Dr. StrangeGun.

…Or How I Wish I Could Stop Analyzing and Enjoy the Movies.

When I was a kid, there were three things I loved – listening to live music, watching live theatre, and going to the movies. In short, entertainment needed to be live or larger than life to jazz me. As I grew up and became a professional musician, my love of live music was tempered by my knowledge. In other words, since I was no longer blissfully ignorant, a slightly out-of-tune french horn or drummer that rushed a little really bugged me – to the point where I could pay attention to nothing other than what to me were glaring errors. Kind of a bummer, really. Can’t tell you how many otherwise fine events have been spoiled for me that way.

When I got into college, I started playing in pit orchestras for musical theatre. I absorbed a lot of theatrical knowledge that way, and it wasn’t long before I was bitten by the acting bug. At the point I began to act on stage, I became much more aware of what it takes to pull off a good performance, and thus became aware of every flaw on stage. Again, my knowledge gave me an awareness much like Adam’s after he took a bite of the fruit from the tree of knowledge.

That left movies. Now being in the business of animation and video production, I’m not a stranger to movie techniques, and I have to admit that way too often, I’ll stop a DVD and point out to Mrs. Digital how amazing a certain shot was, or marvel over the cinematography. But it doesn’t spoil my enjoyment of the movie. (In many ways, it enhances my appreciation for the film.) That was, right up until the time I learned to shoot, and got my concealed carry permit.

I became interested in guns for self defense, largely because I have a family to protect. Once I got into it, I discovered that target shooting is a lot of fun. (Not an inexpensive hobby, mind you, but fun.) That led to a desire to know as much as possible about guns and shooting – the differences in calibers, ballistics, handgun magazine capacities, the difference a longer barrel makes – that sort of thing. What I learned really opened my eyes. And it changed the way I watch movies forever.

Last night, Mrs. Digital and I screened Wanted, the James (Narnia’s “Mr. Tumness”) McAvoy, Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman flick. [SPOILERS TO FOLLOW.] Lots of guns in this one. And as it’s based on a comic book, you must approach it with a willing suspension of disbelief to appreciate it. That was a lot easier before I began shooting.

I don’t mean to dump on this movie. Seriously. It had all the intellectual nutritional value of cotton candy, but there’s a place for mindless escapism. No, but what got me was that practically every bullet that left a barrel immediately violated the rules of physics, for no better reason than it looked cool.

Normally, my biggest gripe is that writers and directors allow heroes and villains the luxury of guns that only run out of bullets when needed for dramatic tension. In other words, your hero might blast away 20 or 30 rounds, then, just when he’s about to drop the bad guy dead in his tracks, he has to change magazines, thus allowing said bad guy to slip through his proverbial fingers. Now manufacturers today make some amazing handguns – with capacities and capabilities unheard of just 20 years ago. But your typical 1911-style .45 ACP semi-auto handgun holds just eight rounds plus one in the chamber. That’s nine shots, kiddies. Want more? Then keep a couple of spare magazines in your pocket. Presuming you do that, you might reasonably be expected to carry a maximum of 25 rounds – but that means you’ll do two magazine swaps during your gun battle. Sure, there are so-called “high capacity” handguns out there, and not everybody shoots the larger .45 ACP round. But the most I’ve seen in a hi-cap handgun would be around 15+1 for a 9mm semi-auto – a far cry from the bottomless magazines found in the handguns of so many movie and TV show shooters.

In Wanted, it wasn’t a question of magazine capacity. No, this went straight to some fundamental violations of the laws of physics. For instance, McAvoy literally shot the wings off flies. No matter what kind of rounds he fired, the kinetic energy of a sub-sonic or supersonic round is going to turn a fly into a grease spot long before it can separate the wings from the body. You see, when a bullet hits something, it transmits all the kinetic energy into the object. That tends to have a dramatic effect on the thing you hit – everything from rendering it into small, unidentifiable fragments to liquefication of organ tissue.

Case in point: let’s say you hit a body with the afore-mentioned .45 ACP round. Depending on the distance from target, powder charge, and the shape and characteristics of the bullet, you’re gonna put just South of a 1/2″ hole in the front of whatever you hit. Assuming you’re not shooting at ballistic gelatin, you’ll put a much larger hole in the back of the target. Shoot a human body in the head, and the exit hole will likely be fist-sized or larger. In some instances, the bullet will liquefy soft tissue (brains, hearts, lungs) causing an immediate cessation of life, forcing the target to take a dirt nap and quickly assume room temperature forever.

