their guns that doesn't have any kind of supressors/silencer multiple times in a closed space (usually a single room) and then just casually chatting with each 5 seconds later.
In general the sounds of guns are very bad in most movies/tv shows (Heat from 1995 comes closest for me).
nickpeterson 18 hours ago [-]
Michael Mann movies tend to get this right, Heat and collateral have really decent gun sounds. Turns out they are very loud.
Edit: just noticed you mentioned heat already, I need more coffee…
thrill 17 hours ago [-]
Just watch "that scene" from Heat again - it's like a double espresso.
rayiner 20 hours ago [-]
I wonder if part of this is also failing to consider the acoustic effect of loud sounds in enclosed spaces. Guns don’t sound nearly as loud if you only shoot outside.
calyth2018 17 hours ago [-]
Guns are still not hearing-safe outside. And if you're indoors, you probably should double up on the hearing protection (foam plugs with over the ear protection on top)
This one is not that surprising in mass media - there's no way the good guys and bad guys are going to take a pause and actually put on PPE before the shoot out.
m463 15 hours ago [-]
The only time movies try for sound accuracy is with flashbangs.
kriro 20 hours ago [-]
I guess my pet peeve of "firing an arrow" is also a gun mistake of sorts. It can be found in many fantasy books. A bow is not a gun, there's no gunpowder involved. If a commander orders his archers to "fire" what should they do, set their bows on fire?
JKCalhoun 19 hours ago [-]
In reverse, "point blank" is an archery term indicating the distance where, with your bow fully drawn, the point of the arrow can be sighted directly on the target. (Closer and you have to bring the point down, farther and you have to bring the point above the target.)
It seems that "point blank" has come to mean simply, "a shot you can't miss".
ajdude 20 hours ago [-]
I was just watching Tom Scott's latest video, he mentioned firing a trebuchet and the guide pointed this out that you don't "fire" a trebuchet since it doesn't involve gunpowder, you launch it.
Tom's commentary later was that he disagreed with that sentiment. "I disagree with those potential comments. Words change their meaning overtime. In modern English, you can fire an arrow, you can fire a torpedo, we were gonna fire that trebuchet"
dn3500 19 hours ago [-]
In the US Navy at least, you don't "fire" a torpedo, you "shoot" it. The lore is that "fire" has a very specific, very urgent meaning on a warship and you don't use that word unless there actually is a fire.
0xffff2 11 hours ago [-]
There are lots of these hyper-specific "reserved keywords" in the military. Another one from the US Army is "repeat", which is the command for an artillery battery to fire again with the same parameters as their previous barrage. Therefore on the radio we only ever used "say again" to ask someone to repeat their last transmission. Even if no one on the radio had ever or would ever be involved in artillery operations, I imagine it's easier to just train the entire force on a single uniform standard.
kriro 20 hours ago [-]
There's a decent argument for using today's words even for settings that are no the current world. But for fantasy specifically I find it breaks immersion quite a bit. I'm not convinced by the "language changes over time" line of argument. If you take it to a bit more of an extreme it would also be fine to have characters say "cool" or even use some gen-z-ism etc, because hey words change meaning over time after all.
However, I'm also aware that I'm kind of a hypocrite because I'm totally fine with current world grammar and punctuation for example.
short_sells_poo 19 hours ago [-]
You raise a good point, but where would we stop? Should movies depicting medieval events use medieval English? It was the lingo at the time after all.
arjie 17 hours ago [-]
I suppose it’s just a matter of the audience and balancing legibility and plausibility depends on whom you’re writing for. For me, if Legolas was aura farming while Gimli rizzed up Galadriel while Saruman wants to hop on a palantir call that wouldn’t work but perhaps a day comes when that’s enjoyable for someone.
The market for these variations is controlled by IP law, not by demand for writing them or reading them. Emily Wilson’s controversial (for silly reasons, in my opinion) translation of Homer demonstrates what’s available in this genre.
Perhaps one day Gimli will rizz up Galadriel and Sam will say “bye-eeee” as Gollum falls into Mt Doom. One might even get to the stage where an LLM sits in place of the text and translates live into your own hyper-personalized idiolect or more usefully into that which will never take you out of the scene.
gherkinnn 17 hours ago [-]
As an example, "Hitting it out of the park" has no business in a medieval setting.
folbec 20 hours ago [-]
And what about archer companies doing "volley fire" ? As in what looks like 99% of Hollywood movies.
