Also, when getting hit by a 9mm, people don’t usually go flying back about 8-10 feet. It’s a physics thing.
I get a kick out of Hollywood’s sparking bullets. They shower sparks when they “hit” about anything, including sheetrock, glass, wood, etc.
You don’t see it too often, but a movie or TV program showing a silencer on a revolver used to drive my Dad through the roof.
My only experience in gunfights is limited to years of paintball. The sum of my experience is keep moving and seek cover when reloading. My strategy for home defense is to be sure your target isn’t your family and unload into them.
I have read that the street shoot out in Closed Range is one of the most realistic shoot out scenes ever in a western.
Not much accuracy and everyone not too far away from each other.
But my favorite scene is when Costner just walks up to a bad guy and asks him if he killed his friend. The guy says yes. Costner just draws and shoots the guy and walks on.
Great article, and very informative.
Thanks!
I like the way that whenever someone in a movie or on TV points a gun at someone else, the gun goes “click”.
None of my firearms does that. Maybe all of mine are defective or something.
Pretentious little article but some points are correct - combat’s deafening, machine guns can overheat and do bad things quickly, people aren’t predictable when they’re hit, etc.
The junk about bullets “sounding like bees” is horsehockey: bullets make a loud bang when they go by or if they hit somebody. Sounds like a breaking pine board. If the incoming sounds like bees, they’re shooting at somebody else a long way off, I would guess.
The stupid part about eating MREs during a firefight is idiotic. During a real firefight you have no idea if you’re going to be alive in the next second or so. Tends to concentrate the mind.
It is true that you haven’t any idea how the guy you hit’s going to react. That’s why you always shoot a couple more times to make sure he stays down.
The authors of this piece makes fun of hand signs - as you experienced guys know, you use hand signs on patrol because making noise on patrol is incredibly stupid. We used hand signs all the time, so we stayed alive.
No mention of grenades, but grenades are used all the time and often. Work great but nobody on earth can throw them far enough to prevent getting hit by your own frags. All of us have little bits of our own steel in us from grenades. And no, we didn’t get Purple Hearts from getting hit by our own frags - we weren’t John Kerry.
I'd sure be interested in knowing how many years this Matt Wagner spent in the military, what rank he held and what unit/s he was assigned to that saw all that action...
Especially Africa and South America........
I just don't trust the alleged credentials of these hollywood dudes..........As a side note, the only info I could find on this guy was associated with Stargate and "The Colt", which was aired in 2005 and likely filmed in 2004........which now brings to question his involvement in Afghanistan.
If anyone wants to join the hunt on this guy, ping me on what you find.......
My pet peeve in Hollywood gunfights is cocking a gun. First, whoever has the gun waits until they are actually confronting someone else before they cock the gun. Second, they always seem to cock the gun multiple times, for dramatic effect. Just do it once, it is ready to fire from that point on.
“A six-gun fired and ten men fell without a single flaw, but the darndest thing I ever saw was when they all rode up the draw.” :)
On the other hand, boxes of office paper work pretty well.
There are others. Mythbusters did a pretty good job debunking the shoot-the-hat-off thing, but I saw another example. My late brother wanted to have a cool bullet hole in his hat one time, so he put it on a fencepost and had at it with a 7x57. The problem with that was that it caught a bit of fencepost on the way out and it blew the back of the hat away. Oh, and it didn't fly anywhere.
What else? George Plimpton was an extra in, I believe, El Dorado, and wrote about what they had to do to get him blown into a wall by a shotgun. Body harness and a cable jerk from a hidden winch. I shall insist on all of my opponents being so equipped.
Then, for pure realism, there's this one from The Matrix Trilogy. I'm still working on the shoot-the-automatic-weapon-while-doing-a-cartwheel thing. I can shoot, I just have a hard time with the cartwheel.
One of the most realistic gunfight scenes was in Clint Eastwood’s unforgiven.
To start with, a man is shot in the belly by the assassins, in the open. Both groups are keeping their heads down. The shot man is incapacitated, and suddenly very thirsty because of being shot in the belly, a realistic thing that happens. So he is shouting for water, but his friends are too scared to go out and get him.
Finally, the assassins yell out to the other side to give him some water, and that they won’t shoot. But this is horrible advice, as giving someone with a belly shot water almost guarantees they will die.
Eventually the assassins just leave.
From the point of view of pure realism, that rocked. Along with another assassination of a protected man, who made the fatal mistake of going by himself to the outhouse. They shot him while he was sitting on the seat.
Even as a mere ‘no nothing’ lad I used to get a chuckle out of the ‘good guy’ (we Knew he was the good guy, he was wearing the White Hat) would be riding through a gully with dudes lining both sides of the cliff shooting at him with rifles...Missing him and his horse..
He not only managed to ride unscathed through the hail of bullets, but would also be firing his six shooters - in full gallop - and picking the bad guys of the ridge....
Each six shooter had about 50 shots.... But the accuracy was remarkable. <: <: