2. The Realities of Gun Fights Rarely Match The Movies

This is another broad category, but there are a heck of a lot of ridiculous things that I see in movies with a lot of gun play. Heroes will often save the day with the impossible or at least highly unlikely scenario of disabling a vehicle with a well placed gunshot to its engine or other vulnerable spot. I've played enough silly video games to have seen this trope played out countless times with a heavily armored end level boss, where repeated shots to a usually glowing and hard to hit weak area are the only way to win. That's fine for a game I guess, but I've also seen a ton of movies where some dude manages to shoot an approaching car's engine, resulting in stopping the threat with a glorious explosion. That just doesn't happen very often in real life.

Then there is the weird sideways shooting style popularized in films of the last couple of decades. Sure, most handguns will fire sideways, but why would anyone choose to shoot like that? Guns aren't designed to be fired like that, and a person might as well just shoot a pistol upside down using their pinky to pull the trigger. It's just a dumb way to shoot.

Movies also seem to live by the weird law of marksmanship where the good guys manage to survive out in the open while being fired upon huge groups of bad guys with the worst aim in history, while simultaneously picking the black hats off as if no effort is involved at all. It must be nice to be able to magically dodge bullets through sheer goodness alone, but that's not the way gun battles work in real life.

Finally, guns are loud. Really loud. I have diminished hearing as a result of playing in rock bands for years, and I usually wore earplugs. Hearing a single gunshot up close without hearing protection is a very unpleasant experience for me, and not something I'd suggest. Yet, in a lot of action movies, not only do people manage to verbally communicate despite all of the noise from guns and explosives, but there's rarely any indication later on that their hearing has been compromised. Which brings me to my last point.

1. Suppressors Are Misrepresented A Lot.

A suppressor is the more proper term for a "silencer," those funny looking things screwed onto the end of guns in movies where someone needs to silently dispatch a foe. Usually in films, they barely make any sound at all, just a quick "whoosh" as if a quick blast of air was released. The problem is that for a suppressor to work well in the real world, a lot of things have to be taken into consideration. They work by quickly absorbing and channeling the blast of hot gasses expelled from a gun when it is shot, in a similar principle to how a car muffler functions. I've never heard of a suppressor being developed that will work on a revolver, because those types of guns allow the gasses to escape more readily, but I've seen at least two films in which a bad guy used a "silencer" on the end of a revolver. Those films are "Magnum Force" and "Good Guys Wear Black" (the second Dirty Harry film and a 1978 Chuck Norris flick).

The other thing is that just how quiet a suppressor makes a gun report depends on a lot of factors including the caliber of the weapon, the size of the suppressor, and the velocity of the bullets being fired. In any case, suppressors aren't magical items that instantly make a gun soundless. They usually make a very loud noise somewhat less noisy.


There are films that treat guns and their effects realistically, but plenty more that treat them as totems of power that immediately destroy bad guys and that defy the laws of physics while doing so. This is just a small list of things I've noticed are in a lot of gun films, but there are plenty more. In a country that seems to be experiencing changing attitudes about how guns should be treated in our society, perhaps Hollywood will also change the way film makers portray them.