The worst archery bollocks I've ever seen in a film is in Timeline (2003)
The French are defending their castle at night from an English siege. They simultaneously exchange volleys of arrows with their tips set on fire. Very cinematic.
Then the dastardly English commander calls for "night arrows". What are those? They're arrows whose tips aren't set on fire.
The French soldiers, knowing there's a pile of archers at their door, and knowing exactly where they are thanks to the attackers all carrying torches, stand waiting for the signal to loose their counter-volley, and are surprised by the "night arrows".
Dip their arrow heads in the fire braziers so the tar / pitch starts to burn, ready for the coming "pull" and "loose" commands?
alias_neo 20 hours ago [-]
What's the correct term? Loose? I'm sure I've heard that before.
I know nothing about arrows except to identify the pointy end.
doikor 20 hours ago [-]
It is very tiring to hold back the shot in a position like that. In real life you just wouldn’t do that. And in general your archers know their range and will/should start shooting as soon as they have a target in range without any orders.
The volley fire thing is from black powder musket/rifle days. Basically volleys were used so you can actually seen what you are shooting at (aim) and manuever (hard to move while reloading. Easier if everyone reloads at the same time). Most armies still had small groups sharpshooters/snipers running around the field and taking shots freely.
alias_neo 20 hours ago [-]
> It is very tiring to hold back the shot in a position like that. In real life you just wouldn’t do that
That makes a lot of sense, and is kind of obvious when you think about it. They'd just be wasting energy.
I suppose the way we see it portrayed in film (for some reason it's always LoTR that comes to mind), is for dramatic effect, with scores of arrows flying through the sky at once. But I was always mildly irritated (though without knowing why) by the fact that despite so many arrows flying, the vast majority would miss any target.
kijin 19 hours ago [-]
If most archers start shooting as soon as targets enter the range, and if their individual ranges are clustered around the average, wouldn't that result in a relatively high density of shooting when the distance to a moving group of targets coincides with their average range?
Some movies actually provide a plausible-sounding explanation for the volley fire thing. A dude in charge commands everyone to wait until the unsuspecting enemy enters the kill zone. But even in that case, I guess the archers won't wait with their bows drawn.
doikor 19 hours ago [-]
The opponent has usually seen bows before too and has a rough idea of their range.
cenamus 20 hours ago [-]
Shoot?
JKCalhoun 19 hours ago [-]
Release?
nkrisc 20 hours ago [-]
This is a good example of movies using inaccurate depictions that audiences will easily understand instead of accurate depictions that may confuse them.
Just think of it as a translation.
enaaem 20 hours ago [-]
I wonder what would happen if someone would make a serie or movie with realistic historical fighting? It might just break all previous works. For example armour that actually works and spears being better than swords.
JKCalhoun 19 hours ago [-]
Alas, and a missed opportunity for education…
nkrisc 15 hours ago [-]
Most movies are in the business of entertainment, not education. It’s unfortunate, but such is life.
asimovDev 20 hours ago [-]
thanks, now I will never be able to stop noticing this when watching anything in English
caboteria 19 hours ago [-]
I'm surprised that no-one has mentioned the "magic unlimited magazine" yet, especially with fully-automatic weapons. It's distracting to watch the hero shoot and shoot and shoot and never reload.
Big props to the John Wick franchise for making reloading* a first-class part of their gun-fu choreography.
* ...and badass one-handed press checks that no-one should ever do IRL.
gabriel666smith 20 hours ago [-]
Honestly maybe my favourite part of being an author is being able to get briefly and deeply obsessed with any topic I choose - it's a rare privilege.
Beginning and then almost immediately dropping niche hobbies (eg flight simulators, poker, guns in the linked post) is transformed from something a spouse or partner might see as an undesirable and potentially annoying personality trait, into: "this is research, darling, it's my job", which is probably significantly more annoying.
