TexasCHLforum.com

Off-topic and not a mistake, but watched Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (Jack Reacher 2) last night and saw a bit of trivia. At about the 50-minute mark, the TSA agent with a flashlight in his hand and checking passengers' tickets is Lee Child, the author of the Jack Reacher series.

I don't know when that became a thing--the authors of books on which a movie is based having a cameo in the film--but, all in all, I think it's kinda cool. I remember some from years ago: Stephen King in Pet Semetary, John Irving in The World According to Garp, Peter Benchley in Jaws, John LeCarre in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. And, of course, I think every movie ever made about the Marvel Comics universe has Stan Lee pop up somewhere.

The Reacher movie was okay. I may watch it again and pay more attention to the gun handling. There were, however, some less than believable action scenes in it.

The Annoyed Man wrote:I'm a huge fan of Stephen Hunter's novels, because he gets it right. Here's a list of Hunter's works, which I would recommend to anybody looking for a good read....

Thanks for that list. Now we all have it consolidated and in one place.

I've read only two of Hunter's Swagger novels, didn't know about some of the others, and am just about in need of a new reading list...chronic, old-age insomnia has had me routinely reading about four hours a night, and I'm sure the folks at Amazon are wondering if I'm actually consuming all the titles I get through Kindle Unlimited, or just checking them back in after three days, regardless.

If I had the time necessary (because there seem to be bizarre gun errors every few minutes, it would take a while) and could stomach watching it again, I'd DVR the pilot episode of the new TV series Shooter, based on the movie of the same name. Which in turn was based on a Stephen Hunter novel...and Hunter is either fuming mad, or shrugging in resignation as he takes his check to the bank. Hunter has admitted he's less a handgun guy, but the knowledge and research shown in his books about rifles is solid.

Not so with this TV series (produced, BTW, by Mark Wahlberg). Now, I can forego some gaffs sometime if it doesn't glaringly break the fictive suspension of disbelief, but if it's a show or movie or book where firearms are so prominent as to be almost a principle character? Mistakes there and the writer, producer, and director should be, well...avoided.

This one starts with Bob Lee Swagger out in the woods with a tranquilizer gun rather than his rifle--a sure sign from the get-go that this was going to PC retelling of the book, if it paralleled the book at all--when he comes across two "hunters" that Bloomberg would consider prototypical: chugging beer, ready to shoot at anything, and completely ignorant about their firearms.

But then, this version of Bob Lee Swagger ain't much more informed than the hunters. He says, "What you got there?" then grabs what looks to be a scoped Remington 700 with cammo furniture away from hunter #1. He asks the guy, "Are you a dentist?" "Orthodontist," he responds. How, or especially why, Swagger seems to be psychic is left unanswered.

Swagger opens the bolt, ejects the round, and catches it in the air. "Two-two-three Remington," he says, holding the round in front of the hunters' noses, a round that dose not look like a .223, either that or the actor is only about 5'3". "55 grain," he says (again, some at-a-glance psychic capability is at least inferred because he doesn't even look at the bullet). "You guys have no idea what I'm talking about, do you? The kid at Wal-Mart who sold you this should have told you. This bullet isn't powerful enough to take anything bigger than a squirrel."

Ignoring that bullets have no power factor at all, just weight, mass, composition, and shape, it will come as a distinct surprise to millions of military veterans and civilian shooters alike that a .223 is useful only against game or threats weighing less than 1.5 pounds. That was my first audible groan when I watched this show. There were many, many others.

Oh, and hunter #2, again with Bloomberg stereotypicality, responds to Swagger's misinformed ballistics lesson by holding up a chrome Beretta 92FS and waggles the 9mm pistol at him. "How about this one? Think it has enough stopping power for ya?" Swagger removes the bolt from the Remington 700 before handing it back to hunter #1. The next, of course, comes the obligatory how-bad-am-I hand-to-hand where Swagger disarms the hunters...then pops them both with a round from the tranq gun and walks away, leaving them sedated and alone in a forest populated with wolves.

After leaving the orthodontist and his buddy for wolf chow, Swagger returns to a loving family scene with his wife and daughter at what has to be a pricey piece of property on a hill next to Puget Sound. He goes to a standalone structure below the main house, his work- and reloading-room and gun "safe." Plain wooden door with a deadbolt, windows overlooking at least two sides--including by the door--with no curtains or blinds. High-end rifles are openly on display, just hanging on the walls. He does have lockers for some weapons, including multiple handguns; these lockers are open-grate-front, cabinet affairs.

