So I decided to bingewatch it on netflix …
I was under the impression that Great Britain had some rather draconian hand gun possession laws, yet in 3 episodes I have seen Watson and Henry Baskerville waving around guns … so can someone explain how they could have guns [other than artistic license for us Americans who have to have guns waving around …]
Gun laws mostly affect the number of legal guns, and there’s ample reason to think most of the characters on the show (Or at least Sherlock, Watson and Moriarty) do not currently possess firearm licenses. I’m sure a genius detective, a former military and a criminal mastermind can each figure out how to get a gun if they need to, however.
Or how not to get arrested and get fines or jail time …
I am ambivalent about the show in general, I normally don’t like when they timeshift something [like changing Shakespeare from 1600 to modern] it is otherwise well written, and as background binge entertainment it works just fine.
I’ve noticed that on British and Australian crime/action type shows every bad guy has guns. I suppose it’s harder to ramp up the drama with people attacking each other with clubs and kitchen utensils.
In the original books, Watson always had a gun or access to a gun being that he was ex-military. So, Watson kind of needs a gun to have ties to the original! 
At least, he had one in the Jeremy Brett series which I assume is much like the books so I just consider those to be “the books” 
The real Sherlock had a revolver or two, he would take one along with Watson on tricky cases or when in danger from Moriarty’s minions ( who appeared to be one tenth of London ), and famously to shoot out the walls of his domicile with the large initials V. R. for Victoria Regina. Which even might give pause to American gun-nuts.
Guns, and far more dangerous weapons were entirely legal in those halcyon days, and easy to come by.
A little fellow in Jermyn Street can do you a nice line in home-made grenades to see off garroters and charity pests.
Aside: I watch lots of modern British crime/police shows, and I’m always surprised that the guns seem to be just a plentiful as they are in American crime/police shows. I, too, always thought guns were hard to come by in the UK.
(Don’t care for this Sherlock. Jeremy Brett was my one-and-only Sherlock.)
All true, but the current TV series Sherlock Holmes is set in current London and environs … which is why there probably shouldn’t be free gunplay!
Though I really do enjoy seeing London, it seems as if they did something funky with the production - parts of it look CGI [sort of like they did with Murdoch Mysteries, set in turn of the 1900s Toronto Ca, they CGI’d in period photos, post cards and the like to ‘animate’ the streets. ] Not sure entirely how to describe what it looks like, but there was a long shot [establishing shot?] of the big Ferris Wheel where it looks like the sky and clouds were somehow airbrushed or processed.
That particular effect, where scenes look as if you are taking a god-like perspective on a detailed model train layout, is done by playing with depths of field using a tilt-shift lens, which was not cheap. Now there’s probably an app.
Ah, so that is what they did =)
And isn’t there an app for everything? :smack:
Just because it’s bugging me…
The series in question is simply titled Sherlock.
There have been multiple series titled Sherlock Holmes, but this is not one of them.
My niece got me into Sherlock this month, we binged it.
Thought it was pretty cool.
I use [URL=“http://www.alienskin.com/bokeh/”]this](https://www.lynda.com/Cameras-Gear-tutorials/Photography-Tilt-Shift-Lens/423750-2.html) one.
It’s just Hollywood stuff. The more mundane reality is that, for a variety of reasons, guns have never figured very large in British crime, and serviceable modern guns in crime are even rarer.