We haven't covered any myths for a while, the last article was over 2 years ago. In today's post, we will cover a scene that often shows up in movies and TV. Check out the two screen captures from the popular TV show Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes and Martin Freeman as Dr. John Watson.
Click on the images to enlarge.
In the scene, Sherlock Holmes has just arranged a meeting with his arch enemy, Moriarty, and plans to use his pistol on him. Unfortunately for Sherlock Holmes, Moriarty has planned for this and has positioned snipers in the buildings around, and they are pointing their red laser sights at Holmes and Watson.
Now, we look at another scene from a different movie, Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
Scene from Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Here we see that agent Jasper Sitwell is taking a phone call that informs him that he has just been targeted by a sniper and he looks down to see a red dot visible on his tie.
So, do snipers actually use red lasers on their sights? Let's see what the real story is.
Now let's look at another thing about laser sights. They are useful to acquire targets quickly at short range, because the user can see exactly where the weapon is pointing at, without peering through the weapon's other sights, especially in low light conditions.
However, laser sights are not useful for long range snipers, due to a few reasons:
The primary goal of a sniper is to stay hidden. If a real sniper used a laser like the types shown in the images above, everyone would know where the sniper is, because they can just follow the laser beam back to the source.
The target will also know that he or she is being targeted and can possibly attempt to take evasive action.
Laser light travels in a straight line, but bullets don't. A laser sight completely ignores the effects of gravity, wind, air density etc. This is why rifle sights have adjustments for elevation and windage.
For these reasons, the scenes with the snipers are highly questionable. They look pretty good on TV though.
Folks, it's time for another edition of firearm myths. We already dealt with this topic previously here, here and here. We will look into some more firearm myths which are prevalent in movies today.
1. If someone gets hit by a bullet, they get lifted off the ground and fly backwards.
In several movies, we have a scene where someone (villain, sidekick, red-shirt guy etc.) gets hit by a bullet shot from a handgun and is lifted clean off their feet and through a plate glass window, all by the force of the bullet hitting the person. Can this actually happen in real life? Well, let's recall some basic physics from middle school here. Newton's third law of motion states that, "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction".
Therefore, if there's enough energy in a bullet to send a person flying back 10 feet in the air, there should be an equal amount of recoil energy acting on the firearm, which would send the shooter of the firearm flying backwards 10 feet as well! (assuming that they are both the same weight, of course).
There are firearms that can deliver enough energy to knock a human off his feet (such as a very large caliber bullet or cannon shell), but these firearms are mounted on a weapons platform for a reason and are not carried in someone's pocket.
2. Cocking the pistol/shotgun/revolver to show that someone means business.
This scene is shown in several movies. Hero has a bad guy covered by his pistol and the bad guy is refusing to answer questions. The hero then dramatically pulls back on the hammer to cock the gun (or racks the shotgun's slide) and show the bad guy that he means business and the bad guy immediately starts talking.
In other scenes, the dramatic clicking sound happens when a character walks into a room and announces his/her presence and indicates that he or she is in control of the situation now.
In real life, no one ever walks into a dangerous area without their firearm already cocked and loaded and ready to go at a moment's notice. This is called Condition 0, which we studied a while ago when we were reading about carrying conditions.
Even more amusing is to hear the hammer cocking sound, when the actor is holding a hammerless action pistol, such as a Glock.
3. Firearms exhibiting features that shouldn't happen in real life.
As mentioned above in the previous myth, we often hear cocking noises out of firearms that don't typically make such a noise in real life. One example is the sound of a hammer being cocked back, when the character in question is holding a hammerless pistol, such as a Glock. Another example that is seen in several movies is the sound of a racking slide of a pump-action shotgun, when the character is holding a double-barreled model!
Then there's the scene where someone shoots 15 times without reloading, while holding a 6-shot revolver.
4. It's only a flesh wound.
In the movies, there seems to be a general idea that if someone gets shot in the arm, shoulder or the leg, the person will generally hobble around a bit, but will survive in the end. Then there is the scene where a person will shoot someone in the leg to prevent them from running away and the person getting shot doesn't die. Persons getting shot in the shoulder make a full recovery in the hospital after a couple of days.