Rule #1: The best way to secure your dozens of firearms and accessories is to place them where they are easily visible through a window and secured by nothing that one smack of a framing hammer can't get through.

Rule #2: If you live right by an open body of salt water, never ever try to keep your guns in any kind of sealed container. Constant high humidity and salt air are the best friends your firearms can have. Keep them exposed to those conditions and they'll last you several lifetimes.

Then the setup recruitment briefing by the fed. A tablet PC goes onto the reloading bench and photos are displayed. "Shot by a sniper. We found the hide. Fourteen-hundred yards away."

Swagger's eyebrows rise. "Dang; 1,400 yards." He scrolls through photos to a close-up. "That doesn't look like a 50-cal."

"Three thirty-eight based on the slug." [Note to self: evidently a tiny shotgun slug, smaller than a .410, can serve as a sniper round from long distances. Who knew?"]

Swagger thinks out loud. "Okay. So, 3/4 mile shot through the woods... Boy's a shooter. Only a handful of shooters in the world can take a headshot from 3/4 of a mile away."

In a flashback to Afghanistan, we see Chechen sniper Salatov kill Swagger's spotter with a round through the chest. "He was dead before he fell," says Swagger. Which, of course, contradicts the show's little opening scene which talks about three ways to die from a gunshot, that a headshot is the only "killshot." But never mind. By now we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Swagger has no clue about his supposed area of expertise.

The sniper, Slatov, uses a .338 Lapua Magnum. The feds provide Swagger with what they believe is an exact duplicate of Salatov's "highly customized SABER-FORSST." Swagger is visibly impressed by such a top-end, exotic firearm.

The problem? The SABER-FORSST is a modular stock; it isn't a firearm at all.

Swagger receives the rifle completely assembled and scope mounted (suitable background music ensues). The first thing he does after pulling it from the case is shoulder it with his finger on the trigger.

The second thing he does is put it a mount/vise and take a Tru-Value crescent wrench to the bolts anchoring the rings to the Picatinny rail. It's obvious he is fine-tuning this precision optic because he looks through the scope multiple times, inserts a laser boresighter, and goes back to cranking on the Picatinny attachment bolts with his crescent wrench, supposedly getting the scope honed in before the first live fire.

Now I know what I've been doing wrong. Thanks to this font of knowledge, I'm giving away my scope-ring lapping rods and precision torque wrenches and Wheeler leveling set. I'm buying a cheap crescent wrench and randomly and alternately tightening and loosening the Picatinny rail attachment bolts--undoubtedly scratching the receiver, barrel, and body of the scope along the way--until I get a precise, super-sniper zero.

Best-of-the-best sniper Bob Lee Swagger then goes into his local gun store. "I'm trying out a new rifle, Henry. You got any three thirty-eight Lapua Magnum?"

"Sure we do."

"I need some powder and some three thirty-eight bullets, too."

So take whatever commercial rounds your local gun store has in stock. It matters not what they are. And here's the big lesson to all you reloaders. You have been completely wrong, this whole time, to worry about bullet weight and composition and shape. Just buy the right caliber bullet. And it doesn't make any difference what kind of powder you use, either: gunpowder is gunpowder. Silly people.

Last tidbit, then I can't take it any more. And, no: I never watched another episode of Shooter.

Bob Lee takes his new, highly modified SABER-FORSST complete with screwed-up Picatinny mounts and crescent wrench scratches all over it to a river to sight it in live-fire.

I now really, really want a .338 Lapua Magnum. I've always known they had impressive ballistics. But, wow; add to that they have absolutely zero recoil? I mean, not on a sled or in a vise, just on a rest, and you can balance a shot-glass full of water on the barrel and never spill a drop. Less recoil than a rubber-band gun. Just, wow! (And we're barely halfway through the first episode at this point.)

Oh, and if you want to take one-mile shots, all you need is what seems to be a very basic Bushnell reticle in mils. You don't need no fancy reticles with superfine holdover markings. And you guys thought you had to spend more than $250 on a scope. Pshaw. After all, if it isn't necessary, why would you want a $3,000 scope if, to get it truly right, you were going to scratch it up with your $3 crescent wrench, anyway?

Not goin' back to watch it again, but I think there was another scene in Ant Man where he, in his diminutive state, leaps up over the muzzle and onto the slide of a Glock immediately after it's fired...except that--despite the slow-mo muzzle flash--the slide never moves.

Oh, and how about the scene where the guy sitting in the helicopter grabs a nickel-plated 92FS and, on the third shot, manages to hit Ant Man's flying steed amidst a huge swarm of other flying ants buzzing in and still yards away. Man, if I could shoot a flying ant out of the air at 10 yards...