A round from an AK-47, AR-15, M-15 or other carbine can do a whole lot more damage, simply because the bullet has a lot more force behind it (seriously larger cartridge with a whole lot more gunpowder involved). Because of bullet velocity, they tend to be “through-and-through” rounds (as opposed to, say, a 22 long rifle round that tends to stay inside the target’s body and do a lot of clever ricocheting around, causing a bunch of unpredictable, random damage to multiple vital organs). However, because of the supersonic speed of carbine rounds, you get a lot more organ liquefication.  In the cases where extremities are hit, you tend to see limbs simply blown off.

Now take the flights of fancy in Wanted. Here, firing a handgun as if it were being tossed like a from-behind-the-back Frisbee would allow the shooter to literally bend the trajectory around an object and hit (with unerring precision) a target that would ordinarily be blocked by the closer object. McAvoy fires a bullet around Jolie and scores a bulls-eye directly behind her. Wish I could do that. In the climactic scene, Jolie and her brother assassins are standing in a circle about 20 feet across. She fires a round using her physics-bending skills at the assassin to her side, bending the trajectory so that it kills him, then continues around the room like some sort of superconducting supercollider, in turn taking out each of the other assassins in a 360° sweep. Now that’s shootin’! Aside from the idea of firing a gun in such a way that you could cause the trajectory to follow a 360° arc, about the best you could hope for would be to have bullet that would go through-and-through assassin #1’s skull, and maybe wound assassin #2. Even if you had these clowns obligingly line up, shoulder to shoulder, and fire a handgun at idiot #1, idiot #3 would be unharmed. Call it the application of the second law of thermodynamics, call it entropy, call it common sense – call it what you will, but the energy lost when a bullet crashes through a human skull going in and going out is bound to have a detrimental effect on said bullet’s ability to continue to penetrate bone repeatedly.

These are far from the only times you needed to willingly suspend your disbelief – nope, this particular flick shares the same love and respect for physics that your average Wylie E. Coyote/Road Runner opus does. In fact, in many ways, the Warner Brothers cartoons have a less tenuous grip on the physical world than does Wanted.

Of course, my own awareness of all things guns extends to TV shows as well. For instance, did you know that almost every handgun fired on TV shoots 9mm blanks (instead of .45 ACP or .40 S&W) because 9mm blanks are far easier to come by than other calibers? That means that when Thomas Magnum pulled out his trusty 1911 Colt .45 ACP sidearm, he was really firing not .45s but 9mm bullets. A minor point for most, but for fans of the 1911 handgun, it’s nothing short of blasphemy.

Shows like CSI are generally a bit more accurate as to ballistics (although I’d bet the real Las Vegas, Miami and New York CSIs would kill to get their hands on the same slicked-up, tricked-out labs their TV counterparts enjoy, not to mention the speed at which they get all lab results). Still, if you want to get an accurate idea of what guns can do, TV and the movies is the last place to look. Which makes me realize just how much TV and the movies have created a knowledge gap that is affecting our national debate over guns. To put this into perspective, instead of guns, let’s talk about pregnancy and babies. If your only knowledge of obstetrics came from watching Saturday morning classic cartoons, you would probably believe that babies were delivered by large storks. Only by getting some first-hand experience with the joys of pregnancy would you come to understand where babies really come from. I would wager that if you could somehow require everybody who wants to discuss guns – pro or con – to visit a range and actually take a handgun course (and learn to shoot), the tenor of the discussion would change dramatically. Nothing like a few facts and a dose of reality to change the framing of the debate.

Now I’m not saying that if every gun-banning advocate was required to learn how to fire a gun and take a gun safety course, it would change them into gun-ownership advocates. However, I’d bet you that the debate would suddenly become a lot less polarized and grounded in a lot more common sense. So perhaps the best course of action I can recommend when it comes to guns is to put down the remote and go learn something about guns. Unless you prefer to remain blissfully ignorant so you can enjoy TV and movies and not turn to your significant other and say “that guy has a Glock that can shoot 30 rounds without a reload…I want one!”