In reality, there is no safe place where a person can be shot and be assured of not dying. There are some large arteries in the arms, shoulders and legs that can cause a person to die from blood loss within minutes if these are punctured. The shoulder joint is very complex and is hard to put back together if shattered by a bullet.
Police and soldiers also don't aim to intentionally wing someone. This is because there is a chance that the shot could miss and hit some other innocent person. Therefore, they are trained to aim at the center of mass, so that there is a greater chance of hitting the target. No one in their right mind ever shoots to wing someone, they always shoot to kill.
5. Put down your gun, officer, and step away, or else the hostage dies.
This is the classic scene in several movies. The hero or heroes barge into a room with their guns out, only to find the villain holding a gun pointed at a hostage's head. The villain then tells everyone to throw down their weapons and kick them towards him, or else he'll shoot the hostage. The heroes will do that and then the dramatic music starts.
No one ever wonders why the villain doesn't now just shoot the hero and the hostage and then make his escape. This is why, in real life, police officers and military forces are trained never to put down their guns in a hostage situation.
We already looked at some firearm myths several months ago here and here. We will look at some more myths in this post. The class of myths we will look at in this post generally have movies to thank for spreading the myths.
1. If you drop a pistol, it will go off when it hits the ground.
You've probably seen this scene enacted in several movies. Someone accidentally drops a pistol and it automatically goes off with a bang when it hits the ground, usually killing some villain's sidekick while it does so. For example, there's the scene in the movie, True Lies, where Jamie Lee Curtis drops her gun down the stairs and ends up shooting a whole bunch of people.
You want the truth? The probability of this happening was certainly higher with older model pistols, so it might make sense if it happened in a cowboy movie. With more modern designs, this is much less likely to happen, especially with models manufactured since the 1980s or so. This is because there are devices called drop safety devices that are designed, precisely to prevent this from happening. In fact, we discussed these devices in posts here, here and here last year. And most modern pistol designs include one or more drop safety devices built in. As a matter of fact, the US military as well as NATO and some other countries' militaries require pistols to pass several drop tests before acceptance. SAAMI standards which are followed by most manufacturers in the US (as well as some foreign manufacturers selling products in the American market) also require pistol models to pass several drop tests. As do some states in the US (for example, California and Massachusetts, though the test standards for each state are different). The US Federal Gun Control Act of 1968 also introduced drop tests for imported gun models. On top of that, most reputable manufacturers add drop safeties to their designs, because they don't like lawsuits.
Why do we still hear news reports of people getting shot accidentally by dropped firearms then? Well, in the majority of such cases, the firearm in question usually turns out to be an older model firearm, which doesn't have drop safety devices built in. In extremely rare cases, the firearm has a malfunctioning drop safety device.
2. Handling one gun is good, handling two is even better.
In quite a few movies, we see the hero or heroine bursting out from a door with two guns, one in each hand. This scenario is also played out in certain videogames (such as the Tomb Raider series with the Lara Croft character). Sometimes the character aims them both at the same target and sometimes they are pointing at different targets.
Angelina Jolie playing Lara Croft in the movie Tomb Raider. Click on image to enlarge..
Keanu Reeves playing Neo in the movie The Matrix. Click on image to enlarge.
Note that Neo doesn't even bother to look where he's shooting!
In fact, director John Woo has made it his trademark and the scene appears in several movies that he has directed, often starring Chow Yun-Fat.
Click on images to enlarge.
In fact, in the movie Hard Boiled directed by John Woo and starring Chow Yun-Fat, the commanding officer says, "Give a guy a gun and he's Superman, give him two guns and he's God!"
So what is the truth here? Well, it looks pretty awesome in the movies, but it isn't such a good idea in real life. For one thing, each firearm requires one eye to aim it properly, so while it is hard enough to aim when the two firearms are pointing mostly parallel to each other, it is pretty darn hard to do it when the two are spread apart and pointing at different targets! On top of that, most modern shooting stances, such as the Weaver Stance, Chapman Stance, Isoceles Stance etc. emphasize using both hands to aim a single firearm, in order to stabilize it better.