On all the hammer-cocking and slide-racking sounds effects, I've become convinced that, if it's the sound only, it's the director, the editor, and the foley artist having some beers in a studio and adding all the clicking and racking in post-production. That even if a film hires (and listens to) a firearms consultant, once he and the actors have gone home the doofuses can get crazy all on their own with no one to correct them. Kinda like it's almost inevitable that they consider silence anywhere to be a vacuum, so even in scenes where your skilled operator is being ultra-stealthy, they always make it sound like he or she is wearing tap shoes and clacking across a wooden floor.

Recently read a book titled Tier One by Brian Andrews and Jeffrey Wilson; to be released September 1, the first in a series. I wouldn't be so critical if the book description wasn't, "In a world violated by terror, the old lines have blurred. Meet the next generation of covert ops... Can a Tier One Navy SEAL adapt and become the world's most lethal spy?"

The book is readable, overall; a couple of dropped articles/prepositions, inappropriate pluralizations, and concurrent misuse of objective/subjective pronouns, plus some annoying use of repetitive phrasings (everything that someone tosses to someone else is always "caught in midair," as if there were some other way catch it). But I don't expect much more nowadays (Hemingway be spinnin' in his grave).

But if your whole core premise is that you start with elite operators--the best of the best SEALs and Delta--you'd better know more than just the right acronyms. Even then, I would expect the authors to know that the manufacturer's name is SIG SAUER, and that "SIG" is never written "Sig"...which they do throughout.

The gafs are minor and overlooked by most readers; the book has 493 reviews on Amazon, with a 4.5-star rating, 58% of the reviewers giving a perfect 5 stars. But my teeth were grinding. Examples:

First boots-on-ground op of this new clandestine task force, the protagonist (a SEAL with 20 years on the teams) is handed a SIG516 and three charged magazines, and a P229 plus three 15-rounders. This is done at INFIL, not at prep or in transit. The AR is already loaded, and he does a press-check to confirm, then stows the magazines in his vest. He can obviously see the rounds topping the magazines, but he simply takes it at face value that the firearms and ammo he's handed are all hunky-dory; he didn't load the magazines himself, didn't run a function check of the weapons, and has no idea whether the EOTech on the AR is correctly sighted in. Yeah; right.

His team of four splits into two, and he has a number of yards of open ground to run across before engagement is anticipated to begin, when he will use C4 to breach a warehouse door. So what's the very next thing he does? Why, he flicks the safety off of his AR before positioning the sling over his head, of course. Any experienced operator would certainly prefer to run across 25-30 yards of uneven terrain with a 556 chambered and the safety off. How else are you supposed to do it?

Okay, small spoiler alert; I lied. C4 breach of the warehouse door, flash-bangs deployed, then automatic gunfire from both sides...only to find out--after two tangoes, a potential innocent, and one team member are down--that the whole thing was a staged drill, and that all "ammunition" in use was of a mysterious, special "low velocity" type that wouldn't cause injury even at close range. None of the "combatants" involved wore headgear, but maybe the folks running the simulation didn't care much about putting out an eye or creasing a skull.

I may be way behind the curve in my dotage, but I'm familiar with no 556 training rounds that look exactly like regular M855 or M193 cartridges (remember, our hero at least got a close look at them as he stowed the spare magazines). Things like the Winchester Q3290 SRTA are certainly not less-than-lethal rounds: they just aren't intended to reach out past a couple hundred meters, and they require changeout of the BCG to a blowback, M2-type training bolt. Simunitions would come closer, but an uninformed five-year-old can spot the difference between their proprietary BCG and ammo and the regular stuff.

Seems like all the carbines in the book are equipped with EOTechs, which are interchangeably described as red-dot sights. And I'm perfectly fine with that. No weapon-mounted lasers are ever described (only infrared NV illuminators) yet, late in the book, out of nowhere the "red dot sights" are now painting actual red dots on the targets at point-of-impact...aka, a laser, not a red-dot sight. No explanation or clarification.

Other oddities and discrepancies I won't go into. Maybe I'll write an Amazon review just so the authors know that they have places they can improve, and that people are aware of it. Sigh. I'd so like to find great escapist authors who can combine realistic small arms and hand-to-hand combatives; believable espionage and political intrigue; solid, setting-specific use of tech; and a deft fictive voice with masterful prose. Perhaps it's simply too much to ask. Ludlum to Thor to Clancy to Eisler to Harris to Cumming to Silva to Child to Hunter to Sanford to Follett...nobody's done it yet.

rotor wrote:If you want to read accurate read Stephen Hunter. Bob Swagger is amazing in Hunter's books.

