Sorry, fellas – by the time these movies were made, the likelihood of life on Mars was negligible (Heinlein notwithstanding), and taking guns along was, any way you loked at it, a dumb idea. That the accommodating director and screenwriter decided to plop down monsters on Mars doesn’t really excuse this.
And guns might be inanimate objects that don’t just “go off”, but the possibilities of accidents and their catastrophic results certain justify NOT taking them as a prudent course. They don’t take hand grenades on space missions, either*, even though somebody would have to trigger them for something to happen.
*except in It! The Terror from Beyond Space
Including, of course, the deadliest animal known.
Then I take it that we are either being sent to Mithra and will have to watch out for snow apes, or we are going to stay on Terra and be dumped where we can expect leopards. Am I right?
Of course it does. * In the context of the fiction*, the place they were going to is dangerous. Hence, guns. It’s totally irrelevant what we knew about the real Mars.
Now, if you could show an older story that involved astronauts with guns in a context where the gun was utterly unnecessary, you’d have a point. Say, a fiction about an Apollo astronaut shooting another with their ‘emergency gun’. It would be idiotic to take a gun on an Apollo mission, then as now.
The risk of an accident would be approximately zero. Astronauts are surrounded by switches and levers which, if flipped accidentally, can kill all of them. In that context, having a projectile weapon in a locked case, with a safety on it, probably makes it one of the safest items on the ship.
You know, even among the poorly trained gun accidents are vanishingly rare when compared against the number of times a gun is fired every day. We’re talking millions to one odds. You may not be personally comfortable with guns and think they are an accident waiting to happen, but people like me have been using them safely our entire lives without even coming close to having an accident that could have endangered someone. And a gun in a spaceship would be in the presence of only people who had extensive safety training and who wouldn’t even go near the thing unless there was a dire need. It’s a silly argument.
The only real argument against guns in space is that you don’t want to pay to haul up the weight of something you don’t need. The intrinsic safety of the gun is simply not relevant, because it’s plenty safe.
I will agree that if your spaceship has toddlers on it, you might want to keep the guns locked up. But then, you’ll probably want your abort switch or hypergolic fuel shutoff to be toddler-proof as well.
Ain’t buyin’ it. The people in the stories start out in a world like ours. The guns are an absurd addition.
Another movie with an equally absurd gun is Harryhausen’s First Men in the Moon*, but I’ve been trying to keep this focused on Mars.
How many of these fictional guns violate Chekov’s Law? That is, if they included guns… did the plot end up NOT involving them?
Robinson Crusoe on Mars has a revolver he almost shoots the monkey with. He mistakes the tail for an alien tentacle, and almost blows away what he believes to be the first Martian he meets. I do not recall if he uses the weapon later.
He doesn’t. Not even when he meets his Man Friday.
This one’s mentioned in the OP.
I thought he saw a monkey tail behind a rock and considered shooting it.
He does. I was responding to his saying that he didn’t know if Paul Mantee ever used the gun later on in the film. As I say, he doesn’t.
Then it isn’t the guns that are silly; it’s the Martian monsters that are silly. If you’re going to a planet (or a place more generally) that might have dangerous critters living on it, taking weapons is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Scientists knew a lot earlier than the public (including science fiction writers) were willing to admit that the likelihood of finding anything other than maybe microscopic life on Mars was completely negligible. But screenwriters want monsters, because monsters are interesting. (Some guy having a two-hour-long conversation with Mission Control about maybe going over there, and then finally, several hours later, going over there, and exclaiming happily over a rock–look, it has little manganese nodules!: Not interesting. To most people, anyway.) On the other hand, a movie in which the intrepid heroes land on Mars and are then immediately killed and eaten by the Martian critters because they didn’t even bring any guns is going to be both short and kind of depressing; so fictional Mars explorers bring guns–in their Universe, a perfectly prudent thing to do, because there might be monsters–and then sure enough, there are monsters!
My father was an adult in the 1950s. He grew up in a rural area, where squirrel, rabbit, and venison were important supplements to the family diet, and bears and cougars were a small but real threat. When he was a teenager, he was given a .22 rifle and encouraged to bring in all the small game he could get. To him, guns were simply a tool in the toolkit. Like hammers and axes, they could kill you if you mis-used them, but you learned the safety rules at an early age.
Modern city slickers have little experience with guns, and they fear the unknown. But this is an aberration. It is not typical of most of the population, through most of the country’s history.
Thanks.