It is easy to make mistakes with a verb one might not think to question like "cocked". Of course, ideally, you'd question every word used, so that the % of readers who understand its full associated meaning don't have their immersion in a story suddenly & painfully torn away.
To be less glib, I find that when speaking about a topic from a character's perspective - in dialogue or narration - a relatively important part of empathising with their point-of-view is understanding the physical and linguistic structure of their world. Sometimes I find there's no way to do this without putting hundreds of hours into understanding the tools they would use or the way they would live. Write what you know!
kevdoran 20 hours ago [-]
Kinda like when the hacker character in movies does... just about anything
waltwalther 19 hours ago [-]
...enhance...enhance...
kevdoran 17 hours ago [-]
...Rotate 180 degrees to the other side of the subject....
cwillu 14 hours ago [-]
“Can the computer take us around the other side?”
“…it can hypothesize.”
Jack Black in 1998 was righter than he had any right to be :p
20 hours ago [-]
stevage 19 hours ago [-]
Somehow this almost inspired me to write some fiction just for the sole purpose of including some real howlers of this kind, that the average reader wouldn't notice. I wonder how many you could squeeze into one scene.
n6242 20 hours ago [-]
One mistake in non-fiction blog posts: not including a label or title for the pictures.
defrost 21 hours ago [-]
(28th June 2021) .. and I didn't find a Mistakes: Long Gun Edition.
542458 20 hours ago [-]
I'm not a deep-in-the-weeds expert, but if I had to put together an "obvious long rifle mistakes in fiction" article, it’d probably be:
* People pumping shotguns after every round, or unnecessarily cycling the bolt after every round
* Wrong action type for the gun
* Wrong shotgun ammo for the context
* Wrong safety type for the gun (most long guns have safeties, but they are operated in a variety of ways)
* Magazine vs clip vs chamber vs tube
* Shotgun impacts launching people across rooms, or unrealistic recoil (both too high and too low) for the weapon type
RayeEvtuch 20 hours ago [-]
Many long guns are not semi-auto and have to have their action cycled after each round. that's super common.
waltwalther 19 hours ago [-]
Generally, all long guns that are not auto/semi-auto must be cycled after every shot in order to chamber another round. This includes pump-action, bolt-action, and lever-action rifles/shotguns. There are exceptions, such as revolver rifles.
There are also instances when semi-auto pistols might need to be cycled after every round.
defrost 20 hours ago [-]
How about accounting for Coriolis "force" in addition to drop and wind when shooting ULR 5,000 yards?
Have you seen that in a film? Is it actually a thing, can you ignore it?
542458 20 hours ago [-]
Surprisingly, Coriolis at extreme ranges (like 5000 feet) can be relevant enough to be corrected for, but how much and in what direction depends which way you're shooting and where on the planet you are. There's a fun calculator here: https://codingace.net/physics/coriolis_effect_shooting.html
defrost 20 hours ago [-]
It's ignored in practice when firing long guns at 5,000 yards.
The minuscule effect is overwhelmingly dominated by everything else. Heavier, longer range shells from naval guns, yes - rifles, no.
Buckshot spread is another common mistake in fiction, e.g. when it's close you still need to aim
nephihaha 21 hours ago [-]
Geoffrey Boothroyd wrote some letters to Ian Fleming about James Bond's armoury, which Fleming took on board. Fleming incorporated a Boothroyd character into the books who was later merged with Q.
bombcar 20 hours ago [-]
Bond using a “top secret compact rifle” that I recognized as an AR-7 was greatly disappointing to me, especially I had just finished discovering how crappy a gun that thing is.
ourmandave 20 hours ago [-]
The first complaint is "heard the snick of the revolvers safety."
I assume a lot of writers get their misinformation from Hollywood sound effects and the countless other gun related liberties.
Like the terminator asking for a phased plasma rifle in a 40W range. Everyone knows those weren't available until 1997.
bestouff 19 hours ago [-]
You know how to recognize an American movie ? There's a gun on the poster.
CrociDB 19 hours ago [-]
What if they're not mistakes at all, just creative choices?
jdkwxnkwxnsk 18 hours ago [-]
Then most people on this comment section would have to find something else to preach and declare absolute knowledge about. Ah wait, that’s just every comment section around here.
