Guns are loud. We know this. But regularly in TV shows and movies people shoot them in small rooms, or inside at all, and they never even flinch or cover their ears. . . this bugs me. Almost all guns are extremely loud. I don’t even want to imagine being in a small room where a gun was shot. It would stunningly loud. But, most guns in entertainment today do no justice to that.
Thoughts? Stories?
In the Austin Powers movies, or at least the first one, Mike Myers flinches and blinks every time he fires a gun. It wasn’t a comedic affectation; I think on the laserdisc (yes, I’m that old) commentary track he mentions how not-comfortable he was pulling the trigger. I’ve also seen an interview with Jackie Chan, talking about the Police Story movies, where he says he has to do some test shots away from the camera to get past the involuntary flinching so that he can then point the gun with authority and with eyes wide open.
I’ve never fired anything more powerful than a BB rifle in my life, so I have no idea how my body would react to an actual firearm discharging in my hand. I also once worked on a movie set in which the bad guy character opened fire with a machine gun in one scene. I was many metres away, and probably should have accepted the offered earplugs. It was ages ago, but I feel like I remember a physical sensation in my chest, like a thunderclap was going off nearby.
Since this is about TV shows and movies, let’s move this over to CS (from MPSIMS).
Guns on-screen rarely behave anything like guns in real-life unless and until it becomes plot-important that they do.
Your observation about the noise (and risk of serious ear injury/deafness) is right on the money. Why? Because stopping to show people putting on ear protection before a gunfight would slow the pacing or break immersion, and having all your characters deafened for the rest of the movie would hinder your ability to tell the story. So realism is sacrificed for storytelling.
Another thing is the noise the guns themselves make. Every time someone draws, moves, or even points a firearm, we’re treated to all these “chk! K-chk! Clk!” noises. You’d think every gun was full of loose screws rattling around. These noises have no basis in reality - they just serve to draw the audience’s attention to the firearm on screen, to remind them that cool gun things are happening
Recoil and the sheer weight of a firearm are also ignored unless, again, it’s plot-relevant - unless the filmmaker needs to make a point about how especially-powerful a firearm is or how weak/inexperienced the shooter is. I had a fairly small, fairly compact 9mm pistol and let me tell ya. The sucker was heavy. Holding it for any substantial length of time was tiring.
None of these things are at all surprising - the point of most films is to tell an entertaining story, not to accurately depict reality. But it is worth examining the impact these depictions have. My perception is that they make firearms seem less impactful than they really are. Movie guns are not as loud as real guns, they’re easier to use and control, and they announce themselves with cool noises so that they don’t take you by surprise. The result is that people are conditioned to see guns as exciting toys rather than enormously dangerous tools of destruction.
Oh yeah, absolutely. There are a lot of scenes in TV and movies where the people who really know how guns work are just looking at the screen and thinking yep, he should be deaf right now. At the very least they should be reacting to the loud noise.
A lot of gun folks get irritated at the word “silencer” because they don’t make a gun go “pfft”. Yes, they do significantly drop the sound level, but they don’t make the gun almost completely silent. Hence some folks get irritated if you don’t call them “suppressors” instead.
Hiding behind a table or a couch, or even a car, also doesn’t work. Most guns will shoot right through those. The only “safe” (ish) place behind a car is behind the engine block. Bullets will go right through car doors.
Most handguns also don’t repeatedly click once they are empty. You get one click, and that’s it. You have to rack the slide to reset the hammer if you want a second click. Going click click click because you ran out of ammo may be dramatic for the screen but most guns don’t do that.
People don’t go flying backwards when struck by a gun either.
Another pet peeve of mine is accuracy, especially bad guys with Stormtrooper aiming and good guys who can hit a tiny target 200 yards away with a handgun.
It depends on the weapon. Something relatively weak like a 9mm pistol isn’t going to be too bad, but a .44 magnum is going to kick like a freaking mule when you shoot it. A 12 gauge shotgun will also kick a lot harder than I think a lot of people realize. Also, a lot of the hype about so-called “assault weapons” makes people think that an AR-15 is a super-powerful military rifle. It’s not, and if you shoot one the recoil is very light compared to other weapons. The AR-15/M-16 type rifles are specifically designed to be controllable on full auto, so firing a single round out of either (the AR-15 can’t fire full auto) is no biggie. Similarly, firing a full-sized machine gun from the hip is just going to spray bullets all over the place with no control whatsoever, because the recoil from a fully automatic weapon firing full-sized rifle rounds is much more substantial than what they show in the movies.
Yeah, that irritates me too. Everybody needs to pump the shotgun or rack the slide. If you already had a shell in the chamber of your shotgun ready to fire you just ejected that perfectly good un-fired shell onto the ground.
