TV Guns vs. Real Guns: What Hollywood Gets Wrong

Television, movies and whatever you call the in-between streaming content on Netflix, Hulu, et. al. will show you all sorts of gunplay—and all sorts of firearms mistakes. Sit down and watch a shoot-em-up show with any sort of gun nerd, and you’ll start to hear whining about how they messed up something as soon as they bring a firearm out. While we could probably complain all day long about Hollyweird’s inability to get their gun details straight, here are a few particularly egregious errors that should be stamped out.

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Shotguns are not an all-powerful weapon on par with a rocket launcher

Yes, we agree with Clint Smith, shotguns are powerful fight-stoppers and can remove chunks of meat from a target, instead of making neat little holes. But even our favorite gravelly-voiced firearms instructor would tell you that Hollywood leaves viewers with unrealistic expectations that a shotgun has power on par with a Panzerschreck. You could pick a scene from any number of films, but I blame director John Woo for starting this madness, with shotguns that fire exploding rounds whenever necessary to spice up the footage. Enjoy the montage below:

The Winchester Model 1892 was not in every western conflict ever

I will say that, in recent years, Hollywood has moved away from using the Winchester Model 1892 as a prop for every single Western film. But in the 20th century, whether the was set in the 1840s through to the end of the 1880s, the Model 1892 appeared regularly, just like a Colt Peacemaker, as a stock weapon whenever a rifle was needed.

You may grant artistic license to some films, but in a movie like Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid, focusing on an outlaw who died in 1881, it’s silly to show off a rifle that didn’t come into production until more than a decade after The Kid died:

Older Westerns were generally very bad at this; Comancheros was one of the worst of them all. Giving John Wayne a Model 1892 for a film set in the 1840s makes as much historical sense as giving Doc Holliday a Thompson submachine gun for a film showing the Shootout at the OK Corral… which thankfully hasn’t happened. Yet.

Cowboy machine gun fantasy

Since we’ve raised the unpleasant spectre of putting machine guns in a western, let’s look at one of the most common Hollywood tropes of all: A historically inaccurate abomination of a fake machine gun, cobbled together by a props team that must have been high on superglue. One of the worst examples is this scene from A Fistful of Dollars. Where’s the ammunition? (And did you notice that likely anachronistic Model 1892 at the start?):

At least they remembered to include ammunition in that sequence.

All-powerful, all-accurate Uzi submachine guns

Whoever ran Uzi’s marketing team in the 1980s was a genius. I’m not saying there’s anything particularly terrible about the Uzi, although it wouldn’t be my first choice if my fairy godmother granted me any SMG I desired. But I will say that it also probably wouldn’t have been the first choice of every tough guy and mercenary in the world, despite 1980s action movies leading you to believe as much. The Christopher Walken classic The Dogs Of War is but one example of this:

Ironically, such films were probably responsible for saving lives in the 1980s, by leading gang-bangers to believe they didn’t actually need to aim during a drive-by shooting—if you could spray and pray from the hip, like the movies, surely it was good enough?

Conclusion

Like I said at the start, we could complain about movie gun mistakes all day long. If you’ve got some irritating examples in mind, drop ‘em below; maybe we’ll revisit this down the road, and in a perfect world, some armorer might actually read this article and be motivated to get things right.