Simulacra 20 hours ago [-]
I'm sure it exists, but we need this for movies. Of all the things I wish the movie industry would do, removing the sound of racking a slide or pulling back a hammer...on an automatic.. is top of my list of things that need to absolutely go.
RJSquirel 19 hours ago [-]
This. Every movie shotgun uses the sound of a Remington 870 racking. Every camera uses the sound of a Nikon MD11/12 winding. I'm sure there are more.
jdkwxnkwxnsk 18 hours ago [-]
Please, these are more often than not just creative choices, sure they may be inaccurate but accuracy is seldom the point a director is trying to make when taking creative liberties like this.
If every movie was as close to reality as possible they wouldn’t be classified as entertainment.
ghusto 20 hours ago [-]
Jesus. Is this what _we_ sound like when talking about IT?
nottorp 20 hours ago [-]
Probably.
But I think sometimes we're more justified than the gun nuts. Take for example the movie series favorite "we'll track him through his GPS".
skinfaxi 20 hours ago [-]
More justified for what?
wizzwizz4 20 hours ago [-]
IT mistakes are frequently glaring plot-holes that render entire sections of the story impossible. Gun mistakes are generally a choreography problem, a weapon that's possible but just hasn't been manufactured, or someone learning information about the gun's state via the wrong channel (where such an information channel does exist).
Sure, sometimes a bullet impact throwing someone off a cliff is plot-relevant, but I couldn't name a single example. On the other hand, I can think of several examples where (supposedly) state-of-the-art encryption is cracked digit by digit, or where a radio receiver is tracked from a distance where the receiving pattern would be orders of magnitude below the noise floor (most often from orbital satellites), or where a device is remotely "hacked" that is not even plausibly connected to a network (less common, now that everything is IoT, although it's really prevalent in works set in the late 90s / early 00s).
jdkwxnkwxnsk 18 hours ago [-]
If _you_ sound like this when talking about IT then you really ought to reevaluate your social skills. It’s not the topic, it’s the stuck-uppiness of it all.
20 hours ago [-]
bombcar 20 hours ago [-]
Yes, it’s the flip side of Gell Mann Amnesia - nerding out!
boesboes 20 hours ago [-]
yeap. And if you talk about trains like this, they blame vaccines ;)
20 hours ago [-]
vova_hn2 20 hours ago [-]
[dead]
unpopularopp 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
nkrisc 20 hours ago [-]
Go to any rural community in any country in the world and you’ll probably find at least one rifle of some kind.
I’m very in favor of strict gun laws, especially for handguns, but rifles have very legitimate and important uses for people who live away from dense urban environments.
defrost 20 hours ago [-]
There are many guns in Australia (the country that, according to the US NRA, "banned" guns) where they are tools with an application that require a licence to use (just like explosives, dangerous chemicals, lasers above a certain oomph level, cars, giant trucks, etc)
EdwardDiego 20 hours ago [-]
Not handguns though. Well, not legally.
defrost 20 hours ago [-]
Yes, handguns - police, military, some security, and gun clubs all have hand guns.
There are plenty of countries aside the US where citizens can and do own guns.
E.g. gun control is strict in most of Europe compared to the US, but it's entirely attainable to most people without a criminal record to own firearms.
bombcar 20 hours ago [-]
Also amusing is I see way more rifles especially in Europe than I ever do in the USA; Paris and other metros really seem to like having soldiers walking around armed.
Here we just have cops with sidearms and one or two cowboys open carrying.
EdwardDiego 20 hours ago [-]
Yes, but typically not handguns, the prevalence of them in the US is unusual compared to other Western countries.
short_sells_poo 20 hours ago [-]
It's important to make a distinction between ownership and carry permits. Ownership permits allow you to own and store firearms in your home in a secure place, and take them (unloaded) to a shooting range.
Carry permits allow you to carry loaded firearms in public.
Carry permits tend to be heavily restricted, but I believe handguns are not. The UK is an exception in that gun control is significantly more onerous than any other European country and more or less bans civilian handgun ownership completely.
E.g. in Switzerland, it's trivial to get a handgun. Not any more difficult than buying a double barrelled shotgun or an AR-15 style rifle. On the other hand it's very difficult to get a license that allows you to carry loaded firearms. The regular firearm permit allows you to transport unloaded guns from your home to the shooting range and back.