3. The hero or villain doesn't know that his pistol is empty.
This scene has been replayed in several movies that it is almost a cliche: One character aims his pistol at another person and squeezes the trigger and then all you hear is "click". Curses, the character had fired off so many shots that he didn't realize that his pistol was out of ammunition. For even more drama, the character usually pulls the trigger several times while the other person laughs at him.
Classic scene from the James Bond movie Dr. No, starring Sean Connery as James Bond.
So what is the truth here? The image below shows what really happens to a pistol after you have fired the last round in the magazine:
Click on image to enlarge
After the last shot is fired, the slide locks back in the rear of the pistol, the barrel is exposed and the ejection port is left open and it stays open until the user inserts a new magazine in and releases the slide back manually. In many pistols, you can't even pull the trigger when it is open like this. It becomes pretty obvious to the user, as well as everyone around him/her, that the pistol is out of ammunition.
As you can see in the movie clip of the movie Dr. No shown above, the character of Professor R.J. Dent pumps six bullets into the pillow on the bed and then his pistol slide correctly locks open at around 0:09 into the movie clip when he runs of of ammunition. Then after a little while, when he attempts to shoot Mr. Bond a second time at around 1:02, his pistol slide seems to have returned back as though it was loaded, thanks to a little Hollywood movie magic. In reality, the slide should have stayed open and it would have been fairly obvious to him as well as James Bond that he was out of ammunition.
We looked at some firearm myths last month. Now it is time to examine some more stories and see if they are really myths or true facts.
1. You can escape bullets by diving underwater.
We've all seen the movie scene where the hero swims underwater, while all the villains impotently shoot at the water in an attempt to hit him, but our hero emerges unscathed on the other end. Is this really possible, the reader asks. Well, there is a fair bit of truth to this. We've all seen people shooting into bottles filled with water and puncturing them with splashing all around. However, it is a different matter when one shoots into a larger body of water, such as a lake. Water offers a lot of resistance to bullet movement and slows down bullets considerably.
The popular TV show Mythbusters ran an episode where they tried to confirm or disprove this story. They rigged up a block of ballistic gel to simulate a human body and immersed it in a public swimming pool and then shot it with various weapons. One of the interesting things they noted was that slower moving snubnose bullets from a 9mm pistol seemed to penetrate deeper into the pool than faster moving spitzer bullets from rifles like the M1 Garand. In fact, faster moving spitzer bullets tumbled when they hit the water surface and quickly lost their speed. At certain angles, the bullets just disintegrated upon hitting the water surface.
They initially tried shooting a 9mm pistol vertically into a plastic acrylic tank containing water and a ballistic gel block and noted that the bullets lost enough speed that it couldn't penetrate the gel block below 8 feet (2.44 meters) of water when fired directly vertically in (which is the worst-case scenario). They then shifted operations into a bigger body of water, i.e. a local swimming pool.
In order to make things more realistic, they conducted the swimming pool tests by shooting at a 30 degree angle into the water surface (just as the guards might shoot at the hero escaping from the wall of the castle) and they discovered some surprising results:
Using a replica civil war rifle, they couldn't hit the block of ballistic gel from 15 feet (4.57 meters) or even 5 feet (1.52 meters) distance because the bullets kept swerving off in the water. When hitting it from a totally unrealistic 3 foot (0.91 meters) range, they managed to get a fatal penetration. Bear in mind that the gel was in only 2 feet (0.61 meters) of water for this to happen.
Using a modern day assault rifle shooting NATO 5.56x45 mm. ammunition, they tried shooting at the gel block from various ranges. Bear in mind that this weapon fires a bullet at 2500 feet/second (762 meters/second), which is way faster than a civil war era weapon. At 10 foot (3.05 meters) range, the jacketed bullet just shattered when it hit the water surface, with no fragments in the gel block. At 3 foot (0.91 meters) range, the bullet broke up as before, but the tip of the bullet just slightly penetrated the gel block in what would be a non-fatal injury.
Using an early 20th century M1 Garand rifle (which fires a bullet at 2800 feet/second (853 meters/second)) showed similar results. At 10 foot (3.05 meters) range, the bullet simply shattered on hitting the water surface and at 2 foot (0.61 meters) range, it barely penetrated the gel block.