If you fire a large caliber pistol or high powered rifle inside of a car or small room, you will almost certainly suffer some degree of permanent hearing loss. Also, muzzle blast from powerful pistols and rifles is a violent and visceral thing; having a weapon fired near your face will result in burning residue and percussive acoustics, and if you get a muzzle flash into your eyes you are likely to be blinded.
Also, when you see cop or military shows with people doing diving rolls through windows and doorways, hiding behind the sheet metal of a car door or behind a sheetrock wall, or firing fully automatic box magazine fed small arms for many seconds without reloading, this is all nonsense, and is mostly a good way to get killed or run out of ammo real quick.
Stranger
It’s an animated series, but in “Archer”, they regularly reference how loud guns actually are.
Archer himself has chronic tinnitus from repeated exposure to gunfire from a young age and very likely also has poor hearing - it may not be an affectation when he calls a character’s name repeatedly and with increasing volume to get their attention.
I’ve not seen that in films.
Not much annoys me with theatrical weapons save silencers on revolvers and using an automatic weapon in the “spray and pray” method.
The final confrontation between Josey Wales and Captain Terrill, as Josey works through every single one of his revolvers, each one clicking on an empty cylinder.
I think that is from the jet engines and listening to Kenny Loggins at maximum volume.
Stranger
A revolver will go click repeatedly (assuming it’s double action), so that one is accurate. It’s semi-auto handguns that don’t have a double-action hammer that will only click once. If you want it to click more than once you have to rack the slide in between clicks.
He’s cocking the hammers in between each shot. What’s more unrealistic is how he managed to grab the saber and force it into Terrill without slicing his fingers off.
Stranger
Hell, with a regular auto pistol the standard is once you run out of ammo the whole mechanism locks open so you know that’s what happened.
And yeah, these suckers are LOUD
A couple of other entertainment portrayals of guns not mentioned yet that get my dander up.
Pocket pistols and derringers. Speaking to the point ECG makes -
which, while largely correct, leaves out the issue of platform. A 9mm in a full size pistol is very controllable, a 9mm in a sub (or sub-sub) compact, is a bitch. A .357 in a full size revolver is a bit worse, in a snubby scandium, can be uncontrollable after the first shot.
But in fiction, you get people pulling out concealed weapons all the time and not only having no issues with recoil, but the 200 ft perfect range mentioned upthread, despite how absolutely shitty short barreled weapons are past what we sometimes call pissing range.
And that leaves out derringers that are released in ‘functional’ calibers. Just don’t. Respect your intact fingers.
A second gun entertainment trope that makes my hair stand on end is various pistol whipping / melee actions. OMFG. It makes some, limited, pro-suspension of disbelief if you’re talking a full frame revolver, where you’ve got a heavy wooden grip (that are still surprisingly fragile!) but on a semi-auto? Do you never want to swap magazines again, or at least not without a lot of work potentially.
Or if you’re attacking with the barrel, you might get away with it on a revolver (but possibly never have any accuracy out of it again if you misalign the barrel or sights), but the number of things that could go wrong with alignment and precision moving parts is even worse.
If it is ruin your sights or get killed, I’ll go with ruining my sights. Bad guys who pistol whip folks are just dumb, and deserve what they get.
Mostly. I have a Firestar Compact chambered for .40S&W and it is quite controllable. Probably because it’s solid steel and weighs 31oz. empty. Way too heavy for CCW, and wearing it in an ankle holster would slap a limp in a rhino, but a fun gun to shoot.
I will note that the derringer is .32ACP. I’m not that stupid.
Wimp!
Stranger
Agreed, IRL, but we’re talking about in Entertainment. Where a character will knock someone out in melee with their pistol and then murder another 100 mooks with the same gun. 
IMHO it’s both weight and size of the grips that make most CCW weapons nearly uncontrollable (thus the bitch about scandium / titanium 357s), but you’re right, a mere compact is a good compromise. But I would also find one unworkable in an ankle holster.
As for @Stranger_On_A_Train - OMFG. I repeat, respect your damn fingers. And jaw/face, I foresee someone using that pistol whipping themselves with the recoil.
There are so many things that are wrong in the typical gun scene in entertainment, and I won’t reiterate them. One that really bugs me is when someone gets the drop on the good/bad guy, then has a discussion with him, then to reinforce what he’s said, he suddenly racks the semi-auto pistol. So you were threatening someone with what amounted to an unloaded weapon? The other big one is the aforementioned person flying backward across the room when shot. Even a .12 ga. with slugs won’t do that.
I like to rack the slide, catch the ejected bullet, and throw it at the target with the retort, “The next one’s coming faster.”
Stranger