There are a lot of shooting clubs in former eastern bloc countries as well, and both long guns and handguns are popular for sport shooting.
boesboes 20 hours ago [-]
yes, but nobody gives a fuck.
Perhaps the commenter shouldn't have said: only gun nuts care.
skinfaxi 20 hours ago [-]
Not handguns though right? I think you need a justifiable need in most of Europe like being in a hunting club.
bebe9494i4 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
adjejmxbdjdn 20 hours ago [-]
Dogs kill about 30-50 people in the U.S. every year.
Intimate partner gun violence alone leads to about 700 women being killed every year.
So by your logic, if you’re a woman and your partner has a gun, and is walking towards you and you can’t clearly tell that they don’t have a gun on them, “they just want to give you a kiss before leaving home” isn’t an argument. They’re vermin that can kill you and you’re absolutely allowed to play it safe, defend yourself and shoot them.
duk3luk3 20 hours ago [-]
Yes, that sounds appropriate and proportional to me, given the massive danger posed to (mostly) women by mostly (men) regarding domestic violence.
dullcrisp 20 hours ago [-]
Cars kill 40,000 people I just shoot for the tires though.
rjsw 20 hours ago [-]
There are cartridges specifically designed for shooting cars.
I think better analogy would be a drunken partner, loudly shouting "i will cut you", and chasing you with a knife, when you try to run away.
But you are forgetting one major thing: dogs are not people!
syrgian 20 hours ago [-]
I am a dog owner, and I agree that a loose and aggressive dog is a liability to humanity and you are making everyone a favor if you kill it even if you could have escaped (e.g. you manage to get into your car in time). If it was attacking you, it could be a child (or another dog, too) next time. I would say that even a loose, non aggressive dog of a breed that is very statistically likely to mangle people (e.g. Bully XL) should be taken away from their owners that same day.
amarant 19 hours ago [-]
As a fellow dog owner I feel obligated to point out that not all barking is aggressive.
People not used to dogs often seem to think it is, and I'd hate for people to start shooting dogs just because they bark. Dogs bark, it's what they do.
bebe9494i4 18 hours ago [-]
Maybe we just do not give a damm if its agressive, or teritorial or reactive barking? The dog will bite anyway. Or maybe it is just horny and wants a quickie humping? Do not care, not interested!
Like we are suppose to guess that tail wagging at 1.5hz with 10 degree amplitude is safe (but only if ears are not raised)? Or that running away is bad?
It is just a trap to blame victim for "provoking" an attack. Dog should be secured and on leash, that is what responsible dog owners do!
05 20 hours ago [-]
I think there should be mandatory courses the owner needs to take to own these breeds (and pass the exam with satisfactory marks), loose or not if one slip of a leash can lead to a kid getting mangled then it's not safe for the owner to walk even a leashed untrained dog.
qwertytyyuu 20 hours ago [-]
But like don't going around shooting dogs people ask your child not to pet
jdkwxnkwxnsk 18 hours ago [-]
Now this is certainly a take. A bad one, surely, but a take nonetheless.
Don’t pet strange dogs. Don’t let your children pet strange dogs. Don’t mess with animals you don’t know unless you’re willing to risk being bitten or worse. Simple as that.
bebe9494i4 17 hours ago [-]
> Simple as that.
Can I run away? Or is that me "messing" with strange animal and initiating a conflict?
Can I walk on "their teritory" (also known as public street or park)? Or is there some broken rule here?
What if dog is really really horny, and wants small dog I am carrying?
> willing to risk being bitten or worse
I am not willing to risk that. I will not allow that! Simple as that!
Some people judge fiction way too harshly for inconsequential but inaccurate details which only serve for narrative structure. There are actually tons of authors who get all of these details right, but you almost never read their books because if they can get them published at all, nobody reads them, because they absolutely suck. An author that gets these details right and is actually a good storyteller is extremely rare. It’s basically a list consisting of Tom Clancy and John Le Carre.
It’s just a pet peeve. At some point you have to let it go, or you’ll end up wasting your time writing blog posts begging authors (who largely don’t care) to talk to you so they won’t get inconsequential details wrong.
