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Comment by jff | Hacker News Reader

The guns thing really is pretty epidemic. There's a huge thread over on Something Awful about this, hundreds of pages of people pointing out how the movie's "M-16" is actually an SKS dressed up funny and how it doesn't have any sights, that kind of thing. Similar thing is most cases: how hard would it have been to buy a real AR-pattern rifle? And when they hire a consultant, they ignore them half the time, just like with computer stuff in movies.

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I also think it's interesting how TV and movies portray caring for gunshot victims.

In the movies, the first priority is to remove the bullet from the victim, usually in a dramatic and agonizing way. Once the bullet is removed, the victim is miraculously cured.

In reality, the first priority is to stop the bleeding. Most of the time, doctors won't even attempt to remove the bullet. The bullets are sterilized from the explosion, and you'll generally do more harm than good by trying to remove it.

This is so true. I remember how irate I was when I realized that Rambo III insisted that a thinly mocked-up Browning was actually a DShK. That annoyed me but not nearly as much as Neo's Scorpions ejecting what looked like 5.56 casings on the floor during the lobby gun fight. Maybe necked-down brass looks sexier pinging off the floor.

But worse than all of this is what happens in movies when people are shot. People inevitably fly backwards, sometimes tens of feet. There's a nice Quora answer about this [1]. I get the need for a great action shot, but it's a thumb in the eye to everyone who actually has even a ballpark concept of kinetic energy delivery.

[1] http://www.quora.com/Guns-and-Firearms/Does-shooting-someone....

Or if you don't want to register, http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlownAcrossTheRoo...

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