They used a huge Barret 50 caliber rifle capable of shooting at over 3000 feet/second (914 meters/second). Bear in mind that this is a sniper rifle capable of long range shooting. Result: The bullets created a big splash upon hitting the water surface, but either disintegrated or lost enough momentum after travelling in 3 feet (0.91 meters) of water that they couldn't inflict a fatal wound to anyone below this depth.
Conclusion: This scenario could actually work if the person is deep enough under water, as water does decelerate bullets by a surprisingly huge amount. Also, faster moving spitzer bullets tend to disintegrate a lot quicker when they hit the water surface, depending on the angle and speed they're fired at.
2. You can fire a gun underwater.
Some readers may have heard of special forces using guns that can fire underwater and such. For instance, there is the Russian SPP-1 pistol invented for combat divers. The actual truth is that you don't need a special gun that fires underwater, because most modern ordinary weapons can also do so, but doing this is an extremely bad idea.
The first problem is that sound carries a lot further underwater, so if a person happens to be underwater when firing a weapon, it could rupture their eardrums and severely disorient them or even knock them out with the shockwave.
The second problem is if the barrel contains an air bubble when underwater, the bullet travels through it and then hits water. Since water isn't as compressible as air, the pressure spreads in all directions. At this point, with all the pressure building up, something has to give and usually it ends up with either the barrel or the action exploding.
The reason some people think that guns can't fire underwater is because black powder won't ignite when wet. Well, most modern weapons don't use black powder for their propellant. They use cartridges filled with modern propellants, which are capable of burning even when underwater.
So what happens if you clear the weapon of all air bubbles and then attach a thread so that the weapon fires underwater while the user stays out of the water (or at least with their head out). In this case, most modern weapons, such as a Glock or a SiG 9mm pistol will fire, as will rifles like an M-16 or a Garand M-1. However, the range of the weapon will be severely shortened because water tends to offer significantly more resistance to bullet movement, a fact that we already noted in our last section. A test by the Mythbusters TV show determined that an M-1 Garand bullet only had a range of around 6 feet (or less than 2 meters) when fired underwater. Also, the resistance of water also applies to the operating mechanisms of automatic and semi-automatic weapons. This means that these weapons will most likely not go through their operating cycles and hence will only fire one shot.
Conclusion: Yes it is possible, but it is an extremely bad idea.
3. You can come out of the water and start shooting immediately.
We've all seen scenes from Rambo movies where Sylvester Stallone's character suddenly pops out of the river and starts shooting people around him. So what's the truth here?
Like we noted in the previous section, water is not a very compressible fluid, so it is a good idea to get as much of it out of the barrel as possible before firing. If not, when the bullet hits the water pocket, it will try to push it out of the way and the water not being compressible is pushed with high pressure to the sides of the barrel. The barrel is usually not built to handle these levels of stress and may possibly explode. So, obviously, the key is to do one of two things:
Empty the barrel and action of as much water as possible very quickly, so it is possible to shoot the weapon. This means the barrel must have strategically placed drain holes to do this.
Make the barrel much thicker to handle higher pressures. However, this increases the weight of the weapon.
Both these methods are used by various manufacturers of modern Special Forces weapons. Examples of these would be Heckler & Koch HK-416, Magpul ACR, Robinson Armament XCR etc. In fact, there are videos of what is called the "Over the Beach" test that some manufacturers advertise, to show how quickly their weapons can be pulled out of the water and fired.
But recall that Vietnam Era special forces did the same thing with regular M-16s as well. So what did they really do? Well, the reality is that they had to clean their weapons and drain them out before using them. On leaving the water, they would point the barrel downwards and then pull back on the forward assist lever to break the tight seal in the barrel. This would allow most of the water to drain out. In fact, one of the early objections in the M-16s design was that the barrel was of 5.56 mm. diameter which meant more water would stay in the barrel due to capillary action, whereas a wider barrel would drain it quicker. That is why the field manual recommends against carrying the barrel upwards in heavy rain, otherwise water could get stuck in the barrel. The interested reader is welcome to read a now declassified report about the issues of the AR-15 (the prototype M-16) here: http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=AD202468&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf. For those interested in how the procedure of draining water from the barrel of an M-16, chapter 2, page 0009 00-7 to page 0009 00-10 ("Unusual operating conditions") of the Army manual TM 9-1005-319-10 describes how it is done, along with pictures.