And then the author with his own specialty started writing about my field ... oh so badly.
So, knowledge of weapons doesn't translate in knowledge of writing (or vice versa). My only criteria any longer is just don't say "clip" unless your character has scored himself a Mauser C96 or similar and we're good.
The tough thing is, once you get "above average" in terms of accuracy, those of us who like to be a little more pedantic will grade on a curve!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadline_(science_fiction_stor...
Tangentaly related observation, but Reagan may have been the only president to really pay attention to movies and entertainment for inspiration of future events, and possibilities. It was said that he had a similar reaction to War Games, and took it very seriously
In general the sounds of guns are very bad in most movies/tv shows (Heat from 1995 comes closest for me).
Edit: just noticed you mentioned heat already, I need more coffee…
This one is not that surprising in mass media - there's no way the good guys and bad guys are going to take a pause and actually put on PPE before the shoot out.
It seems that "point blank" has come to mean simply, "a shot you can't miss".
Tom's commentary later was that he disagreed with that sentiment. "I disagree with those potential comments. Words change their meaning overtime. In modern English, you can fire an arrow, you can fire a torpedo, we were gonna fire that trebuchet"
However, I'm also aware that I'm kind of a hypocrite because I'm totally fine with current world grammar and punctuation for example.
The market for these variations is controlled by IP law, not by demand for writing them or reading them. Emily Wilson’s controversial (for silly reasons, in my opinion) translation of Homer demonstrates what’s available in this genre.
Perhaps one day Gimli will rizz up Galadriel and Sam will say “bye-eeee” as Gollum falls into Mt Doom. One might even get to the stage where an LLM sits in place of the text and translates live into your own hyper-personalized idiolect or more usefully into that which will never take you out of the scene.
https://acoup.blog/2025/05/02/collections-why-archers-didnt-...
The French are defending their castle at night from an English siege. They simultaneously exchange volleys of arrows with their tips set on fire. Very cinematic.
Then the dastardly English commander calls for "night arrows". What are those? They're arrows whose tips aren't set on fire.
The French soldiers, knowing there's a pile of archers at their door, and knowing exactly where they are thanks to the attackers all carrying torches, stand waiting for the signal to loose their counter-volley, and are surprised by the "night arrows".
Such nonsense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcUVOlbNb30
I know nothing about arrows except to identify the pointy end.
The volley fire thing is from black powder musket/rifle days. Basically volleys were used so you can actually seen what you are shooting at (aim) and manuever (hard to move while reloading. Easier if everyone reloads at the same time). Most armies still had small groups sharpshooters/snipers running around the field and taking shots freely.
That makes a lot of sense, and is kind of obvious when you think about it. They'd just be wasting energy.
I suppose the way we see it portrayed in film (for some reason it's always LoTR that comes to mind), is for dramatic effect, with scores of arrows flying through the sky at once. But I was always mildly irritated (though without knowing why) by the fact that despite so many arrows flying, the vast majority would miss any target.
Some movies actually provide a plausible-sounding explanation for the volley fire thing. A dude in charge commands everyone to wait until the unsuspecting enemy enters the kill zone. But even in that case, I guess the archers won't wait with their bows drawn.
Just think of it as a translation.
Big props to the John Wick franchise for making reloading* a first-class part of their gun-fu choreography.
* ...and badass one-handed press checks that no-one should ever do IRL.
Beginning and then almost immediately dropping niche hobbies (eg flight simulators, poker, guns in the linked post) is transformed from something a spouse or partner might see as an undesirable and potentially annoying personality trait, into: "this is research, darling, it's my job", which is probably significantly more annoying.
It is easy to make mistakes with a verb one might not think to question like "cocked". Of course, ideally, you'd question every word used, so that the % of readers who understand its full associated meaning don't have their immersion in a story suddenly & painfully torn away.
To be less glib, I find that when speaking about a topic from a character's perspective - in dialogue or narration - a relatively important part of empathising with their point-of-view is understanding the physical and linguistic structure of their world. Sometimes I find there's no way to do this without putting hundreds of hours into understanding the tools they would use or the way they would live. Write what you know!