I agree. Hunter's a gun guy...sort of. The very sad thing, though, is that Hollywood took advantage in Shooter (the book was titled Point of Impact), and pretty much messed some stuff up.

But even Hunter messes stuff up. In a 2011 Washington Post Op Ed piece, Hunter wrote:

Particularly in rural Arizona, given the upsurge in border violence, it's likely that residents feel the need to defend themselves against drug predators, coyote gunmen or others. Yes, they can use semiautomatic rifles and shotguns, protected by the Second Amendment and unlikely to be banned by local law, but women generally don't care to put in the training needed to master them. Nor can the elderly handle them adeptly

I'm sorry? Women and the elderly can't handle an semiauto sporting rifle?

'Scuse me?

That's what turned me off to Stephen Hunter. He's a gun guy...but only in his niche. That he would opine that a basic .223 AR patrol rifle is beyond the ability of a woman or someone of golden age to handle baffles me. Fifteen-year-old girls shoot the platform extremely well. And as a guy taking Centrum Silver, I can say that I handle an AR-15 better than any other long-gun or shotgun in my safe.

rotor wrote:If you want to see fantastic gun work see the movie John Wick. I have tried to analyze the scenes but they all look great and realistic. Keanu Reeves does such a good job with gun-fu.

The Keanu Reeves thing was a revelation. I always thought of Reeves as a slacker doofus. If anyone was far-left anti-gun, it was Keanu Reeves.

Whether that was the case in his twenties, I can't say. But a mutual acquaintance, Dana Workman, clued me in to the 21st Century Reeves.

The man owns and customizes multiple firearms. He shoots 3-gun competitions. He trains regularly with USPSA champion Taran Butler.

Color me floored. Absolutely floored.

Maybe we need a separate Topic where we can acknowledge pro-2A actors, celebrities, athletes, politicians...and just notable people out spreading the fact that the Second Amendment really does still exist.

Many of Lee Child's early books (and some firearm errors continue to sneak in; for someone who writes action-centric books like the Jack Reacher series, you'd think 10 minutes of research/verification would be in order). One of his lines I remember: "I chose the Beretta 92 over the Glock 17 because it had 10% more fire power."

Another writer you'd think would do some firearm research is Robert Ludlum: "...snicked the safety off the Mauser semi-automatic revolver."

Joe Pike: "You don’t need to double-tap with the .45. One shot will knock a big man off his feet."

Stieg Larsson in The Girl Who Played with Fire refers to the murder weapon--and contends the same type of weapon killed former Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme--as a "Colt .45 Magnum."

The movie Die Hard 2: "That punk pulled a Glock 7 on me. You know what that is? It’s a porcelain gun made in Germany. It doesn’t show up on your airport metal detectors and probably costs more than what you make in a month."

I also see, with some frequency, fiction writers and "journalists" feel that any mention of a bullets diameter needs to be prefaced by a period...as in a ".9mm pistol" or a ".12 gauge shotgun." Little teeny tiny rounds.

Or the opposite. Tony Monchinski, in a pretty awful zombie book, Eden (that I stopped reading less than halfway through), the 40mm S&W pistol is used regularly to dispatch hordes of the undead. No, not a grenade launcher, a carry pistol. At over 1.5 inches in diameter, that's one potent pistol caliber.

Stephen King's been mentioned already, but hey. In The Dark Tower books, his gunfighter uses a Ruger .44 Automag. Hm. In The Drawing of the Three, one of Balazar's cronies opens up with his "wonderful Rambo machine"...an M-16 which King tells us is impossible to fire full auto: "After the first four or five [shots], two things happen to a man--even a powerful one... The muzzle begins to rise and the shooter himself begins to turn either right or left, depending on which unfortunate shoulder he has decided to bludgeon with the weapon's recoil. In short, only a moron or a movie star would attempt the use of such a gun." Same book: Roland breaks open the shotgun the officers were using and then works the pump action to eject the shells.

I watch the show, but The Walking Dead is usually good for a firearm faux pas or three. In the very first episode instruction is given to take the safety off a Glock. And the action performed? Pressing down on the slide release. Oh, and Daryl's crossbow (a terrible choice in the zombie apocalypse) has no sights. But he's all William Tell with it, regardless.

And the whole venerated TV series, The Rifleman, was set circa the late 1870s. Only problem is that Lucas McCaine carried a custom Winchester Model 1892.