Les Jones

Guns > Gun Advice for Writers and Reporters

If you know much about computers, you probably grimaced during Independence Day. Will Smith's character uploads a virus from his PowerBook to the alien computers, shutting them down and saving Earth. Computer viruses are platform-specific, and there's no way a human computer virus would be able to infect alien computers. Kind of took you out of the story, didn't it?

The same thing happens to gun enthusiasts all the time when we read the newspaper, turn in for the night with a crime novel, or watch the latest action movie. And we do notice. Like computers, guns are a technical subject with lots of arcane details, and it's easy to get things wrong.

The classic mistake is the crime writer who has a character switching off the safety on his revolver. Only four revolvers in history had manual safeties, and those models are extremely uncommon outside of movies and crime novels. One of those guns, the Webley-Fosbery, was made famous in The Maltese Falcon when Bogey dryly says of the gun that killed his partner, "Webley-Fosbery automatic-revolver. Thirty-eight, eight shot. They don't make them anymore." A number of semi-automatic pistols, notably Glocks, don't have manual safeties, either.

News stories that mention the SKS often refer to it as an assault rifle. That sounds scarier - it's got the word "assault" in it, after all - but the SKS isn't an assault rifle, either by standard military terminology (it lacks fully-automatic fire and has insufficient magazine capacity) or the brain dead standards of the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban (it doesn't have a removable magazine or a pistol grip). It's simply a semi-automatic carbine. Also, contrary to common legend, the SKS isn't a cheap knock-off of the AK-47, having been first produced two years earlier, and being of a completely different design.

Other mistakes are more subtle. For instance, you've seen movies where the gun is shot empty, and the doomed character holding it desperately pulls the trigger over and over - "click! click! click!". If you're going to use that dramatic device in your script you have to be careful. That scene will work for double action trigger mechanisms which cock and then drop the hammer when the trigger is pulled, but many guns have trigger actions that can't cock the hammer on their own. That includes the Colt .45 auto, the Browning Hi-Power, the ubiquitous Glock, and practically any rifle or shotgun. Once those guns are empty pulling the trigger will produce one "click" and no more.

If your action thriller script gets optioned, ask the director to film an actual silenced gun being fired with no audio effects. Instead of making a high-pitched "tooweet" sound, a silencer will silence a pistol caliber shot completely. A silenced pistol makes no sound at all except for the mechanical noise of the hammer falling and the action cycling. There's a silencer scene in The Bourne Identity that films this exactly right, and most of the audience probably thinks it's a mistake because they're so used to the phony Hollywood "tooweet" sound.

If any reporters want to go shooting let me know. I'll provide the firearms and ammunition. My treat. Here are some additional resources for writers who want to know more about guns.

• Common Mistakes Writers Make About Guns - thriller writers Emory Hackman and Linda Adams
• Don't Shoot Holes in Your Credibility - Writing World
• Gun Terminology Cheat Sheet - cribbed from a writing course, it has a few niggling mistakes, but it's not bad
• Real Revolvers Don't Have Safeties: Firearms Information For Writers - And Readers - William Sanders