“…it can hypothesize.”
Jack Black in 1998 was righter than he had any right to be :p
* People pumping shotguns after every round, or unnecessarily cycling the bolt after every round
* Wrong action type for the gun
* Wrong shotgun ammo for the context
* Wrong safety type for the gun (most long guns have safeties, but they are operated in a variety of ways)
* Magazine vs clip vs chamber vs tube
* Shotgun impacts launching people across rooms, or unrealistic recoil (both too high and too low) for the weapon type
There are also instances when semi-auto pistols might need to be cycled after every round.
Have you seen that in a film? Is it actually a thing, can you ignore it?
The minuscule effect is overwhelmingly dominated by everything else. Heavier, longer range shells from naval guns, yes - rifles, no.
* Opinion of a ULR shooter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP7IKshdiiY
* Range Proof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7owwTz7Z0OE
I assume a lot of writers get their misinformation from Hollywood sound effects and the countless other gun related liberties.
Like the terminator asking for a phased plasma rifle in a 40W range. Everyone knows those weren't available until 1997.
If every movie was as close to reality as possible they wouldn’t be classified as entertainment.
But I think sometimes we're more justified than the gun nuts. Take for example the movie series favorite "we'll track him through his GPS".
Sure, sometimes a bullet impact throwing someone off a cliff is plot-relevant, but I couldn't name a single example. On the other hand, I can think of several examples where (supposedly) state-of-the-art encryption is cracked digit by digit, or where a radio receiver is tracked from a distance where the receiving pattern would be orders of magnitude below the noise floor (most often from orbital satellites), or where a device is remotely "hacked" that is not even plausibly connected to a network (less common, now that everything is IoT, although it's really prevalent in works set in the late 90s / early 00s).
I’m very in favor of strict gun laws, especially for handguns, but rifles have very legitimate and important uses for people who live away from dense urban environments.
Steps you need to take to legally obtain a handgun (in Australia) - https://www.ssaa.org.au/?ss_news=handgun-ownership-facts-in-...
E.g. gun control is strict in most of Europe compared to the US, but it's entirely attainable to most people without a criminal record to own firearms.
Here we just have cops with sidearms and one or two cowboys open carrying.
Carry permits allow you to carry loaded firearms in public.
Carry permits tend to be heavily restricted, but I believe handguns are not. The UK is an exception in that gun control is significantly more onerous than any other European country and more or less bans civilian handgun ownership completely.
E.g. in Switzerland, it's trivial to get a handgun. Not any more difficult than buying a double barrelled shotgun or an AR-15 style rifle. On the other hand it's very difficult to get a license that allows you to carry loaded firearms. The regular firearm permit allows you to transport unloaded guns from your home to the shooting range and back.
There are a lot of shooting clubs in former eastern bloc countries as well, and both long guns and handguns are popular for sport shooting.
Perhaps the commenter shouldn't have said: only gun nuts care.
Intimate partner gun violence alone leads to about 700 women being killed every year.
So by your logic, if you’re a woman and your partner has a gun, and is walking towards you and you can’t clearly tell that they don’t have a gun on them, “they just want to give you a kiss before leaving home” isn’t an argument. They’re vermin that can kill you and you’re absolutely allowed to play it safe, defend yourself and shoot them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.50_Beowulf
But you are forgetting one major thing: dogs are not people!
People not used to dogs often seem to think it is, and I'd hate for people to start shooting dogs just because they bark. Dogs bark, it's what they do.
Like we are suppose to guess that tail wagging at 1.5hz with 10 degree amplitude is safe (but only if ears are not raised)? Or that running away is bad?
It is just a trap to blame victim for "provoking" an attack. Dog should be secured and on leash, that is what responsible dog owners do!
Don’t pet strange dogs. Don’t let your children pet strange dogs. Don’t mess with animals you don’t know unless you’re willing to risk being bitten or worse. Simple as that.
Can I run away? Or is that me "messing" with strange animal and initiating a conflict?
Can I walk on "their teritory" (also known as public street or park)? Or is there some broken rule here?
What if dog is really really horny, and wants small dog I am carrying?
> willing to risk being bitten or worse
I am not willing to risk that. I will not allow that! Simple as that!