The new M16 Mark 4 Mod 0 has modifications to drain water from a barrel in around 8 seconds. This means it can start firing a lot quicker than its predecessors, but the user still needs to wait for water to drain first before firing. That means Hollywood is generally gassing when it shows people shooting the moment they come out of water.
There is also a secondary big movie myth here. Recall that the hero usually comes out of a muddy river and starts shooting immediately. Now a muddy river contains water, but also contains mud, silt, dead leaves, tiny fish, sticks etc., none of which is a good idea to have in a barrel when the shooting starts. In fact, it is a good idea to have nothing but air in the barrel before shooting. In Vietnam, special forces personnel would come out of the water and hide in a quiet place while they spent some time getting all the mud out of their weapons.
So what does a user who carries his weapon in the heavy rain do if he wishes to shoot immediately. First, one option as stated by training manuals, is to carry the weapon barrel downwards, so that rain water and other debris don't enter the barrel. Another option is to apply a condom at the end of the barrel. This keeps the water out and it is easily torn away by the first bullet coming through the barrel and doesn't affect its flight path that much either. In fact, there is a commercial product called a "barrel cot" that does exactly this and it is often used by hunters who hunt in snow or muddy conditions.
There are a ton of firearm myths going around, thanks to the movie industry. This post aims to deal with some of them.
1. Some ceramic guns cannot be detected by airport security equipment.
This myth was chiefly spawned by the movie, "Die Hard 2: Die Harder", starring Bruce Willis. In that movie, his character makes a reference to a mythical Glock 7 pistol, which he claims is "a porcelain gun made in Germany, costs more than your month's salary, and is undetectable by metal detectors." First, Glock never made a model 7, their first pistol was the model 17. Second, Glocks are made in Austria, not Germany. While it is true that a Glock has a fair amount of polymer in its frame, it is a dense material that is visible to X-rays. Also, 85% of the Glock is still made of steel. The same facts are true for any other polymer framed pistol as well, not just Glocks. In fact, Mike Papac, the advisor from Cinema Weaponry, that supplied the firearms for the movie, tried his best to talk them out of that scene. In his own words, "I remember when we did that scene, I tried to talk them out of it. There's no such thing as a gun invisible to metal detectors, and there shouldn't be, but they wouldn't budge. They had it written in the scene and that was that."
2. You can explode anything by shooting it
We've all seen this scene in countless movies. Hero shoots at a car's gas tank and it promptly explodes into a huge ball of flame. Hero shoots at an oxygen tank embedded in a shark's mouth and it promptly blows the great fish to kingdom come. Hero shoots at an oil drum and creates a huge fireball that distracts everyone. Hero shoots at a ...., well you get the idea.
Frankly, if cars exploded into huge fireballs with every tiny puncture or sudden impact, all automobile manufacturers would have been buried in lawsuits years ago. The TV show, "Mythbusters", famously showed how wrong this is in real life. In order to get a gas tank to reliably blow by shooting it, you need to light a fire outside the tank to vaporize the gas inside it to a point that the tank over-pressurizes and then shoot it with a special incendiary bullet! Normal copper or steel-jacketed bullets just don't produce enough sparks to light anything reliably. Well, there's an outside chance that that a steel jacketed bullet may produce enough sparks to start a fire, but this is not a reliable method of ignition. There's a reason people developed special incendiary bullets for specialized applications. And they're not usually available outside the military.
3. Bullets cannot penetrate behind car doors
You always see police take cover behind car doors in the movies. First, even bullets from a 9 mm. handgun will penetrate a single car door, provided they don't hit the steel support beams of the car. Rifles will easily penetrate through the body of the car and come out the other side as well. There are plenty of videos available on the net showing how false this myth is.
4. Machine guns have unlimited ammo.
Watch any action movie where people carry machine guns and you'll notice that they keep firing for a very long time. Time for a reality check:
This is a M-16 fired in full-auto mode. A M-16 fires at 700-950 rounds/minute depending on model (according to Wikipedia), which means it fires between 11.67 and 15.83 rounds/second. A standard magazine contains 20 or 30 rounds, depending on model. At that rate of fire, a 30 round magazine will be emptied in approximately 2-3 seconds, which is about how long it took to empty his magazine in the video. Also note that a full combat load for an US infantryman is 7 magazines (i.e. 210 rounds). This means, if the gentleman above was carrying a standard combat load and fired everything in full auto mode, he could comfortably finish firing his entire supply in under two minutes, including unloading and reloading new magazines. Notice how he switches to firing in semi-auto mode in the second half of the video.
The same is true for other assault rifles as well, not just M-16s. AK-47s have fire rate of 600 rounds/minute, which is 10 rounds/second, which means they'll empty a 30 round mag in 3 seconds flat. A FN FAL has a similar rate of fire at 650-700 rounds/minute. This is why some military rifle models (such as the M16A2 and M16A4 models) don't even support full auto mode as an option and only offer single shot and three-round burst modes.
Now think of the scene in any movie, where the bad guys break into a room brandishing weapons in full-auto mode and proceed to fire for like 30+ seconds and break every glass in sight, all without reloading once. Do you think that could happen in real life, now that you've seen the video clip above?
5. Silencers reduce the weapon's loud "bang" to a soft "phut".
This myth is mostly seen in various spy movies, where the hero carries a silenced pistol or assault rifle and all you hear is a soft "phut" sound and someone falls over and the security flunkie standing 20 feet away hears nothing. Hollywood also shows that not only are silencers almost silent, but also any cylindrical object can be used as a silencer (water bottle, bottle filled with socks etc.) So what is the truth here?
The truth is there are multiple sources of noise when a gun is fired:
Noise of the hammer striking the cartridge.
Noise due to the exploding propellant material and hot gases leaving the barrel.
Noise due to the bullet flying through the air (sonic boom, if the bullet is flying supersonic).
Noise due to ejecting the empty cartridge case and cocking the weapon.
Noise due to bullet striking the target.
Of these, #2 and #3 are the primary sources of loud noise from a firearm.
First, let us consider the noise due to the exploding propellant (which could be gunpowder, cordite, smokeless ball powder etc.). It makes a lot of noise, about 140-160 decibels (dB) worth. By comparison, a loud hard rock or heavy metal band tops out at around 115 dB or so (The author has personally watched concerts by AC/DC, Motorhead, Judas Priest and Iron Maiden from close range. AC/DC has reached 130 dB on occasion and Iron Maiden held the record in 1985). A metal tube isn't going to do much to reduce the noise of exploding gunpowder. This is what an average pistol (Glock model 36) with a silencer sounds like:
Interesting side-fact to notice is that the silencer is actually longer than the pistol is. Notice that there is no soft "phut" noise coming out of the pistol. Think you would fail to hear it over 20 feet away? Now that you've heard that one, here's what a typical automatic submachine gun (Heckler & Koch MP-5) with a silencer attached sounds like:
Notice that it sounds nothing like the movies make it out to be. Mind you, this is a weapon that fires smaller pistol ammunition, not full sized rifle ammunition. There's no soft "phut" sound in this video clip either. As with the previous myth, notice how quickly the shooter goes through her 30 round magazine as well.
So now that we've seen that silencers aren't exactly very silent, what are they for then? Well, they do reduce the sound a bit, from 140-160 dB to 130-145 dB or so, with the quietest ones measuring up to 117 dB. This reduction in loudness level makes it more easier to bear, especially when hearing protection is added. They also reduce the recoil force of the weapon. They also alter the sound signature a bit, so the resulting sound doesn't sound exactly like a gunshot (hence, the Finnish expression, "A silencer does not make a marksman silent, but it makes him invisible.") They are also more useful in closed environments, such as inside a building, where the loud sound and flash could disorient the person shooting the weapon. In the case of supersonic bullets, the sound of the bullet breaking the sound barrier often overshadows the sound of the silenced barrel, so it often misdirects people as to where the shooter is.
Since silencers don't actually make a gun silent, the term itself is a misnomer. In fact, the firearms industry prefers that you refer to them as suppressors instead.
